November 29, 2025 • 30 mins
Newt talks with William Hartung and Ben Freeman about their new book, "The Trillion Dollar War Machine.” They discuss the profits of militarism, highlighting the role of traditional Pentagon contractors and high-tech firms in promoting destabilizing technologies. They also examine the influence of politicians, lobbyists, media, and think tanks in perpetuating the war machine, enriching a wealthy elite at the expense of global peace and domestic stability. Their conversation further explores the inefficiencies in the defense acquisition system, where increased spending does not equate to increased security, and they highlight the wasteful nature of current military expenditures. They also discuss the evolving nature of military technology and the challenges posed by new defense tech firms verses traditional defense contractors. They conclude with a call for a national discussion on military strategy and spending, emphasizing the need for a bipartisan effort to address these systemic issues.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
On this episode of Each World, America spends nearly a
trillion dollars a year in its military. This extraordinary spending
not only attracts from our ability to address pressing social problems,
but compels us into foreign wars to justify our vast
arsenal sold to us the name of security. Our military
industrial complex actually makes us far less safe. Top policy
(00:28):
experts William Hartung and Ben Freeman follow the profits of
militarism from traditional Pentagon contractors who received more than half
of the Pentagon's budget, to the upstart high tech firms
that shamelessly promote on proven and destabilizing technologies. Bill n
masked the neighbors of the war machine, politicians, lobbyists, the media,
(00:50):
Hollywood think tanks, and so many more whose work enriches
a wealthy elite yet the expense of everybody else, spreading
conflict around the world and embroiling America and endless wars.
Here to discuss their new book, The Trillion Dollar War Machine.
Our run away military spending drives of America into foreign wars
and bankrupts us at home. I'm really pleased to welcome
(01:12):
my guests, William Hartung and Ben Freeman Bill and Ben,
thank you for joining me on knits World.
Speaker 2 (01:31):
Yes, thank you, thanks for having us neith.
Speaker 1 (01:34):
Pentagon spending today, adjusted for inflation, is one hundred billion
dollars higher than it was at the height of the
Cold War. Yet we have half the troops, half the ships,
half the aircraft. How did the US end up paying
more but getting so much less?
Speaker 3 (01:52):
That stat there, that was one of the stats that
really first shocked us when we started writing this book.
Revealed a hidden truth behind the US military of today,
that we're spending more and more on security and getting
less of it. And what our book attempts to do
is explain the story why, why that is happening, and
(02:14):
how we've gotten to this point. And I think a
very direct answer to your question, Nute, is that we
have a broken defense acquisition system. The way the DoD
bias things is fundamentally broken, and a considerable amount of
money is just simply being wasted.
Speaker 2 (02:33):
And the notion fewer better weapons, but a lot of
the weapons are too complex, hard to maintain, and at
a certain point quality can't make up for less of quantity.
Normal Augustine, the former head of Lockey Martin, he sort
of joked at the way we're going in twenty fifty,
we'd have one fighter plan and the services we have
to share it out over the course of the week.
(02:54):
We're not there yet, but it was insightful in its
own way.
Speaker 1 (02:57):
It was actually picking up on a comment by President Coolidge, who,
when told they needed a certain number of planes for training,
said well, couldn't they just buy one and share it?
I tell audiences all the time. I think I'm the
longest serving teacher to the senior military. I've been teaching
major generals on the art of war since nineteen eighty three,
(03:18):
and I routinely tell groups of military leaders, if we
reduce the Pentagon to a triangle and put the other
two thirds of the building into a museum, we would
actually have a better defense of some in about two weeks,
because so much of what we do now is just
(03:38):
nonsensical bureaucracy. What led you to to write this book, Well,
I've been writing around this issue since. In nineteen seventy nine,
I worked with a guy named Gordon Adams now Aby Ross.
I wrote a book called The Iron Triangle. It's kind
of an update of status of the military industrial complex.
Speaker 2 (03:57):
Interesting. Many of the companies that he profiled us since
been absorb in the merger boom. And at Columbia I
studied with an engineering professor, Seymour Melman, who had written
a book, The Permanent War Economy of the United States.
But I blame this all on Ben, you know. When
they approached me, I'm like, I've been writing about this forever.
The world's on fire. I don't have time for this.
(04:18):
Ben wisely convinced me otherwise, And the book is far
better because he's a little bit of a clear writer,
less of a hothead. I think it'll reach more people.
Speaker 3 (04:28):
Now I'll tell you new to be perfectly candid. This
book began by ruining a perfectly good day on a boat.
Speaker 2 (04:35):
You see.
Speaker 3 (04:35):
Bill came down to Florida, where I live on vacation,
and he was on this beautiful boat ride. He was
boohooingg that his old publisher wanted him to write a
new book. Unbeknownst to Bill, I already had a book
in mind that I wanted Bill to write, and so
with a little lobbying of my own, Bill agreed to it.
And the book I wanted Bill to write, which he
(04:55):
has ultimately very kindly wrote me into writing with him.
The I thought this book had to be written was
that the military industrial complex of today was just a
fundamentally different beast than in Eisenhower's time, and we were
documenting a lot of this influence at the Quincy Institute.
We were seeing the military industrial complexes overlap with the
(05:19):
foreign influence industry, you know, foreign government's lobbyists working together
with the fence contractors to push arm sales. And we
were seeing the think tank influence by defense contractors. We
were seeing their influence at universities, Hollywood, on the DC
Metro for crying out loud, just everywhere you turned. We
were seeing the military industrial complex's influence, and we realized
(05:40):
nobody had put all of these pieces together. And so
that's where this book really started. We wanted to provide
people with this holistic look of the military industrial complex,
including the defense tech sector, which Bill had also been
covering in great detail too.
Speaker 2 (05:54):
And I would say that sector, even since we started
the book as mushroomed little bit out of the mix,
because I was still stuck talking about the old guard
like Lockheed Martin, which I wrote a book about, there
really is a competition, although they may sort of pay
off both sides through big projects like Golden Dome. Even
though fighter Plane is you know, unman wing men, So
(06:17):
that whole drama I think is going to be critical,
and I think Ben has more of a sense that
there's positives and that you need powerful companies to dislodge
powerful companies and to create competition. The question is what
are they offering, How do we know if it's going
to work, how does it fit into our strategies. I
think we're kind of a pivotal moment, probably more so
(06:38):
than we realized when we started the book. When you
say we're a pivotal moment, what do you mean, well,
I think, love it or not, we're not as powerful
as we once were. There's power in the world, just diffuse.
