 And for people who are just joining us, welcome to the Code Pink webinar to discuss author Andrew Cochran's new book, The Spoils of War, Power, Profit, and the American War Machine. We're really grateful to have you here. Thanks for being early and we will get started shortly. And welcome to people who are watching on YouTube and Facebook as well. If you have any questions or comments during the webinar, you can go ahead and post them in the chat and we'll be monitoring those as well. So again, welcome everyone to the Code Pink webinar to discuss author Andrew Cochran's new book, The Spoils of War, Power, Profit, and the American War Machine. I'm really excited to have people here today. We'll get started in a few minutes here. And thanks to everyone who's watching on YouTube and Facebook as well. Welcome everyone to the Code Pink webinar to discuss author Andrew Cochran's new book, The Spoils of War, Power, Profit, and the American War Machine. For people who are in the Zoom chat and also people who are watching on YouTube, if you wanna go ahead and introduce yourself in the chat box, you wanna let us know where you're zooming in from. If you have an organizational affiliation, that would be great. We'd love to hear from you. And again, welcome. Hi folks, thanks for introducing yourself. Hi Kirk from Lawrence, Kansas. Great to have you here. From Cuyuga Falls, Ohio. Welcome Eric. Nyleen from Tucson. Brad from St. Paul. Great to have you on. Thanks for joining us. Great, great. Welcome everyone. Again, welcome everyone who's joining us both on Zoom and also YouTube and Facebook. We're really happy to have everyone here with us for a great conversation with author Andrew Cochran about his new book, The Spoils of War, Power, Profit, and the American War Machine. We will get started very shortly. So thank you for joining us. Myon, can you hear me? Yes, we can hear you. Okay. Perfect. Thank you so much. All right, I see some more people joining us on YouTube and Facebook as well. So I think we can go ahead and get started. And I'll introduce myself as well. So thank you everyone again for joining the Code Peak webinar where I'm very excited that we're gonna discuss author Andrew Cochran's new book, The Spoils of War, Power, Profit, and the American War Machine. My name is Carly Town. I'm one of the national co-directors at Code Pink, which is a women-led anti-war organization working to end US wars and militarism, support peace and human rights initiatives, and redirect our tax dollars into healthcare, education, green jobs, and other life-affirming programs. So like I've said, I'm very, very excited to talk with Andrew Cochran today about his new book, which is very timely. As you might be aware, Congress is currently deliberating on two enormously important pieces of legislation as we speak. So one is the National Defense Authorization Act, which will approve Pentagon funding for 2022. And the other is the so-called Build Back Better Agenda, which would fund, among other things, healthcare and expansion to education and green jobs. And you wouldn't know it from media coverage, but at $3.5 trillion, or probably more notably $350 billion annually, the Build Back Better Agenda would only cost half of what we're currently spending annually on the Pentagon budget, which if you projected it out 10 years, is slated to cost $8 trillion over the next decade. So senators like Joe Manchin and Kirsten Sinema, who have claimed we can't afford to spend $350 billion annually on social programs, have themselves actually voted for every Pentagon budget since 2012, in the process approving $6 trillion in Pentagon spending since that year. So I think it's really clear, right, that opposition to social spending in the face of the climate crisis is not about, quote unquote, affordability, right? So why are corporate Democrats like Joe Manchin and Kirsten Sinema and Republicans opposing the Build Back Better Agenda yet are more than happy to approve over $8 trillion in Pentagon spending over the next decade? There's obviously not one easy answer to this question, but I'm actually really excited and can't think of anyone better to talk us through this current moment and how we've gotten to this point about how the US war machine really operates than author Andrew Cockburn. So Andrew was born in London shortly after World War II, where he grew up in rural Ireland, went to school in Scotland in Oxford, and thereafter entered into the family trade of journalism. And after spells on Fleet Street, he joined World in Action, which is a great investigative documentary show on British independent TV, where he began taking an interest in defense issues. So Andrew moved to the US in 1979, and in 1982 published The Threat Inside the Soviet Military Machine. This book was a national bestseller and revealed that the Soviets were not in a huge threat as we had been told for decades by the Western Defense Lobby. So since then, Andrew has written hundreds of articles on defense and other topics, several books, many documentaries, and co-produced the 1997 action movie The