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Will AI Tank Think Tanks? · Net Assessment

• 0:08
  Melanie Marlowe: Hello, and welcome to Net Assessment, where we debate the hard choices facing America's national security and foreign policy communities.
• 0:15
  Melanie Marlowe: Today we're going to talk about the new Inspector General's report on the Iran war.
• 0:19
  Melanie Marlowe: Last February, were the stated objectives of the Iran war aligned with the resources necessary to fight it? What about now?
• 0:26
  Melanie Marlowe: What does the IG have to say about the sometimes overlooked activities of the State and Treasury Departments with respect to the war?
• 0:32
  Melanie Marlowe: And what does expending so many high-cost, long-range munitions and interceptors mean about how we're fighting this war?
• 0:39
  Melanie Marlowe: I'm Melanie Marlowe of CSIS, here with Chris Preble of the Stimson Center and Dr. Tom Karako, also of CSIS.
• 0:45
  Chris Preble: Whoop, whoop.
• 0:46
  Melanie Marlowe: How are you? Or, I should say, who are you?
• 0:48
  Chris Preble: How are you, Tom?
• 0:48
  Tom Karako: Who are you? How you doing? Well, hey, great to be here. The last time I was on Net Assessment was as a sub for Brian McGrath-
• 0:58
  Chris Preble: That's right.
• 0:59
  Tom Karako: ... which was a very long time ago, so, that...
• 1:01
  Chris Preble: Pre‑COVID. Pre‑COVID, yeah.
• 1:02
  Tom Karako: Long-time listener, second-time caller.
• 1:06
  Chris Preble: Awesome.
• 1:06
  Melanie Marlowe: Great. Well, Tom, tell us a little bit about yourself.
• 1:08
  Tom Karako: Yeah, so I'm at CSIS. I run the Missile Defense Project. We've got a whole team of people on that. It's a busy issue these days.
• 1:15
  Tom Karako: I've been here for about 10 years.
• 1:18
  Tom Karako: In previous iterations, I taught at Kenyon College, Carnegie Mellon, and I worked for a bit of time on HASC, for Strat Forces.
• 1:25
  Tom Karako: And a long time ago in a galaxy far away, I went to grad school in Claremont and overlapped with Mel for about a year.
• 1:33
  Melanie Marlowe: Yeah. And while he was there, he got a Ph.D. in political theory, which he has used to great effect in the Missile Defense Project. [crosstalk 00:01:40]...
• 1:39
  Chris Preble: I was going to say, political theory and missile defense, those two things go together perfectly.
• 1:44
  Melanie Marlowe: They do. He actually… I'll put this in the show notes.
• 1:47
  Melanie Marlowe: He wrote an article for War on the Rocks many years ago about how we're misnaming missiles, these numbers-
• 1:53
  Tom Karako: Oh, yes.
• 1:53
  Melanie Marlowe: ... will not do.
• 1:55
  Tom Karako: It's a hobby horse.
• 1:56
  Tom Karako: AARGM-ER does not, you know, it sounds like a pirate expression, but we used to call missiles after Atlas and Thor and Jupiter and Titan back when, you know,
• 2:04
  Tom Karako: giants walked the earth. So, anyway, I've got ideas.
• 2:08
  Melanie Marlowe: Okay. Well, Chris, what are you up to?
• 2:10
  Chris Preble: Well, hello again. We missed my normal tagline, but it was for a good cause. Thanks, Tom, for joining.
• 2:15
  Chris Preble: I'm great because I just spent several days in the waters of our neighbor to the north, catching fish, and I would say they were very kind, but I didn't see
• 2:23
  Chris Preble: anyone. I didn't see any Canadians, or hardly any Canadians out on the out on the Lake of the Woods. But, yeah, we had a good time.
• 2:31
  Chris Preble: My brothers‑in‑law and I, our annual fishing trip, nice to just spend a few days out on the lake in the fresh air. It was really a really good time.
• 2:39
  Melanie Marlowe: That's great. Well, I have to say all of our teams won yesterday. Denver, I hate to say, Tom, Dallas, and Minnesota.
• 2:46
  Chris Preble: Vikings. Woo‑hoo!
• 2:47
  Melanie Marlowe: So, that's really good.
• 2:49
  Melanie Marlowe: And then, as I just opened my fridge to get something out to slurp on while we're talking here, I saw that my big news is I bought a chicken.
• 2:57
  Melanie Marlowe: I bought a Costco chicken, and I have never done that before, and this was a...
• 3:02
  Chris Preble: Wait, wait, wait, wait.
• 3:03
  Melanie Marlowe: This is a big event for me. This is, like, the biggest event of the last-
• 3:07
  Chris Preble: I thought you were an American.
• 3:08
  Melanie Marlowe: ... I don't know how long. I know, I know.
• 3:10
  Chris Preble: Wait, you bought a chicken like the roasted chickens that are in, the roaster?
• 3:12
  Melanie Marlowe: Yeah. I did.
• 3:13
  Chris Preble: That's a big deal? Like, you haven't done that before?
• 3:16
  Melanie Marlowe: I mean-
• 3:17
  Chris Preble: What?
• 3:17
  Melanie Marlowe: ... I've been fascinated by the economics of it. I've read about how Costco bought its own farm-
• 3:21
  Chris Preble: Oh, my God, Melanie-
• 3:21
  Melanie Marlowe: ... all this stuff.
• 3:21
  Chris Preble: ... what the heck?
• 3:23
  Melanie Marlowe: I've just, like, I've never bought one myself, and so-
• 3:25
  Chris Preble: Okay, that's just-
• 3:25
  Melanie Marlowe: ... this is like-
• 3:26
  Chris Preble: ... wow.
• 3:27
  Melanie Marlowe: … I'm big on the protein. I bought some Chomps. I bought protein bars.
• 3:30
  Melanie Marlowe: Not going to lie, I had lunch with my dad last week, so he told me all these vitamins I had to buy. I did it. I spent 50 bucks on vitamins.
• 3:35
  Melanie Marlowe: And he recommended some turmeric. I got some in the cupboard. I think I'm going to be making...
• 3:40
  Chris Preble: Costco chicken.
• 3:40
  Melanie Marlowe: I'm going to be making soup with the rest of it now because it is fall, and it's football and soup season. So, there, you go.
• 3:47
  Chris Preble: Gang, you can't see the background in Melanie's, but she has her jack‑o'‑lantern fall theme in the background, which is so awesome right now.
• 3:54
  Chris Preble: Like, ah, and she even...
• 3:56
  Melanie Marlowe: I have decorations. I haven’t put all up, yeah.
• 3:57
  Chris Preble: She even has orange, leafy, faux leaf wreaths.
• 4:02
  Melanie Marlowe: Yes.
• 4:02
  Chris Preble: It's really awesome.
• 4:03
  Melanie Marlowe: Yes, it is my season.
• 4:04
  Melanie Marlowe: Okay, not only is it my season, it is my show, and as I mentioned, we are discussing for the most part the just‑released Lead Inspector General report on
• 4:12
  Melanie Marlowe: Operation Epic Fury that covers through June 30th, 2026, so a lot of time when we were in a ceasefire and from three or four months ago.
• 4:19
  Melanie Marlowe: Now, this report is mandated by law, and it covers the Department of Defense, State, Treasury, and other supporting agencies.
• 4:26
  Melanie Marlowe: The DOD IG is the lead, but IGs from the other departments drafted various sections.
• 4:30
  Melanie Marlowe: And interestingly to me, some of the appendices look at other related ongoing and planned oversight projects, which I'm looking forward to, the one on the
• 4:38
  Melanie Marlowe: Navy's ability to sustain maritime security capabilities, because I think we might be doing that for a little while.
• 4:44
  Melanie Marlowe: Now, my first thoughts on the report are obviously the situation has deteriorated since June 30th, and we even thought we might have seen massive strikes on
• 4:52
  Melanie Marlowe: Iran and Houthis over the weekend, but those were called off. But the weapons and equipment are actually still in place if the president again changes his mind.
• 5:01
  Melanie Marlowe: Besides this report, a couple of other documents have been circulating.
• 5:05
  Melanie Marlowe: Last week we got a CBO report in the form of a letter that was a response to Democratic members of Congress about costs, from which we can glean some
• 5:12
  Melanie Marlowe: supporting information.
• 5:14
  Melanie Marlowe: And on September 3rd, the Pentagon provided some additional information on the costs of the war to Congress, and that has been circulating among members.
• 5:22
  Melanie Marlowe: And then, obviously, think tanks, including Stimson and CSIS, and independent analysts have done a lot of work on the financial and other costs of the war.
• 5:30
  Melanie Marlowe: Now, I'm sure that there are parts of the report that each of us wants to focus on more than others, but I'd like to start out with our brief thoughts on the
• 5:38
  Melanie Marlowe: IG system generally and your overall assessment of this report in particular.
• 5:42
  Melanie Marlowe: And I have to say, and I suspect since Tom and I did go to grad school, if he has some of the same thoughts, unless he's evolved over time, concerned about
• 5:50
  Melanie Marlowe: that...
• 5:52
  Chris Preble: People do change, Melanie. You never know.
• 5:54
  Melanie Marlowe: I've really noticed that in the last while.