The challenges are hard. I mean Russian invasion of Ukraine,
the situation of Israel, Gaza, how do we address the
(07:00):
challenge from China and now the new focus on Latin
America what they're calling the Donro doctrine, Donald Trump and
Monroe mash up. And then domestically, there's a lot of division.
Our economy. It's not as strong as it was. It's
especially not serving certain parts of the working class. We
used to have good paying manufacturing jobs. All that's in
(07:23):
the mix, and part of that is, all, right, what's
our strategy, and also how does the Pentagon budget and
the military fit into what kind of society, what kind
of economy, how do we want to educate and train
the next generation? And then, you know, more narrowly, just
this new fight between the big contractors which formed in
the nineties during the merger boom. I think this is
(07:45):
the biggest moment in the defense industrial base since then.
Speaker 3 (07:49):
I really think that last comment of Bills is really
the key there, and I think that is the reason
we're going to look back on twenty twenty five specifically
as the year where the defense industry fundamentally changed. There's
a paradigm shift that's been underway in the last nine
months under the Trump administration, and that transition is explicitly
(08:13):
away from the major defense contractors, the primes who rose
up during the nineties defense consolidation that Bill mentioned, and
if that was a defense industry consolidation, I think we're
in the midst of a defense industry displacement where those
old guard firms, to some extent or another, are actively
being pushed around at least if not completely pushed under
(08:37):
by the defense tech sector. And to Bill's point, I
was perhaps a little optimistic, a little too optimistic, if
I'm critical of myself, about the rise of them being
able to push out the defense contractors. But what we're
seeing is that a rising Pentagon budget is kind of
lifting all boats, and so the old guards getting plenty
of money, and the defense tech startups are getting more
(08:59):
and more money. But I think as we transition to
the future, we're going the way of a more sophisticated
defense industry, and so I think the old guard defense
firms are in big trouble.
Speaker 2 (09:11):
And there's no question we have to integrate new technology.
It's just how do we do it, how much hope
do we put in it, what's the strategy? And of
course we'll need a different kind of workforce to be
more involvement of our universities, and AI will be suffuse
throughout society. So how do the military uses relate to
the broader uses.
Speaker 1 (09:29):
One of the things which explains part of this. You
all made the case that these big Pentagon contractors have
nine hundred and forty five lobbyists. They spent one hundred
and forty eight million dollars in twenty twenty four a loan,
So they have about two lobbyists and two hundred and
seventy five thousand dollars per member of Congress, which makes
(09:50):
reform pretty tricky because you're clearly going uphill against a
pratorian guard protecting the past.
Speaker 2 (09:58):
Yeah, and as Ben points out, in addition to money,
a lot of the Hill is run by twenty three
to twenty five year olds and they have to deal
with the whole range of issues. So in addition to money,
the lobbyists bring expertise to the table. When they're reaching
for ideas for framing, they're more present. And some other
groups that don't have as many lobbyists as much money,
(10:20):
and there's kind of that interaction. A lot of them
came from government. They have expertise, so sometimes they control
the discussion internally as well as whatever money they spend.
I love your reference to the pratorian guard. I similarly
call it the autoimmune response at DoD when it comes
to buying stuff, where you know when innovation comes in
(10:42):
and automatically they're just swarming to crush that and fight
that innovative thing off. That's not part of what they're producing.
And it is to your point.
Speaker 3 (10:50):
Too, it is the fact that they have that autoimmune
response because they have the lobbyist. They have the lobby
they have all this other influence too, I think tanks
and elsewhere which we point out. I will say this
the new guard. They know the game and they're starting
to play it more and more. And a Reil, for example,
which is a very big player in this new defense
(11:10):
tech surge, they have forty two lobbyists on their payroll
right now and that's just one firm, one of the
defense tech firms. They're leaning into the jobs argument too,
creating a big facility in a swing state like Ohio.
So you're seeing the defense tech firms create this lobbying
and influence campaign of their own. So I think at
the very least they're going to be able to push
(11:31):
back on the praetorium guard as you put it.
Speaker 2 (11:33):
And there's a new revolving door ex military folks not
going directly to the startups, but to the VC firms
that fund them. And as a former head of procurement
of the Pentagon said, you could cash in big time
in front of your investments hits more than making a
couple hundred thousand as a board member. Pollunteer recruited Mike Gallagher,
who ran the Congressional China Committee, And interestingly, he's in
(11:57):
his forties, so a lot of times people do it
later in their career, but he's sort of staking to
center his career on this connection.
Speaker 1 (12:21):
You know, the Japanese used to have of this tradition
that bureaucrats worked for a limited salary, but then they
got absorbed into these very big companies had amazing salaries
once they're retired. And to somebody said, we fit that.
I mean, one of the points you all make is
that I think there are seventeen hundred former senior DoD
(12:42):
personnel employed by the major defense contractors that according to
a government accountability study. There's the whole process here which
I find challenging. There's something wrong if somebody is arguing
for an inferior weapon or an inferior system for profit
reasons in a way which actually weakens our capacity to
(13:05):
defend ourselves.
Speaker 2 (13:07):
Yeah, and Congress plays a role because sometimes the Pentagon
wants to get rid of something and they put it back,
so military form becomes either harder or more expensive. And
then internally for example. Of course, Air force pilots are
not thrilled with the move towards and systems. Some of
them call the drone operators the chair force.
Speaker 1 (13:28):
Let's say that I agree with your general concern. It's
too bureaucratic, it is too driven by non defense interests.
I always tell people that Jerry maguire, the movie in
which the agent the football player keeps saying to him,
I want you to show me the money. That explains
(13:49):
a great deal of the various arguments in Washington, DC
that under whatever the rationale, the real underlying argument has
showed me the money. And it's true in healthcare, it's
true in defense. True sadly at NASA, where we have
been funding a Boeing project that is absurd and amazingly indefensible,
but the politicians sustain it. How do you break through
(14:11):
that kind of a system. I think part of it.