Peacemaker starring George Clooney and Nicole Kidman. He's also written books about Saddam Hussein with his brother Patrick and Donald Rumsfeld. Andrew currently lives in Washington and is the Washington editor of Harper's Magazine. This means he has a front row seat to watch the headquarters of a declining but still rich, powerful and cruel empire, as he's noted. So I'm very, very excited to welcome Andrew Cockburn with us today. And just before I invite you to speak, Andrew, just a couple of reminders for people on the call and people who are watching on YouTube and Facebook. So Andrew will have a chance to talk more about his important new book, and during which time, if you have any questions, you can type them in the Zoom chat, type them on YouTube or Facebook, and we will have at least, you know, approximately 10 to 15 minutes for Q and A at the end here. So please send us any questions you have for Andrew and we'll make sure we get to them. And also this webinar is being recorded and live streamed. So all participants will receive recording of this when we're done. So with all of that, I'm very excited to hand it over to you, Andrew. If you want to give us a great overview of your book and some important themes in it. Sure, well, it's great to be with you. It's great to be on. I really appreciate it. I'm a long time been a huge admirer of Code Pink and everything you guys do. So my book, it's really, you know, the title spoils a power profit in the American War Machine should give you a fairly good idea of where I'm coming from on this. But I want to emphasize it is about, you know, the word profit is very important in that because, I mean, there are a lot of themes explored in the book, but I would say the one that I'm most anxious for people to understand and to internalize when thinking about this issue is that the American War Machine isn't really about defense or even about war. It's about something else. It's about profit or money. I mean, the object of the exercise is to increase the power and wealth of the military industrial complex of the entire, which now includes, you know, not just the services and, you know, the manufacturers, the contractors, but also the whole universe of think tanks and the politicians who live off this and, you know, this whole enormous thing that now sort of squats on the American body politic. In fact, in one of the pieces, one of the chapters in the book, it's called The Pentagon Virus, I talk about how the, you know, in a way the defense complex, it's like a creature. You think of it not as an institution, but as an organic living, breathing being of some like giant single cell thing, like a virus or an amoeba that exists really in a sort of mindless way, except a concern to grow and to protect its food supply and increase its food supply, the food supply being money. And that is the object of the exercise. So when people say, oh, we've got a hopeless military, they're so incompetent, you know, they lose wars all the time and so forth. Well, actually I think they're very smart because winning wars and, you know, doing an effective military job isn't really the top priority. The top priority is making money, you know, and increasing bureaucratic and institutional power, which helps explain why they lose wars all the time, so forth. So I explored this in, you know, how to take a number of approaches to explaining this. In fact, the first two stories in the book, two chapters are about examples of how the main objective that I've been describing actually prevents them being effective militarily. It really sort of gives the game away. And it came in the form of two things, two very real tragic events that happened. The first one is about an incident back during the Afghan war when two American pilots were flying along in a plane called the A-10, which was specifically designed to be able to help troops on the ground. So the people, the pilots cover everything in the plane is designed to allow them to be able to see very clearly what's happening. They can fly at low level because it's heavily, you know, and survive because it's quite heavily armored. It's very cleverly designed that way. They have a wonderful very wide expansive view from the cockpit of the ground and so forth. So they're flying along and they get orders to attack a particular farm compound because the controller who's miles away says, we know that the Taliban are in there and they're attacking American troops. So they fly down and they take a look and they can't see no sign of this. They see an Afghan farm family actually it's getting towards the end of the day, towards dusk. So they're bringing in the animals for the night and the children are helping. It's a very bucolic, you know, rural peaceful scene. So they radio back saying, oh no, you know, that's not what's happening. There's, you know, they describe what they're seeing. There's no TIC troops in contact here. So they're told, no, go ahead and bomb. And they say, no. Then a voice, another voice comes on, which is from a B-1 bomber, a huge supersonic, or designed to be