What Comes After Pentagon Pete Wrecks the Defense Department?

Of course, in Europe, Sarium is a house with the largest house in the world. Many thousand animals were born on them, with a lot of flowers and herbs in the village. The Viviv Rosario D.E. 28, 22, 23.

This is Deep State Radio, coming to you direct from our super secret studio in the third sub basement of the Ministry of Snark in Washington, D.C.

and from other undisclosed locations across America and around the world.

“Hello and welcome to D.S. Art, I am David Rothkuff, your host and we are joined this week by two experts who will help us through some of the issues that I think are most important.”

And your most interested in one of course, is the inimitable and irreplaceable Rosa Brooks of Georgetown University Law Center, how are you doing Rosa? I'm very good, David. Excellent. Excellent. And we are joined also by an old friend, Sharon Weinberger, who is the editor and chief now of the bulletin of atomic scientists. Very important job. Congratulations on getting that job, Sharon. Thank you, David.

And Sharon has a book coming out in just a few weeks called Valley of Death.

How big tech is fueling the future of war, congratulations on that. Have you received copies of the book or you sort of?

I think I'm just going to get them this week in the mail. That is the hope. That is the high point of writing a book. Oh, yes, that day that you opened up the box. That's right. There's no reviews. There's no accountability. No looming deadlines. Well, it is a great thing and it is a could not be more timely.

And it's kind of in the vein of what I want to talk about. Let me frame it this way. You know, I've been watching Pete Hegg says the word Iran running out of missiles. You know, not having enough food on aircraft carriers. The kind of insanity of the $1.5 trillion defense budget.

Firing women and people of color who are generals and admirals because they're women and people of color. And it strikes me that the defense department is in kind of a crisis unlike any I've ever seen before. Real management crisis, not just bad judgment and hat. You know, how we go off to war, which we're used to. Not just bad judgment and overspending sort of going beyond where we are there.

But really, I've gotten everything wrong all at once.

“And so the first question I want to ask before I move on to the core of this, which is where do we go from here?”

Do you agree with me that this is an unusual crisis for the Department of Defense right now? Let me start with you, Sharon. So, yes. I mean, the point that we're at right now with the defense industrial base and running out of Interceptors is unusual.

It's exasperated by the war in Iran, the ongoing war in Ukraine. But people have been sounding the bell warning about the defense industrial base as long as I've been involved in writing about these issues going back over 25 years. I started my life in this field as a defense analyst working on studies for was then the deputy Undersecretary Defense for Industrial Policy.

So, so those are those issues. Those underlying issues are not new.

Basically, the roosters have come home to rooster.

The metaphor is that things that people have been warning about for 25 years are happening now worse because some of the policies of the current administration in terms of military operations. But the second strand of that is we've had over the past maybe six, seven years of movement of Silicon Valley into defense, making great promises about what they can do. And there have been efforts first in the Biden administration now in the Trump administration.

And now in the Trump administration to try to bring Silicon Valley in. But, where are they? What are they doing to help us now in this crisis? Yeah, and Rosa, what's your take on this? I know you're a big Pete Hegseth fan.

“You know, I think there are several different pieces to this.”

One piece is specifically about defense industrial complex and the acquisition system and so forth.

One piece is a bigger piece that is also not brand new. Pre-dates Trump, which is about American ability more generally to do things fast when we need them. And that has to do with public private relationships with regulations with all kinds of stuff. And then there's a third piece, which is the uniqueness of the Trump administration and Pete Hegseth's reign of terror at the Pentagon.

“And I think they're all interacting to cause this crisis.”

And absolutely, I mean, Sharon is the expert on this. The piece that that first piece is not new. People then say more or less forever. Oh, no, we've got to fix this, back in World War II, we built the Pentagon in 25 minutes or whatever. And we turned out warships every seven seconds and now look at us.

We can't renovate a bathroom in the Pentagon in less than six years and ten billion dollars.

So that's not new. And that's a problem. I think we're seeing in the context even of the midterm elections and the sort of agonizing amongst Democrats, as well as as well as fueling some of the mega stuff agonizing about that broader issue of how come America can't do stuff anymore. And that partly is a result of, you know, the problems are not completely wrong.

That that's partly a result of this sort of sometimes overly complex regulatory system. But also it's sometimes a result of Supreme Court decisions that make it very very difficult for the government to actually do much of anything. But he raises their hand and says, but my private property rights and so forth. And it's to do with relationships between business and government, et cetera. So that's a whole big complicated thing that is going to take a long time to figure out.

“But then the third thing and this is this is the piece that I think is is really new, right?”