Speaker 2 (14:14):
Somehow we have to generate an actual discussion about what
our strategy should be. I know you are part of
the military reform movement which tried to power through a
lot of this. We could use that. Again, there's not
that many members who are really well informed on this,
and a lot of them spend more time trying to
protect one of the other states or districts than talking
(14:36):
strategy or how to do things better. And then in
the Pentagon, some people are attached to the existing bureaucracy.
There's jobs, there's careers, and there's others who would like
to innovate. So I think one of it is just
a national discussion about strategy, about technology, the alert knowledgeable
citizenry that Eisenower talked about. Obviously that's difficult now. I
(14:58):
mean there's miss and disinformation, there's conspiracy theories, there's division.
Everybody reads their own information sources. I think we might
need something old school like meeting people, teachings or even
podcasts where you can have a longer conversation. So that's
a little bit independent. On the money, I think it's
a piece of it.
Speaker 3 (15:19):
I think Bill's right, you need that you need a
top down and a bottom up approach here, like this
is a big, wasteful monster we're trying to slay here.
And at the end of the day, as we point
out in the book, it doesn't make America safer, and
you know a lot of cases, it makes America less safe,
and so we have to provide the information of the
public so they understand that this idea that more spending
(15:39):
equals more security, it's who we That's just not how
the system works. And then to explain to them how
their tax dollars are being wasted. And I think there's
an opportunity for that in the near future where you're
seeing people worried about their healthcare premiums going out, quadrupling
or even more in some cases going up, and the
inflation put food on the tables getting harder and harder.
(16:02):
Yet at the same time we're willing to spend billions
of dollars on it's basically a failed F thirty five program.
I think pointing out those disconnects is key and getting
people mad about it's going to be key. Then top down,
I think you really have to have a true doge
at DoD. You know, when Dose came around, I think
(16:22):
a lot of us in this community that knew there
was all this wasteful spending at DoD. We're just waiting
for Elon Musk and his folks to get to DoD
because you know, we're just sitting there saying, man, if
you want government waste, go to the largest government bureaucracy
it's loaded with waste. Folks in the military will tell
you how much wasteful spending there is. Yet when DOGE
went to DoD, they barely found the change in the
(16:45):
couch cushions, so they didn't cut hardly anything from DoD.
I think you need somebody to come in and really
do that to get meaningful reform.
Speaker 2 (16:53):
And I think you need intelligent efficiency. There's all kinds
of paperwork which I think the big firm's hide behind you.
They hire former acquisition officials and make it hard to
enter the field. But I think to do it, you
couldn't do it in three months. I think you would
have had to study what works and what doesn't work
in the various bureaucracies, and of course it would be
a huge fight to make those changes. So and I
(17:15):
don't know that many people who would know, well, okay,
what does work, what doesn't work. I think you do
want independent testing, You want safeguards against price gouging. You
want to be able to be flexible to adapt technology
to changing circumstances. If it takes twenty years to develop something,
you really can't do that. But I think we need
(17:35):
some of those former officials to tell us what they
think would work. I think we need Congress to be
more cognizant. They used to have an Office of Technology Assessment.
Given that a lot of the new stuff is tech based,
I would like the government to have the expertise to
evaluate all that. But it might be controversial because it
might cost a little money to keep people with that
(17:56):
expertise in government rather than industry. A lot to think
about it, but because it's in flux and there are
possibly this clash between the new guard and the old Guard.
Andrew has a manifesto called Arsenal Democracy two point zero
and it's critique of the current system. But it's pretty good.
I mean, you know, we could have probably written it
(18:17):
what's the new system and what is going to work
and not work, and what are the safeguards and the strategy.
So there is some hope in that change because we
can't really have a military based on twentieth century technology.
Speaker 1 (18:45):
Part of that is the technologies are changing so rapidly.
If you look at what's happened with drones in Ukraine.
On both sides of Russian and Ukraine, the forces profound
rethinking of how we set up operations, at least for
the moment. These drones have given an enormous advantage to
(19:09):
the defense and have made the classic armored warfare that
we like up through the Iraqi campaign basically not sustainable
because just the tanks just get killed. And yet you're
wrote taking on the armored community and you're taking on
the piloted aircraft community. If you say, let's really study
(19:33):
what I understand. First became obvious in a fight between
Azerbaijan and Armenia, where the Azerbaijanis had mastered this technology
and just massacred the Armenians. And that was the forerunner
which the Russians obviously had not studied, or they would
have realized that running down the road towards Kiev large
(19:54):
armored columns was going to be a nightmare and a disaster.
But if you look at the American system right now,
to go in and suggest that scale of change arouses
so much opposition, And I am puzzled about the whole
program of a next generation fighter and a next generation bomber.
(20:16):
When I'm looking at the rise of automated systems, and
you mentioned Andrew earlier. They have this ghost Shark automated submarine,
which when you take out the human in a submarine,
and the amount of space that a human needs, and
the amount of support that a human needs, and the
dining room and everything else, you suddenly get a radically
(20:39):
smaller vehicle that actually carries far more torpedoes. And as
Ioner said it in the unclassified information, the ghost shark
that they're building for Australia basically can go out about
eighteen hundred miles autonomously by itself. If you wanted to
really screw up any Chinese communist effort to invade Taiwan,
(21:03):
it wouldn't take very many ghost sharks to simply make
it impossible to cross one hundred and forty miles of
the Straits of Taiwan. But we invest huge amounts in
exquisite tax submarines that are nuclear powered and have brilliant crews.
But you'd have to ask yourself in the next cycle,
(21:25):
is that the right investment? And because all of the
senior admirals will have come out of traditional ships, how
hard is it going to be to get them to
stop and say, you know, maybe we're in a different
world now. Yeah, And there's a couple of things. One
is I think drones are leveling the playing field a bit,
because not many countries could build a tank or a
(21:47):
fighter plane, but they can make relatively cheap drones.
Speaker 2 (21:51):
Israel, Turkey, Iran, Ukraine also has a parallel DIY program
where they take Chinese drones, put weapons and cameras and
if it's a suicide drone that does the trick. So
some of these legacy systems they wouldn't farewell in a
new approach. They don't give you as much an advantage
as maybe they did in the past. And I think
(22:13):
there's got to be a range. I mean, if they're
too exquisite and they take too long to maintain in
a war like Ukraine, it would put you at a disadvantage.
