WarTalk：レームダック下のイラン戦争、「ピートなき11月」、Bay of Tofu、そして Team Yankee

War Talk post midterms edition. I mean, there's so much fallout for everything that we cover. We're going to talk Iran war, future of the Pentagon, Congress and defense, the future of the Secretary of War and Deputy Secretary of War. Will we still have a Secretary of War for the next two years? An absolute outrageous amount to cover. We got the full game here. So Brian, introduce yourself and take us away. What does this mean for the war in Iran? What do these election results do for the dynamic of how this ends up resolving? Yeah, Brian Clark, I'm senior fellow at Hudson Institute, which is the think tank here in Washington. The pressure will be on to reach some kind of resolution. You can already see, obviously, you've got internal to the administration. J.D. Vance is already saying the war was the big reason we lost. The president even acknowledged that that was the reason we lost. So it seems like the escalation they threatened earlier is probably off the table at this point,

and they're going to now be looking to try to come up with a way to get Iran to agree to something that the White House can spin as victory. I don't know how they're going to possibly do that because the Iranians are not motivated to try to give the White House any wins. But I think the administration is going to be desperate pretty soon to come up with some kind of fig leaf to put over this because the blockade that they thought was going to eventually bring it to its – bring around to its knees is not really bringing it to its knees, and it's going to be too slow to really yield the kinds of results on the timelines that the administration wants because I don't think they want to go into the new Congress with this still going on and give the Congress this easy way to start squeezing the White House. Also, because the war is going on, Congress is not going to be willing to pass the NDAA or appropriations. So we're going to be under continuing resolutions through probably the end of this year into next year. And the White House does want to get its budget approved at some point.

And that is going to require ending the war because Congress, the Democrats, don't want to sign off any bills. They're going to give tacit approval to the war continuing. Are you telling me this? That's a podcast. Is it going to solve this? More. By the way, that was a good launch. Representative Elaine Luria, who called out Brad Cooper and was like, I've known the man for 25 years, read the room. So it's I don't I don't think Congress has any interest in not only continuing this war, but really enduring any more of sent comm shenanigans. I think there's a bipartisan. How many comms people work in, had to approve this at some point, and then not only approve it, but it came out the day after the election? Like, in what world do we want to hear about his fucking workout habits? Like, I'm sorry, go, like, end this war already. What are we doing here?

Yeah, I mean, look. And it's so much worse than the Paparo time cover. So much worse. Yeah, because this was not only – this wasn't a reporter from an outside area coming in and being like, hey, you're the GCC commander in one of the largest and most important theaters that we operate in. Let's interview you. They made all of these – It's a cell phone. Yeah. Yeah. All of these were internal – I do want to touch back a little bit. They never had a theory of victory. They never had a theory of what the strategic national interest was with Iran, because if they did, like, honestly, the election results wouldn't matter that much because they would still be able to say, hey, it is in a strategic national interest to the United States. The results of our domestic politics don't actually matter. and they could make full-throated noise and kind of back up the reason that like, okay, maybe we don't continue with strikes, but we're going to continue our strangulation of Iranian oil because we think that that's a long-term strategic

victory and that's going to bring them to bear. This is going to be the worst of their instincts to come out and just make deals. Whatever the best deal is available is without any real thought to the second and third order effects. So what you're going to end up with necessarily here is going to be something that is much worse than JCPOA, which was torn up by the first Trump administration because it was terrible. I mean, let's let's presidents losing midterm elections and still doing the war. Right. We had President Bush in 2006, like a big war protest vote that brought a lot of Democrats into Congress. And he's like, fuck it. I'm going to do a surge. I don't care. I think it's the right thing. I really believe in this. I think it's the right thing for the American people. I think it's the right thing for the Iraqi people. And like, regardless of how you think about it, how it went, like he was still able to do that because he had a vision here. And he convinced the Congress to go along with it, right? Because the Congress funded that and they funded supplementals on top of that to pay

for the surge. And here I think the problem is they don't have a theory of victory. They can't convince the Congress that what they're doing is a good idea. They have no path forward that gets them to victory. So Congress is not going to be willing to fund it. And anything they and right now they're going to be in this continuing resolution limbo for the duration until they come up with a resolution to the conflict. Well, and once again, this this goes back to you have to communicate to Congress. And if this Congress didn't like you, which was supposed to be way more favorable, the next Congress certainly is. And it's I mean, if I'm if I'm going to go in the White House and I have any sort of like, you know, careerist mindset, I didn't hop into politics yesterday. I have to be thinking, all right, what does damage control look like? Damage control looks like getting people who can actually talk to Congress, who can advocate, who can make sure the party is at least able to find some sort of glide path to 2028. And none of that is with the current crowd running things. So the people who propped up the war, you're looking at Pete, he's got to go away one way or the other, whether it's impeachment, resignation, firing. Marco Rubio is probably going to exit stage left on his own, if I had to guess, and that's based upon some other reporting.

And so you're left with the people who sign up for any deal, like Steve Whitcoff, who maybe falls his way into a Secretary of State role if he survives. He's probably a side deal. Yeah, yeah. Point being, it's like, you're just in Brian Wright. No universe he gets confirmed, Tony. No. But that'll just be, I mean, I hate to say it, though, that's how the end of the first Trump administration operated as well. Yeah. You ended up with a whole lot of acting, which obviously we've talked about the budgetary issues that you run into and the statutory issues that you run into when you have acting versus when you have actually confirmed cabinet level secretaries and deputies. But, yeah, I mean, like I think you're right. There's no environment in which he gets confirmed. I would be hard pressed to see anybody who thinks they have a political future being somebody who's going to want to go in now and run one of these agents or run the Pentagon. And that's actually probably one of the most. Can we stay on Iran? Can we just close the loop on Iran a little bit? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then we'll do high ground stuff. So, like, okay, so Trump, you know, we did the first few weeks, kind of had a pause.

There was maybe sort of a deal there. He didn't like it, started rebombing again. We tried to maybe look for a deal again. It wasn't there. Now we're in this blockade phase. I mean, the leverage that the Iranians have now compared to before, as Brian was saying, is, like, much higher. But then, OK, so then they're going to nuclearize, right? I mean, yes. So going forward, it looks like there's greater public support in Iran for nuclear weapons, which is obviously counterproductive to what the administration wanted. But they don't really have the resources, right? So they are still kind of constrained in terms of their ability to actually follow through on that because they aren't the economy suffering. And so the right now that I mean, the administration's idea is, well, we've opened up the strait largely. So there is traffic coming out at the rate that it was before. They're protecting it at great cost. They've got this blockade that's squeezing Iran. I mean, if they continue doing what they are doing for, you know, another year, you know, maybe you would see the results that the administration wanted.