supersonic bomber designed to fly to Moscow and drop nuclear weapons on Moscow. And that is now being used to combat Taliban guerrillas in Afghanistan. The B-1 is very happy to bomb. They say ready to take the, you know, I won't do the jargon, but they say ready to copy, ready to bomb. So the people who can see what's going on the ground refuse to bomb. The people who can't see what's going on the ground because they're like three miles up, agree to bomb and they duly bomb and blow away this Afghan family and destroy the farmers. So, and then the next chapter I talk about where the more or less the same thing happened, not that someone refused to bomb but that a B-1 drops bombs on something on where they can't see what's on the ground and kills five American soldiers. And this is all to explain, or to explain, I should say, meet. So we've got one plane that works, another plane that doesn't. The Pentagon is trying to get rid of the one that works because it's cheap and it's not a sort of vastly complex, $300 million nuclear bomber, which is what the Air Force likes because it's more money. So it's a perfect example of how it's, this is not about defense. This is not about, you know, an effective weapon, whether you think that's a good thing or a bad thing, they're not so interested in that. They're interested in something else. And that's something, you know, that comes up in so many ways throughout the book. And I think it's really important for people to understand that, especially for people, you know, progressives like, you know, we are like, you know, Code Pink. You know, Code Pink is a great anti-war organization, but you have to understand what the wars are really about. It's not just that, of course, we all know and we all just deplore the fact that, you know, as you said, Carly, at the beginning, you know, they're gonna use, spend $8 trillion over the next 10 years. Actually, my calculation will be, it'll be well north of $9 trillion, given the cost increases that are inevitable for reasons I can explain in a minute, as opposed to things we desperately need that's in the bill-back-better bill. So, and that is the reason why we have the, you know, basically unquestioning acceptance. I mean, the Congress votes these through this ludicrous amount of money for defense, which doesn't give us a good defense, by the way. It's, you know, that's beside the point. It's because this whole apparatus, this creature, as I've been saying, has gotten so much sort of like a intertwined, like a, you know, a strangler pig, you know, the plant that wrapped itself around a tree and kills it. It's so much wrapped itself around our society and our economy, that it's almost impossible to get away. I mean, in the book, I give examples. For example, I mean, well, let me quote one example, which was Barack Obama, on very unfortunately, gave the go-ahead for a massive reorganization, modernization, they called it, of our entire nuclear forces. It was really to build a whole new nuclear force. The one we had before worked well enough in terms of, you know, threatening to blow up the world if we were attacked, which you could do perfectly well. It's really all you want from a nuclear force, if you want one at all. And Obama agreed that, no, no, we've got to have a whole new one, effectively, new bomber, new, you know, missile, intercontinental missile, new submarine, missile submarine, new submarine missile across the board, a trillion, probably by the time they're finished, $2 trillion, okay? So they, and part of that, they were gonna sort of make, you know, increase facilities for making the nuclear weapons themselves. And at the heart of a nuclear weapon is a plutonium pit. They call it a pit, it's really a ball, was also shaped roughly a ball of plutonium. We have a great number of these plutonium pits, which are, you know, lethal, by the way, for a hundred thousand years, if anyone who comes into contact with them, we have, we built so many during the Cold War, we have a huge surplus of all the ones we're likely to need. And yet they said, oh, no, we've got to build more. We've got to overhaul, build new facilities that the Los Alamos National Nuclear Laboratory in New Mexico to make more plutonium pits. At that time, the Senate, in the early part, when this was all being proposed, the Senate, one of the senators in New Mexico was Tom Udall, as decent and liberal, a senator as you can find, absolutely great guy, wonderful and everywhere, I really liked him. He went and fought like a tiger to have these, you know, these useless and deadly pits, you know, increase for the increased production because it was, you know, part of the New Mexico economy and, you know, lots of voters and money for New Mexico. So he was like trapped, he had to do that. And then, you know, I can cite you dozens of examples from across the country where people who, you know, philosophically and, you know, people with whom you and I would be entirely in sympathy with, you know, with them and with their positions on practically everything. But when it comes to dealing with the