Where Russia is cranking out stuff that may not be
as technically proficients ares, but they can do it quickly.
Speaker 1 (22:27):
They're just going to say. The sheer number of drones
that the Ukraine NaNs are going to make in house
this year is a revolution and capability. We don't see
anything like it.
Speaker 2 (22:38):
No, these aren't just victory guards. These are the weapons
of war.
Speaker 3 (22:41):
The Ukraine conflict is fundamentally changing conflict, and not just
that conflict. You're seeing this in Israel, Gaza, too, And
I think to your point, new you know, as much
as we might love or friends and family in the
US Navy, in the US Air Force for that matter,
we're getting to a point where the technologology of some
of this equipment is exceeding what humans can withstand. I've
(23:06):
wrote in the book about flying with the Thunderbirds as
special guests with them, and you know, when you do that,
you go through, you know, like a half day training
on how to make sure you don't pass out even
in a you know, a flyover. You know we were
not in combat, or you know we were going to
do a flyover, and you get very serious training on
how not to pass out, you know, from the g's
(23:26):
And that's an n F sixty that doesn't have the
speed of an F twenty two or an F thirty five,
let alone future aircraft. So we're very quickly getting to
a point where the human body just can't withstand the
capabilities of the technology that we have. And we have
to recognize that, because if we don't recognize it, America's
adversaries certainly are and they're going to be creating these
(23:47):
unmanned systems with greater capabilities than our man systems.
Speaker 1 (23:50):
It's a little bit like when we went into a wreck.
I think in retrospect we should have expected you unieds
and other kinds of low cost but very deadly operations.
And at the time I think it was shocked us.
We were fully prepared to fight a traditional war against
a traditional opponent and we would win it. And I
(24:13):
remember I happened to be in Australia about five months
before we went into Iraq and was a dinner with
the head of the Australian military and I said, if
you were faced with the problem of defeating the United States,
what would you do? How would you try to do it?
And he said I wouldn't. He said, It's inconceivable in
(24:33):
a normal traditional war that I'm going to be able
to beat the United States. So I would invest in
gorilla capabilities. I would have lots of equipment that was decentralized.
I would assume we're going to lose round one, and
then I'd be available to make round two really painful.
I thought that was just so totally outside the way
we thought of, and then of course that's what happened.
Speaker 2 (24:55):
And sometimes they measure power by money. The US spends
more than the next ex hunters involved. But if you're
buying the wrong things, money is not the issue. If
there's asymmetric warfare, different levels of morale. I mean, the
revolution of military affairs was supposed to be we have
superior information, superior networks, period precision kind of mnitions, but
(25:15):
in Iraq that didn't get the job done, or for example,
the bombing of the houtis the costs exchange was not great.
Some of our missus were a few million dollars. There's
were cheap, so even just economically sustaining some of these
wars as a challenge.
Speaker 3 (25:29):
To your point, their bill and to your point Nude,
I think part of the system that's in place we
talk about a lot in the book is how Hollywood
has helped to perpetuate this and helped to keep that
old guard going. When we see movies like Top Gun
and Top Gun two, these are movies with pilots in seats,
with butts in seats. It's not a sexy in Hollywood
(25:51):
to put the drones out there. Very often when the
AI or the advanced military technology is put in a movie,
it's scary. It's terminator too, you know, it's hiberdyne systems
trying to end humanity as we know it. And so
again there's this built in autoimmune function in the cultural
part of the miic that is repelling the technological transition, and.
Speaker 2 (26:13):
Some of these weapons that don't function well in reality
are killing it in the movies.
Speaker 1 (26:18):
But I saw the second top gun. They were trying
to use basically absolutely tactical aircraft to penetrate and I
said at the time, well, before what happened, you know,
in the real world, you'd use B two bombers and
you would have such precision that, in fact, you would
(26:39):
penetrate the target instantaneously with the zero risk. And it
occurred to me just listening to you guys, I hope
this is not an inappropriate thought. But because these guys
are obviously extraordinarily well trained and they practice and they're very,
very courageous. But if you actually tried to film the
be Too assault in Iran, the number of hours of
(27:02):
just flying, you couldn't make it a very interesting documentary. Now,
it had taken the Israeli Air Force to degrade and
destroy the Iranian air defense system, but which they did
pretty successfully. But and that effect was we sent seven
vehicles a long distance, they refueled a number of times,
(27:24):
they got to the right target area, there was no
effective in aircraft capability. They took out the SISE and
then they flew home.
Speaker 2 (27:32):
Yeah, and even in Iraq and Afghanistan, a lot of
the casualties were just transporting things, and so the Pentagon
became interested in modular solar and so forth, which I
think there's still some interesting even though in some circles
alternative energy is a bad name. So there's a lot
in it. And of course Hollywood likes heroes. An unmanned
(27:53):
vehicle is not a hero, Tom Craze somehow winning a
battle that they couldn't win in real life as a hero.
Speaker 1 (27:59):
That's right, if every citizen could read your new book,
The Trillion Dollar War Machine, how runaway military spending drives
the America into foreign wars and bankrupt us at home.
I think, just in terms of starting the conversation and
picking up on what Eisenhower tried to warn us about
that when you build huge systems that are self serving,
(28:22):
that have a huge interest in manipulating everybody else to
their advantage, you are inherently both putting your national security
and your democracy and your freedom at risk and Eisenhower,
who of course had been a career soldier, a West
Point graduate, a five star general. I think he genuinely
had a fear that we had now gotten into a
(28:42):
cycle where the systems that are supposed to serve us
in fact have us serving them. And I think your
book helps make that point. So I encourage everybody to
take a look at the trillion dollar war machine. Bill
and Ben, I really want to thank you for taking
the time to share with us, and I think it's
a very important conversation. Thank you both for joining me,
(29:04):
and I think this was a very very good conversation.
Speaker 2 (29:07):
Thank you so much. Yes, thank you.
Speaker 1 (29:13):
Thank you to my guests, Bill Hartung and Ben Freeman.
