The Worst Case of Defense Department Malpractice in Our Nation’s History

subbasement of the Ministry of Snark in Washington, D.C. and from other undisclosed locations

across America and around the world. Hello and welcome to Deep State Radio, I am David Rothkuff your host and this week is every week we are going to take a deep dive into the news. We've got a couple of guests joining us this week and we're going to start with our friend Frank Kendall, who is the former U.S. Secretary of the Air Force, because we got some questions

about the management of the United States Department of Defense. How are you doing Frank? I'm doing well personally, David, it could be with you again.

“Well, I'll glad you're doing well personally and the rest of us, I think we just have to”

wait for a while, maybe two and a half years, something like that.

So, Frank, here's the thing.

When I read in the newspaper, well, I don't actually read in newspaper, but when I read online, that the United States has depleted substantial portions of its long-distance precision weapons and it's going to take, they say, months and by that, I'm sure it means years to restore this. I think something very much akin to Department of Defense malpractice is going on and I'll

amend this just a little bit or add to it. By saying that during the Biden administration, I recall sitting down with Jake Sullivan, the National Security Advisor, and other senior National Security officials, and we were

talking about the weapons we were going to provide Ukraine with, and why we had to manage

the weapons we were providing Ukraine, because they didn't want to run too low on them, and they were concerned about the size of our munitions stock. The only reason I bring this up is that people have known this is a problem for a while, but nonetheless, it seems like this administration has been incredibly reckless in drawing down these supplies of really vital munitions.

And so, I'm wondering what your reaction is to this whole thing.

“Well, I think we're accepting a lot of risk-dead, but it was a little perplexed by why we”

were using such sophisticated munitions. We've got a lot of fairly accurate, less capable munitions, but they're not stand-off munitions. One reason I tried to operate from the further distance and not to put your aircraft at risk is the risk of having people shot down and then becoming prisoners, which I think

would have been a political disaster for this administration. So I think that may have been one of the motivators. They penetrate their defenses better, they are precise, they're efficient in some ways, but they're also relatively low in numbers in our inventory, and those munitions, which when I was younger than the Air Force, we tried to buy as many of them as we had production

“capacity for, in some cases, are really important for some other scenarios.”

So I'm a bit surprised that we did do this. I do understand why people thought we needed to do it, but we apparently from all the reports I've seen have expanded a significant fraction of these weapons, and it's going to take a long time to recover. There are some efforts going on by the administration to improve production capacity

to add capacity, that will take some time, measuring years, and then it will take years to actually do the production. So we're taking a fairly long period of risk because of what we've done and run. Yeah, we are also joined by our friend, Beloved friend, Rosa Brooks, who is just back from the Arctic Circle.

And if you'd like to explain why you're in the Arctic Circle, you can do that. But we're also talking about this particular issue, Rosa, and you know, you worked in the policy planning department at the Pentagon for a while, and you would think that one of the things that you would take into consideration when you launched into a war with somebody was, whether you actually had enough munitions to conduct the war and what you would be

left with afterwards. But maybe I'm reading too much into that, maybe that's just not the kind of thing you

That's too obvious, David, that's the kind of, you know, rookie thing.

“People look for the obvious, the Trump administration is playing the long game, like a multimillion”

year game in which the entire planet Earth is extinct, and it doesn't matter anymore. Yeah, I mean, I did just return from the Arctic, where I was part of a residency program for writers and artists, and looking at the impact of climate change among other things, which was fascinating and depressing, as is US foreign policy right now, overall. One of the things that sort of baffles me, I would frankenose all this far better than

I do, but for many years, you know, the US had this theoretical commitment to being able

to fight major conflicts in two theaters simultaneously, and it was sort of always clear

that that would have been pushing it, particularly if one of those conflicts with China, we then shifted approaches significantly, but yes, you would think that even if we couldn't fight two conflicts on two major fronts successfully at the same time, that we would want to be able to fight, say, one conflict, successfully on one major front at the same time.

“It's not entirely clear to me that the Trump administration has even retained that basic”

commitment, because we don't seem to be doing particularly well in Iran, but the thing that kind of baffles me here, and it'd be curious to know, Frank's take, what is going on? What is going on in the minds of, you know, I don't know, never mind.