• 5:56
  Melanie Marlowe: I actually have some constitutional concerns about the 1978 Inspector General Law, and I'm not going to go into a ton of those.
• 6:03
  Melanie Marlowe: But I should note, this is not crazy, or maybe it is crazy because of the source I'm about to cite, but the Carter administration Office of Legal Counsel at
• 6:11
  Melanie Marlowe: the time in 1978 did not think that it was constitutional. President Carter, eventually, signed it on good government grounds.
• 6:18
  Melanie Marlowe: But there are questions about the IG, as the OLC said then, it's “neither fish nor fowl.” It's under the nominal supervision of the executive branch agency
• 6:26
  Melanie Marlowe: heads, but the Inspector General decides “what to audit, who to evaluate, what to investigate, how to write the reports, and who to hire within the office.”
• 6:34
  Melanie Marlowe: And so, other people that we've discussed on the podcast, including Jack Goldsmith, expressed their concern with the system as well.
• 6:40
  Melanie Marlowe: Now, legality aside, I see the public appeal of an office which can carry out what are perceived as nonpartisan neutral investigations.
• 6:48
  Tom Karako: I've got Jack Goldsmith's book.
• 6:50
  Chris Preble: He just held up Jack Goldsmith's book.
• 6:52
  Melanie Marlowe: Oh, I'm sure he'll say something about that then. And this report is very neutral, and it's a little bit long for a lot of listeners just to go grab and read.
• 6:59
  Melanie Marlowe: It comes in at around, you know, 40‑ish pages. But it's not hard reading.
• 7:04
  Melanie Marlowe: You can definitely get through the first several pages if you're looking for the gist of the report. It's less wordy, I would say, than a normal CRS report.
• 7:12
  Melanie Marlowe: It's divided into three sections, mission and resources, U.S. losses and sustainment, and U.S. diplomatic and economic activity.
• 7:18
  Melanie Marlowe: And I have to say, it takes the administration at its word on the February mission goals, and it lays those out as being: to destroy Iran's offensive missiles,
• 7:26
  Melanie Marlowe: missile production, and other security infrastructure, and to ensure that Iran never has nuclear weapons.
• 7:32
  Melanie Marlowe: And it does note that the full mission remains classified. And then it goes on to look at the evolution of the mission as the war's continued.
• 7:39
  Melanie Marlowe: And I will just say the bottom line in this report is things aren't great. We spent a lot of money. We didn't have funding.
• 7:46
  Chris Preble: Love.
• 7:47
  Melanie Marlowe: Yes. We've expended a ton of weapons when we didn't have a lot for deterrence and warfighting when it started.
• 7:52
  Melanie Marlowe: There are opportunity costs for what we're doing, and when this is over, we're going to have to make permanent decisions about our basing and force posture in
• 8:00
  Melanie Marlowe: the region, and at the moment, some decisions have been at least temporarily forced by events.
• 8:05
  Melanie Marlowe: I suspect there will also be some hearings about how we fight these wars in the future. So, with that, I think Tom must be very anxious to talk about the-
• 8:13
  Tom Karako: Very anxious to get in, yeah.
• 8:13
  Melanie Marlowe: ... the IG. Are we settling in for a lecture, Professor?
• 8:17
  Tom Karako: Well, no, actually, I was thinking of the Jack Goldsmith thing as soon as you did, because he also quotes a group of folks from the mid‑1990s, just before 9/11, who called them “congressional ferrets of dubious constitutionality.” And, you know, the point is, you know, you have to be subject to executive control.
• 8:33
  Tom Karako: That's the principle of separation of powers. The Carter administration doubted their constitutionality at the time. But here's the thing.
• 8:41
  Tom Karako: Goldsmith argues this, and I think he's right. They're just really useful. Of course, there's the exceptions. But this is a really good report.
• 8:49
  Tom Karako: And I'll tell you, big picture, you know, my take on it is I was doing a comparative analysis of the bottom line, how they went about costing things.
• 8:57
  Tom Karako: And, you know, whether it's $33 or $31 or $37 billion, nevertheless, they're, kind of, in the ballpark.
• 9:03
  Tom Karako: All these, the CBO, which you sent around, Mel, has a slightly different number. There's also different dates that are being used here in terms of the study.
• 9:12
  Tom Karako: But hey, look, I think it's a good report. They put out a lot more information in some respects than the press conference.
• 9:18
  Tom Karako: The press conferences on OEF, kind of, slowed down. You know what's not in the front of this report, though?
• 9:25
  Tom Karako: Unlike just about every other DOD report to Congress, unless they've changed this, is how much it costs to put together.
• 9:31
  Tom Karako: Every other report to Congress is, "This costs $200,000." It's not there, but that's neither here nor there.
• 9:38
  Chris Preble: I thought you were going to say there's no picture of Pete Hegseth in the report.
• 9:40
  Melanie Marlowe: I, yeah, that's what I thought you were going to say.
• 9:43
  Chris Preble: I know most Department of Defense reports, have a picture of Pete Hegseth with a thumbs‑up or doing push‑ups in front of the troops.
• 9:49
  Tom Karako: That's true.
• 9:49
  Melanie Marlowe: I will say that the IG report says “Department of War,” but the CBO says “DOD.”
• 9:55
  Chris Preble: Yes.
• 9:55
  Melanie Marlowe: Yeah. Okay. All right, Chris.
• 9:57
  Chris Preble: Spoiler, listeners, I found this report to be very boring.
• 10:01
  Chris Preble: And maybe that's the story, because what we know about this war under official cover, that is, the official justifications for the war, do not always align
• 10:11
  Chris Preble: with what's actually happening. So, we're grateful to the media that still exists and hasn't been banned by the White House for covering some of this.
• 10:20
  Chris Preble: We'll get into this in the show.
• 10:23
  Chris Preble: And the other thing that I thought, again, I'm being really cheeky, is, when I learned that there was a DOD IG report, I said, “Wait, I thought we did away
• 10:33
  Chris Preble: with DOD IG.” Like, oh, now I see.
• 10:36
  Chris Preble: It's both DOD IG, Department of War IG, Department of State IG, and, wouldn't you know it, USAID IG, which again, I thought, “Wait, is that a thing?
• 10:45
  Chris Preble: I thought that was gone.” So, no, on a serious note, I think for those people, and I count myself as one of them, I don't normally dig into IG reports.
• 10:55
  Chris Preble: So, my frame of reference for what an IG does and how they write and what they do, the most recent thing was the Special Inspector General for Afghan
• 11:04
  Chris Preble: Reconstruction, SIGAR. I read many of their reports, and they are far more, shall we say, fulsome.
• 11:11
  Chris Preble: Like, there's much more than merely a reporting of the relevant facts as the Trump administration wishes you to understand those facts.
• 11:19
  Chris Preble: And yet, even with that caveat, there are a few things that jump out of the report where you say, “Hmm...”
• 11:27
  Melanie Marlowe: Yeah. You know, I was on the Hill, I was on the Oversight Committee in 2012, 2013, and we did have a lot of briefings from the SIGAR-
• 11:37
  Chris Preble: Yep.
• 11:37
  Melanie Marlowe: ... for Afghanistan. So, and they were very different reports than what this one is as well.
• 11:41
  Melanie Marlowe: And maybe if this goes on for 12 more years, we'll get deeper and fuller reports.
• 11:46
  Tom Karako: Maybe. Yeah. Look, my take on this is there's just utility in having these numbers out there.
• 11:51
  Tom Karako: And I'll just say that, it's not for lack of trying, but there hasn't been, I would think, enough transparency about this from the administration.
• 12:00
  Tom Karako: And there's a couple, as a comparative, there's the CBO numbers again, and this. And what does the CBO do?
• 12:06
  Tom Karako: The CBO drops a footnote to my CSIS colleagues Mark Cancian and Chris Park as the most comprehensive public analysis.
• 12:13
  Tom Karako: And I can't help but make this observation, because there's been a decent amount of grousing about the “crime of public math”, that especially some folks at
• 12:22
  Tom Karako: CSIS have been accused of. There's been accusations of leaks. There's been accusations of a lack of patriotism. And this is all for [crosstalk 00:12:32]...
• 12:32
  Melanie Marlowe: Wanting Iran to win.
• 12:33
  Tom Karako: Or wanting Iran to win. Being soft on Iran.
• 12:36
  Tom Karako: Essentially not being a sufficient cheerleader for, basically, again, doing public math and warning about the inventory problem.
• 12:44
  Tom Karako: And I think that we've been as vocal as just about anybody in this town on the inventory problem with Operation Epic Fury. And it is a bit of a head‑scratcher.
• 12:54
  Tom Karako: Couple head‑scratchers here, one, going back in time, oh, I don't know, three years ago, when there was a certain coterie of munitions conservers who, you
• 13:03
  Tom Karako: know, “We couldn't spare a square to send 155 to Ukraine, because we might need that for Taiwan,” right?
• 13:10
  Tom Karako: And I will tell you, I was cautious about sending Patriots to Ukraine. I was cautious about ATACMS until PrSM started rolling off the line.
• 13:19
  Tom Karako: But you know how many SM‑3s and SM‑6s and Tomahawks and THAADs and JASSMs, do you know how many of those we sent to Ukraine and were expended in Ukraine? Zero.
