I joined Erik Prince, the founder of Blackwater on the Bill Walton Show. We cover US defense policy, the War in Ukraine and plenty more.
We won the Cold War and lost the peace : A Tour de Force with Erik Prince and Stephen Bryen
Former Navy U.S. Seal and founder of the private military company Blackwater Erik Prince says that “We are fighting wars the wrong way.” Stephen Bryen is known as the “Yoda” of the Arms Trade. Time Magazine comments, “He knows every sinkhole in the regulatory swamp. Ignore him at your peril.” He is also a former Deputy Undersecretary of Defense and founder of the Defense Technology Security Administration.
This week, we are discussing Erik’s new paper “Too Big to Win: How the Military and Industrial Complex and the Neocons Keep America Losing.” One of the central questions posed by Prince – How has America transitioned from a post-Cold War era of dominance to its current state of disarray?
The Ukraine war provides a unique snapshot. Russia clearly prepared for the contingency of a long war, and they began this preparatory work long before they invaded in 2022.
NATO members like the U.S., by contrast, still haven't seriously addressed their completely unprepared defense manufacturing industry over two years into the war.
In 2023 they convinced the Ukrainians to do a NATO style offensive into the teeth of prepared, hardened Russian defensive lines. It worked out about as well as you can imagine. NATO elites thought Russia was going to give up after the first wave in 2022 lost a bunch of men and vehicles to Javelins, HIMARs, etc. They were all clapping themselves on the back and touting the inevitability of Ukraine pushing Russia out of their country.
They completely ignored the adjustments Russia was making to reconstitute their forces and rework their tactics and larger strategy. They switched from big arrow offensives to "bite and hold" micro-offensives of the type the British pioneered in WWI. Don't send a battalion or brigade forward. Have a squad seize the fighting position in front of them, and then have your other squads seize the positions to the left and right. Then dig in, move up your anti-drone EW assets, and dare the Ukrainians to come for you.
NATO planners have to be apoplectic at this point because this slow, relentless strategy doesn't give them an opportunity to use expensive weapon systems to wipe out concentrations of Russians.
One of our central problems is that we spent 23 years bombing goatherders, and before that we had the 90s, where we smoked a few countries employing outdated soviet hardware crewed by poorly trained, underpaid, unmotivated soldiers.
It takes an agonizingly long-time to build a single guided missile because the defense manufacturers optimized for length of contract and low cost of labor, rather than optimizing for production capacity.
Walk through most defense factories for the big manufacturers and you'll see industrial spaces with very few people working in them. It's because they wanted to stretch their contract for 100 missiles out over 6 years while employing ten line workers to actually build them. *numbers aren't exact, they're just a general example
Our defense industry has a glut of consultants and upper management, and a skeleton crew of people who can actually build the weapons we and our allies need for war. And they're not going to start hiring a bunch of people unless the U.S. government guarantees them long-term contracts.
The problem is that: The purpose of war is, war itself! Peace, on the other hand, is not the goal, it is even the opposite, every war, whoever the victor, carries within itself the seeds of future conflicts…