Is is that we now have this bonkers administration that is systematically demolishing both some stuff that doesn't work in defense system. But also a lot of things that actually worked reasonably well. And what they're leaving in their wake is just chaos, right?

And this is of course one of the things you're always told when you go into any new job, right?

And I wish somebody had said this to feed headset, not that he would have paid attention. You know that even if you go into a job and you're pretty convinced that there's a lot of stuff that's broken, you know, wait, look, listen, learn, don't just fire everybody on day one because then you're going to discover that nobody, nobody's left who knows how to do anything at all. And that's kind of where we're getting, right, in the defense system at this point.

They've just decimated the ranks, both of the senior career military people and civil service folks. And you end up and add it on top of that some words that make no sense, et cetera, et cetera. So you add that to the mix with those two long-standing problems. And yeah, this feels like a real crisis and a real opportunity for China, Russia, et cetera.

“Well, the question is, I think, whether it's an opportunity for us because, you know,”

I was having conversation with the mutual friend of Rosa. And my news kind of a lot of defense background the other day. And she referred to, you know, the state of the Pentagon. As it will be when this administration ends as kind of rubble, you know, that wherever you look, you're going to have problems.

You're going to morale problems. You're going to have structural problems. You're going to have strategic problems. You're going to have a problem. I mean, it's going to take many, many years to get past this issue of producing adequate

munitions. You're going to have problems caused by the fact that this, you know, president, the Secretary of Defense, seen how bent on pursuing some absolutely lunatic plans, battleships, golden dome, these kind of things. And, and so, you know, the defense department, interestingly, since World War Two, since it was built as Rosa says in 25 minutes,

has been one of these places in Washington that has benefited most,

you know, Henry Kissinger said the most important force in Washington is in Russia.

And it's benefited most from that. The way debates about the future of the Department of Defense have gone more or less for 50 or 60 years is we're going to do 3% more of this or 5% less of that. Well, it's not, we are going to start over. When people come in and say, let's do something radical, they get crushed.

You know, I mean, Dom Rumsfeld said, I'm going to do some radical stuff. He got immediately got squashed by the establishment. But in this particular case, you can't just leave it as it is.

And it's coming at a moment of massive technological transformation,

where all the legacy systems, which Trump seems to like, including steam power catapults off of aircraft carriers, the all those things are over. And the future of warfare is being redefined in Ukraine in Iran and in Silicon Valley.

And so it's just going to be as close to a tabular Rosa moment as, as we have been within the defense establishment. The question sharing is, do you think the leaders in the defense community can get their heads around that? You know, do you think they could actually handle what is an opportunity

to essentially reinvent something that hasn't been reinvented for 80 years and do something new?

“Look, to be fair, I think there are some even now within the defense department”

or department of war, is it's calling itself now, that are trying.

But as you've well pointed out, you have these different forces coming in. You have people within the defense department trying to rethink how you engage Silicon Valley, how you take advantage of this technological revolution. And then you have sometimes these sort of seemingly half-random edicts about steam catapults, about golden dome.

And you know, that all has to be resolved. I think the bigger question though that goes beyond just this administration. And in fact, beyond defense issues is so, okay, we've known for 25 years or more that they're, I mean, going back to the 90s that there are problems with our defense industrial base.

How do you resolve it? You're probably not going to resolve it by just, you know, when you're screaming Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley. They make a lot of big claims. They have a lot to offer, but clearly they are not

unable to immediately solve our defense industrial base problems. I don't think you can probably solve the defense industrial base problems without solving some of the bigger problems in our manufacturing base and our supply chains that go beyond strictly defense.

“So I think the question is, you know, whether this administration”

or even a next administration, how do you solve the problem that we cannot produce basic munitions at the rate we need for the military engagements were involved in? I don't have the answer to that question. I know what's going on now clearly isn't working.

It wasn't working in the last administration. I'd be curious for Rose's thoughts on what can come next. If you're enjoying this episode and once again, even more out of the DSR network, you need to check out our sub-stack.

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That's DSR network.substack.com/awgist. Well, Rose, I'm curious as you thought, too, but to add to that.

“Where do you know Rose from Athens? And where do you find Rose again?”

Of course, in Europe, Rosario is in his house. With the greatest news on the world. A lot of 1000-year-olds are waiting for him, with a brother and brother-in-law. The VW Rosario D.E.