• 13:29
  Melanie Marlowe: Zero.
• 13:30
  Tom Karako: Absolutely zero. All the long‑range stuff that we talked about as being so important to Ukraine.
• 13:35
  Tom Karako: So, the complaints about munitions during the Biden administration from some of our friends, it's funny, isn't it?
• 13:41
  Tom Karako: We don't hear a lot of commentary from those same folks now.
• 13:44
  Tom Karako: This again is just either chirping, quiet chirping, or, you know, “Why aren't you cheering enough?” So, it's a little peculiar, I'll just say.
• 13:52
  Melanie Marlowe: Okay.
• 13:53
  Melanie Marlowe: I actually wanted to talk about that second, but since Tom's already on it, and I think we can tell why Zack picked Tom to sub for him today, let's talk about
• 14:01
  Melanie Marlowe: the second section, the U.S. Losses and Sustainment. This is what the war has cost in terms of personnel, weapons, equipment, and facilities.
• 14:08
  Melanie Marlowe: And the report says, “Operation Epic Fury has resulted in strategic inventory shortfalls and revealed industrial‑base bottlenecks for munitions resupply.” Now,
• 14:17
  Melanie Marlowe: I don't think that it revealed it, as Tom mentioned, people who've been thinking about even Ukraine have been concerned about this, and other people have been
• 14:25
  Melanie Marlowe: worried about this for a decade or more.
• 14:28
  Melanie Marlowe: And then the CBO report talks about DOD's opportunity costs and says the shortfall would become especially problematic if a conflict arose with an opponent
• 14:36
  Melanie Marlowe: whose arsenal included China.
• 14:38
  Melanie Marlowe: Now, of course, I think the costs include things like allies who find it increasingly difficult to trust us, increasingly difficult to explain to their hostile
• 14:47
  Melanie Marlowe: populations, their now hostile populations, why they should work with us.
• 14:51
  Melanie Marlowe: Again, we're looking at things like what's happening in these other countries that are getting extremely worried.
• 14:57
  Melanie Marlowe: So, Chris, what is your sense of what the war has cost in terms of personnel, weapons, equipment, and facilities?
• 15:04
  Chris Preble: I certainly think that the report downplays, or more accurately, relies on DOD reporting on casualties, which we know was itself misleading, right?
• 15:16
  Melanie Marlowe: Yes.
• 15:16
  Chris Preble: And again, kudos to The New York Times reported on this, The Atlantic has reported on this, that you can…
• 15:22
  Melanie Marlowe: The Washington Post, I just want to interject [inaudible 00:15:24]-
• 15:24
  Chris Preble: The Washington Post, yeah.
• 15:24
  Melanie Marlowe: ... had a really good story just the other day.
• 15:27
  Chris Preble: Right. So, I mean, I start there.
• 15:29
  Chris Preble: Like, look, we're going to talk about things that go boom, but I start with people, and more people have been killed in this war than the Trump administration
• 15:39
  Chris Preble: wants you to know. And again, reading this report, you won't know that, right?
• 15:44
  Chris Preble: You're going to read this report, and you're going to think the numbers are what the Trump administration has been saying, and that's misleading.
• 15:53
  Chris Preble: I think that, especially, to Tom's point about calling attention to the damage that has been done to facilities in the region, is not rooting for failure.
• 16:03
  Chris Preble: It is not siding with the Iranians. It is reporting accurately and calling on U.S. government officials and military leaders to fess up.
• 16:11
  Chris Preble: And it's not just about taking responsibility, it's about what are you going to do about it? Like, what's the plan next time around?
• 16:19
  Chris Preble: I think there are multiple vectors that this can go in the future. And I think now is an appropriate time to talk about that.
• 16:27
  Chris Preble: But ultimately, the reason why these losses are higher than the Trump administration wants you to believe, and certainly higher than the American people expect
• 16:37
  Chris Preble: from the wars that the United States has fought recently, is that this war was supposed to be over in a couple of weeks.
• 16:45
  Chris Preble: It was supposed to result in the overthrow of the government of Iran and, I don't know, wind up in the hands of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, aided by a bunch of
• 16:54
  Chris Preble: Kurdish rebels from Iraq.
• 16:56
  Chris Preble: The entire scheme is so utterly cockamamie, like utterly foolish, and members of the Trump administration were telling the president that, and yet he decided
• 17:06
  Chris Preble: to go to war anyway.
• 17:08
  Chris Preble: He rolled the dice, and now we all, and I mean this truly, now we all are paying the price, because he believed that it was going to last for two weeks.
• 17:18
  Tom Karako: First of all, on the question that Mel asked about the bases, and I think you all had a show on this, I don't know-
• 17:22
  Chris Preble: We did, yeah.
• 17:22
  Tom Karako: ... a while ago. I have to say, I probably didn't agree with many of you about picking up and leaving those bases, but let me tell you something.
• 17:29
  Tom Karako: There's been devastating damage, and so, it's about seeing the world as it is, not as you want it to be.
• 17:35
  Tom Karako: Bahrain, all these other places have taken very significant damage, and we're going to have to adapt.
• 17:41
  Tom Karako: And so, Chris, I absolutely agree with you that it's fessing up to that situation.
• 17:45
  Tom Karako: But let me go back to the beginning, which is, yes, I think there was a sense this was supposed to be easy.
• 17:51
  Tom Karako: This was supposed to be quick, and over, and done in a short period of time like Venezuela. You can understand why they perhaps had that hope.
• 17:59
  Tom Karako: But I will tell you, there was plenty of reason to think that that wouldn't be the case, and I don't believe for a minute that the president was not getting
• 18:07
  Tom Karako: that advice from the Joint Staff, for instance, making all these warnings, and there's been plenty of reporting on that from the beginning.
• 18:15
  Tom Karako: But here's my beef, which is, if you want to take Vienna, take Vienna.
• 18:19
  Tom Karako: And what we're seeing here is a fundamental mismatch or misalignment of that old formulation of ends, ways, and means.
• 18:26
  Tom Karako: So, the administration comes in with maximalist ends. By the way, which I, to some extent, largely agree with.
• 18:32
  Tom Karako: I actually really agree with the strategic logic of the preventative war about the missile program based on the trends, actually, that was well‑founded.
• 18:40
  Tom Karako: But you have to will the ways and the means to achieve those ends.
• 18:44
  Tom Karako: And the reason that we've been attriting or hemorrhaging these exquisite long‑range standoff weapons and interceptors that have been playing catch, one of the
• 18:52
  Tom Karako: reasons is that there's this misalignment, and we have this extraordinary risk aversion.
• 18:57
  Tom Karako: If you want to change the regime in Iran, then you had better will the ends and the ways to include special forces or ground forces on the ground.
• 19:05
  Tom Karako: Heck, they're building new missiles right now. It's been reported. They are opening up the tunnels, 50 of the 69 tunnels we closed off.
• 19:12
  Tom Karako: They're building hundreds of missiles anew from spare parts. Why? Because we're not there on the ground.
• 19:18
  Tom Karako: Now, am I saying I'm endorsing a big ground invasion of Iran? Those aren't the words that came out of my mouth.
• 19:24
  Tom Karako: What I'm saying is, if you have those maximalist ends, and you don't have the ways and the means to get there, then you're going to end up with these very
• 19:33
  Tom Karako: problematic outcomes.
• 19:34
  Tom Karako: And oh, by the way, they probably waited too long to give the administration the chance to kill the tens of thousands of people who might have, for instance,
• 19:43
  Tom Karako: rose up.
• 19:44
  Tom Karako: But I said this in the summer of 2025, that the administration was letting the regime off the hook, and that we could not afford to come back and do this again.
• 19:52
  Tom Karako: And that, unfortunately, is where we are right now.
• 19:56
  Melanie Marlowe: Yeah.
• 19:57
  Melanie Marlowe: Look, I am a little bit more restrained on some of this, but I've said on previous shows that if they had really thought this was going to be two weeks of
• 20:05
  Melanie Marlowe: bombing, and if I thought that they were really going to accomplish something, I would've been on board with this.
• 20:11
  Melanie Marlowe: But there was just something about this that was absolutely unrealistic, and the longer that this went on in January and February, it became really apparent.
• 20:20
  Melanie Marlowe: I think I may have mentioned before, Chris and I were at an embassy right before this started, and we were being asked, “Is this going to happen?” And we said,
• 20:28
  Melanie Marlowe: “Yes. Yes, this is going to happen.” And that was very concerning, because it was really clear that we were not ready for what was about to transpire.
• 20:37
  Melanie Marlowe: And of course, the advice situation is real, but it's who the president chooses to listen to.
• 20:42
  Melanie Marlowe: And so, when we look at those two things, I'm going to go back, and maybe this will be my year‑end “Ha ha, I was right,” but I'm not very happy about it.
• 20:50
  Melanie Marlowe: A few episodes ago, we did an episode on a strategy of consolidation, and could there be one?
• 20:56
  Melanie Marlowe: Because it sounds like a really good idea for us to start figuring out how to minimize some of our commitments.
• 21:02
  Melanie Marlowe: Well, not only have we not done that, but I said, “There will not ever be a strategy because Donald Trump is at the top of this.