I don't want to know what's going on.

I was going to say, what's going on at Pete Higgs's mind, and then I realized, I really don't want to know. But let's say not Pete Higgs's, but let's say other military planners of greater intellectual and moral seriousness, who are still in the Pentagon, if to the extent that we think there are any, because it's so extraordinarily reckless to use up munitions at the rate we have

in a war, which sort of violates every possible principle of successful military operations in the sense that, you know, we don't seem to be following, you know, the old go big and have it exit strategy, Colin Powell approach, we also don't seem to be following the portrayance counter insurgency approach. So it's not clear what, if any, set of principles is guiding what we're doing, and we've

put ourselves in a very vulnerable and dangerous position. And so I don't know, do they have some theory of this, or is this just driven by a kind of Pete Higgs-Heth Donald Trump use the big bombs, because we've got them, and it makes us feel like we're bigger men to use big bombs, you know, I have no idea, because other, you know, Frank's a good question that Rosa is posing here, and, you know, obviously

my first instinct is to assume that these are very high testosterone bombs, because Pete

Higgs-Heth wants a very high testosterone department of defense. It certainly sounds like a high testosterone strategy, because I have long been a believer that testosterone numbs the human brain, but there are people in the United States military, who ought to know better. Perhaps in senior positions, thousands of them, you know, and yet this kind of thing is

happening, and it does raise some questions about the nature of the leadership that the United States military is providing, or doesn't it, or they just following orders, and they don't have a choice. You've raised a very fundamental issue. The current Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, the person at Donald Trump brought back from

retirement is a three-star general to make into a four-star general and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, John Dan Cain, who might know reasonably well, gave a speech recently, and which he talked about how it was his duty and his duty as senior officers to give him advice about what the military could do, but not about what it should do.

“I think this is a fundamental misreading and misunderstanding of the role, and frankly, it's”

a cop-out. It's a way to insulate yourself from the consequences of the things that you've given advice about. The major blunder that was made here appears to have been that this will be a short, easy, quick war that we could do a decapitation attack on the Iranian leadership that the regime

would fall. There would be people in power, or be more friendly in the United States, and we all over after a few days. That was incredibly naive, and the consequences we're seeing are consequences that were easily foreseeable, in fact, have been forseeing by other administrations in their planning.

has had a lot of time prepare for the type of strikes we launched, and has prepared

to control the strait of hormones. The fact that they did that, and that we haven't been able to do much about it over the last several months now, indicates the scale of the blunder that we made, and conducting this operation.

“So I agree, I don't think that good advice was given, and I think that, if that”

would have been followed, but maybe it was given, it wasn't followed, I don't know. We don't know the details of what happened there, but this is a very avoidable situation we've gotten ourselves into with, and there's no good way out of it at this point. We're now locked in a situation where I think the best we can hope for is to reopen the straits, enter into some long-term negotiations for the Iran, about their nuclear

program, and end up at a status quo, which is worse than what we had before Donald Trump ever touched this problem.

The first time he touched it was the Jepoa Graham at the Obama Administration, that concluded

he threw that out in his first term, and said, "I'm going to get a better deal, this is a lot of you deal." He did not get any deal at all. Then he waged a campaign a year ago to 12-day work to attack the nuclear facilities, which he told us were obliterated, and now we're back in a prolonged conflict that detect the

“same capabilities, and which now is resolved in the straits of removes being closed for several”

months. This is about as bad an outcome as one could imagine in this scenario. If you're enjoying this episode and want to get even more out of the DSR network, you need to check out our sub-stack. The DSR network sub-stack is the absolute best way to follow deep state radio, the DSR

daily, where it's matter, need to know, silicon consciousness, AI, energy, and climate, and the daily blast. Sign up to get notified every time a new episode drops and stay up to date on the latest news and expert analysis. Right now, we're offering 20% off of a DSR network membership.