It's just, you know, the question is, does anybody feel enough confidence in that they're going to be willing to fund it? On the congressional side, no. And can you get anybody on board in terms of actually leading that at the Pentagon beyond the current team? And I don't think that's the case either. So I think there's no world in which they're going to be able to keep it up long enough for it to work. So they're going to have to come up with some kind of off-ramp. And you're right. I mean, this puts you on the direction. Like, what are your big asks now? I mean, I would already go straight back to it's going to be reparations. I would ask for war damages reparations to include the atomic site. I would ask for some type of security guarantee on peaceful civilian energy. they may push for the toll, continue to push for the toll. I could see some type of consortium where it's like them, Qatar, balancing with Saudi Arabia and UAE for like control of the straight and like how things transit in and out of the straight and some type of profit share between those four,

which basically goes back to like a pre-Islamic Revolution OPEC kind of styling in some shape, form, or fashion. because really, realistically, they don't have to give much up because I think they think that now time is on their side. They have weathered the storm. When you talk about Iran holding cards, there's a lot of geopolitical cards that they hold strictly on the fact that they can challenge and drive up prices. And I think, you know, they know that. And the Congress is going to be very quick to be like, we need to end this. and it's going to be on the president to get it done. Right. I mean, God forbid anything else happened in the world, because right now half the deployed Navy or half the deployed underway Navy is in the Central Command AOR, right? So it's in the Arabian Sea, Arabian Gulf. Luckily, Brad Cooper is doing wonderful work. Yeah, he's doing a bank-up job. So you've got half the deployed Navy is there. You can't keep that up forever. That's the only way that we're able to keep traffic flowing out of the strait and the only way we're keeping the blockade on Iran.

And so as soon as that lifts, Iran can start cutting off access to the strait again. Brian, when I play video games and then once you do one battle with your troop, it gets a little scar and gets more powerful. That's how it works. Exactly. We're getting a bunch of coins, and we're going to go to the next stage of Donkey Kong. That's probably the degree of strategy. That's the battle strategy that's going on here. The other thing is Iran is basically holding the Gulf countries hostage. Right. So the thing that people don't talk about is if we do any sort of escalation of attacks, Iran just starts attacking the Gulf allies again. And they have basically no missile defenses at this point. So they're going to turn more of their infrastructure to rubble. And even that's going to make it even harder to get any oil out of there, because now the port infrastructure will begin to be affected on top of the refineries that are basically already shut down. Rest in peace, Bioshock. Yeah. Rest in peace, NSA Bahrain. Right. We're you know, we're never going back there. So, Brian, kind of on that point, like I do want to talk about the bases for five seconds, because like, I mean, those are things that are significant congressional line items usually every year.

And so it's like, like, is is it just the world in which we just don't fund them anymore? Do we move them farther back? Because I think there's going to be this battle in Congress of do we keep a presence in the Middle East that just isn't there? Or do we just straight up say, yeah, we're not doing this anymore. We're out. Because that will be the fight in the NDA next year. Right. Yeah, I think there's going to be – I mean, I think probably the new Congress is going to be less interested in building up a bunch of infrastructure there. You know, it's going to be back to the lighter footprint that we had pre-OIF, OEF. Because NSA Bahrain, we built most of that during OIF. So I think we're going to go back to some lighter footprint where a lot more of this stuff is being done from sea, or we use partner facilities in the UAE and Qatar, and then we'll use the existing facility that the Bahrain Navy already had. But, yeah, it's going to be – I think we're going to just back out. It's going to be now the U.S. is not necessarily a big player in the Middle East from the naval perspective.

I don't think there's any intention on the Navy's part now to send any of those ships back to Middle East or the Coast Guard. The Coast Guard moved all its forces. They've got six fast response cutters that now live in Singapore, along with the littoral combat ships. So all the ships that were in the Persian Gulf have now gone to Singapore, and they're hanging out in the South China Sea, which has been great for PACOM, to be able to deal with the China gray zone threat, but not so great for CENTCOM. Is this a lesson for the PLA? of are they going to say the lessons of we found a way to get the U.S. to basically abandon bases at near shore bases, right? Or are they going to say this was unique to the Trump administration and probably other people aren't going to do this? Are they looking at that as a lesson in any way? Not sure. I mean, I think one lesson that they're drawing is that if the Iranians can put up this kind of fight, what have they expected to see against Taiwan?

I mean, if your enemy really, if your target really is resilient in a way that, like the Iranians were, what's your hope of actually bringing them to heel short of a, you know, large-scale ground invasion? My one note on that is, like, it's not about the absolute level of resilience. It's, like, the relative level. it's like it's like the relative level of change that your society is feeling right and it's like many people have been through a lot of shit yeah that's a good point and the Taiwanese haven't at all so going from like no shit to like my god my life is like my daily life is completely changed and I'm like living in a like struggling society wartime environment versus like oh yeah this is It's just like, you know, currency crisis number 14 and inflation crisis number 12. And like, yeah, my government has already shot like seven of my friends three months ago. Like, I mean, it's a different baseline you're working off of from a resilient.

Yeah, they're a private pile in the bathroom of a full metal jacket. I live in a world of shit. Where the Taiwanese, you know, very much it's very nice, you know, not nearly as much. What I will say, Tony, is I think the difference is, and I think it's very hard for China to apply the lesson learned. So the forces that we put into the Middle East were largely on a war footing during GWAT and things like that. And then they were being actively used for combat against Iran. So they become legitimate military targets in a very real way. For the threat to the U.S. basing that's in Asia, you would have to conceive that China is actively targeting bases in Japan, in Okinawa, you know, down throughout the mainland into the Philippines in a way, like almost almost preemptively. And I think doing that would be escalatory because not only would it bring more to the U.S., it would also bring in, I think, all of those allies that are kind of like fence sitting right now. And I think that so it would be a much more nuanced geopolitical play for China to be able to do that.

Unless for some reason, you know, they started, you know, massive war with China over Taiwan preemptively, which I don't see that happening either. my thoughts on why it would be hard for them to take a one-to-one. Let's go back to the Pentagon. How many drinks do we think Pete Hexeth had? So Dumbledore had a great article about this, which was that because of Pentagon bureaucracy, Pete's sobriety pledge only went through on election night, and so he's had the worst 48 hours of his life sober. But, yeah, I suspect there's been a lot of globes dropped in the last week. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, he's had a really shitty day, right? A shitty week. I mean, there were already the stories that were coming out prior to the election of him, like, trying to contact Marsha Blackburn and get his way into being appointed as a senator for Tennessee.

so the only thing worse than a new phone who dis is a new phone who dis and put it on social media that we are absolutely not talking to you my favorite stories are that he wants to go out on a high note so he can run for president exactly yeah build on the success maybe he made an upswing like it's not hard to go up from here Brad Cooper he needs to have his own like between two ferns podcast that he could do with Feinberg or something. They can talk about basically their workout routines, what podcasts are going to be, how many agents they have working, that kind of stuff. I really want the Feinberg truth serum interview because from day two, he just must have been like, this fucking guy is not it. He's not it. What am I doing here? And so Leiberg has spent, he spent 30 years being able to fire whoever the fuck he wants.