• 21:09
  Melanie Marlowe: He is at the head of this, and he is in charge of this.” And I think that with the things that he says and the very reflexive actions, and, you know, last week
• 21:17
  Melanie Marlowe: saying, “We have more exquisite and elite weapons coming off the production lines than ever before.” Well, we might be producing a lot of stuff right now, but
• 21:26
  Melanie Marlowe: the people that he listens to are not the people who are really advising him beforehand or now as to what the best course of action might be and what the costs
• 21:35
  Melanie Marlowe: are going to be. And like you said, so I'm just going to say one more thing about the basing. And I do think that we're going to have to pull back.
• 21:43
  Melanie Marlowe: We're just going to have to pull back because, number one, unless this plays out very differently, and again, I have not said day‑by‑day, you know, it's a win
• 21:51
  Melanie Marlowe: or a loss or this or that.
• 21:53
  Melanie Marlowe: I've expressed my concern with certain aspects of this, our ability to stay in maritime operations, our ability to go back and forth on bombing and, you know,
• 22:02
  Melanie Marlowe: big, intensive strikes, that kind of thing.
• 22:05
  Melanie Marlowe: But it is very hard to see how we are going to leave our expensive radars and personnel and planes and all of this near where the likelihood of damage is.
• 22:13
  Melanie Marlowe: That said, I don't want to give up all that property in the future.
• 22:17
  Melanie Marlowe: But I have a hard time believing… As Hung Cao said, and maybe this is going to, you know, mean that he doesn't get confirmed as Navy Secretary, “the Iranian
• 22:26
  Melanie Marlowe: forces blew the hell out of Bahrain.” And then he said it left the Lincoln’s crew no place for them to pull in.
• 22:32
  Melanie Marlowe: And then he was asked by a reporter if Bahrain would be necessary to sustain strenuous deployments like the kind the Lincoln crew just saw.
• 22:39
  Melanie Marlowe: He said, “I have a task force looking into that.” We all know the answer to that.
• 22:44
  Melanie Marlowe: And then they had to go to Diego Garcia, and it added weeks of time into resupplying, getting people healthcare, all of that. Chris.
• 22:52
  Chris Preble: Well, a couple things. I mean, I just state categorically that I do not think this was Vienna worth taking. Okay? I do not buy the logic of preventative war.
• 23:00
  Chris Preble: And partly because, again, to stick to the metaphor, Vienna could have been taken. Iran, a country of 92 million people, cannot be taken.
• 23:08
  Chris Preble: Like, that's not how it works, right?
• 23:10
  Chris Preble: For God’s sake, the lessons from Iraq and Afghanistan, countries far smaller than Iran and way easier to deal with, is just not the same.
• 23:18
  Chris Preble: So, right there, I just reject the premise of the real problem here is that, you know, the problem is that we shouldn't have attempted this in the first place.
• 23:27
  Chris Preble: Full stop. As for what you were getting at, Melanie, in terms of who is advising the president in the national interest.
• 23:33
  Chris Preble: Now, I understand that this president has a particular view of what is in the national interest.
• 23:39
  Chris Preble: And for him, if it's in Donald Trump's interest, then it's in the nation's interest.
• 23:44
  Chris Preble: You know, as the famous saying goes, "What's good for General Electric or General Motors is good for the United States." Well, for Donald Trump, it's, "What's
• 23:53
  Chris Preble: good for Donald Trump is good for the United States." We know that's not true. Okay. And yet the people who are advising him buy into that logic.
• 24:01
  Chris Preble: What's good for Donald Trump is good for the United States.
• 24:04
  Chris Preble: So, now we've run this experiment several times where the president of the United States gets to wage war.
• 24:10
  Chris Preble: Congress has no say, none, zero percent, nothing to do with it. And people are, sort of, shrugging their shoulders.
• 24:17
  Chris Preble: It's like, "Well, I guess this is the way this is the new system we have." I'm not shrugging my shoulders.
• 24:23
  Chris Preble: I think it's an appalling abdication of responsibility on the part of Congress. And so, we shouldn't just let it go. We shouldn't just shrug our shoulders.
• 24:32
  Tom Karako: I take your point, Chris, in terms of my Vienna comment is very much about the disconnect between the two.
• 24:38
  Chris Preble: Yeah. Yes.
• 24:39
  Tom Karako: But the administration had the maximalist ends, not merely of the preventative war for the missiles-
• 24:44
  Chris Preble: Right. I know.
• 24:45
  Tom Karako: ... but also the regime change, and they didn't have the means to get there. And that's the tragedy of all this.
• 24:51
  Melanie Marlowe: Okay. So, talking on means, where I had wanted to begin, let's go there. There's unified government right now.
• 24:57
  Melanie Marlowe: There are majorities of Republicans in the House and the Senate. There's an ostensible Republican in the White House right now.
• 25:04
  Melanie Marlowe: Why is there no funding yet for this war? There's been an emergency supplemental proposed of almost $90 billion. That has gone nowhere.
• 25:12
  Melanie Marlowe: The reconciliation is supposed to be replenishing munitions, has gone nowhere.
• 25:17
  Melanie Marlowe: We don't have a top‑line for appropriations in the Senate yet, so, you know, that's all going to have to wait till, I hope, the lame duck, and, you know, we
• 25:26
  Melanie Marlowe: have a CR that goes until then. But we're paying for this through very creative accounting. Why can we not pay for this war?
• 25:34
  Tom Karako: Because we don't, there's not really unified government. It's a coalition government.
• 25:38
  Tom Karako: You know, it's not going to get any easier for the White House to legislate or appropriate come January, February of next year.
• 25:45
  Tom Karako: But that's the other kind of surreal, bizarro‑world quality here, is the sense that, well, because the PB27 proposed budget request had a really big number on
• 25:54
  Tom Karako: paper, which, oh, by the way, was an enormous gambit by putting all the really important munitions and Golden Dome and shipbuilding stuff into the mandatory,
• 26:03
  Tom Karako: reconciliation pot, that gambit is not looking very wise in retrospect.
• 26:07
  Tom Karako: And so, we've got this problem, and I'm going to pick a little nit here with the CBO report that I came across just this morning.
• 26:14
  Tom Karako: This had $22 billion for munitions through August, slightly different than the other reports.
• 26:19
  Tom Karako: But it says, and I quote, “Replacing those munitions has been the largest single component of the costs incurred by DOD during the conflict.” You know what's
• 26:28
  Tom Karako: wrong with that sentence? The verb tense.
• 26:31
  Melanie Marlowe: Yeah.
• 26:32
  Tom Karako: It's "It will be." It has not been, because we haven't obligated those funds, because the supplemental that Mel talked about, yeah, it was sent over, and I think Secretary Hegseth met with a couple of Republican senators.
• 26:45
  Tom Karako: But it is astonishing to me that for all the references to we're on a war footing, we're no, no, no, no, we're not on a war footing.
• 26:53
  Tom Karako: You will know we're on a war footing when Congress appropriates as if there's a war on.
• 26:59
  Chris Preble: Yeah.
• 27:00
  Melanie Marlowe: I'll say there was something similar in the IG report where it talks about the bottlenecks and significant lead times and so forth, and that DOD says that they're working on reallocating funding to alleviate constraints and choke points as they arise.
• 27:14
  Melanie Marlowe: They don't have the funding. I mean, whatever they're pulling out of FY '26 or elsewhere.
• 27:19
  Melanie Marlowe: And in addition, of course, as we all know, it's going to take a long time to replace all of this.
• 27:26
  Chris Preble: I mean, look, again, we have to acknowledge the U.S. government spends lots of money that it doesn't have because we're $40 trillion in debt and that seems to be going on indefinitely.
• 27:36
  Chris Preble: And, you know, as Hemingway famously said, “You went bankrupt slowly and then suddenly.” Until that happens, like, what actually will prevent the spending of
• 27:45
  Chris Preble: more money?
• 27:46
  Chris Preble: I mean, there's some shuffling around, and there's like moving money around, and some of those stories have come out, and they don't look very good, and it's
• 27:55
  Chris Preble: clearly a shell game. But at the end of the day, this is one of the realities.
• 28:00
  Chris Preble: The President of the United States has at his disposal a massive military machine that can do stuff without anyone actually authorizing it to do stuff, because
• 28:09
  Chris Preble: it's there. It's extant. It exists.
• 28:12
  Chris Preble: As I like to say, when you have a really big hammer, everything looks like a nail, and we're seeing this play out repeatedly under this administration.
• 28:21
  Melanie Marlowe: First of all, I want to say, I like Jules Hurst, who's the DOD Comptroller. I think that he's honest.
• 28:26
  Melanie Marlowe: I think he's just, like, when he goes to Congress or when he writes something down, I think he's telling the truth.
• 28:33
  Melanie Marlowe: He seems sometimes a little nervous or anxious about if you should be answering the questions and so forth.
• 28:39
  Melanie Marlowe: I'm sure a lot of people in the Pentagon right now are anxious and nervous about whether they should be answering questions.
• 28:45
  Melanie Marlowe: But I will say that the CBO anticipates that going forward, the war will cost about $2 billion a month if we are in a ceasefire and about $3 billion a month if
• 28:54
  Melanie Marlowe: we are firing on all cylinders. And so, that's a lot of money. I also want to note, creative accounting in war is not new.