defense complex in their home ground, they have to fall over. So that's the main thing I talk about in the book. And, you know, I give as many examples as possible from all sorts of different directions. But there's another aspect that I also, it's not quite so obvious, but I also would like people to pay attention to, which is for reasons that, maybe I'll explain later, but anyway, put aside for the moment, for various reasons, there's a huge tendency, a huge drive, a compulsion to make more war fighting more remote for the US military. And the most obvious example of this is drones, drone warfare, where you have someone sitting in a trailer in Nevada, outside, preach, preach Air Force base in outside Las Vegas and lots of other places too, who are directing weapon firing weapons that are in, you know, on the outside of the world until, you know, very recently, Afghanistan currently in Syria, God knows where else, Somalia, definitely. And, you know, terrible things happen as a result because, and we saw, you know, most vividly at the, just at the last days of the Afghan war, when a drone killed a family was supposed to be, you know, they said they were trying to kill a senior ISIS terrorist commander or bomb maker, suicide bomber. In fact, it destroyed an Afghan family, who by the way, the guy was working for the Americans, including whatever it was, six children, eight children, I can't remember, too many children. This is all part, you know, this is not just with drones, it's like in everything they want to do is to separate, to make it more remote. And the reason mainly is, that's where the money is, that's where the money is, you know, the more complex of technology, the more you can sort of affect things at a distance, that's part of our Air Force ideology particularly, but also it applies to all the services. So the idea of someone being in direct contact with, you know, with what is going on on the ground, with, you know, with the actual business at hand, you know, fighting, targeting, maybe deciding not to fight, not to fire, it's all separated out. Basically, as I say, for reasons of profit, but I mean, it's led to this sort of, this ideology of remote activity. And that goes back to what I was talking about just now, that those two opening chapters in the book, where you see the terrible effects of that, where they cause the whole system, the system is biased towards remoteness, therefore, you know, tragedy ensues. So those are the main two things. I also talk about something I hope people pay attention to, what a knife edge we're on in terms of nuclear weapons, that the whole compulsion and the whole sort of system, this gigantic, incredibly complicated system that's been built to enable launching the weapons and how they're continually trying to streamline it. And there's a whole process that was very horrified to learn about this called jamming the president. In other words, you know, we all know that what's meant, what's supposed to happen is, they detect missiles coming from Russia, the radars and satellites give warning, and then, you know, it goes to the military headquarters here, and then someone wakes up the president and, you know, he has to decide, you know, and he gives the order and we fire back. They've done their best to make the really impossible for anyone to the president or anyone he wants to talk to, have a sort of sit down and think about this for a little while, you know, shall we blow up the world or not? It's all, you know, the whole process he has like three minutes, you know, three minutes to think it over or not to think it over and to give the order to launch and then the whole thing proceeds almost automatically and or as automatically as they've been able to make it and they've done their very best. So that, you know, there's no need actually why if you're going to, if the whole idea is to deter the other side from starting things in the first place, there's no need to be able to do it immediately because, you know, we have things on submarines, whatever, you know, the things are survivable. It would be much more sensible, surely, to, you know, to keep the warheads away from the missiles as used to happen once upon a time. It'd be very sensible not to have this launch on warning, you know, that doctrine, which has been there for a long time, that the idea is that you, if you see the, if you see what you think is enemy missiles coming away, you get ready to launch or you do launch actually, which is, you know, it's utter madness because there's a number of times when it's almost happened and each time it turns out those actually enemy missiles weren't coming our way or in certain cases were heading towards Russia because this applies to both sides, that, you know, that, you know, that they almost did it. And there was one, you know, for instance, there was a time in the Soviet Union when they thought they saw American missiles coming toward them and they were getting ready. It was down to one guy in the bunker who was, you know, if he'd said, yes, it's real, they would have launched and then, you