That's right. Okay? And then all of a sudden, he's having to work for, like, the worst cabinet secretary we've had in half a century. Yeah, he's working for a guy that he wouldn't have hired or kept on as an intern. The true best guest for the CENTCOM podcast is Paparo, where he's just doing the John Mulaney bit of, where's my fucking money, man? I was going to say though, Jordan, I think that's a really interesting take and something that I hadn't thought about. I was listening – you go back and read Liar Spoker. You listen to even Scott Galloway talk about very early on when he was doing investment banking stuff. And he's like, yeah, I slept in my office and I had an extra shirt. And people would get reamed out and fired for minor grammatical errors in a memo at these places. And, like, everything is treated like it's, like, the most important thing ever. To go from, like, being the boss in an organization like that, where you're, like, again, like, you have the ability to basically look and be like, you, punch him. You, you're fired. You, jump out of that window. And, like, people will do it.

To be in the deputy at the Pentagon and looking around and being like. He found his firm at 32. It's been 30 years of his word goes. And then all of a sudden, this. Yeah. I mean. Yeah, no, I can't imagine. For lasting more than a month, like maybe. I don't know. I don know I don know if he deserves it Bless your heart You know what Exactly But what so what I mean one thing that kind of is funny to me or weird to me is the war in Iran to just kind of double back on that slightly You know, everybody kind of perceived this is the president. Netanyahu came up with this scheme and they decided to go in and it was basically them deciding this. But now that we're seeing it kind of play out, I mean, Higgs F and Cooper are both like all in. I mean, Brad Cooper is the guy that's arguing we should be escalating again. We need to go in there and hit him again. I mean, it's just sort of shocking to me that guys that have the best information theoretically available to them are the ones that want to continue to escalate this conflict. And it's actually Trump that's sort of kind of vacillating on whether to escalate or not. So just the fact that, you know, they whether they were willing participants at the beginning, they are like all in now.

And all of this needs to blow back on them just as much as it blows back on anybody else. I mean, the best information is a really interesting framework. Right. Because, like, you know, there are some types of information which are valid. that they have that we don't. It's like, okay, like Iranian leadership intention, how their economy is doing, you know, unrest monitors or whatever. But the piece of information that matters the most are gas prices and coal numbers. And, you know, if all you're doing is thinking about, you know, where the troops are going or whatever, like that's kind of not on your mind as much. And at least if you're the president, like you ostensibly became president because you cared about those two things, right? So it's not surprising to me that having a more blinkered view of the war would make you more bullish on its prospects. The difference between a chief of staff like Ridgway, who is willing to push back and make like kind of political judgment calls based on his military advisement to political appointees, vice like Dan Cain, who came out and said, I don't make political determinations.

My job is only to offer best military options. And it's like you can't get to a military victory without some type of policy objective that you're actually driving towards. And the denial of that and the attempt to separate that at those levels is exactly what these guys are doing. Brad Cooper is not wrong. The U.S. could win a war with Iran. That's not the question, though. Like the question that's being asked is can we do it in a way that doesn't cost us everything else? And there's never been a good answer to that because nobody has determined, like, this is what we're willing to give up for this because nobody has defined what the strategic national interest is. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. We have no objective, so we can't come up with a plan to achieve it. I mean, the ostensible interest is them not getting a bomb, but that's not interesty enough for the American people. Right. Right. Well, it was already at the table. It's not like a normative judgment about whether or not we should care about it. It is just like a revealed preference.

that, like, we don't care that much. There's been this whole argument for years, right? If you're in Brad Cooper's seat, right, you are an admiral. You finally get to command at wartime. It is your campaign. You have, you know, the might of the fleet. You've stolen all Paparo's assets, and you're held at a distance. And you get to do this, you know, strike campaign, but you don't get to do anything else. It is going to be your legacy. And everyone's argument for years has been, well, surely, you know, if the American people feel something, they'll care about the campaign. And it's actually the opposite. They felt the pain and they said, was this worth it? Perhaps we should reflect upon the last 25 years, because the difference between this and the last 20 years was that like the American people did not feel economic pain from GWAT. Certainly those who lost people felt that. But that was kept to certain communities. And now it's different. And it turns out that had this had for some reason, Afghanistan driven, you know, oil prices up to one hundred and fifty in 2011, we would have been out of there.

I mean, realistically, like the surge coincided with the housing crisis, kind of like 2007 surge in Iraq, 2008 was the housing crisis. You know, that did have a pretty substantial economic impacts. And if you really think like the long tail on that was President Obama gets elected. President Obama withdraws from Iraq in 2011. Like, you know what I mean? Like, you can easily paint like the reason that all of these things were able to happen was because like there was able to be we're mad about this, but we're really mad about the economy and the economy is going to motivate us. And that's I mean, again, these guys just kept doubling down. I'm like, I doesn't really matter. The gas prices don't really matter. They're going to understand that Iran not getting a bomb is really important. you really have to suspend disbelief to get the United States to that because again, North Korea has a bomb and it hasn't demonstrably changed anything. Pakistan has a bomb. It hasn't demonstrably changed anything. I'm not saying that I want global proliferation, but I'm saying you now have to restate the theory of

they can't be allowed a bomb because what's the reason? And if the reason is just we don't want them to have one, okay, comma, and I don't know how the current campaign gets you to them not having a bomb, though. I mean, I guess the idea would be we're going to squeeze them enough to where they eventually agree to not pursue a bomb, which they'd already kind of agreed to do. It's a regime change play, right? And then it's even worse. And then we're up at the aftermath. And that's exactly it. Yeah. And honestly, if anything, what we've done has reinvigorated the desire for people that are in the regime to push for a bomb because they can look at North Korea and go, they're leaving them alone, so maybe they'll leave us alone. Can we do a little history lesson? Let's do it. So Mayorkas was impeached in 2024. Before that, we have to go back to 1876. Secretary of War William Belknap, who was a Grant-era official who got hit for corruption.

He was famous for his extravagant parties and elegantly entired first and second wives. Many questions how he managed such a grand lifestyle on his $8,000 government salary. Once the trail of evidence starts coming up, he just minutes before the House of Representatives was scheduled to vote on articles of impeachment, Bill Kemp raced to the White House, handed Grant his resignation, and burst into tears. Now, I don't know. How far does people want to push this? I mean, here's the thing, right? Like those impeachment articles are coming Monday the second the gavel hits in the House. Thomas Massey has promised this much, and that's why, you know, Mike Johnson was keeping the House out of session. Politico reporting that, you know, you're probably going to have a pretty good margin for the House voting yes. I think there's going to be a lot of people who are going to be out of politics who are going to say, Pete, cost me my job because the narrative within the GOP is explicitly that the war, whoever you blame for it cost them the election.

And then if you go to the Senate, I don't know if you get to like the two thirds thing, but like talking to some folks, you're probably going to get at least half a dozen GOP folks on board. And it's just whether the White House wants to endure even more of that pain before the new Congress even starts. That's my big thing, too, is like, has has the Trump administration lost enough of the riz that they no longer are able to even put the Republicans into some type of coalition to back things that they want at this point because they've so fractured the party. So a couple of things that happen, like normally in these lame duck sessions, especially if a lot of people lose office, they don't even come back, right? Because if you're in Congress and you lose your election, you lose your office, your physical office. So you have to start operating out of other places. And a lot of those guys just don't come back in. They come back for the very minimum amount of time, but then they just sort of disappear.