Paid members get an ad-free listening experience, select episodes two days early, 50% off of David's need to know sub-stack, and more. To get your 20% off, go to DSR network.substack.com/ogist26. That's DSR network.substack.com/ogist26. Yeah, you know, now, as it happened, and this is kind of the way the Department of Defense

works sometimes, a senior officer did make a statement to the effect of, "Well, because we've depleted these munitions, should it come to pass that we need to choose between defending ourselves or defending Israel? We won't be able to defend Israel." And it was very clear that this message was at what they call in Major League Baseball

or Purpose Pitch, you know, that it was designed to get the attention of senior people in the administration and to do it in a place where they felt sensitive. But Rosa, of course, it's not just Israel. Ukraine has been seeking weapons like this for many, many years. We haven't given them as many as they wanted or needed.

And of course, there are other people who are watching closely, like those in Taiwan and our enemies. And so, you know, if this takes years to reset, what do you think the consequences are, Rosa, I think we're already seeing the consequences, which is that our allies and partners now more or less take it for granted than they can't count on the U.S.

And that they are going to have to figure out how to do things, mostly without the U.S. You know, if the U.S. pops up all of a sudden, you know, one day Trump wakes up and he's feeling benevolent and they get something good for us for a little while like bonus for them. But they're not counting on it.

They do not see us as a reliable partner or reliable ally. Indeed, some of our former allies and partners now, actually, us as a potentially an act of threat.

And we have, we have the absurdity of having the Canadians for the first time ever feel

like they have to draw it military plans to possibly defend Canada from a U.S. invasion.

“You know, so, so I think that's what we're already seeing.”

We're already living in a world in which everybody has decided that we are best case irrelevant and pop up with something randomly helpful like the broken clock that's right twice a day, or randomly helpful every now and then. And worst case, you know, an active threat to them and that's not going to change. I mean, the Ukrainians, we've been giving them whiplash with our changes in approach.

And I think they still have whiplash and I'm sure that they're having internal conversations where they just say, you know, look, who knows, maybe the U.S. does something useful. Maybe it doesn't, but we need to assume that we need to assume that we can't count on them.

mightest touch, right?

King mightest everything he touched turned to gold.

That didn't actually turn out well, even with everything turning to gold. It turned out pretty badly for mightest and everybody he liked. But Trump just touches everything and it turns into total trash.

“And that's what has happened with every, you know, every foreign policy thing Trump touches”

turns to trash, the Iran war, which was a, you know, horrifically misguided idea to begin with. You know, we, we're now trapped in this bad situation. We have no way out. These via Iran, you know, our biggest hope is sort of restoring something approximating a worst person of the status quo, anti.

And meanwhile, we have depleted our own capabilities, our own munitions and our own defense capabilities in a way that will take us for access many, many years. Yeah, we'll take anyway. I'm sure Frank and I were both waiting with interest to see when you said everything he touches turns to, uh, I was, this is a family podcast David.

You know, I was not going to get a family podcast. There could be, there could be children listening. Like, you know, maybe, maybe even see your defense department. Yeah, that's true. If you're listening, please listen, uh, Frank, another thing in this vein, though, that you

sort of tangentially touched upon was that a couple of weeks ago, uh, Trump said, "Hey, you crane. I'm going to give you the license to manufacture Patriot missiles."

“Um, and many of us who heard that thought, well, does he actually have the right to do that?”

But secondly, um, a couple of weeks later, he said, you know, I don't know if we're actually going to do that because if we do that, they could manufacturer the missiles and, and then sell them to somebody that were used for purpose we didn't like. So, no, I don't, I don't think we're going to do that.

There was a third component of the skeptical analysis of this, which was, even if we did that,

it would take years for them to take advantage of it. In any event, one thing after, even though, you know, Laura Loomer likes you, crane now and so Trump, you know, had a warmer meeting with Zelensky. Our ability to provide support for Ukraine as a result of what's going on in Iran and as a result of the president's predisposition, not to help Ukraine, it's not getting better. It does seem like it's actually deteriorating.

Ukraine have to admire their, their grit determination and their innovation. They've done remarkably well in the situation they found themselves in. You mentioned Patriot David, among the

“munitions that are being explained at a very high rates, Patriots, one of the most important.”