know, we'd all be cinders. He luckily, that was a sensible human person and said, wait a minute, I don't think this is real, I don't think this can be really happening. And said, you know, it's switched it off and so we were all saved. Similar things have happened at our end. So, you know, that's, but again, I think that the reason we have and you have to read spells of war to, it's too, you know, it's taken me too long to explain it all now why this has come about. But again, it goes back to my basic argument that it's really the suit of money, of profit, of power, institutional power, particularly by the Air Force, but all the services and their contractor allies to bring this about. So, I've probably been talking for long enough, I'll give you room to ask a question or anyone who wants to ask a question. That was really great. I mean, I think a couple of points that you brought up are really important, you know, the sort of shift towards more remote and a lot of times what we think of is drone warfare. I mean, we talk about that a lot at Code Pink. I mean, obviously from our perspective, it's because there's also a lack of accountability that comes with drone warfare, right? Like Congress isn't approving that kind of warfare on the daily basis, but your point that it's also about profit, I think is really important and one that we don't often discuss. So, I think that's great to hear. I mean, horrifying to hear, but we need to know why these things are happening in order to take them on. And, you know, I have a couple of questions from the audience. I did wanna ask you maybe one more question about some of the themes in your book. I know that, you know, I was looking over it and it looks like you in part four, you include a few chapters about sort of the corruption on Wall Street and international finance. And, you know, we talk about that a little bit at Code Pink. We talk about, you know, BlackRock, which invests in weapons manufacturers and, you know, making that connection between Wall Street and war profits years, but could you talk about more, like why you included that in the book and how that connects to the U.S. war machine as well? Well, it's all part of the U.S. machine. I mean, it's, you know, I mean, I'm just thinking about it. It's pursuit of money. I mean, hey, it's at least with the defense system that I'm talking about, they, you know, it's disguised. I mean, they say, you know, we need this money for defense. And as I've been arguing and stating here, no, they need the money because they want the money and defense is a good excuse. I mean, I'm not saying that every serving man and woman in the U.S. military thinks this way, but the people in control very certainly do. But then we have Wall Street where, you know, they make no secret of it. We want more money, but it's, to me, it's part of the same overall system. And in fact, you know, the degree to which Wall Street actually and the defense, the defense system are very intertwined. I mean, I give you an example. In the late 60s, 1960s, the Lockheed Corporation was about to go bankrupt. The, actually the Pentagon were, they were prepared to let it go bankrupt because they could pick up the pieces and, you know, they would still, they would still get what they wanted. But the bank, the Chase Bank, run by David Rockefeller at the time, rang up the president and said, no, you can't let this happen because Lockheed Corporation owes us a lot of money. So you have to bail them out. So, you know, it was Wall Street coming to defense's aid. Also, you know, that they're very intertwined while the Wall Street model of ripping the rest of us off, to my mind, well, put it this way, Wall Street doesn't really, just as defense doesn't really exist, the defense system doesn't exist to defend us really, except as an excuse. Wall Street, to my mind, doesn't really play a functioning part in the economy. This is what really, it's really why I put it in the book, is, you know, it doesn't do anything particularly useful. You know, it's really, if you think of the, you know, our financial, our economic system as like a sort of pipeline, you know, conveying in which we exchange goods and services through the medium of money, of dollars. It's like Wall Street sort of plugged into that pipeline and sort of siphoning. It's like someone taking, you know, stealing oil from an oil pipeline. This is a Wall Street, you know, basically siphoning off money to no particular benefit to the rest of us. There's another thing, but though in those chapters that aren't directly about the Pentagon, there's one I really want people to look at, which is about sanctions, which is about the one, what is actually our principal weapon these days, is starvation, is to star, you know, to triple people economically and to starve them to a great degree. And I talk about the evolution of that weapon. And in a way, I compare it to, you know, bombing. I mean, you know, the bombing is meant to be precise and you know, you take out the quote unquote bad guy or the, you know, the enemy factory and you know, cause