So if you're on the Republican side, you may not be able to assemble enough humans to vote to be able to get anything done because a lot of these Republicans are just going to check out for the remainder of their time. So that's not going to help. And then you've also got the fact that Massey's discharge petition or whatever has to get voted on. So they've got to do something with the Hegseth impeachment proposal one way or the other. They have to act on it if they're going to do anything in the House. The staff have given up. The members have given up. Nobody is mounting a real opposition to this. You're just – I mean, I guess if you stay in office, then, like, the government is handling your legal bills for all the investigations. But, like, aside from that, is there any – but, like, on the other hand, you're a bigger target if you're still in the cabinet, right? Like, if you're gone, then you're kind of like yesterday's news, and it's a little more exciting to do oversight on people who are still, you know, appointed officials.

You can get the Lindsey Graham defense of we're not here to litigate the past, however he talked. I can't remember his voice. But, like, you get that if you're out. If you're still in, you're not fast. Yeah. Right. So, you know, yeah. But he provides a nice target that attracts a lot of attention. So maybe taking attention off of other people. So they're like, well, let's keep the lightning rod in there as long as possible. And aircraft carriers, everybody's aiming. I mean, just like, I mean, you know, if the administration, and I don't know if the administration actually wants to get anything out of Congress before the end of the year. So it might be they're fine with just, you know, stasis, you know, where they do a continuing resolution to keep the budget, keep the government open, basically. And they just let everything else, like the wheels fall off of it until the Democratic leadership comes back in in the new year, because they're going to have to deal with this massive petition. They're going to have to do something about the Iran war to pass anything on defense legislation. I just think the whole thing is going to kind of grind to a halt. And then there's all these Republicans that aren't going to be there at all.

It just seems like there's going to be no activity on the Hill other than just hearings to beat up on the administration potentially. Yeah, you're going to see in big, bold print, none of the funds in this bill may be used to continue operations in the CENTCOM AOR. Right. If you're lucky, you get that, and they actually pass something. I mean, I think the argument that some of the Democrats are making is that any bill that we pass on the NDA or the appropriations supports the war, and therefore we don't want to be furthering that, and we're going to use that as basically a way to be able to do it. Well, and the proclivity to make the administration fault. Yeah. And the proclivity that the Pentagon has shown recently of attempting to move money around also doesn't give them there. If you're not dealing with somebody who's dealing with good faith on the other side, that's going to execute the things that you put in the bill. Then why would you even pass that? And that becomes the danger that the Democrats get themselves in is like, well, we wrote all these provisions. And they go, yeah, but they're not following the law. So why would they follow the provisions of this bill?

Well, and, you know, this is also part of the original sin of the reconciliation bill, is that all that money was very broadly defined. So what they're doing is they're moving that money around to pay for things as they need it because the money in that appropriation was just in buckets, broad buckets of categories that they can push into any other investments they want to make. So the fact that the Congress kind of set this up by passing that reconciliation bill with such loose acquisition roles associated with it. You know what a really great election night? Raul Castro. You think Cuba's off the menu now? I think he was having a party. I mean, like, you can't do Cuba, right? How can you do Cuba? I mean, dude, maybe you still can. But, like, if you think it's going to be bloodless, like, that's the thing. If you think you found an opposition figure and you think they're going to handle it themselves, you certainly can't do it with green suitors.

Right. Like that. I think that is off the table. I wonder if there's a bay that we could land these opposition people at. That's right. How would that work? No, just quiet sort of an insurgent. Yeah. Under woke three point oh, the Bay of Pigs is now the Bay of Tofu. You cannot land there. Yeah, I was just wondering, like, if there's any historical analogies to trying to do a bloodless coup in Cuba that hasn't gone well. Don't worry, Justin. We'll send them with drones. They'll be fine. They'll have a hair cover. They'll be good this time. They have good authority that robots don't bleed. But they do feel. So the idea would be, Florida is, like, the last bastion to the Republicans now. So do you want a humanitarian disaster taking place 90 miles offshore of your last, you know, redoubt for the Republican Party? The disaster.

We're relieving the disaster. Come on. Except all those people are going to be. They haven't had power for fucking four years. That's true. Except they'll be making their, they'll quickly be making their way over to Florida as part of the, you know, reparations or as part of the restitution that we need to make to the people. Didn't you say the Coast Guard had nothing to do anymore because they can't be in the Gulf? That's true. If you have a lot of Coast Guard, they can be freed up. Yeah. Yeah, I think it. Yeah, I mean, like. No disrespect to the Coast Guard. I love the Coast Guard. Can we talk about, okay, let's talk about Feinberg leaving, OSC leaving, future of, like, the Pentagon, like, spending money and doing things. Yeah. So we had good reporting well prior to the election that Feinberg had submitted a resignation letter, and it was rejected by the White House. and he was told, please stay, or whatever they say to somebody who has his background to convince him to stay. There is the beginnings of reporting now that he has resubmitted his resignation with more of a I'm not asking tone to it.

So, yeah, I mean, like him leaving as the champion of dog and as the guy who was going to bring in VC money and it was going to, you know, write the ship on procurement and apparently also take all the blame for, uh, you know, the failure to rearm, uh, and replace all of the missile scores that we've had. You forgot about that? He didn't. Yeah. Like, you know, again, like he's, he's, he's had a, he's had a lot. Um, you have him going out and then you have like, you know, multiple discussions about people in the NSV and the OSV all leaving very, very soon. The ship starts to look real rudderless real quick. Uh, Yeah. So, like, let's let's talk about what Congress looks like from the DOD perspective of like it's actually better for the defense budget that what we're looking at is like a 260 Dem majority instead of like a 218. Because usually there's like this block of like 20 to 30 people split between the Dems and Republicans who are like cut the budget by 10 percent. It comes up every year. And I actually think that gives leadership more room to maneuver to at least keep the budget flat.

You're probably not getting stable with inflation, so it will be a real dollar cut. But I don't think you're going to see a real cut across the board. Maybe certain products will be cut. You're certainly going to get more regulatory scrutiny for how things are awarded. But, like, from the, you know, to your point of, like, Feinberg being the champion of the dog and everything else, like, the thing is, is, like, the companies that matured to do all of this and are now building things, like, they're in congressional districts now, which means the new members are going to learn very fast that they can't actually just suddenly wipe the board. And so I think you're going to see more haggling than some commentators expect. But, yeah, I think more than budget cuts, you're going to see scrutiny over some of the deals that were made, who made donations to what for certain renovations, et cetera. It's going to be more of that than it is going to be like. That's a catastrophe. But I think the VC market might very well look at this and say, yeah, Yeah, maybe like seeds in Series A rounds for defense tech are probably not the best place to invest.