Newsworld is produced by Gingrash three sixty and iHeartMedia. Our
executive producers Guarnsey Sloan. Our researcher is Rachel Peterson. The
artwork for the show was created by Steve Fenley. Special
thanks to the team at Ginglish three sixty. If you've
been enjoying Newtsworld, I hope you'll go to Apple Podcast
(29:34):
and both rate us at five stars and give us
a review so others can learn what it's all about.
Join me on substat at ginglestre sixty dot net. I'm
Nick Gingrich. This is news world,
On this episode of Each World, America spends nearly a
trillion dollars a year in its military. This extraordinary spending
not only attracts from our ability to address pressing social problems,
but compels us into foreign wars to justify our vast
arsenal sold to us the name of security. Our military
industrial complex actually makes us far less safe. Top policy
(00:28):
experts William Hartung and Ben Freeman follow the profits of
militarism from traditional Pentagon contractors who received more than half
of the Pentagon's budget, to the upstart high tech firms
that shamelessly promote on proven and destabilizing technologies. Bill n
masked the neighbors of the war machine, politicians, lobbyists, the media,
(00:50):
Hollywood think tanks, and so many more whose work enriches
a wealthy elite yet the expense of everybody else, spreading
conflict around the world and embroiling America and endless wars.
Here to discuss their new book, The Trillion Dollar War Machine.
Our run away military spending drives of America into foreign wars
and bankrupts us at home. I'm really pleased to welcome
(01:12):
my guests, William Hartung and Ben Freeman Bill and Ben,
thank you for joining me on knits World.
Speaker 2 (01:31):
Yes, thank you, thanks for having us neith.
Speaker 1 (01:34):
Pentagon spending today, adjusted for inflation, is one hundred billion
dollars higher than it was at the height of the
Cold War. Yet we have half the troops, half the ships,
half the aircraft. How did the US end up paying
more but getting so much less?
Speaker 3 (01:52):
That stat there, that was one of the stats that
really first shocked us when we started writing this book.
Revealed a hidden truth behind the US military of today,
that we're spending more and more on security and getting
less of it. And what our book attempts to do
is explain the story why, why that is happening, and
(02:14):
how we've gotten to this point. And I think a
very direct answer to your question, Nute, is that we
have a broken defense acquisition system. The way the DoD
bias things is fundamentally broken, and a considerable amount of
money is just simply being wasted.
Speaker 2 (02:33):
And the notion fewer better weapons, but a lot of
the weapons are too complex, hard to maintain, and at
a certain point quality can't make up for less of quantity.
Normal Augustine, the former head of Lockey Martin, he sort
of joked at the way we're going in twenty fifty,
we'd have one fighter plan and the services we have
to share it out over the course of the week.
(02:54):
We're not there yet, but it was insightful in its
own way.
Speaker 1 (02:57):
It was actually picking up on a comment by President Coolidge, who,
when told they needed a certain number of planes for training,
said well, couldn't they just buy one and share it?
I tell audiences all the time. I think I'm the
longest serving teacher to the senior military. I've been teaching
major generals on the art of war since nineteen eighty three,
(03:18):
and I routinely tell groups of military leaders, if we
reduce the Pentagon to a triangle and put the other
two thirds of the building into a museum, we would
actually have a better defense of some in about two weeks,
because so much of what we do now is just
(03:38):
nonsensical bureaucracy. What led you to to write this book, Well,
I've been writing around this issue since. In nineteen seventy nine,
I worked with a guy named Gordon Adams now Aby Ross.
I wrote a book called The Iron Triangle. It's kind
of an update of status of the military industrial complex.
Speaker 2 (03:57):
Interesting. Many of the companies that he profiled us since
been absorb in the merger boom. And at Columbia I
studied with an engineering professor, Seymour Melman, who had written
a book, The Permanent War Economy of the United States.
But I blame this all on Ben, you know. When
they approached me, I'm like, I've been writing about this forever.
The world's on fire. I don't have time for this.
(04:18):
Ben wisely convinced me otherwise, And the book is far
better because he's a little bit of a clear writer,
less of a hothead. I think it'll reach more people.
Speaker 3 (04:28):
Now I'll tell you new to be perfectly candid. This
book began by ruining a perfectly good day on a boat.
Speaker 2 (04:35):
You see.
Speaker 3 (04:35):
Bill came down to Florida, where I live on vacation,
and he was on this beautiful boat ride. He was
boohooingg that his old publisher wanted him to write a
new book. Unbeknownst to Bill, I already had a book
in mind that I wanted Bill to write, and so
with a little lobbying of my own, Bill agreed to it.
And the book I wanted Bill to write, which he
(04:55):
has ultimately very kindly wrote me into writing with him.
The I thought this book had to be written was
that the military industrial complex of today was just a
fundamentally different beast than in Eisenhower's time, and we were
documenting a lot of this influence at the Quincy Institute.
We were seeing the military industrial complexes overlap with the
(05:19):
foreign influence industry, you know, foreign government's lobbyists working together
with the fence contractors to push arm sales. And we
were seeing the think tank influence by defense contractors. We
were seeing their influence at universities, Hollywood, on the DC
Metro for crying out loud, just everywhere you turned. We
were seeing the military industrial complex's influence, and we realized
(05:40):
nobody had put all of these pieces together. And so
that's where this book really started. We wanted to provide
people with this holistic look of the military industrial complex,
including the defense tech sector, which Bill had also been
covering in great detail too.
Speaker 2 (05:54):
And I would say that sector, even since we started
the book as mushroomed little bit out of the mix,
because I was still stuck talking about the old guard
like Lockheed Martin, which I wrote a book about, there
really is a competition, although they may sort of pay
off both sides through big projects like Golden Dome. Even
though fighter Plane is you know, unman wing men, So
(06:17):
that whole drama I think is going to be critical,
and I think Ben has more of a sense that
there's positives and that you need powerful companies to dislodge
powerful companies and to create competition. The question is what
are they offering, How do we know if it's going
to work, how does it fit into our strategies. I
think we're kind of a pivotal moment, probably more so
(06:38):
than we realized when we started the book. When you
say we're a pivotal moment, what do you mean, well,
I think, love it or not, we're not as powerful
as we once were. There's power in the world, just diffuse.