It's an air defense system, you know, Ukraine led just last night. It was under attack and it was running out of Patriots, right? A very important missile for their defense. It's also a very important missile in the Pacific for defense of our bases in the Pacific. So of all the things that have been drawn down, that's probably one of the ones that concerns me the most. And that morning shot, if you will, that was fired by the Commander in Europe about his inability to do

all of his missions because the shortage is really on point. So we don't really have a whole lot of options here. It takes a long time to increase the capacity of production line. You also have to increase the capacity of all the suppliers into that production line. Then of course, you have to actually acquire and build the missile. So there's no short-term thing here. But I want to pick up on what Rosa was saying about the loss of trust. That is probably the most significant strategic

damage that's been done by this administration. The Trump first administration could have been

looked at as an aberration, but we brought them back. And our allies and partners now have to live in a role in which even if there's a change in party in the next administration, there can be another one after that. And the U.S. can no longer be seen as a long-term reliable strategic partner. That's a fundamental change in the world. And a world that's been very stable, thanks to the United States, and very much to our benefit. Thanks to the United States since World

War II. And the strategic reversal of this very successful strategy of engagement in the world, close relationships with other democracies and support of principles and values that we all shared has been completely upended. And it's going to be very hard to get that back. But that's a huge strategic loss for the United States. Yeah. And you know, it's interesting that it's happening at this time because clearly Trump and Hague Seth are saying we're building the strongest

military ever. And the United States Congress seems willing to write the military, huge checks, biggest checks they've ever gotten the biggest checks that any military in the world has ever gotten, not incrementally bigger, gigantically bigger than they have ever gotten.

you know, I can put two and two together. I know why you were in the Arctic because on August 1st,

the New York Times ran this head line. Trump's fixation on Arctic ships led to billions in no-bid contracts where Trump has apparently made a deal with Finland for 11 icebreakers.

“And these spending $7 billion on icebreakers. And all of a sudden, where does Rosa come back from?”

The Arctic. You know, put two and two together. Are you part of some Trump initiative? And where are you anywhere, anywhere near Greenland, I'm worried? Not very, you know, I was not I was north of his fall bar in that area. But you know, if I were the fins, I wouldn't be spending that money yet given Trump's, you know, famous fickleness. You know, having a contract with Donald Trump or the US, which now is the same as having contract with Donald Trump, you know,

means nothing. We will feel happy to cancel that if Trump gets mad at the fins, which could happen

any second now. But yes, apparently what happened there is, you know, he met with the finish

head of state and he got along well with him. And he said, you know what, you guys need our ice

“breakers. And by the end of the meeting, Trump was like, my God, what we need our ice breakers.”

And let's just order a hundred of them. What the hell? I mean, in fact, we do need ice breakers. We don't need as many as we now have a contract for and they're, you know, as usual. We didn't exactly shop around here to find the best deal and the best quality ice breakers. So we just sort of went with, you know, Trump's got, which, which, you know, worked out really well with the reflecting pool. So, you know, why worry? But, but we do actually need ice breakers. And we need ice breakers

because, well, because despite the fact that the climate is warming and the ice is melting, I can attest to the fact that there's still a good deal of ice up there. Icebergs, ice pack, pack ice, you name it, glaciers. And we are, we are now entering a big global scramble for

“the polls. I mean, the, the, the, for better or for worse, mostly for worse, climate change has”

opened up shipping routes that were previously inaccessible most of the year. It is creating the possibility of resource exploitation that is extremely attractive to every state in the, on, in the globe and particularly sort of those with some claims to Arctic territory. And the U.S. had fallen behind, you know, we had under invested, you know, very ambivalent about this because I, I, I'm very concerned that we are about to see a sort of massive devastation, you know, you can, environmental

further devastation of the region as U.S. Russia, China, Canada, you know, you name it Norway, all try to grab any resources they can in the region. That being said, I also think that the U.S. had for several decades under invested in, among other things, the scientific research capacity in the Arctic and the Antarctic, and we, we, we, we, we, we, we no longer even have a research scientific research icebreaker in the Antarctic at all. And so, whether we are focused on conservation,