• 29:01
  Melanie Marlowe: When I was in grad school, the recent history was Kosovo.
• 29:04
  Melanie Marlowe: And looking at how that was covered by the Clinton administration, which did not have an AUMF, that was, kind of, interesting as well.
• 29:12
  Chris Preble: No, that's true.
• 29:13
  Melanie Marlowe: Yeah. Okay. A couple of other things that I want to hit on, even though I think Tom escaped without saying what he actually would do about basing. It's fine.
• 29:21
  Chris Preble: It's all right, Tom.
• 29:25
  Tom Karako: You know what? Can I address that?
• 29:26
  Melanie Marlowe: Sure, fine.
• 29:26
  Tom Karako: I mean, this is something also, I think I know we disagree on.
• 29:29
  Tom Karako: Maybe it was you who said you wouldn't want to give up the property, and that's to say, look, I think it's important to retain the ability.
• 29:36
  Tom Karako: We've had Patriots in Bahrain since 1991, okay?
• 29:39
  Tom Karako: They're supposed to buy some of their own, but we've had Patriots there, including for our own forces there, since 1991. I absolutely agree.
• 29:46
  Tom Karako: Don't give up the base.
• 29:48
  Tom Karako: This is where I disagree, on Afghanistan and Iraq, for instance, is the one thing that I would have asked in return before we left, for all the blood and
• 29:56
  Tom Karako: treasure that we devoted there, is to make sure that we have a base, a foothold, that if we have to come back, we have the ability to do so.
• 30:03
  Tom Karako: So, I would absolutely agree with that.
• 30:06
  Tom Karako: I don't necessarily think you have to decide that you're going to just build everything back up the way it evolved over the past 30‑plus years.
• 30:13
  Tom Karako: But I would be very loath to close down the ports or close down the bases entirely, and I would absolutely retain the flexibility and the freedom of action to
• 30:21
  Tom Karako: have something there if you decide that you need to.
• 30:25
  Melanie Marlowe: Do you think that our allies want us to have the same footprint that we had before?
• 30:29
  Tom Karako: Do you mean the GCC partners?
• 30:30
  Melanie Marlowe: Yeah. They're not our allies.
• 30:32
  Tom Karako: What I would say is they're calling up the president asking for help with the Houthis, MBS, for instance, and he's going along with it.
• 30:39
  Tom Karako: So, I actually think that they protest too much on that front, that they're probably going to want us there more than they want us gone.
• 30:48
  Chris Preble: Yeah. I disagree, but more fundamentally.
• 30:51
  Chris Preble: I mean, I understand what Tom is saying with respect to flexibility, but it's precisely the flexibility that I'm worried about.
• 30:59
  Chris Preble: And so, that's exactly what I don't want.
• 31:02
  Chris Preble: I want us to have time to deliberate as a nation when the United States goes to war, and what you allow to happen when you have forward bases and people, U.S.
• 31:11
  Chris Preble: personnel, in these places, it short‑circuits the appropriate level of national debate before going to war.
• 31:18
  Chris Preble: In that respect, those bases are functioning, I would submit, exactly as their advocates intended.
• 31:25
  Tom Karako: Counterfactual, Iraq War, 1991. We had to move an iron mountain across the world to be able to get there. We didn't have the presence there, but George H.W.
• 31:33
  Tom Karako: Bush said, “I'm going with or without you, Congress.” And he dared.
• 31:36
  Tom Karako: Now, in the end, Congress approved it, and I think that was the right move, but I hear what you're saying about how it seems tempting.
• 31:43
  Tom Karako: But I also think you can have forward presence while still being, I don't like this word, so I'm not going to say restrained, but I'll just say prudent.
• 31:52
  Chris Preble: Fair enough.
• 31:53
  Melanie Marlowe: I think we certainly have to be hardening what we have over there, looking at the planes that are damaged, which the report does cover.
• 32:01
  Melanie Marlowe: One of the reasons why it's hard for the report to assess everything is because, for example, as we mentioned, it doesn't know what we're going to rebuild and
• 32:10
  Melanie Marlowe: what Congress is going to assess our future there should be.
• 32:14
  Melanie Marlowe: And, you know, some of the things that have been eliminated, some of the aircraft, there are things that we aren't necessarily building again, but they were
• 32:23
  Melanie Marlowe: very expensive and we would want them in the future.
• 32:27
  Melanie Marlowe: Okay, so I want to keep this on partners, but maybe even more to allies, because as we have expended all of these munitions, we are trying to get the defense
• 32:36
  Melanie Marlowe: industrial base up and producing more, and there have been, I think, really important moves made in the Department, especially by the Deputy Secretary, to try
• 32:45
  Melanie Marlowe: to do this. And I will say he's been very creative and forceful, and, you know, people are having to make some substantive changes.
• 32:53
  Melanie Marlowe: But we have promised our allies a lot.
• 32:56
  Melanie Marlowe: We have taken their money, and we have said, “We are going to supply you with weapons.” Now, right now we have about a $30 billion backlog to Taiwan.
• 33:05
  Melanie Marlowe: Some of that's just being held up because of maybe the upcoming meeting that is happening on Thursday, but for other reasons as well.
• 33:13
  Melanie Marlowe: But a lot of our allies, our actual treaty allies in Asia and in Europe, have been buying these weapons, and they are watching them literally go up in smoke.
• 33:22
  Melanie Marlowe: So, how do we manage that situation? I'll tell you, I hosted a small roundtable at CSIS last week with the Germans. They are desperate to co‑produce.
• 33:31
  Melanie Marlowe: They are desperate to get in on our supply chains. They want to help us. They want to buy our Tomahawks and Typhon systems.
• 33:38
  Melanie Marlowe: They're setting aside €12 billion for defense.
• 33:42
  Melanie Marlowe: I want them to hurry and get all of this before their government falls and they have a government that wants to make deals with Russia.
• 33:50
  Melanie Marlowe: I'm only, kind of, joking.
• 33:52
  Melanie Marlowe: But what does it say about our credibility when we are telling them they need to buy our stuff or we're wanting them to buy our stuff, and yet we cannot
• 34:01
  Melanie Marlowe: deliver the weapons that they want and need?
• 34:05
  Tom Karako: I'll go first. Melanie, at the top didn't ask me what I've been doing lately, the typical Net Assessment thing.
• 34:11
  Tom Karako: But one thing that I've been doing lately, is I went to Sweden.
• 34:15
  Tom Karako: And I'll tell you, I know you both probably spend a lot more time in embassies and such than I do, but I was amazed.
• 34:21
  Tom Karako: First of all, I met with some very senior Swedish MOD officials, and by the way, it was for a nuclear boot camp.
• 34:27
  Tom Karako: They were getting very serious about nuclear deterrence, which is remarkable.
• 34:32
  Tom Karako: Their threat perception on Russia is through the roof, and they've tripled their defense budget.
• 34:37
  Tom Karako: But the conversations that I had, to a person, were exasperation, which is, “We are being told that we're a model ally. We've tripled our defense budget.
• 34:46
  Tom Karako: We've bought your stuff.
• 34:48
  Tom Karako: We say we want to buy more, all the things that you're telling us to do.” And yet, because these many, many billions, and more significantly, actually, this is
• 34:56
  Tom Karako: one cost that was not in any of these documents, the cost is not measured just in the dollars of what it will take to replace.
• 35:03
  Tom Karako: The cost will be measured in time, and it is the time it will take to replace these and the potential window of vulnerability that now the U.S. is jumping in
• 35:12
  Tom Karako: line of the FMS process.
• 35:14
  Tom Karako: And on the one hand, you have the White House saying, “Buy American” in reality, they're saying, “Actually, those missiles, those Patriots that you,
• 35:22
  Tom Karako: Switzerland, have not only bought but paid for, that we're going to take them.” And the various countries that have bought and paid for PAC-2s, the United
• 35:31
  Tom Karako: States Army's going to take them. And so, our allies are looking around saying, “What the heck? There's no way we can win here.
• 35:38
  Tom Karako: We literally cannot do the thing that you're telling us to do because you've just jumped the line in this vaporization of all of this stuff.”
• 35:46
  Chris Preble: Mm‑hmm. Yeah. I mean, there's a couple thoughts here.
• 35:49
  Chris Preble: First of all, it's quite a demonstration of gall, chutzpah, shall we say, for the Trump administration to say, “You must buy these things,” which you can see
• 35:58
  Chris Preble: with your very own eyes you will not get any time soon.
• 36:02
  Chris Preble: And yet the pushback has been, I think, so far fairly muted on the part of U.S. allies because many of them feel like they have no choice.
• 36:10
  Chris Preble: To which I reply, you should have thought of this a long time ago. Like, how do you solve this problem?
• 36:17
  Chris Preble: You get in a time machine, and 10 years ago, when the man who said he was going to cut off Europe in particular and was saying nasty things about the Japanese
• 36:26
  Chris Preble: going back to the 1980s, when this guy got elected president, you should have said, “Hmm, I think we need a Plan B.” Now, that's a little harsh, and I'll admit
• 36:35
  Chris Preble: that's a little harsh.