The challenges are hard. I mean Russian invasion of Ukraine,
the situation of Israel, Gaza, how do we address the
(07:00):
challenge from China and now the new focus on Latin
America what they're calling the Donro doctrine, Donald Trump and
Monroe mash up. And then domestically, there's a lot of division.
Our economy. It's not as strong as it was. It's
especially not serving certain parts of the working class. We
used to have good paying manufacturing jobs. All that's in
(07:23):
the mix, and part of that is, all, right, what's
our strategy, and also how does the Pentagon budget and
the military fit into what kind of society, what kind
of economy, how do we want to educate and train
the next generation? And then, you know, more narrowly, just
this new fight between the big contractors which formed in
the nineties during the merger boom. I think this is
(07:45):
the biggest moment in the defense industrial base since then.
Speaker 3 (07:49):
I really think that last comment of Bills is really
the key there, and I think that is the reason
we're going to look back on twenty twenty five specifically
as the year where the defense industry fundamentally changed. There's
a paradigm shift that's been underway in the last nine
months under the Trump administration, and that transition is explicitly
(08:13):
away from the major defense contractors, the primes who rose
up during the nineties defense consolidation that Bill mentioned, and
if that was a defense industry consolidation, I think we're
in the midst of a defense industry displacement where those
old guard firms, to some extent or another, are actively
being pushed around at least if not completely pushed under
(08:37):
by the defense tech sector. And to Bill's point, I
was perhaps a little optimistic, a little too optimistic, if
I'm critical of myself, about the rise of them being
able to push out the defense contractors. But what we're
seeing is that a rising Pentagon budget is kind of
lifting all boats, and so the old guards getting plenty
of money, and the defense tech startups are getting more
(08:59):
and more money. But I think as we transition to
the future, we're going the way of a more sophisticated
defense industry, and so I think the old guard defense
firms are in big trouble.
Speaker 2 (09:11):
And there's no question we have to integrate new technology.
It's just how do we do it, how much hope
do we put in it, what's the strategy? And of
course we'll need a different kind of workforce to be
more involvement of our universities, and AI will be suffuse
throughout society. So how do the military uses relate to
the broader uses.
Speaker 1 (09:29):
One of the things which explains part of this. You
all made the case that these big Pentagon contractors have
nine hundred and forty five lobbyists. They spent one hundred
and forty eight million dollars in twenty twenty four a loan,
So they have about two lobbyists and two hundred and
seventy five thousand dollars per member of Congress, which makes
(09:50):
reform pretty tricky because you're clearly going uphill against a
pratorian guard protecting the past.
Speaker 2 (09:58):
Yeah, and as Ben points out, in addition to money,
a lot of the Hill is run by twenty three
to twenty five year olds and they have to deal
with the whole range of issues. So in addition to money,
the lobbyists bring expertise to the table. When they're reaching
for ideas for framing, they're more present. And some other
groups that don't have as many lobbyists as much money,
(10:20):
and there's kind of that interaction. A lot of them
came from government. They have expertise, so sometimes they control
the discussion internally as well as whatever money they spend.
I love your reference to the pratorian guard. I similarly
call it the autoimmune response at DoD when it comes
to buying stuff, where you know when innovation comes in
(10:42):
and automatically they're just swarming to crush that and fight
that innovative thing off. That's not part of what they're producing.
And it is to your point.
Speaker 3 (10:50):
Too, it is the fact that they have that autoimmune
response because they have the lobbyist. They have the lobby
they have all this other influence too, I think tanks
and elsewhere which we point out. I will say this
the new guard. They know the game and they're starting
to play it more and more. And a Reil, for example,
which is a very big player in this new defense
(11:10):
tech surge, they have forty two lobbyists on their payroll
right now and that's just one firm, one of the
defense tech firms. They're leaning into the jobs argument too,
creating a big facility in a swing state like Ohio.
So you're seeing the defense tech firms create this lobbying
and influence campaign of their own. So I think at
the very least they're going to be able to push
(11:31):
back on the praetorium guard as you put it.
Speaker 2 (11:33):
And there's a new revolving door ex military folks not
going directly to the startups, but to the VC firms
that fund them. And as a former head of procurement
of the Pentagon said, you could cash in big time
in front of your investments hits more than making a
couple hundred thousand as a board member. Pollunteer recruited Mike Gallagher,
who ran the Congressional China Committee, And interestingly, he's in
(11:57):
his forties, so a lot of times people do it
later in their career, but he's sort of staking to
center his career on this connection.
Speaker 1 (12:21):
You know, the Japanese used to have of this tradition
that bureaucrats worked for a limited salary, but then they
got absorbed into these very big companies had amazing salaries
once they're retired. And to somebody said, we fit that.
I mean, one of the points you all make is
that I think there are seventeen hundred former senior DoD
(12:42):
personnel employed by the major defense contractors that according to
a government accountability study. There's the whole process here which
I find challenging. There's something wrong if somebody is arguing
for an inferior weapon or an inferior system for profit
reasons in a way which actually weakens our capacity to
(13:05):
defend ourselves.
Speaker 2 (13:07):
Yeah, and Congress plays a role because sometimes the Pentagon
wants to get rid of something and they put it back,
so military form becomes either harder or more expensive. And
then internally for example. Of course, Air force pilots are
not thrilled with the move towards and systems. Some of
them call the drone operators the chair force.
Speaker 1 (13:28):
Let's say that I agree with your general concern. It's
too bureaucratic, it is too driven by non defense interests.
I always tell people that Jerry maguire, the movie in
which the agent the football player keeps saying to him,
I want you to show me the money. That explains
(13:49):
a great deal of the various arguments in Washington, DC
that under whatever the rationale, the real underlying argument has
showed me the money. And it's true in healthcare, it's
true in defense. True sadly at NASA, where we have
been funding a Boeing project that is absurd and amazingly indefensible,
but the politicians sustain it. How do you break through
(14:11):
that kind of a system. I think part of it.
Speaker 2 (14:14):
Somehow we have to generate an actual discussion about what
our strategy should be. I know you are part of
the military reform movement which tried to power through a
lot of this. We could use that. Again, there's not
that many members who are really well informed on this,
and a lot of them spend more time trying to
protect one of the other states or districts than talking
(14:36):
strategy or how to do things better. And then in
the Pentagon, some people are attached to the existing bureaucracy.