combating climate change and scientific understanding, or resource extraction, we do need some icebreakers, just probably not quite as many and probably not at this cost. To, I, I, it was what end up defending the Trump administration. So let me turn to you to Frank. Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, it's like a life. But let me turn to you, Frank, because you've been involved in this world for long time. And, you know, the people in the defense department, and maybe even you at points in your

life, you know, have big appetites and one of my big expensive systems. But we're going from, you know, a budget that's multiples of the next largest budget to maybe $1.5 trillion. And within that budget, there are a whole bunch of things that seem, I don't know, and, you know, argue with me as Rosa just did superfluous. Like this golden dome air defense system, which the experts,

I talk to say, can never possibly work, and will cost infinity dollars if it does. Or the Trump

class battleships. Like, you know, I mean, it was around, I don't know, the 1940s at some point that people realize battleships weren't going to be that useful and more, but Trump likes them because they're big. And maybe they can be gold. So there's some of those. And all sorts of other

a big superpower that spends a lot doesn't mean you actually win the wars you get into. And when

“you do get into wars or you're associated with wars you discover, well, what Russia discovered in”

Ukraine and we discovered in Iran, which is the other side can put together a bunch of $10,000 drones and, you know, outduel us for a fraction of what we're spending. And yet, it seems to force us to want to accelerate our spending. So I find all of this concerning and, you know, I was wondering what your view is, right? But David, there was so much you want you to just said, you can start with the corruption. It's a systemic feature of this administration. It's everywhere. Contracting me

awarded without, you know, standard processes or adequate competition to people for a variety of reasons that are not appropriate. Gick goes on and on. If you think about waste fraud and abuse, there's a lot in each of those categories that we can point to. You mentioned a couple of them. Going in the wrong direction in terms of what you acquire and what's going to be useful and most cost-effective in future conflicts. I'm going to give you a chance to plug my book,

which just came out a month ago on the future of warfare, lethal autonomy and unmanned systems being the centerpiece of that. Battleships aren't in that equation and either is golden dome. I'm one of those experts on missile defense. I worked on it for several years. It was not successful

the first time. It won't be successful this time. There's enormous amount of waste. We're living in a

world in which we're having huge deficits. The greatest threat to this nation in launcher may be its economic posture right now. We just keep making that worse with the actions to relieve taxes on rich people and spend money on things that we don't need. There's a wide array of targets there that we could talk about. I don't know who's making the judgments in the Pentagon or what kind of advice is being given the Donald Trump about these things. Apparently he's just doing what

“he wants. He pursues things I think because they look nice and sound nice to them and everybody”

lines up and salute him off goes off and spends money. I can pretty much guarantee you the

Navy will never require those battleships. What sound Trump has gone, they will be gone immediately

but will have wasted to money the meantime. The same is true and golden dome. There are some elements are going down which are needed for other missions such as warning of missile attack and so on. It's a battle management command control and communication and some of those elements are probably worthwhile but the overall program makes no sense whatsoever. So our majority in ambitious snap judgments and then I'm going to come back to the corruption. There's going

to be a lot of investigations into how contracts were awarded and who got them and a lot of corrective actions taken because of the way this administration is spending money. The one and a half trillion they're talking about for the defense department. They're working hard in the department to figure out how they can spend that money. It's more money than you can spend that a reasonable pace on the force that we have. The production capacity is not there. There's only so much

you can spend on readiness. We're not dramatically increasing the size of the force. So it's it's, you know, probably I wish I had. Most of the years I worked in the Pentagon, they're about 20 of them. We were looking at decreasing budgets relative to our plan. That's

never an easy environment to work and that's been the norm for a long time. Right now what we're

seeing is a lot of very unrealistic planning based on unrealistic numbers which I think will be confronted by the reality of the physical situations the country has within the next year or two.

“That's where we're headed like it or not. That's what's going to happen.”

Rosa, you know, Democrats always are afraid of being accused of being soft on defense. So, you know, even though the reaction to Trump wanting to spend this money, the waste fraud and abuse, the fact that his sons have gotten into the defense business, the mismanagement of the money they have, has been in my view kind of muted. But say Democrats win in November. There's an election in the 89 days.