You know, big institutions like battleships turned very slowly. And what it takes is a strong leadership that's willing to make some chur. Heggseth and Trump seem dedicated to getting us back to our military capabilities of the 1850s, or to be fair, maybe the 1940s. But do you think that, for example, a next democratic president

with the advisors that come from our policy community, is actually going to be able to get their head around the idea of the kind of sweeping change we need and do something about it? Yes, so I think two separate questions. And there are, you know, one is, does this create opportunities?

Yes, and everybody's always attributing to Ram a manual.

The, you know, never let a good crisis go to waste, which I think Mackie Veli might have said, actually, before Ram a manual said it.

The great moments of innovation, political,

“social economic, technological innovation,”

often follow periods of calamity and disarray. Because you do get a chance to sort of, you know, throw up. I mean, this wasn't the way to do it, right? The way Heggseth is doing it is not the way to do it. It is a terrible, dangerous way to do it.

Stupid, dangerous, misguided, probably illegal, etc.

But, you know, it does create an incredible opportunity for whoever comes next to say,

"I didn't knock this down, but now we have this rare chance. Kind of you get once every 50 years, if not once every century, if not even less often, to really rethink things and how we do things. And we're going to work with Congress and so on.

We're really going to overhaul this." And yes. The second question, though, is, do I actually think that whoever comes next is likely to take advantage of that in a smart way?

“No, I'm not very optimistic, partly because as you suggest,”

David, it's a huge, it's really hard. You know, like, I don't know where to start.

I mean, I've got a few thoughts, but I don't really know where to start.

It's so big. You know, and this is part of the problem of this system we've created already is that the defense industrial and acquisition system is so convoluted, nobody actually understands it. Nobody really fully understands the DOD's budget for instance.

I mean, it's such a giant sprawling mess with so many interconnected pieces that the opportunities to just screw it up even more are significant even if you're a really smart person who's really determined. But I also think that there is a real danger that whoever comes next is frankly not going to be that determined and not going to be that creative

to start with, you know, that I'm not seeing anything particularly exciting in the current group of potential democratic presidential candidates. I doubt that a Republican is going to come in

“who's going to be, you know, that's not even go there, right?”

So he was in Iowa this week. That's exactly how I know. Don't make me think about that. So, I'm not that optimistic. I mean, if I had to make a prediction, this is not what I want,

but if I had to make a prediction, you know, the US fades into a connection on the international stage and we become weaker and weaker and more and more vulnerable. And, you know, that's sort of the end of American empire and maybe there are some good things about it for people other than

us, but it's kind of going to suck for us. Well, that's the kind of cherry outlook that we turned to for and have been for so many years now. No, no, thank you, Rosa. But, you know, the point is well taken, right?

They're of all the presidents of the United States who ever understood how the military works and how military industrial base works. The one who understood it best was Dwight Eisenhower, who was the commander of Supreme Commander of Allied Forces in Europe during World War II. And 65 years ago, said, beware this military industrial complex

because it'll sort of eat you alive. And 65 years later, it's winning. And, you know, his warning has sort of fallen on deaf ears. But, you know, go read the speech because, you know, it's remarkably prescient.

Having said that, you know, one of the things that's different is that, for the past, you know, I mean, the Eisenhower military was the, you know, the sort of apotheosis of the industrial air military industrialized warfare. And over the course of the past couple of decades,

we've seen the introduction of new technologies. But sort of as icing on the cake, you know,

it's always sort of on top of an industrial bay.

Now we're at a moment where there's some really big fundamental questions about the future of warfare. And whether people will be involved, whether AI will be involved, how AI will be involved, whether autonomous weapons platforms or the future, what is it that makes a country strong,

can a small country have the power of a big country if it uses it, et cetera, et cetera. There are a whole bunch of big questions. And a lot of the thinking on this stuff is being done by the tech guys that you've been writing about sharing.

And one of the things that I found striking in this article that you wrote,

was that it was nowhere nearly as harsh as I would have been on, on Silicon Valley. You were very, you know, because I, I mean, I look at these brola darts,

“and I think some of these guys are absolute nuts.”

And, and shouldn't be anywhere near our national security. But, you know, you, in a very rational and, and way-based and reporting, essentially said, look, Silicon Valley, it doesn't love Trump. It loves profits.

Silicon Valley is all about the bottom line.

Do you think a bottom line or a, and Silicon Valley can break away from its seeming connectedness at the hip to Trump? And help us her in these kinds of changes. Be a constructive partner. Or do you have, you know, you know, Peter Teele and,

uh, of outskarp said, you know, working to ensure that women don't have the vote? Yeah, so it's a complicated question. Um, because, you know, part of what I argue is, so it, no. Silicon Valley is not going to lead the way and say, Trump is going to lead us down the road of fascism or whatever, and we need to do X.