Maybe we should find a new market for our ROIs. Yeah, I agree with a lot. I think what we've been seeing is folks making procurement and contracting decisions have been making decisions that include some of these new defense tech companies that are connected to the administration or even the president's family. and it's not necessarily because like somebody called them to say Don Jr. called and wants you to buy the stuff from his company. It's because they say, well, my boss's boss is really tight with these people and I don't want to leave them out in the cold. So if I'm going to do, you know, some kind of, most of these procurements have multiple, multiple winners. So I'll include them in the mix. So I'll keep these politically connected companies in the mix as we move forward and then eventually we'll winnow down to somebody who's the real winner. And then maybe if they don't, You know, if they don't cut it, then we'll lose them then. But it influences the decisions that these contract novices and acquisition officials make because they just know that these political connected companies are going to come and, you know,

put pressure on their boss and their boss's boss. So they keep them in the mix at least as long as they can, which gives them government contracts and allows them to go do fundraising based on the fact they have a government contract because now I'm, you know, a viable company. So just this vicious cycle. And I think that's going to start to fall off now because these contracting officers and procurement officials are going to be like, oh, I might have to go over and talk to the Democratic Congress about the decisions I made and why I made them. So I think we're going to see a real, you know, kind of constricting at that action level where, yeah, you've got people that are doing corruption at the political level, but down at the level of people who might be legally liable for these decisions, they're going to be having to watch their backs and probably make smarter choices. is now when we talk about the Elon of it all. I mean, like, what do you do about SpaceX? Yeah. I mean, so the stupid nationalized commentary is dumb, but I think there's going to probably be an ask to say that, at minimum, Starshield has to be spun off as, like, its own subsidiary that Elon can't touch.

And I think that, you know, whether that's even supportable from an infrastructure standpoint, I have, like, no idea because telecoms are not my expertise. But I think, yeah, there's just going to be so much investigations into who pressed the button, who turned it off. And there's going to be a lot of PMs on the gov side who are going to be happy to point the finger. I was hearing that before the election where people were just openly complaining about it. Well, and I think that's, you know, to me, that's going to be the biggest hang up is going to be there. One I agree with you I think Starshield they going to make demands on Starshield Because again it goes back to the argument you know we can say that the department was somewhat directionally correct with the Claude and anthropic decisions and discussions that they made around, like, Claude's ability to throttle models. Now, yes, on deployed edge compute in top secret enclaves or in secret enclaves, they couldn't reach in and throttle a model. That's true.

However, on unclassified, which is where a preponderance of military work occurs, they showed the ability to reach into these systems for their commercial customers and downgrade them without saying anything to them and without alerting them. And they did that when Fable was first released. So that kind of validated the Pentagon's fears. We don't want to give a commercial company this amount of control over something that we're going to employ. This is what our fear was. That exact same logic applies to the Starshield enterprise. If you're going to say that we are going to use Starshield as a backbone for, you know, military communications, C2, you know, command and control, we're going to use it on communications platforms. We're going to use it for drone driving or whatever. Like, then, yes, there's going to be zero way that they're going to let a commercial company still have control over it. There also gets to be the whole issue. this is something that people have talked about before Elon Musk doesn't have a security clearance technically by the way

the letters of law are written I'm not even sure he's eligible for one because he kind of openly does drugs which you know whatever but then also it wasn't you know his citizenship status and all those things they were always there was some questions the fact that he doesn't have a security clearance and yet sits over the top of a system that conceivably is used to transfer classified data is also somewhat problematic if he is the one who can give directions on when turning it on, turning it off, things like that. Because it shows that he has a hand in that that goes beyond, I sit here and make, you know, budgetary moves for the company, and that he actually has operational control, which means, you know, who's going to tell him no when he has to see something? And I think those are going to be really hard questions that they're going to get asked, probably very quickly. There's so much dependence on StartShield for a lot of these robotic and autonomous systems we got deployed. We're fielding all these forces, including in CENTCOM, where that's the only comms network that you've got available to you.

And to have that be dependent upon, you know, whatever Elon wants to do that day is not a tenable situation. So they're going to have to make them spin it off and create a subsidiary that's managed differently than under SpaceX overall. And I think going forward, there's going to be a bunch of, you know, changes in probably how the government's going to be able to acquire those services. And I agree they're probably going to have to come up with different governance structures at SpaceX, you know, kind of like we do with, you know, other defense contractors where they have to create subsidiaries that are going to have different rules compared to their commercial counterparts. And Elon's trying to get into mobile, you know, network, mobile broadband networking, taking the boost mobile spectrum that he was able to, I guess, acquire from them and try to do basically, you know, space to surface cellular telephone service or mobile telephone service.

So now that's going to be another potential capability that the DoD might want to use and now has to figure out how that's going to get managed relative to SpaceX's other offerings. Because, like, the way that the DoD works with Iridium, you know, on the equivalent capability, it's pretty tightly governed. You know, the Iridium has a bunch of rules and a bunch of ways that they've managed that program that make it, you know, not nationalized, but it's fairly regimented. And they're going to want the same kind of thing if they're going to use SpaceX's space to user mobile telephone service. I think that's right. I think, too, just stepping back a little bit more broadly, just kind of looking at the defense tech, Neoprimes, the small startups, things like that. One, we saw yesterday Shield AI did an acquisition of a counter UAS system, which is interesting because one of their better counter UAS systems is their existing UAS system. but sorry that's a bad joke

but like so Shield does this acquisition they have now done several acquisitions and they start to look like hey like you know that's going to be the way forward for us and we're going to buy these relatively early companies that have decent valuations and that's going to help drive our valuations as well flip side of that is you've got these PE firms and these VC backed firms that have started investing in defense tech about three-ish years ago, maybe four years ago, start of Ukraine, when we started to see like, hey, defense is starting to shift and it's going to be more commercialized and there's going to be these startups that are starting to see things. They're starting to get to the point where they're looking for profits, like the PE firms in particular. They're starting to look for profits. And I worry that you're entering a phase where you're going to see less funding going to the pre-seed, seed rounds, A rounds and stuff like that. you're going to see P.E. starting to back out a little bit where they're going to be like, well, I don't really know. And you're basically going to be left with these big, you know, heavily valued neoprimes that are going to be there just trying to snap up these little companies.

And they're basically just going to create the primes of the past just again. Like it's kind of by virtue of them being the only ones with cash because people bought in early to them. And I worry that what we're going to start to see is these boards get really anxious over maybe we're not going to get as much dog funding. Maybe there's not going to be as many UAS purchase. And they're going to start bailing on what would be profitable companies, but maybe not profitable to the, you know, the PE values that they had given them originally or the multiples that they gave them originally. That's a fear that I have because I think what that will actually do is that will really drive down and slow both the competition and the innovation. And as we talked about with Michael Kaufman on here, like the speed of innovation, and even, you know, Travis Metz talked about this. Like we're doing a, you know, VIU is doing a drone competition every six months. Ukraine is iterating every six to 12 hours sometimes on, you know, capabilities. And like so keeping up with that requires having multiple people that are doing iteration and figuring out what the next thing is.

And I think a consolidation at this point would actually probably slow us down more on acquisition and actually getting capabilities into warfighter hands. Adam Smith has been as the chair, assumed to be chair of Hask, right? He's been around for a long time. He's done this before. I think he very much knows the difference between hunting for corruption and bad deals and, you know, making sure that, you know, he under he has, I think, been on record of saying he understands the value of actually viable new robotic autonomous systems. So I think managing all of the new members of HASC who do not understand those things will be a very hefty job on the PSMs to explain the difference there. And it will almost be managing the stray voltage will be the hardest things for staffers because there will be so much that people want to go after. Do you want to spend a little bit of time, Tony, talking about your piece that you recently wrote, the how-to guide for staffers, because I think it's a good lead-in?