There's jobs, there's careers, and there's others who would like
to innovate. So I think one of it is just
a national discussion about strategy, about technology, the alert knowledgeable
citizenry that Eisenower talked about. Obviously that's difficult now. I
(14:58):
mean there's miss and disinformation, there's conspiracy theories, there's division.
Everybody reads their own information sources. I think we might
need something old school like meeting people, teachings or even
podcasts where you can have a longer conversation. So that's
a little bit independent. On the money, I think it's
a piece of it.
Speaker 3 (15:19):
I think Bill's right, you need that you need a
top down and a bottom up approach here, like this
is a big, wasteful monster we're trying to slay here.
And at the end of the day, as we point
out in the book, it doesn't make America safer, and
you know a lot of cases, it makes America less safe,
and so we have to provide the information of the
public so they understand that this idea that more spending
(15:39):
equals more security, it's who we That's just not how
the system works. And then to explain to them how
their tax dollars are being wasted. And I think there's
an opportunity for that in the near future where you're
seeing people worried about their healthcare premiums going out, quadrupling
or even more in some cases going up, and the
inflation put food on the tables getting harder and harder.
(16:02):
Yet at the same time we're willing to spend billions
of dollars on it's basically a failed F thirty five program.
I think pointing out those disconnects is key and getting
people mad about it's going to be key. Then top down,
I think you really have to have a true doge
at DoD. You know, when Dose came around, I think
(16:22):
a lot of us in this community that knew there
was all this wasteful spending at DoD. We're just waiting
for Elon Musk and his folks to get to DoD
because you know, we're just sitting there saying, man, if
you want government waste, go to the largest government bureaucracy
it's loaded with waste. Folks in the military will tell
you how much wasteful spending there is. Yet when DOGE
went to DoD, they barely found the change in the
(16:45):
couch cushions, so they didn't cut hardly anything from DoD.
I think you need somebody to come in and really
do that to get meaningful reform.
Speaker 2 (16:53):
And I think you need intelligent efficiency. There's all kinds
of paperwork which I think the big firm's hide behind you.
They hire former acquisition officials and make it hard to
enter the field. But I think to do it, you
couldn't do it in three months. I think you would
have had to study what works and what doesn't work
in the various bureaucracies, and of course it would be
a huge fight to make those changes. So and I
(17:15):
don't know that many people who would know, well, okay,
what does work, what doesn't work. I think you do
want independent testing, You want safeguards against price gouging. You
want to be able to be flexible to adapt technology
to changing circumstances. If it takes twenty years to develop something,
you really can't do that. But I think we need
(17:35):
some of those former officials to tell us what they
think would work. I think we need Congress to be
more cognizant. They used to have an Office of Technology Assessment.
Given that a lot of the new stuff is tech based,
I would like the government to have the expertise to
evaluate all that. But it might be controversial because it
might cost a little money to keep people with that
(17:56):
expertise in government rather than industry. A lot to think
about it, but because it's in flux and there are
possibly this clash between the new guard and the old Guard.
Andrew has a manifesto called Arsenal Democracy two point zero
and it's critique of the current system. But it's pretty good.
I mean, you know, we could have probably written it
(18:17):
what's the new system and what is going to work
and not work, and what are the safeguards and the strategy.
So there is some hope in that change because we
can't really have a military based on twentieth century technology.
Speaker 1 (18:45):
Part of that is the technologies are changing so rapidly.
If you look at what's happened with drones in Ukraine.
On both sides of Russian and Ukraine, the forces profound
rethinking of how we set up operations, at least for
the moment. These drones have given an enormous advantage to
(19:09):
the defense and have made the classic armored warfare that
we like up through the Iraqi campaign basically not sustainable
because just the tanks just get killed. And yet you're
wrote taking on the armored community and you're taking on
the piloted aircraft community. If you say, let's really study
(19:33):
what I understand. First became obvious in a fight between
Azerbaijan and Armenia, where the Azerbaijanis had mastered this technology
and just massacred the Armenians. And that was the forerunner
which the Russians obviously had not studied, or they would
have realized that running down the road towards Kiev large
(19:54):
armored columns was going to be a nightmare and a disaster.
But if you look at the American system right now,
to go in and suggest that scale of change arouses
so much opposition, And I am puzzled about the whole
program of a next generation fighter and a next generation bomber.
(20:16):
When I'm looking at the rise of automated systems, and
you mentioned Andrew earlier. They have this ghost Shark automated submarine,
which when you take out the human in a submarine,
and the amount of space that a human needs, and
the amount of support that a human needs, and the
dining room and everything else, you suddenly get a radically
(20:39):
smaller vehicle that actually carries far more torpedoes. And as
Ioner said it in the unclassified information, the ghost shark
that they're building for Australia basically can go out about
eighteen hundred miles autonomously by itself. If you wanted to
really screw up any Chinese communist effort to invade Taiwan,
(21:03):
it wouldn't take very many ghost sharks to simply make
it impossible to cross one hundred and forty miles of
the Straits of Taiwan. But we invest huge amounts in
exquisite tax submarines that are nuclear powered and have brilliant crews.
But you'd have to ask yourself in the next cycle,
(21:25):
is that the right investment? And because all of the
senior admirals will have come out of traditional ships, how
hard is it going to be to get them to
stop and say, you know, maybe we're in a different
world now. Yeah, And there's a couple of things. One
is I think drones are leveling the playing field a bit,
because not many countries could build a tank or a
(21:47):
fighter plane, but they can make relatively cheap drones.
Speaker 2 (21:51):
Israel, Turkey, Iran, Ukraine also has a parallel DIY program
where they take Chinese drones, put weapons and cameras and
if it's a suicide drone that does the trick. So
some of these legacy systems they wouldn't farewell in a
new approach. They don't give you as much an advantage
as maybe they did in the past. And I think
(22:13):
there's got to be a range. I mean, if they're
too exquisite and they take too long to maintain in
a war like Ukraine, it would put you at a disadvantage.
Where Russia is cranking out stuff that may not be
as technically proficients ares, but they can do it quickly.
Speaker 1 (22:27):
They're just going to say. The sheer number of drones
that the Ukraine NaNs are going to make in house
this year is a revolution and capability. We don't see
anything like it.