“Silicon Valley will do exactly what is good for Silicon Valley and good for profits.”

So, if the next administration is a democratic administration, you are going to see a clear pivot back to where they were before. This doesn't mean that some of the brologarchs don't have innate values. I mean, Peter Teele, a Greer disagree with him, has believed in what he's believed in for a very long time.

But, he's also not a simple character. You know, he sourd on President Trump, he didn't support him financially

going into his second administration.

Um, but the thing is, Peter Teele also knows he has to work with Democrats. He has to work for the Republicans. Alex Carp is well. So, no, in answer to your question, like don't expect Silicon Valley to lead the way to anything other than their profits. But, if there is a change of administration, they are going to switch sides just as they

did with Morgan Trump in this administration. Well, they're going to try. But, one of the things that I don't think they fully accept is that they are now deeply associated with Morgan Trump in this administration. And I have sat with Democratic Senate staffers, not long ago,

who have said to me, "We are preparing our list of investigations or house staffers and we are preparing our investigations." And we think, you know, what they're doing on AI is wrong. Or we think what they're doing with, you know, the Trump's sons and their businesses is corrupt. Or we think, you know, they're going to come after them.

And it's not going to be so easy to just sort of say, "Oh, well, let's just shift a few dollars into the Democratic column. Everything will be fine." Well, not just that. The other issue is that even within Maga, you know, Trump made a strategic decision to sort of lean into the crypto

bros, the Silicon Valley, the defense bros, the defense tech bros. But even within Maga, there is a split. There is a pretty big backlash coming against AI. And part of that is, from within the Maga movement itself, with deep, deep skepticism of AI.

So the concern for Silicon Valley should be that they play this all wrong, that they get as you correctly point out a backlash in the next democratic administration, or with congressional investigations after the midterm elections. But then if you add to that a backlash within the Republican within the

Maga base, there could be a big reckoning coming for Silicon Valley that will not work in their favor. So they're not necessarily playing this right.

Where is the most important threat from Earth?

And where does it take me to get back? Of course, in Europe, Sarium is a threat. With the greatest threat in the world. Many thousands of threats are waiting for you, with the spread of blue and beautiful dust.

The Vivae, Prosario, D.E.

“Do you think the Democrats will be vindictive or pussycats, Rosa?”

And G, that's a hard one. I'm going to go with pussycats about that. Can I have both? No, but I mean, I, I'm going to, as, I know my job here is to be the pessimistic cynic.

So I will, I will play that role. I'm totally cynical about this, even if there's another democratic administration. You know, I think there will be a lot of posturing because there are going to be a lot of campaign promises made relating to Silicon Valley

AI and data centers and everything else. You know, and there's going to be lots of promises of tough action

And I think that there will be a little bit of Kabuki theater.

“And then I think the world is very, very likely to continue to spend”

on its usual axes, which, which is to say in our system, that the people who have all of the money are going to largely be able to get their own way. You know, there will be some noisy show stuff. And then Silicon Valley will kind of go back to doing what it's doing

because because, you know, this is, this is decide on which the bread of whoever is in power is still going to be buttered, frankly. So, so, you know, which, which doesn't mean that I'm totally hopeless about any reigning back of excesses, et cetera.

But I don't think anybody should count on some, you know, radical, radical new approach. Now, I want to save the last question for Sharon about her book because I'd like her to encourage people to pre-order her book. But so, let me ask you a question which is slightly off of all of this

for us a bit.

It's just something that, to me, I mean,

hagseth triggers me more than almost anybody else in this administration. I have to admit it because of the racism or the misogyny or the

“stupidity or the waste or, you know, just one thing after”

another. But a couple days ago, they fired the people who run stars and stripes, which has been this independent, you know, entity within the defense, the establishment, covering the defense establishment pretty fairly since, you know,

what World War II. I mean, they've been doing this a long, long time. And I just thought this is what are the most sort of gross, kind of grossly authoritarian, ugly things. And of course, it's summer and people don't get all wound up

about this and I was just wondering what you thought, Rosen. Yeah. I mean, I don't know what there is to say, except that obviously this is very consistent with the approach

of Pete Hexeth to the media and Trump to the media from the very beginning, which is, which is that they think the job of the media if any. And they're not really convinced there ought to be a media. But if to the extent that there is one that their job should be to be,

you know, chills and amplifiers and propagandists on behalf of the administration and anybody doing anything differently is going to find their access denied. They're going to fight, you know, or worse, they're going to find themselves the subjects of investigations and subpoenas.