Yeah, yeah. So I, you know, as a former house staffer, I finally got around house people, as we say, finally wrote a piece called How to Be a Good Staffer. And it's – the reason I wrote it was for two reasons, one of which is that you have this massive swing in new members, which means new staff, both on the House and the Senate side, probably, I think, more than 100 new members, if I'm doing my math correctly, at least on the House side. And how you go from, hey, I have to spin up a new staff. I have to get people smart on it. Like, the numbers are just not there because of what the last few years looked like, particularly for the Dems of, like, staff fleeing the Hill. You're going to have to bring in a lot of new people. So I wanted to help get people accustomed to the Hill, particularly about how to be good at their job from a policy perspective because when I was a staffer, the office I was in was basically just like a pressure cooker for, like, you better learn fast. And so I took a lot of those lessons that were ingrained in me.

I also wanted to because talking with a lot of my former colleagues, and even political had an article about it this summer, the quality of staff has declined as there's been a focus on comms, ideology, and posting over actually doing the work of legislating. And the only way the republic, you know, turns back to good is that you have to have good legislative processes. Congress has to reclaim its Article I powers. And that starts with staff and members who believe in the legislative process, who are able to do it, and who don't just rely on Claude to do their job for them. Wait, I thought Jordan wants Claude to do more of these decision-making based on what we've been doing. Look, I mean, relative to the 22-year-old, I do think Claude can be an upgrade, but we're still not completely – AIs haven't completely superseded us. Yeah, no, I agree. I think that's absolutely right, and I really appreciated the piece, One in particular where you point out like how lobbyists take advantage of basically the staff members inability to or call it time constraints, inability to read or, you know, the time to actually read bills fully.

They come in and they say like this AI weapon system is biased and we need to take it out. And like you're correctly like point out like, wait, are you talking about bias in like the way they do the weights and training? Are you saying that it, like, targets people of color more, and then they take three days to get back to you, and they're like, we meant the second one. People of color. Yeah. I mean, it would be – okay, so, Tony, what are you putting on the Dems, like, congressional reform agenda? I mean, I don't think now is, like, a moment you can double everyone's salary. It's always, like, a tricky thing to do that kind of thing. Yeah, so I'll say on the salary a bit, there has been a lot of work over the last few years. Interns are paid now, which I know is such a low bar. Staff is actually paid at decent salaries. It's still low for D.C., but it's like you only need two roommates instead of ten sort of thing. I really think on the Dem side of their legislative priorities, it's going to be a lot of what we just talked about,

which is regulatory reform for the DoD, like keeping them honest. And on the staffer side, there's just going to be a lot of hard pains in learning how to – the DoD is not this mystical place. I think when Ike Harris was on the show, Jordan, with us, we talked about it. It's like if there's anything that new staff can do, it is find a way to demystify the DoD for themselves so they don't treat it as like this magical place where they just give me the answers or not and that it's a bureaucracy like any others. Well, actually, the thing I've been seeing most recently is that because, of course, the administration doesn't want to share any information with Congress because that comes from the leadership on down. I mean, unless it's about their workout routine, you know, or their, you know, between two ferns podcast, that's the extent to which they want to share information. What I hear from staffers is they can't get anything out of DOD. Basically, it's not magical or mystical. It's just they get zero out of there because it's all mediated by OLA to be essentially just publicly releasable information.

They can't hardly get a real answer. So they come to think tanks a lot of times to say, well, can you explain to me what this is supposed to be saying and what the DOD is really trying to do or the department is really trying to do here? And that's just gotten worse. I mean, that's just been a trend for the last decade or so is less and less useful information coming out of the department to the staffers in particular. I mean, they'll, you know, they sometimes share good information with the members, but the staffers get this very kind of, I guess, they get very surface level inputs that are sometimes incoherent. So that leaves the junior staffers kind of questioning, like they don't understand any of it because they have no background. So that ends up being something that think tankers end up having to help with. You heard it here, folks. If you're a new staffer, you can call Brian at 1-800-WARTALK. for 24-7 support. Just put in the comments. He's better than Claude. Exactly. Or just as Claude, yeah. I mean, what we would see is, like, when I was in,

we would have staffers come out relatively regularly, congressional staffers, you know, CODELs, whatever. They'd come out to training, or they'd come out to the unit, or they'd come out when we were deployed. And the tone and tenor of the way that we addressed those changed so dramatically. Like, if it was a CODEL and it was just like, You look at the staff list and like you'd have obviously somebody at the command. You'd be like, hey, you're having like this and this person. They're on the congressional staff for this guy. And they're like, what are you guys going to do? And we're like, oh, we're going to take him to the range and we're going to show him some vehicles and we're going to talk to him about a couple of things. And they're like, perfect. And it's very much like glad handing photo op opportunity. They get to shoot a gun. They leave and they're like, that was amazing. Then you have the PSMs come in like the professional staff. Very different. Like they would be like, hey, we need to have a discussion about what you guys are going to say. They don't want to see any of that shit. They want to see you actually have a fulsome conversation about what's going on. And they're going to ask you questions and you better be ready.

Because like I forget the name of the guy that was the lead PSN that used to come out to Syria pretty routinely. But he was like, I wouldn't say that he ever yelled, but he definitely chewed a couple officers asses like pretty hard. because they would start saying just kind of like bullshit. They would just answer poorly questions that he had, and he would start digging in, and then you very quickly realize you're like, oh, no, this guy actually knows what he's talking about. And he's talking to a bit. That's the question with the Tony and pay, right, is like, yes, you can – like what's happened over the past, you know, five, seven years or so is it's gone from having lives be like, you know, basically like poverty level salaries for entry level folks to like somewhat somewhat more functional. But it doesn't change the calculus where like once you want to buy a house or like have a second kid, you kind of it becomes extremely hard to stay on in Congress. And that's why you have such a grave, you know, such a dramatic fall off between like what, you know, members can afford to pay people and the quality that is in the personal offices and then the quality that you see in in congressional staff.

And it would just it would just be great to have, you know, the PSMs feel like they can stay a few more years. And then the staff and then and then the representatives offices who like, look, these are not unimportant. Like, it would be great if there was also additional kind of knowledge and expertise coming from there. And often it isn't because just, you know, the people are 23 and they don't have any time. They have not had any time to develop any expertise. Right. And they can get pushed around. When the department comes over and they either give them bullshit or they don't tell them anything substantive or they're just giving them the publicly available information, they can't recognize that, right? They don't recognize that they're getting a snow job and they're not able to ask the right questions. And that's why I just see a lot of that, especially under the current leadership, which is really using OLA to constrain the information that's made available to Congress. So hopefully the new leadership can kind of break through the logjam over there on the congressional side. Yeah, and one note on that, which is not that much.

