Latest / Normal Men / Episode 67 - Getting Defensive

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Episode 67 - Getting Defensive · Normal Men

• 0:00
  Ed: So we totally just used up every piece of material that we had before we click record.
• 0:06
  George: Yeah, that's. That's about par for the course, though.
• 0:08
  Mike Black: This is true.
• 0:09
  George: Every time we. Every time we get ready to record, I click in and Low Tax is in here and he's immediately dropping one liners and it's like, dude, can you just save this until I hit record? Like, what are you doing, man?
• 0:21
  Ed: Then we spend 10 minutes trying to fix the computer and we're done for.
• 0:25
  George: It's more like 20 this week.
• 0:27
  Mike Black: But you know what?
• 0:27
  George: That's okay. It's fine.
• 0:29
  Lowtax: So, George, you saw the Odyssey and I take it you concur that MILF Anne Hathaway is worth seeing.
• 0:38
  George: Anne Hathaway is a goddess and we don't need to be applying any four letter acronyms to her, but she absolutely stole the show. She really. She really did. She was the best performing
• 0:49
  Mike Black: actor or
• 0:50
  George: actress in the movie by a pretty wide margin, I would say. Others did fine. Matt Damon was fine. I didn't hate it, but he wasn't like, really standout. He. He did a decent job.
• 1:00
  Ed: He kind of not supposed to be, though. He's kind of. Things kind of happen to him.
• 1:05
  George: Well, yes and no. We don't want to do a spoiler episode for that yet. I think we can save it for next week. But I do see exactly what Ed was talking about with last week's observations. If you want to hear those, you can go back and listen the episode. And we don't really have to say more than that. I think. Proctor, you saw it this week too, didn't you?
• 1:22
  Propter: I did not. I was going to, but then it didn't happen.
• 1:24
  George: Okay, homework for this week. And Low Tax won't be driving 45 minutes to the nearest theater, so he can just sit on mute the entire time next week.
• 1:31
  Propter: So cool.
• 1:33
  Ed: Maybe you should just, like, Go Pirate
• 1:35
  George: was definitely not Nolan's best flick, but it was really good.
• 1:40
  Lowtax: I was going to say I could. I'll get with Ed. We'll figure something out here.
• 1:53
  George: This is Normal Men, a podcast from four men who are clinging desperately to normalcy in an era when that's asking a bit too much.
• 1:59
  Propter: I'm George in Charlotte in D.C. i'm
• 2:01
  Mike Black: Proctor Malone in Outer Florida.
• 2:03
  Lowtax: I'm Low Tax speedrun enjoyer.
• 2:05
  Ed: And I'm Ed in Boston.
• 2:11
  Propter: So we have a guest this week that we are very excited about. We have managed to free Mike Black from his wasp infestation or whatever it was that was affecting his computer last week. So We've now got him coming in loud and clear. And we, we are excited to learn about the happenings in Defense World from one of Blue Sky's finest.
• 2:35
  Mike Black: Yes, hello. Yeah, so I guess should I do an introduction of. Of myself if folks don't know who I am?
• 2:44
  Propter: Sure, yeah. Do you, do you have formal credentials?
• 2:47
  George: You're not a regular on NATSEC Blue sky, which admittedly there are only like five people that are.
• 2:51
  Lowtax: So.
• 2:54
  Mike Black: Well, I was kind of wondering, like, what, what the, what the overlap was between, you know, the listener base for this and, and, and, and I want to say NASDAQ Blue sky, because, yeah, there's like three of us, but Blue sky in general.
• 3:05
  George: So we consider ourselves Blue Sky's official podcast.
• 3:09
  Mike Black: Whether.
• 3:09
  George: Whether Blue sky itself.
• 3:11
  Ed: George, it's. George, it is Blue Sky's only podcast.
• 3:16
  Lowtax: That's right. It's about, I would say the listener base is about 50 NATSICK blue sky and 50% JRPG furry type people.
• 3:27
  Ed: That's. That's not wrong.
• 3:29
  Mike Black: Hi, James. And there's probably more overlap between those two.
• 3:36
  Lowtax: Absolutely.
• 3:37
  Mike Black: One might think.
• 3:38
  Lowtax: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 3:40
  George: But for our listeners who aren't on NATSEC Blue sky and, or, or are not just generally perverted, etc. Mike, tell us a little bit about yourself.
• 3:50
  Mike Black: Yes. So short version of kind of how I, I guess I, I came to be a expert in the ndaa, I guess, if there is such a thing. So I was an Air Force officer for a while, about a decade. So for most of the 2010s, or actually all the 2010s, maintenance. But maintenance logistics. But I had a very weird career that involved me doing a whole bunch of other not really maintenance logistics stuff. And then of course, I'm a politics nerd, obviously. So you kind of combine those two things. And even though I've never actually worked in Pentagon, which is something that I almost like at least once every six months that somehow comes up that people think that, like, I've worked there my whole life. And I'm like, no, I've. I've been to the Pentagon physically three times, but I've been around, in and around U. S. Fence policy going back, like I said, to we'll just say 2010. Currently I'm a civil servant on the Global Strike Command Matchcom staff, which is a good time. Any standard disclaimer, what I say is not the position of DoD Air Force, blah, blah. Though if you think that you probably need your head tripped. And also since we're gonna talk about Congress, if there's anybody from Tom Cotton's office listening. I'm going to say nice things about armed services, so please do not try to get me fired again. Which is the thing that, that, I mean, fire is maybe a strong word for what I am describing, but Tom Cotton's office once took exception to something I said on the interwebs and made sure that they knew that my boss knew that I had said something they were not happy about. So that's the thing that happened. So yeah, that's, that's, that's basically me. My, my background in a nutshell.