• 36:37
  Chris Preble: But right now the response is, candidly, it's not, we want co‑production, which means we are dependent upon the United States approving these licenses and
• 36:46
  Chris Preble: approving the plans and all that other stuff. We need our own production.
• 36:51
  Chris Preble: And when the President of the United States and Trump administration officials say, “No, you are not allowed to have in your legislation or a Europe‑first
• 37:00
  Chris Preble: sourcing, you're not allowed to have those provisions in your defense industry." But in the United States, we have them exclusively.
• 37:08
  Chris Preble: Like, you only can buy made‑in‑America for U.S. DOD.
• 37:11
  Chris Preble: But for every other country in the world, when you insert a clause like that into your legislation, that's completely inappropriate.
• 37:19
  Chris Preble: I mean, it's so utterly absurd.
• 37:22
  Chris Preble: And from a political perspective, Melanie, you want to talk about politics and the next German government and the next French government and the next, let's go
• 37:31
  Chris Preble: down the list, how does this play politically to the citizens in these countries who are being asked to vote for the governments who have made these deals with
• 37:40
  Chris Preble: the United States of America, which provide minimal economic benefits to the people in those countries, very minimal, provide no actual security in the short
• 37:50
  Chris Preble: term because the weapons do not exist and will not exist, and yet are being routinely bullied by this administration?
• 37:57
  Chris Preble: How do we think this is going to go down well politically? I'll make a prediction, not well.
• 38:03
  Melanie Marlowe: Yeah, Chris, I have no disagreement with you on it is decades late for Europe to be thinking about this.
• 38:08
  Melanie Marlowe: But at the moment, in such a time of crisis, it's extremely self‑defeating for us to be behaving the way that we are, you know, demanding that they not have
• 38:17
  Melanie Marlowe: “Buy European,” but they do “Buy American.” But I do want to reiterate, there are several allies that are, Sweden's one of them, that is really trying to pull
• 38:25
  Melanie Marlowe: its weight, but Germany as well, and they're about to have a lot of industrial capacity and open buildings and people that have technical expertise because
• 38:33
  Melanie Marlowe: their car industry is dying.
• 38:35
  Melanie Marlowe: It won't transfer over directly to building missiles and planes and all of that, but they have a future as the biggest economic powerhouse in Europe.
• 38:43
  Melanie Marlowe: They have a military future if the rest of Europe can come to terms with that as well. So, I hold out hope, but it is extremely disappointing.
• 38:51
  Melanie Marlowe: On the last thing, how the State and Treasury Departments have handled this, I'm a little unhappy about the back‑and‑forth of the Treasury Department and if
• 38:59
  Melanie Marlowe: they're going to impose sanctions and, if they aren't, and then the exemptions and just the volatility.
• 39:05
  Melanie Marlowe: I mean, I have some issues about how some of these things are structured anyway, but particularly the volatility.
• 39:11
  Melanie Marlowe: But I think the State Department, I mean, I think Marco Rubio, obviously, he's trying to keep his head down. He's not out saying stuff every day.
• 39:19
  Melanie Marlowe: But the people below him have, in my view, done heroic work trying to get civilians out of the region, evacuating diplomatic personnel.
• 39:26
  Melanie Marlowe: I know a family that was in an embassy in that region, that they were on vacation when all of this went down, and they've never been able to go back to their
• 39:34
  Melanie Marlowe: home. But, you know, they had a pet. I mean, all of this stuff that people aren't thinking about that has really affected lives.
• 39:41
  Melanie Marlowe: And in my view, they've done the best job they can. I do worry about them, you know, not being there to have our diplomats on the ground.
• 39:48
  Melanie Marlowe: Some of them have gone back at this point, but that has been a wound.
• 39:53
  Chris Preble: Well, I agree with you, Melanie, about the section that talks about what the State Department has done to evacuate U.S. citizens, diplomats, et cetera, has been pretty impressive and quiet, and, I think, kudos to those responsible.
• 40:06
  Chris Preble: I do want to say something about the economic passages of this section, where the section “Economic Fury” begins.
• 40:14
  Chris Preble: You know, “Economic Fury refers to economic‑related actions that complement U.S. actions in OEF, targets Iran's ability to generate, move, and repatriate
• 40:23
  Chris Preble: funds.” Like, this is how they're going to bring Iran to heel.
• 40:27
  Chris Preble: On the next page of the report, the top of the page reads, “In response to market conditions, Treasury temporarily authorized the sale of Iranian‑origin oil,
• 40:37
  Chris Preble: petroleum, and petrochemical products.” Come on.
• 40:41
  Chris Preble: I mean, that's one of those moments when I said, is like, if you read this report and it's written in the dry, mundane language of IGs, that tells you all you
• 40:50
  Chris Preble: need to know about the amount of economic pressure and pain that the United States is able to inflict on the Iranians, because guess what?
• 40:59
  Chris Preble: Right now there's way more pain being felt in the other direction.
• 41:04
  Tom Karako: If you want to take the Shell station, take the Shell station.
• 41:07
  Chris Preble: Better.
• 41:09
  Tom Karako: No, look, back to the crowd that was saying, “What's the strategy with Ukraine under Biden?” The strategy's changing on a weekly basis, and Chris, the sensitivity to the market, to oil prices, has seen all this vacillation from the administration just all over the place.
• 41:23
  Tom Karako: And I think, Melanie, you asked about the allies a second ago, among other things, among the vacillation on Greenland and 17 other topics, the degree of
• 41:32
  Tom Karako: sensitivity to oil prices and to the economic impacts of OEF, it's like, well, didn't you see that coming?
• 41:38
  Tom Karako: And the other thing that really I can't help but point out is we didn't fill up the Strategic Petroleum Reserve before this thing kicked off.
• 41:46
  Tom Karako: And so, if you're looking for a comprehensive plan, that's another little detail.
• 41:51
  Melanie Marlowe: I'm going to add one more thing that you just brought up, the sensitivity to the oil prices. Yeah, we're really sensitive to it here.
• 41:58
  Melanie Marlowe: We're not so sensitive to it with our allies and people that are really paying very expensive costs and on fertilizer and food production that's going to be
• 42:07
  Melanie Marlowe: very expensive next year.
• 42:09
  Melanie Marlowe: And again, this is making it harder for the governments that want to work with us to do so, unless it's because we have something that they want.
• 42:17
  Melanie Marlowe: But this has been really hard for our allies to bear, and I can tell Chris is wanting to jump in on something here, too.
• 42:24
  Chris Preble: No, no, no. I think It's not just we're paying more.
• 42:27
  Chris Preble: And for many Americans, that is a problem because affordability is a problem, and diesel costs are going to be translated into the cost of everything that is
• 42:37
  Chris Preble: delivered on a truck, meaning your groceries and your stuff. Okay? But we're...
• 42:43
  Chris Preble: I will say this, merely, and I'm putting scare quotes around this, we Americans are merely paying more for oil that is, the price of which is set on the global
• 42:53
  Chris Preble: market. For many people around the world, they don't have oil to buy. There are shortages.
• 42:59
  Chris Preble: And look, it's the end of September now in D.C., it's going to get cold, and these people are going to be cold in parts of the Northern Hemisphere.
• 43:09
  Melanie Marlowe: Yeah. I mean, I'll just say, in conclusion, as you two know, my thoughts, this is what happens in war. You know, there are high costs to be paid.
• 43:16
  Melanie Marlowe: It's important that we confront them, that we talk about them, that we make sure that we're prepared for them. And to me, it isn't even the lack so much of...
• 43:23
  Melanie Marlowe: Or even the expansion, as we've mentioned, of the munitions and having the Navy out there.
• 43:28
  Melanie Marlowe: It's that the goalposts have moved, and there's been no acknowledgement of, maybe, we've made some missteps.
• 43:34
  Melanie Marlowe: You know, I saw people last night saying, "Yeah, Europe should be helping us with the Strait of Hormuz." And going to both of your points, there are vast
• 43:41
  Melanie Marlowe: reservations why they don't want to do that.
• 43:44
  Melanie Marlowe: They may finally decide that they absolutely have to, but we have not proved to be reliable or stable, and it's a very hard call, and I wish that we would have
• 43:52
  Melanie Marlowe: had more conversation in Congress.
• 43:54
  Melanie Marlowe: I'm looking at Republican Senate candidates in Michigan and Iowa now that are very concerned about what you've both mentioned on the affordability front and
• 44:02
  Melanie Marlowe: hoping that the president can come to a resolution on this.
• 44:05
  Melanie Marlowe: Well, we're going to talk a little bit more about China, so if you want to do a lightning round, say one or two things really fast.
• 44:11
  Melanie Marlowe: One, do you think that there will be some big deals coming out of the Xi-Trump meeting, and what's your one big hope?
• 44:18
  Chris Preble: I'm not going to say in advance what is going to happen with the Trump-Xi summit, because instead, at the Stimson Center, we report on what has happened.
• 44:26
  Chris Preble: So, the China program, my colleague Yun Sun, the director there, and I will be talking about that on Monday.
• 44:33
  Chris Preble: I'll include a link in the show notes so people can check out that event where we discuss the key takeaways.
• 44:39
  Chris Preble: So, I'm going to stick to not trying to predict the future because it hasn't happened yet.