Start taking over committees. There's going to be, you know, an election two years after that. They could take over. Is the next job for the next department of defense or for the people on the hill just repairing damage that Trump has done rebuilding stockpiles, ending programs that

pervasive malpractice and defense management that the United States is going to be sort of back on

its heels undoing these problems for the next few years and unable to actually be forward thinking. What's your view on it? You know, you're optimistically assuming there is a next administration with with some capacity to do anything in Congress. And I'm not at all sure that that will be the case.

“I think let's, I mean, even assuming that Democrats take control of the house and who knows”

even the Senate by a tiny majority and the presidency, I think that the problems go so deep that you would really need supermajorities to be able to make the kinds of changes that are needed.

Because let's not forget, and again, this is something Frank can speak to in much more detail than

I can given the portfolios he's had at the Defense Department. There was already plenty of waste fraud and abuse. Not to speak of just waste that had to do with the congressional appropriations process itself and the degree to which members of Congress and the Senate had their pet projects and their districts, which you often had the Defense Department saying, "Stop funding this. We don't need it. We don't want it. It's wasteful. It doesn't work.

Et cetera." And then you'd have Congress kind of saying, "Tough luck." You know, this creates

jobs in my district or, you know, this, this, this somehow benefits somebody's giving me campaign donations.

So, "Tough luck." So, so we already had a Defense budget that was so large and complex that nobody truly understood it that we all know contained all kinds of stuff that was somewhere between overly expensive and actively bad for the United States because it was going to create things that didn't work or we didn't need and didn't want. Then on top of that, we get the Trump administration, which just treats it like, you know, the sack of Rome, right? They're just going for whatever they

can get out of this. And just ransacking everything at this point. The combination of those things,

“I think, you know, yes, it's devastating. Yes, it's not just a question of, you know, patching a few”

weeks and sort of going back to where we were before the Trump administration. You know, ideally, we would have a really massive overhaul of the defense budget, of the acquisitions, process, et cetera, of the sort that I think you, you know, you get every, you know, you get a chance to do that every 50 years or so. And to do it requires, you know, an enormous amount of political will and Congress to be serious about it. And I don't know that there's any likelihood in the, in the near future that

the Democrats will have the large enough majorities and will be able to bring in enough for Republicans, um, even though, you know, so many of these were once upon a time by partisan issues, not anymore, to to be able to make the kinds of changes that we, we truly need. Yeah, and when you need changes like that, it requires a rethinking of doctrine, strategy, right, threats, what are we even trying to do? Right. And, and, and it's hard to get there and, and it's something

“I hope we can talk about more here. Um, but if you want to read about that, then you could read”

Frank's book, lethal autonomy, the future of warfare, whether we like it or not, which is dealing with some of the fundamental changes in the nature of warfare, um, that we have got to address and that we ought to be addressing right now. And, and frankly, I, you know, I just laid out what I think's going to happen in Rosa. Seconded it. Um, we're going to have to be able to walk and shoot gum at the same time. We're going to have to be able to dismantle and repair and yet rethink

and reinvent the huge task. I encourage you if you're interested in thinking about how it may go to read lethal autonomy. I know that we will invite Frank back to talk about that a greater length, uh, in the not too distant future. And I hope Frank you will join us, um, but, uh, for now, everybody go read his book and, uh, um, will invite Rosa back to read it. They just have to buy it. Let's be clear here. They have to buy the book. Yeah. Reading it would be a bonus.

because obviously served you well. Uh, and I'm glad that you're back, Rosa, welcome back.

“And, uh, we'll see you around here. Each and every week, please join us here. Please join us on”

YouTube or, uh, a sub stack or Instagram or TikTok or wherever you get your podcasts, uh, for this

and all the podcasts we do, um, uh, including now Friday, the daily podcast we do is interactive.

“So you can come in, listen to the news, talk to us about what it's like, um, and that went”

great last week, this week we had a guest with us on Friday at noon, and that'll be Mary Troop.

So join us for that. For now, thank you, Frank. Thank you, Rosa. Thank you, everybody. Bye,