They're going to lose their jobs, et cetera. And we, this is just the latest, this is just the latest shot in that, I mean, it's, it's sad, of course, stars and stripes. Yeah, it's not exactly been like a hotbed of, you know, communist sedition.

It's, you know, it's largely been an extremely middle of the road and generally, you know, pro military pro defense, unsurprisingly. But that said, it, you know, it has been independent.

“There have been times when they've broken important stories”

and they've done some pretty hard hitting stuff over the years. And previous administrations have sucked it up. You know, does, does anybody ever like it when, when their administration is the subject of some hard hitting reporting that reveals something on flattery, of course not, but the norms that in the past

have forced defense secretaries and presidents to kind of go, all right, well, this sucks, I don't like it. But I guess I have to sort of pretend that I'm okay with this. Those norms are kind of gone at the Pentagon. And, and this, yeah, this is the new normal.

The new normal is, you know, you're not making me look good. You're gone. And thank your lucky stars. You're not in jail. So far.

So far. So far. All right. Well, so shared, I'd like to end on, on, on, on a brief focus on your book, Valley of Death, how big tech is feeling the future of war,

which I suspect, you would be, you know, we should remind everybody that they can pre order now and we'll come out on September 22nd. Do I have that right? Correct.

Um, I haven't, on my calendar circled in red. Um, Sharon is a great journalist. She is a great writer. This is a really important topic. It's at the center of what we're doing.

And this audience for this podcast, which is, in many of some of them, been with us for 12 years now, is, you know, tens of thousands of people are interested in this subject. So they should all buy your book. That's my point of view.

What's your pitch to them? So my pitch is that this is the biggest change that's taking place in our defense industrial base, you know, since the end of the Cold War, and why is that important?

So I actually first started looking at this

when I worked for you back at Foreign Policy 10 years ago when I was seeing where the shift was in focus, which was Silicon Valley getting engaged in defense. Well, why does it matter? I mean, yes, it might be able to bring us some better technologies,

but it's also a very different defense industrial base. These companies are producing things on their own

And they own the underlying technology, which is very different than the way defense production worked for a most of the Cold War period. Well, why does that matter? It matters because when you have Elon Musk,

who, for example, controls Starlink and can make unilateral decisions about who has access to something

“that has become increasingly important to say the military”

and Ukraine, when he can threaten not to take astronauts to and from the international space station, it matters a lot. It matters a lot for companies like Palantir, which have a commercial system that they employ

and can set the ground rules more for government than government can for them at sometimes with contracts. The idea of the book began actually with a Pentagon funded study about what I call the billionaire's bomb, where they asked could a billionaire sort of rogue capitalist

develop and sell nuclear weapons. And this was done for the Office of Net Assessment, back when Andy Marshall was there. But the underlying idea of the study, as I was told about by the participants,

“whether Elon Musk is going to go build nuclear weapons.”

But what happens when you have a concentration of power and wealth in individuals or companies, not as much subject to government control,

and can develop very, very powerful weapons

that the government doesn't completely control. It is a huge threat to our defense base, to democracy, to accountability. And that fundamentally is what the book is about. Fascinating topic ties very closely to a lot of our discussions here.

And many of the threats, the Azirot users, as term senescent, united states faces, are internal threats. Many of the threats and challenges we face are not external as they were during the Cold War of World War II. And we're ill-prepared for that.

But even, you know, I mean, in my view, one of the mistakes of the Biden administration as they carefully weighed the pros and cons of Ukraine policies, for example, and whether they could trigger a war with Russia, nuclear war,

was that they didn't realize that the biggest threat to Ukraine and to our interest was if Donald Trump got reelected, that it was domestic. It wasn't foreign. And we have trouble putting these ideas together.

“It's very, very important to understand them.”

And this book will be, you know, a essential reading

for everybody who's involved in this. So I encourage everybody to go out and order it. And then when it's out for a while, and you've done all the big fancy places, you'll be out promoting your book.

We'll invite you back, and you can promote it again here. Is that it? Okay? With pleasure. Thank you. Well, thank you, Sharon.

And thank you, Russ, and thank everybody. This is Deep State Rainier for this week, and for all of you have been listening to us for, as I said, 12 or 13 years over along. We've been doing these podcasts.

The last week of the summer before Labor Day

is always a week we take off.

So you don't get new episodes unless there's global cataclysm. So you don't want to have a new episode for us, but we will give you the best of. So this week, all new programming, and right after Labor Day,

back at it with all new programming. But next week, you know, it's a good time to catch up on things that you've missed here. For now. Thanks Sharon.

Thanks Rosa. Thank you, everybody. Bye-bye. (music)