• 44:45
  Tom Karako: Fair enough.
• 44:46
  Tom Karako: I like that methodology as well, and so I will follow it by saying that what has been reported, what has already been reported, is that President Trump plans a
• 44:55
  Tom Karako: flyover for Xi, in contrast with the singing children that he received in Beijing.
• 45:00
  Tom Karako: So, I'll wait as well, but I'll just say that I'm not hopeful that the China hawks will be happy, if they're being honest, when this is over.
• 45:08
  Tom Karako: I think I'm, kind of, dreading where this may go.
• 45:12
  Melanie Marlowe: Okay. I think there will be no big deal made out of this.
• 45:15
  Melanie Marlowe: There are many things I wish that we were doing better on, critical minerals, I think, destabilization in the Middle East and with Russia.
• 45:24
  Tom Karako: Xi is going to have a very wry smile on his face. Because that...
• 45:29
  Chris Preble: That is a good prediction, Tom Karako. I agree with you. That will happen.
• 45:34
  Tom Karako: And just remember, it is in China's interest for us to keep hemorrhaging what we're hemorrhaging in the Middle East.
• 45:39
  Tom Karako: And so, I also wouldn't expect China to lean in too hard and say, "Oh, would you please stop this?" No, they're having way too much fun watching us make these
• 45:46
  Tom Karako: mistakes. They're not going to stop us.
• 45:49
  Melanie Marlowe: Okay. Well, on that note, how about a grievance, Chris? Frank Costanza: “The tradition of Festivus begins with the airing of grievances.
• 45:57
  Melanie Marlowe: I got a lot of problems with you, people. And now, you’re going to hear about it!”
• 46:03
  Chris Preble: Okay, my grievance, this just popped into my mailbox this morning.
• 46:07
  Chris Preble: But these days we get fairly bombarded with stories about corruption, from Bitcoin to, you know, sweetheart deals made in foreign countries that miraculously
• 46:17
  Chris Preble: wind up among U.S. treaty allies or security guarantees.
• 46:21
  Chris Preble: But there's another form of just basic sort of garden-variety corruption that goes on, and ProPublica has the story today where a company, Navatek, was
• 46:30
  Chris Preble: funneling donations to, in this case, Senator Susan Collins of Maine through a shell company.
• 46:36
  Chris Preble: This is the kind of thing that happens all the time, because companies that are recipients of government contracts are not supposed to be making direct
• 46:46
  Chris Preble: donations to the people, in this case, Senator Collins, as chairman of the Appropriations Committee, is literally writing them the checks in return.
• 46:55
  Chris Preble: It is grotesque.
• 46:57
  Chris Preble: We know that it happens, and so we shouldn't be shocked that many Americans look upon this place where we three live and say, "To hell with all of you.
• 47:06
  Chris Preble: This is a sick and twisted affair." And so, yeah, I'm aggrieved.
• 47:11
  Chris Preble: And my understanding is this is only the first of many stories along this line that ProPublica will be publishing, and I'm anticipating that it's going to be
• 47:20
  Chris Preble: ugly.
• 47:22
  Melanie Marlowe: Yeah. Okay. Tom.
• 47:23
  Tom Karako: Well, I mentioned that I was in Sweden recently, and I was impressed, met some very senior defense folks, and I was just impressed with how all in they are, how they think about the Russia problem, they think about a thousand-year framework.
• 47:36
  Tom Karako: They don't think about it just in a NATO framework. And that is why it's, kind of, been on my mind. Last month was the fourth anniversary of when the U.S.
• 47:45
  Tom Karako: Senate voted on the admission of Sweden and Finland into NATO, which I have to say, in the long scheme of things, was probably one of the most
• 47:53
  Tom Karako: counterproductive moves in terms of Putin's calculus of the Ukraine conflict.
• 47:58
  Tom Karako: But my grievance is, and I'm not going to give up on this, my grievance is with Senator Josh Hawley, who was the lone vote against the admission of Sweden and
• 48:07
  Tom Karako: Finland.
• 48:08
  Tom Karako: And he did so, just go back to his explanation in the Senate and in an article that he wrote, if you look up in the dictionary the definition of the logical
• 48:17
  Tom Karako: fallacy, non-sequitur, there's a picture of this article.
• 48:20
  Tom Karako: Because it's an argument that, well, we couldn't possibly admit Sweden and Finland into NATO because that will necessarily translate into more requirements for
• 48:29
  Tom Karako: the United States, will require, as he says, more U.S. forces in Europe, which, in the long haul, more military hardware, more dollars spent to the detriment
• 48:38
  Tom Karako: of our security needs in Asia. And you know what?
• 48:42
  Tom Karako: He was right about the need to focus on China as the priority, but it is a non sequitur, because adding Sweden and Finland allows Europe to do more for Europe.
• 48:51
  Tom Karako: They are very impressive. Sweden's tripled its defense budget. Finland has an enormous amount of artillery. The Russians still remember the Winter War.
• 48:59
  Tom Karako: So, I think in the long scheme of things, we're coming up on the anniversary of their admission in the spring.
• 49:06
  Tom Karako: In the long term, this is a big deal and a big progress point. Don't take my word for it.
• 49:11
  Tom Karako: If you don't recall it, go look at Senator Tom Cotton's speech on the floor of the Senate, where he lays this out and then adds that it is curious indeed that
• 49:20
  Tom Karako: someone would vote for the admission of Montenegro and North Macedonia into NATO, but vote against Finland and Sweden.
• 49:27
  Tom Karako: That person who did so was, of course, Josh Hawley. So, I'm aggrieved.
• 49:32
  Melanie Marlowe: Okay. I bet in 10 more years you would still have that same grievance.
• 49:37
  Chris Preble: Watch this space. We'll invite Tom back on the show 10 years from now.
• 49:42
  Melanie Marlowe: Okay. Well, my grievance is with Alex Ovechkin, player for the Washington Capitals hockey team. Super disappointing.
• 49:47
  Melanie Marlowe: If you follow Eric Sayers on Twitter, he doesn't tweet a lot, but every time Ovechkin comes up, Eric's saying something about that. Why this time?
• 49:55
  Melanie Marlowe: Because he just appeared in a campaign video for Putin's United Russia Party.
• 49:59
  Melanie Marlowe: The Russian hockey player stands right behind Putin's main propagandist, Margarita Simonyan, when Foreign Minister Lavrov gives a speech justifying the
• 50:07
  Melanie Marlowe: full-scale invasion of Ukraine, and he also participated in a photo shoot for that campaign.
• 50:12
  Melanie Marlowe: And then an ESPN reporter, Robert Klemko, he grabbed him after a different press conference and said, "Did you tell the team you were doing it?" "No." "Were
• 50:19
  Melanie Marlowe: you surprised at the backlash?" "A little bit." But Ovechkin said, "There's nothing you can change now. I'm Russian, I'm going to live there when I'm done.
• 50:27
  Melanie Marlowe: My kids are going to be there. My family's going to be there. You know, I support my country, that's it." He said, "I don't think it was pro-war.
• 50:34
  Melanie Marlowe: I think it's just supporting what's happening in Russia. I want the peace and love for everybody. It doesn't matter who you are.
• 50:41
  Melanie Marlowe: I have lots of friends who are Ukrainians." The old 'I have lots of friends.' "And I hope everything is going to be good and everything's going to be done
• 50:49
  Melanie Marlowe: soon." And then he said, "Can you understand why a member of Congress has said that the Caps should maybe think about if they want to continue to employ him?"
• 50:56
  Melanie Marlowe: And he said, "Well, everybody has their own opinion, right? I'm not a politician. I'm an athlete, and as I said, I'm going to live there when I'm done playing.
• 51:04
  Melanie Marlowe: I support my country.
• 51:06
  Melanie Marlowe: I'm Russian." The reporter asks, "Would you support the genocide?" "What do you mean, genocide?" Media relations translates the definition of genocide.
• 51:14
  Melanie Marlowe: He groans, "Oh, I would like to say, I hope it's not going to be like that," and walks away. Ugh, this is disappointing.
• 51:20
  Melanie Marlowe: And this has been going on actually since 2014. He was happy that Russia was “mowing down the fascists” in Ukraine then.
• 51:26
  Melanie Marlowe: So, this is just disappointing as a Caps fan to see repeated, so just got to say, that's a big grievance. Okay, Chris, attas.
• 51:33
  Chris Preble: My atta is for Richard Gowan of the International Crisis Group. He has a piece in Foreign Affairs on the UN.
• 51:39
  Chris Preble: The UN General Assembly meeting is this week, as we're recording, coming up. It's a great piece by Gowan.
• 51:46
  Chris Preble: The title is Shrink the UN, which is a little bit misleading.
• 51:51
  Chris Preble: What he's really talking about is the subtitle, The Next Secretary-General Must Get Back to Basics.
• 51:57
  Chris Preble: The UN should focus on its core mission, and the core mission that all members should be able to support, or at least they can, which is averting conflict or
• 52:07
  Chris Preble: ending those conflicts that are existing.
• 52:10
  Chris Preble: It's really focusing on that core mission and dropping some of the ancillary things along the way that have caused it to get over its skis.
• 52:19
  Chris Preble: So, again, I'll include a link in the show notes. Richard Gowan is the program director of Global Issues and Institutions at the Crisis Group.