we're so clever, technologically advanced, you know, we don't kill civilians. Well, of course we do. In the same way, sanctions, as we've refined this weapon, and we call it more precise. I mean, it is very, it's a very sophisticated mechanism now, the whole sanctions apparatus, which I describe in spoils of war. But in the end, it's just as indiscriminate as mass bombing. Funny enough, just before we started, I was reading something about Afghanistan and we're doing it again. Afghanistan, because of the drought, they're having the wheat harvest is going to be down 30% this year. They would, or even before the drought, even before that shortfall, Afghanistan didn't grow enough wheat to feed itself. And they were importing it from Kazakhstan. And in Kazakhstan, they have plenty of wheat and they're ready to sell it to the Afghans, but they, the Afghans can't buy it because they have no money. Well, theoretically, the Afghan government, the, you know, the something called the Afghan government has nine billion, I think it's eight or nine billion dollars in U.S. banks, which we've frozen. And they can't have it. I mean, okay, we dislike the Taliban, we know all the reasons why we don't, don't and won't like the Taliban, but still they do want to buy the wheat to feed the Afghan people. And we're stopping that. And they say, when we say, oh, we're being very humanitarian, you know, we let humanitarian supplies through, no, we don't, you know, we've frozen the money. And so, so I, I'm sorry, I feel almost as our sanctions warfare, which is real warfare is, you know, makes me angrier almost than anything else we do. And by the way, he's entirely counterproductive because it doesn't do achieve its stated objective, which is to, you know, bend the other side to one's will. It just makes them hate you more, why not? So anyway, that's sort of an answer to your question. Yeah, I think that's really important, right? I mean, you know, when, when economic warfare like that is more often couched in this, in this humanitarian language and it's really horrifying. So I think that's really important. And also just speaking of Afghanistan, I don't know if you saw, but the CEO of Raytheon today, Greg Hayes, said that the US withdrawal from Afghanistan has had a $75 million impact in sales for the company. So just coming on now and saying that, but, you know, we say. Don't worry, he'll be compensated. He'll be compensated. You know, we've got a new Cold War with China, you know. Of course. I mean, it's going to be okay. I hope he knows that. I'm sure he does, right? But just coming right out and saying that, right? The end of war is bad for Raytheon. So we have a couple of really great questions here in the chat box. And this sort of speaks to something you were talking about a little bit earlier. Laura asked, I understand why, contractors or war profits years, building planes would want more expensive planes, but why would the Air Force want that? Why is what's happening there? Well, because power in the military bureaucracy and actually not just in the military bureaucracy, but let's stick with that. Well, there's two reasons, two aspects, two answers to that. One is, you know, in the government, in these bureaucracies, the more money you spend, the bigger you are. You have more power, you know, you've got more, you know, more clout. If you're spending a hundred billion, billion dollars a year as opposed to the poor stiff who's only spending 10 billion. Your authority is greater. You're going to get more manufacturers kissing your ass and so forth. That's part of the reason. Another part is that now more and more and more, the, being a senior general or admiral, really what you're doing is greasing, foaming the runway for your transition to civilian life where you will go and work for the contractor that you've given a huge contract to. I mean, it's gotten very egregious. There's an organization in Washington a project on government oversight, which does excellent work on this and other things, but they did a report last year, showing that in the last few years, I think it's approaching 400, three and four star generals and also their civilian equivalents in the Department of Defense have gone to work for major defense corporations. Secretary Mattis, sorry, former Secretary of Defense Mattis. He was a four star general. He retired. He went on the board of General Dynamics. He was there for a few years. He was just on that alone. He was paid a million dollars. Then he was made Secretary of Defense. He resigned from General Dynamics. Then after a while, he stopped being Minister of Defense back to General Dynamics. Our current secretary, Lloyd Austin, he had to, I'm sure reluctantly, close out his holdings in Raytheon. He was a director of Raytheon and made, I can't remember, I think it was eight or 900,000 out of that. So it's, you know, it's straight forward. It is very blatantly corrupt. So spending the money brings very rapid and material rewards. It's a reason why there are other reasons too, why the things cost so much, why they want things to cost