Speaker 2 (22:38):
No, these aren't just victory guards. These are the weapons
of war.
Speaker 3 (22:41):
The Ukraine conflict is fundamentally changing conflict, and not just
that conflict. You're seeing this in Israel, Gaza, too, And
I think to your point, new you know, as much
as we might love or friends and family in the
US Navy, in the US Air Force for that matter,
we're getting to a point where the technologology of some
of this equipment is exceeding what humans can withstand. I've
(23:06):
wrote in the book about flying with the Thunderbirds as
special guests with them, and you know, when you do that,
you go through, you know, like a half day training
on how to make sure you don't pass out even
in a you know, a flyover. You know we were
not in combat, or you know we were going to
do a flyover, and you get very serious training on
how not to pass out, you know, from the g's
(23:26):
And that's an n F sixty that doesn't have the
speed of an F twenty two or an F thirty five,
let alone future aircraft. So we're very quickly getting to
a point where the human body just can't withstand the
capabilities of the technology that we have. And we have
to recognize that, because if we don't recognize it, America's
adversaries certainly are and they're going to be creating these
(23:47):
unmanned systems with greater capabilities than our man systems.
Speaker 1 (23:50):
It's a little bit like when we went into a wreck.
I think in retrospect we should have expected you unieds
and other kinds of low cost but very deadly operations.
And at the time I think it was shocked us.
We were fully prepared to fight a traditional war against
a traditional opponent and we would win it. And I
(24:13):
remember I happened to be in Australia about five months
before we went into Iraq and was a dinner with
the head of the Australian military and I said, if
you were faced with the problem of defeating the United States,
what would you do? How would you try to do it?
And he said I wouldn't. He said, It's inconceivable in
(24:33):
a normal traditional war that I'm going to be able
to beat the United States. So I would invest in
gorilla capabilities. I would have lots of equipment that was decentralized.
I would assume we're going to lose round one, and
then I'd be available to make round two really painful.
I thought that was just so totally outside the way
we thought of, and then of course that's what happened.
Speaker 2 (24:55):
And sometimes they measure power by money. The US spends
more than the next ex hunters involved. But if you're
buying the wrong things, money is not the issue. If
there's asymmetric warfare, different levels of morale. I mean, the
revolution of military affairs was supposed to be we have
superior information, superior networks, period precision kind of mnitions, but
(25:15):
in Iraq that didn't get the job done, or for example,
the bombing of the houtis the costs exchange was not great.
Some of our missus were a few million dollars. There's
were cheap, so even just economically sustaining some of these
wars as a challenge.
Speaker 3 (25:29):
To your point, their bill and to your point Nude,
I think part of the system that's in place we
talk about a lot in the book is how Hollywood
has helped to perpetuate this and helped to keep that
old guard going. When we see movies like Top Gun
and Top Gun two, these are movies with pilots in seats,
with butts in seats. It's not a sexy in Hollywood
(25:51):
to put the drones out there. Very often when the
AI or the advanced military technology is put in a movie,
it's scary. It's terminator too, you know, it's hiberdyne systems
trying to end humanity as we know it. And so
again there's this built in autoimmune function in the cultural
part of the miic that is repelling the technological transition, and.
Speaker 2 (26:13):
Some of these weapons that don't function well in reality
are killing it in the movies.
Speaker 1 (26:18):
But I saw the second top gun. They were trying
to use basically absolutely tactical aircraft to penetrate and I
said at the time, well, before what happened, you know,
in the real world, you'd use B two bombers and
you would have such precision that, in fact, you would
(26:39):
penetrate the target instantaneously with the zero risk. And it
occurred to me just listening to you guys, I hope
this is not an inappropriate thought. But because these guys
are obviously extraordinarily well trained and they practice and they're very,
very courageous. But if you actually tried to film the
be Too assault in Iran, the number of hours of
(27:02):
just flying, you couldn't make it a very interesting documentary. Now,
it had taken the Israeli Air Force to degrade and
destroy the Iranian air defense system, but which they did
pretty successfully. But and that effect was we sent seven
vehicles a long distance, they refueled a number of times,
(27:24):
they got to the right target area, there was no
effective in aircraft capability. They took out the SISE and
then they flew home.
Speaker 2 (27:32):
Yeah, and even in Iraq and Afghanistan, a lot of
the casualties were just transporting things, and so the Pentagon
became interested in modular solar and so forth, which I
think there's still some interesting even though in some circles
alternative energy is a bad name. So there's a lot
in it. And of course Hollywood likes heroes. An unmanned
(27:53):
vehicle is not a hero, Tom Craze somehow winning a
battle that they couldn't win in real life as a hero.
Speaker 1 (27:59):
That's right, if every citizen could read your new book,
The Trillion Dollar War Machine, how runaway military spending drives
the America into foreign wars and bankrupt us at home.
I think, just in terms of starting the conversation and
picking up on what Eisenhower tried to warn us about
that when you build huge systems that are self serving,
(28:22):
that have a huge interest in manipulating everybody else to
their advantage, you are inherently both putting your national security
and your democracy and your freedom at risk and Eisenhower,
who of course had been a career soldier, a West
Point graduate, a five star general. I think he genuinely
had a fear that we had now gotten into a
(28:42):
cycle where the systems that are supposed to serve us
in fact have us serving them. And I think your
book helps make that point. So I encourage everybody to
take a look at the trillion dollar war machine. Bill
and Ben, I really want to thank you for taking
the time to share with us, and I think it's
a very important conversation. Thank you both for joining me,
(29:04):
and I think this was a very very good conversation.
Speaker 2 (29:07):
Thank you so much. Yes, thank you.
Speaker 1 (29:13):
Thank you to my guests, Bill Hartung and Ben Freeman.
Newsworld is produced by Gingrash three sixty and iHeartMedia. Our
executive producers Guarnsey Sloan. Our researcher is Rachel Peterson. The
artwork for the show was created by Steve Fenley. Special
thanks to the team at Ginglish three sixty. If you've
been enjoying Newtsworld, I hope you'll go to Apple Podcast
(29:34):
and both rate us at five stars and give us
a review so others can learn what it's all about.
Join me on substat at ginglestre sixty dot net. I'm
Nick Gingrich. This is news world,
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