• 52:28
  Melanie Marlowe: That sounds great. Okay, Tom.
• 52:30
  Tom Karako: So, I will also want to give my atta to a U.S. senator, a late U.S. senator, recently deceased, Senator Jon Kyl of Arizona.
• 52:38
  Tom Karako: And I think it is the case that we are still waiting for someone to fill Jon Kyl's shoes in the U.S.
• 52:44
  Tom Karako: Senate in terms of the nuclear portfolio, in terms of the missile defense portfolio. He was a real policy wonk.
• 52:51
  Tom Karako: He spent an enormous amount of time going deep on, for instance, the nuclear modernization issue back before it was cool, in the George W. administration.
• 53:01
  Tom Karako: And just keep in mind, no one has cut more nuclear weapons from the arsenal than the George W. administration, for instance, big, big cuts, but he was looking
• 53:11
  Tom Karako: forward to the need to modernize.
• 53:14
  Tom Karako: And I want to remind folks that it seems like a lifetime ago, the 2006, '7, '8 timeframe, remember the Four Horsemen calling for nuclear disarmament, and that
• 53:24
  Tom Karako: sort of thing? That was in vogue prior to the Prague speech. That was in vogue before the Georgia War, before Crimean invasion, before Chinese adventurism.
• 53:34
  Tom Karako: There is almost no one in this town that is thinking those things and saying it out loud.
• 53:40
  Tom Karako: The center has absolutely shifted, and I think it was Jon Kyl who almost single-handedly, and with no small amount of effort, single-handedly reinvigorated the
• 53:50
  Tom Karako: nuclear modernization effort in the 2011 timeframe by tying it to the ratification of the New START treaty.
• 53:57
  Tom Karako: It was a spicy issue at the time, but I think looking back, it was especially prescient in terms of the need to restart a modernization complex that had
• 54:07
  Tom Karako: atrophied so many years.
• 54:09
  Tom Karako: So, once again, we've had folks try to fill that portfolio and fill those shoes, but he leaves a very big legacy and leaves very big, aspirational shoes to
• 54:19
  Tom Karako: fill that I hope one day we will. But kudos to you, Senator Kyl.
• 54:24
  Melanie Marlowe: Okay. Well, my atta goes to, this is a small one, Australia. So, first, there's a new [crosstalk 00:54:30].
• 54:30
  Chris Preble: This is a small one? Wait, Australia's not small. Australia's really big.
• 54:34
  Melanie Marlowe: I know. I kid.
• 54:35
  Melanie Marlowe: First, there's a new report from the United States Studies Center called Australia, Japan and the United States: Implementing a trilateral denial strategy
• 54:42
  Melanie Marlowe: along the First Island Chain.
• 54:44
  Melanie Marlowe: And there are four authors, including friends of the pod, Jennifer Parker and Tom Corben, as well as Professors Satoru Mori and Jeff Hornung.
• 54:51
  Melanie Marlowe: They take a look at, what Jennifer says, is how you can make strategy between the three countries work in practice when each country has its own requirements,
• 54:58
  Melanie Marlowe: constraints, and priorities, and there's no NATO-like structure sitting over the top.
• 55:03
  Melanie Marlowe: So, on that note, I just want to say how impressed I am with the bilateral agreements that Australia's making with Japan, for example, on its frigate, on
• 55:10
  Melanie Marlowe: testing and other things, and then how it's working with the United States, for example, on basing, and hopefully on more co-production.
• 55:16
  Melanie Marlowe: And second, we're at the fifth anniversary of AUKUS, which is kind of, I have PTSD still from that episode.
• 55:22
  Melanie Marlowe: I think it's the episode where I got the second most pushback. The non-proliferation crowd was really upset.
• 55:27
  Melanie Marlowe: So, anyway, not as much progress as we maybe would like to be making on both Pillar One and Pillar Two, but there was a really good speech on Pillar Two by
• 55:34
  Melanie Marlowe: Shadow Defense Minister James Paterson.
• 55:37
  Melanie Marlowe: Gave some shout-outs to my colleagues at CSIS and our friend Sidharth Kaushal at RUSI, and he acknowledges that five years in, there are not yet enough
• 55:44
  Melanie Marlowe: tangible capabilities that we can publicly point to that have been delivered by Pillar Two, and says, I think correctly, that “unlocking advanced military
• 55:51
  Melanie Marlowe: technologies quickly requires sweeping cuts to regulatory barriers and attracting private capital to invest in their development.” I think that's super
• 55:58
  Melanie Marlowe: important.
• 56:00
  Melanie Marlowe: And then finally, I've been lucky to spend a lot of time with a lot of Australians from both government and the private sector in the last few weeks, including
• 56:07
  Melanie Marlowe: at the Ambassador's Residence for the celebration of the 75th anniversary of the ANZUS Treaty, and the Defense Minister, Richard Marles, spoke and reiterated
• 56:14
  Melanie Marlowe: the importance of the United States-Australia alliance.
• 56:18
  Melanie Marlowe: But I got to say, the most important person there was Courtney Stewart, Deputy Director of the Defense Program at ASPI and a huge fan of the pod.
• 56:25
  Chris Preble: Woo-hoo.
• 56:25
  Melanie Marlowe: So, it was wonderful to completely accidentally meet her. Okay, what do you have coming up?
• 56:31
  Chris Preble: I am busy. Busy, busy, busy. I mentioned [inaudible 00:56:36]-
• 56:36
  Melanie Marlowe: Well, you should be because you've been on vacation for like a month.
• 56:38
  Chris Preble: … vacation, well, you know, I've been taking on... I've been on vacation a lot. I'm now the bill comes due.
• 56:42
  Chris Preble: So, on Thursday and Friday, I'm participating in a conference at Tufts, the Fletcher School, U.S.
• 56:47
  Chris Preble: Foreign Policy and the Separation of Powers, which is about executive power. Melanie, you will be jealous of me-
• 56:52
  Melanie Marlowe: I am already jealous.
• 56:53
  Chris Preble: ... because I'm going to be hanging out with some really cool, smart people. Really looking-
• 56:58
  Melanie Marlowe: Instead of us, the usual riffraff.
• 56:58
  Chris Preble: ... forward to this discussion [crosstalk 00:56:59]. So, I'm really looking forward to that.
• 57:03
  Chris Preble: And then next week, before we record our next show, I will be speaking at my alma mater, the George Washington University.
• 57:11
  Chris Preble: The Washington Union Society is presenting the Sandra Day O'Connor Washington Union Debate Series, and so I will be participating in that.
• 57:19
  Chris Preble: That is on Saturday, October 3rd. Register for free, I'll include a link in the show notes.
• 57:24
  Chris Preble: And then I also mentioned, in between those two events, I mentioned, the event that I'm doing with my colleague Yun Sun and Peter Slezkine on the thoughts on
• 57:34
  Chris Preble: second Trump-Xi summit, that is on Monday, September 28th, at 9:30 a.m. Eastern Time. Register to watch online.
• 57:41
  Melanie Marlowe: Wow, Chris, you're, kind of, a big deal.
• 57:44
  Chris Preble: Eh, you know, I have my moments.
• 57:45
  Melanie Marlowe: Okay, Tom, what are you up to?
• 57:47
  Tom Karako: Yeah, I'm heading up to New York City tomorrow. So, a little minor grievance, the price of hotel rooms in New York City during the UN General Assembly is-
• 57:54
  Chris Preble: That's not a minor grievance. That's a major grievance, actually, yeah.
• 57:56
  Tom Karako: ... quite pricey.
• 57:58
  Melanie Marlowe: Well, let me take a guess that you only looked at getting a hotel room this morning.
• 58:02
  Tom Karako: It was a couple days ago. But other than that, assuming that the U.S.
• 58:06
  Tom Karako: Senate doesn't recess early, I'll be testifying on Tuesday on a Golden Dome hearing about some perhaps misconceptions about Golden Dome.
• 58:14
  Tom Karako: And then I've got a ton of travel in October, University of Michigan, Southern California for a Reagan Institute and University of Pepperdine event, and going
• 58:24
  Tom Karako: to Berlin for the Missile Defense Agency's multinational conference. So, basically, I'm going to be on the road all of October.
• 58:32
  Melanie Marlowe: Yeah. I feel like I'm going to be on the road almost all of the rest of the year. It's just such a busy time.
• 58:37
  Melanie Marlowe: You'd think that people want to settle down for the holidays, but people want to get lots of stuff done.
• 58:42
  Melanie Marlowe: But first, I'm spending a lot of time this week with allies, beginning with the Canadians, so don't worry, I'm going to smooth everything over, restore that
• 58:49
  Melanie Marlowe: relationship. And then I'm going to make some chicken soup.
• 58:53
  Chris Preble: With your Costco chicken.
• 58:55
  Melanie Marlowe: Yes.
• 58:56
  Chris Preble: Go do that.
• 58:57
  Melanie Marlowe: Yes. Well, thank you for listening to this episode of Net Assessment. If you enjoyed it, please rate us wherever you get your podcasts.
• 59:03
  Melanie Marlowe: Thanks to the Stimson Center for hosting us and to University FM for producing the show. Until next time, be well.