much, those are two of them. Right, I think that's really important. And also, what's happening now is Congress talks about the National Defense Authorization Act and the Senate Defense Appropriations Committee just handed the Pentagon 10 billion more than they even asked for. Right, and I think that dynamic is definitely a huge part of it. Really important. I think we have a couple of other questions. So this one is from an anonymous attendee, former President Jimmy Carter has spoken out about how China hasn't spent the last 40 years or more conducting warfare overseas. Can you comment on the different approaches to military force and preparedness between the United States and China? I think that's an important question. Well, unfortunately, the Chinese show no particular interest in, still show no interest in military actions beyond their borders. You know, as Carter said, one striking distance. Unfortunately, the Chinese are now, I think it seems to me that their military industrial complex is growing in power and they've certainly asked, still they only spend a fraction of what we spend as some argument as to what their defense budget really amounts to. But it's very definitely way less than we spend. You know, there is this whole issue of, will they regard Taiwan as definitely part of China and should definitely be incorporated. So they are definitely increasing the size of their Navy and their Air Force. I don't think it's the slightest prospect of them trying to invade Taiwan, which they keep saying so themselves by the way. So the principle, the most important function of Chinese military spending and developments as far as I can see is to justify an increase in our own. The, you know, we are now, there's a huge, hysteria almost in Washington about the China threat. If you haven't watched or read about the confirmation hearings for the, both the new ambassador to Beijing and the new ambassador to Japan, Rahm Emanuel, when he wasn't having to explain how he'd covered up police murder in Chicago. But he, you know, he received his son, he absorbed hysterical in his defiance of the Chinese. Now we're going to stand up to the Chinese and get the Japanese to stand up to the Chinese. And, you know, a lot of this is to do with selling weapons. I mean, a great friend of mine, who unfortunately passed away recently, Pierre Spray used to say he'd worked in the Pentagon for many years. And he said, he concluded the US government has two main things it does. Its function is to buy arms at home and sell arms abroad. And you really have to understand so how much of US foreign policy, so-called, is to do with weapons sales. I mean, again, I talk, I go back to the book, I talk in spoils of war, you know, why it was that NATO expanded in, you know, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, NATO existed to stand up for the Soviet Union, no more Soviet Union, why do we need NATO? Not a bit of it. They promised the NATO, they promised the Russians at the time, I mean, in 1990, they said, well, if you pull out of Eastern Europe, we will not, NATO will not expand Eastward by as much of an inch as an inch, those are the actual words, not one inch. And the moment the Russians are gone, we started planning to expand NATO, which we've done ensuring Russian hostility and then, but selling lots of weapons to Eastern Europe. So the same thing is going on in the Far East. We're selling many more weapons to Japan, we're selling more weapons to Taiwan. I'm sure we'll get around to selling more weapons to Vietnam for too long. That is the object of the exercise. Yeah, I think that's a great point and really important exercise, right? If you're wondering why we're allies with, say, Saudi Arabia, that would be one of the main reasons, right, to make sure we can sell weapons. That's actually sort of a question that Gustavo has and they're asking, other than the US, what other nations are involved in the mass production and sale of weapons? And Gustavo also asked, like the US, do these nations use their national budgets to overwhelmingly spend on weapons or the military? Well, yeah, I mean, with a lot of help from us, because we've been berating, for instance, Europeans, that they need to spend more on defense. The British UK is spending more money on defense, they hadn't there, but the British UK is very much sort of integrated into the American system. A British company, BAE Systems, is actually a major US defense contractor as well, but it's also the main British defense contractor. So yeah, Britain, everyone's in on it. France, Germany, reluctantly, but also you've got India's increasing its defense budget. And unless I don't wanna sound like I'm, I wanna be sure, I'm not one-sided on all this, the Russian defense sector is, the Russian defense sales are hugely important to Russia. They do their best to sell weapons. Israel is a very much a sort of military industrial state, which depends on weapons and security sales to a huge degree for its economy. So it's not a problem unique to the US by any manner of means, but it's one that's certainly