I've had this conversation with Dem staffers and consultants over the last few years because the GOP, especially in the foreign policy arena for years, had built up kind of this pathway of like this is how you become a staffer. This is we're going to train you, educate you. And like the Dems are really good at training activists. They were really bad at training staff or like SMEs, particularly outside of the NGO space. And so I think the role for think tanks, particularly going forward and WarTalk, is getting people smart again as staffers in a way that's like free and available to them, because it used to be that like, well, yeah, you could do this, but you'd have to do it for free. It was 40 hours a week. You've also got school on top of it. Like that structure doesn't work anymore for like getting the right people in place. And if you want smart staffers and therefore smart members, like you got to make the education and training available to people. Because if you're 22, 23, because that's the only way you're going to get a lot of staff for those prices, you're not going to have a lot of people. Like I was a rarity that I came from an enlisted background and then went into staff like that.

You're just the only way to do it is you have to find ways to train people and set up those institutions. I mean, you know, the sort of like the national security staffer education training I got was all right wing coded because that was the only thing that existed. It's like, thank you, Mr. Hortog. Like I went to Hortog War Studies that like got me down this whole path. But like, you know, that comes with a with a very defined conservative valence, which like, again, is fine. But it just means that there is not the kind of like dem. It's just, you know, I guess it comes back to the donor base. Right. But like, you know, if you're like into war, are you really like a like a big Democrat donor? So it's understandable, but it does. It's totally right. As Tony was saying, that there is this gap in the kind of upskilling that that happens to bring folks into the field. This is like a Vietnam fallout, like why study war, right?

I mean, military history, like it's very negatively coded. So maybe this is our Team Yankee transition? Yes. Are we finally going to get there? Do we have any other midterm stuff? I guess we're going to be talking about this for a long time. Yeah, we've got to get through the actual transition period. We're going to have many of these episodes. Yeah, I think we can kick off Team Yankee. Team Yankee. Yeah, so Team Yankee is the first book in what we're going to do as the War Talk Book Club, which we're going to try to make a monthly thing. But it is one of the original 1980s techno thrillers about World War III. It's written by Harold Coyle. It's about like two hundo pages. And it covers the command and the challenges of being a company commander as part of an armored team Team Yankee in the first two weeks of World War III between NATO and the Soviets It is an excellent case study in analysis of both leadership under fire

the transitions that people have very quickly when under fire, as well as just basic combat tactics, everything from how to maneuver on the battlefield and how you assess things to basic planning, And then even really just like, I don't know, just like when it talks about this is how you fire the gun on a tank, this is like, you know, how you do NPC procedures. Like it feels very much like you're walking through it. I say that coming from a mechanized unit and like not a lot of those procedures changed very much in 30 years, which is, you know, maybe a little bit concerning. Tanks did change, so yeah. Well, so to be fair, that's the one thing, right? The Abrams in this is the original Abrams that has 105 millimeter cannons instead of 120 or 125, whatever it is now. But for the most part, yeah, it's a very good, like, this is how you do armored warfare. So it covers 13 days of a conflict. So obviously, you know, like, it is something that was written to be able to take the story.

Then there's arguments that it's, you know, too one-dimensional and, you know, too much of the American bravada, you know, 1985-ish, you know, American triumphalism. kind of leading the way. I think that's fine. I actually think it was really good because I think the purpose of this book isn't to have a really nuanced view of the way that the strategic level of the war and the political levels of a conflict like that would work. I think this is a great encapsulation of the tactics of one side and what they would potentially use at a very, very, I mean, incredibly tactical level, at a company level. And it shows where there's friction and it shows where there is where there are frustrations that you're going to run into. And I think that that makes this book very useful for young officers and young enlisted men in the United States military. They should read this and they should use this as kind of a case study. Because there's almost like set piece battles where you can walk through what would I have done in this. And it isn't like going and walking the grounds at Gettysburg, which is amazing.

And I think everybody should do it. But I think when you do staff rides like that, you're trying to envision the way armies and corps were being employed in a time that was very distinct from how we fight. This is actually very similar to how armored units will fight now, and it's on a small enough scale that everybody who's in one of these units can kind of be like, oh, that would have been me. Oh, would I have made that decision? Would I have done that? Like, what would I have thought in that place? I think that makes it very useful for a role play kind of scenario that you could run. You know, as a young, if I was a young armored captain that was leading the company, this would be a book that I would give to my lieutenants and be like, you guys should read this and let's have a conversation about, you know, the battle of Hill 214. Yeah, they kind of fucked that one up, didn't they? They did. Honestly, that's actually like, that is the kind of stuff, though, like where I sit, And I wrote about this a while ago on Substack, but I called it, it was an article I wrote called The Day We Almost Died.

And it talks about the decision-making process that, like, led to my ODA being effectively isolated in southern Syria. And the pressures from both, like, the company command and the battalion command and their, the decisions that they were making and the frustration that I was feeling as I was trying to convince them, like, this is a bad idea. We shouldn't do this, and these are all the reasons, and it didn't matter because they had already decided this is what we were doing. And I think that's a very real thing that exists in wartime, and I think he actually wrote it pretty well, like being the captain and having a battalion commander that finally goes, you need to shut up now. Like, and you either need to do it or I'm going to find somebody else that's going to do it. And I think that is something that happens, and you as a young officer, I think you need to learn that, like, you can register your complaints. You can say, hey, this is – I don't agree with the way we're going. But if it's not an illegal, immoral, or unethical decision that you're being asked to do, like, it's a lawful command.

And, like, you need to go execute. And that's kind of the position that the captain finds himself in. I'm blanking on the name now. Bannon, Captain Bannon, finds himself in at one point leading up to this battle of, you know, Hill 214. yeah and i think that that like that whole sequence even leading up to the battle just is such an excellent portrayal of the confusion of even basic combat movements of maneuvering at night behind your own lines um people getting lost and then being like well do i wait for everybody do i just go and then obviously the the commander you know above you who wants his glory is going to say go take that hill um i don't care that nobody else is here um and does it in a very public fashion so there's no way and you have to be the one who's like all right well i have to figure this out how do i do this how do i keep my guys alive and how do i execute the mission um and then all the friction that ensues if i were to design it and i think we already batted around this uh i would design this almost as an aar that you could walk through after your

guys have read it and then talk through what went well and what didn't and like what would what would change and what would we have done different obviously in the end of the book Like, especially in those early battles, like, things go relatively well for Team Yankee. But still, like, you also get to deal with the interpersonal, too. I think he does a decent job writing about the shock that people feel and the realization that, like, I think at one point, like, looking out and seeing, you know, Russian tanks and Russian BMPs burning and then, like, doing the quick math in his head and being like, oh, each one of those can carry 12 people. Like, so I've just, like, and then very quickly, without even saying it, he stops there and he doesn't finish the thought. But, like, it leaves it for you to finish the thought of, like, oh, hell, I just, like, by myself, I just killed 36 people. Like, not including everything else that's going on in this war. And it draws it down to a very personal level in a way that, like, the abstract books sometimes don't because it just becomes, you know, submarine was sunk, plane was shot down, chip was sunk.

and you lose the interpersonal, like, the effect that that actually has on warfighters. I would be interested, Jordan, from your perspective, as somebody who, you know, didn't serve in the military, what did you – what were your thoughts on it? I mean, weird genre, right? It is. Like, I've read a lot of books that are history books about conflict, right? And then, like – and even armored conflict, right? Like, you know, read sort of memoir-y things about World War II and the Western Front and, you know, battles in Africa and whatnot. And it's just like, you know, when the thing is real, then, like, it's very different than this kind of, like, I don't know. It's just sort of milfiction. There's something uncomfortable about the genre, right? Because it's like there's a part of it where it makes you feel like, oh, this shit's really cool. And like you can't you never get that feeling when you're when you're, you know, reading someone's memoir about the about their their experience of war, because like the tenor always is like some of my best friends died in my arms because I did this thing.