encouraged by us internationally, both by co-opting people or encouraging people we control or at least justifying other countries that are not necessarily our friends, like the Russians, they feel they're competing. So I think I see us as very much the engine that sort of powers the global military industrial complex one way or another. Right, by no means are we the only country to sell weapons, but we make up such a large proportion of global military spending and also weapon sales. Great, I think I wanted to ask you also while you're here and then we can start wrapping it up, but I wanted to check in because I'm sure you know that the Congressional Budget Office recently came out with a report about how to shave $1 trillion off of the Pentagon budget over the next decade. And a reminder, right? Your estimation will spend at least nine trillion over the next decade. So what do you make of that report from the Congressional Budget Office and are there other recommendations you might make to cut the Pentagon budget? I would say, I thought it was okay, but it was way too little. I mean, you cut it by half more. I mean, it's ridiculous. I mean, a long time ago in the 80s, it was a great American called Ernie Fitzgerald who was a senior Air Force official involved in cost management. And he started blowing the whistle and he got fired and then the judge got it, you know, he sued, got his job back and everything. But he always, he exposed the pact at the time that we were paying as two great examples that people remember we were paying $600 for a toilet seat and $400 for a hammer, a simple hammer. And Ernie always used to make the point. He said, people had to understand. He reasonably brought this out. He said, people understand that when you have a fighter plane costing, you know, $100 million, that is a whole collection of toilet seats and hammers. There are, you know, it's a similar inflation, just as a hammer, which, you know, which should cost $10 and here they are charging $400. Well, figuratively speaking, that plane is made up of hammers too. I mean, similar cost inflation. And we had a recent example. I mean, he said a toilet seat cost $400. And recently in the last couple of years ago, I talk about this in the book, they discovered the toilet seat cover on a plane on the C17 plane was costing $10,000 for a sheet of plastic. And that's, you know, so forget just shaving, you know, whatever it was, what would day, you know, 12 or 13%, whatever the CRS said, you know, we've got to go much deeper than that. And if you did that, you'd start to get, if you care about such things, you start to get an effective defense because if it's all about the money, as I was saying in the beginning, then you're not going to get a much military effectiveness out of it. You know, he has to start with cutting, you know, cutting the budget, taking a meat ax to the budget. And actually, you know, it's a good argument, good way to approach it if you're discussing with conservatives, because actually, you know, the sort of libertarian side of the right wing gets this. And, you know, you're not going to persuade them that we, you know, the reason to cut the budget is simply so we can spend the money on education because they don't really care. But if you say, listen, we need a decent defense, by the way, so let's slash the budget. You get some of that. Yeah, I think that's a really interesting point about that report. I mean, $1 trillion might sound like a lot to many people, but it's really just tinkering at the edges, right? And what you're proposing is we need an entirely different approach. I mean, the Pentagon has never passed a congressionally mandated audit. We actually don't know where some of this money is being spent, right? We can have to shave a little bit off. Yeah, exactly. Go ahead, sorry. No, no, I think I'm gonna have to go in a minute, but... Yes. So... Great, I think that was all of the questions and thank you so much for your time. I wanted to, is there any last thing that you wanted to end on? I've been posting the link to your book in the chat box, but is there anything else people should know about where to find your book? Well, you can find it, the link you gave, but also on Amazon, if you find it easier. And I would certainly, on a selfish note, if you like the book, I'd really appreciate a positive review on Amazon. It helps a lot, so helps encourage other people to buy it. Great, we will make sure people do that. Everyone here, please go review this excellent book. It's really important. Andrew, thank you so much for your time today. We really appreciate you being on. And with that, I think that wraps up our webinar and our conversation. So thank you so much. And I hope you have a good rest of your night, Andrew. Good night to everyone who participated. We really appreciate your great questions. All right, yeah, thank you. I really appreciate the questions by itself very much so. And thank you for all, it was really great. Thank you, so nice to meet you and hope you have a good rest of your night. Okay, same to you. Bye everyone.