And I think that, like, you know, when maybe other books are better at that piece of it than this, but like that that ain't that that sort of like, you know, hue of the of the narrative falls back when it turns into more of what you were saying. this like you know exercise of okay we're gonna pop the smoke and we've got one thing and we're gonna shoot it really fast and then we're gonna scurry away and hope we don't die and like oh yes and then someone died but like it's not a real person I didn't really you didn't like like I will feel emotional connection to a human being who died if they were real whether or not the author did a great job but if it's fiction like the author really needs to like make me care about someone before they die for me to give a shit. And that I think is the piece that you sort of miss when you're talking about this, like, you know, future wars. Yeah. It's interesting that you bring that up because I think we're there for me being able to put myself into that role because like I've kind of been in

similar scenarios. Like I'm able to go like, Oh, I can kind of, I can abstract all that away because like I've been in those kinds of scenarios and I can just nut it down to like, okay, these are the things that I'm really worried about and kind of pull those out of it. I will say that I had the same thoughts. Even the whole kids thing and the plane rescue and stuff like that whole thing, that could be left out. I could have lived without that. I didn't think that was amazing. They did that for the humanizing effect, sure. I would not say it's a great work of classic literature at all. But I do think that for the purposes of being something that you can use to draw tactical lessons from as a tactical leader in combat, I think it actually does that very well. But I do take your point. And I think that's really – I think it's also interesting to have that viewpoint because I think I can take for granted when they say certain things because I have a history from it. I can put myself in that role very quickly. And I think you're right. There is less – it actually requires less writing to get me to do that than it would for someone who hasn't experienced some of these things.

And by virtue of that, you have to be a better writer to be able to pull a larger audience in. And I think that's a really good observation. Yeah. I mean, my bar for fiction writing is, like, extremely high. And, like, sci-fi writers, they don't hit it. These people, they don't hit it either because they're not, you know, they're not – this is not what they're opting – this is not what they're selecting for. They like the technology and the, you know, order of battle and whatever. I also think that these sorts of books are more relevant when you have fewer case studies in the war, right? Like, Tony's, like, crazy ex-Superbook where, you know, we've got, like, your robot androids killing each other. Like, that is more interesting for me than, like, okay, I feel like I would probably learn more about how tanks fight reading, like, Yom Kippur War history than, like, this kind of, you know, imagined, whatever. But, yes, on the other hand, like, Americans hadn't fought with tanks in 50 years by the time this book came out. So there's like insofar as you're talking about things where there are sort of fewer case studies and it's not something that's like kind of already in the, you know, the zeitgeist in the imagination.

Then I think then I think this type of writing is more useful. But the sort of like, you know, rip from the headlines, like near future stuff. It's like, no, I'll just read like a Brian Wargame. And like that'll yeah, that'll that'll that'll give me what I need. No, and I think that's a really good point, too, because, like, you have to remember, you know, this was written before the Battle of 73rd Easting. So this was the last great, you know, big tank battle that the U.S. fought against the Iraqis. And I do think, like you said prior to that, maybe Korea, like, potentially not even then. Like, there were some tank engagements here in Korea, but, like, potentially you go back even further into World War II before you get, like, significant tank-on-tank combat. And so you're kind of left to, from the U.S. side, either reading Yom Kippur War or going back and reading like Hans Guderian or Rommel, or you're going back into U.S. memoirs, which I think all of those are great. But this also goes back to my common theme that, you know, talking to my buddies who are professors at West Point and, you know, everybody on Substack writes an article about it every other week, how nobody reads.

that includes military officers. And, like, you know, General Clark talked about that in that piece that Wes Morgan did the other day, or I think the other day, last week, where you have to find a way to pull them in. And I think, like, honestly, like, a strong point of this book is that it's only 200 pages. You could conceivably get somebody to read this that is not necessarily a reader. You start getting into the history books that you and I both have, you know, on our shelves and stuff, you might as well just go ahead and write that off. They're not opening it. They're going to come in and maybe they'll have felt the audio book and listen to it. Maybe. Okay. So let's close on this because there truly is nothing new. Justin complains no one reads. My contention to him is that no one has ever read. This is from the Social History of the Machine Gun. In 1872, Major General Sir John Maurice bemoaned the fact that, quote, the colonels of the regiments, as a rule, are fighting hard to stand in the old ways.

That queer animal in the matter of books, the British officer, as a rule, does not know where to get books. He hates literary work, even in the form of writing letters, and hardly has the energy to undertake it. um uh jfc miller uh noted military writer more famous than this other guy gave a particularly striking example of this aversion to reading in 1913 i remember recommending i remember a major recommending um henderson stonewall jackson to a brother officer and then a few minutes later when the book was being discussed committing the error of supposing that the battle of cross keys was a public house in otaheham and jackson was the man who ran it yeah i'd so like look yes no one ever reads no one's ever read the podcast is the you know it's an rs substitute well we'll we'll make it work by the way in the show notes i have had claude remake the board game um that accompanied team yankee when it was released so if you would like to see if you can best our uh

characters whose games we've forgotten because they were so forgettable um in their imaginary fights with the Soviets in Germany, then you can check it out. You also play with a friend as AI as well as, you know, two human version. What a week. What an edition of War Talk. Our next book is going to be The Gunpowder Age by Tonio Andrade. It's a fascinating look at the military revolution in the middle of the second millennium, comparing the Chinese and the Western experiences. It basically talks about guns in China, which is something that gets underweighted when people think about why, you know, the West conquered the world. Thank you for being with us. We're going to have merch soon. Tony's working on some mugs. And, yeah, here's to No Pete November.

Oh, TVD. At the pep rally crowd, he bought his white Mustang off campus. Cause four tires at three o'clock would make him proud. And deadlights busted, soft machines set out the grand prize. 2.8 million people and every bomb that flies. Now I ran tougher than before he hit it. The missile cells were empty, but he'll never admit it. Dominated, dominating, dominating all the way to speak.

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Penetrate! Conquer! Colonize! Plant! What would Jesus do? Overwhelming violence of acts. He left it all the peacemakers. No, fire them. These rules only work if the boss lives on TV. He hired deep right off the couch at Fox and Friends. But the midterms hit, and now he's grabbing the remote. Full confidence. Click. And that's how the show ends. Beijing's employee of the year. Scorted out yelling. I'm deep in January. I'm a lady. That's how I did. I'm a D&S. Can he be? Never a dream. Just repeat. I'm Pete. Have fun in jail, Pete.