• 5:43
  George: Just, just, just since just in case there is anyone from Tom Cotton's office listening. This is not the opinion of Mike. This is my opinion. Y' all are some. And I hope you have a really bad day
• 5:57
  Ed: now.
• 5:57
  George: I will.
• 5:57
  Ed: I.
• 5:58
  Lowtax: The.
• 5:58
  Mike Black: The one one final point. Clarification or not clarification was further elucidation on that. It was one. I'm pretty sure I don't know this RIP app, but I'm pretty sure it was one specific individual in Tom Khan.
• 6:10
  George: No, I'm happy to paint with a very broad brush there. And also this has nothing to do with whatever they went after you for. I'm sure you deserved it. This is principle. Like y' all are some assholes and
• 6:19
  Mike Black: I hope you have a bad day.
• 6:20
  Ed: And that one individual was Elbridge Colby.
• 6:24
  Propter: Look, man, first, first we say we want our elected representatives to listen to experts. Then we say,
• 6:31
  Ed: but not like that.
• 6:33
  Mike Black: The funniest thing, it wasn't even partisan. Like, believe me, I, I have. Even when I was active duty, I said some partisan stuff on social media I probably shouldn't have. Or at least that, you know, if I got in trouble before, I would had to be like, yeah, okay, I kind of deserve that one. This was not that. This was just a straight up complete like, bro, you. You said something that was just factually wrong. It was stupid and I said so. And his staffer saw it, didn't like that. It's probably something the staffer had told him to say. So. Yeah.
• 7:21
  Ed: So.
• 7:21
  Propter: So for those of us outside of the NATSAC blast radius, so to speak, which hopefully is most of us, yes, there's. There's been, there's been some trouble in NDAA land. Can you catch us up on a, what the N. Date, what the NDAA is, and B, what's, what's happening there?
• 7:37
  Mike Black: Yeah, so what the NDAA is, is the National Defense Authorization Act. I'm going to go on. I would say it's a short tangent but let's be real. This isn't going to be really that short of a tangent. But it will be explaining the difference. Yeah, that will. And they never, they really never are with me. The difference between authorization and appropriations with regards to the United States Congress. So historically if you go all the way back to you know, the, the very, very basic. Our Article 1 the core power of the Congress is to appropriate I. E. To give money to the rest of the federal government, particularly the executive, to do things with that. Congress says here's your money. Go forth and do that. That, that makes sense. Now the, the authorization piece is what people will kind of get a little bit confused or you know, they kind of get the, the wires across. So authorization is first. It's something Congress made up. It's been around for. I did some googling because I, I actually didn't fully understand how far back. It's not actually started in the early to mid-1800s. So like 1830 to 1850. Initially it was literally just the non appropriations committee within the Congress or just other people within the Congress passing a law that set some sort of bounds on whatever program or thing that Congress was quote authorizing the federal government, the executive plan to do. So that kind of goes back and forth for, for the rest of the 19th century if you think of it like the most simplest terms possible. Authorization is Congress saying you can do the thing. Appropriation is Congress saying okay, we told you you can do the thing. Here's the money to actually go do the thing that we, we, we authorized you to do. Now it sounds pretty straightforward and it was kind of for. For called first 150 years of the Republic. If you kind of if. If at least for me I, I mentally been the. The modern Congress starting honor around FDRs and time, time and time in the White House. And so if you kind of, if you use that as your chalk, okay, the modern quote, modern Congress starts about then that's also kind of around the same time that the lines start to get a little bit more blurred with regards to authorization appropriation. Specifically you have stuff like the two Ocean Navy act which was passed by Congress right before World War II. It's what basically built the Navy that does what the. The U.S. won World War II with. And interestingly that was actually an authorization act. It was not an appropriation. So it was literally the then 1940s equivalent of the Armed Services Committees. They had you know, war committee and, and naval committees back then since they were two separate departments passed said hey, we authorized the, the U.S. navy to have a whole crap ton of carriers and battleships and a bajillion ship Navy. It was then the appropriators that came in after the fact, after the White House and the Navy and, well, really the Department of Navy and the White House came back to Congress said, hey, you want us to have this gigantic Navy that's been authorized? Here's what it's going to cost. And the appropriators said, yeah, that sounds fine to me. Here's a bajillion dollars. Go forth and start getting the shipyards to crank out ships. I mention that because a lot of people, I think, mentally conceive of the Two Ocean Navy act, just use that as an example. But I think it is a pretty good example that it actually appropriated the money and said, this is actually the money to go build ships. That's not the case. It was an authorization act with me. Proprietors had to come after the fact. And that's an important point though, because at that time, and for the Next, I'll say 30 to maybe 40 years, it was pretty standard for the appropriators, at least when it came to defense, to not do weird things with what the Armed Services Committees said in their authorization. And so you would typically get an authorization bill that would say, well, actually, let me back up for a second. So up until the, until 1959, specific to defense, there was no actual limit or anything on defense. We just kind of all accepted that it's in Article 2, and it's also in Article 1. So Congress will provide money for a Navy and also some army and some other stuff, and whatever money they decide, the executive may ask what's executive or not. That's what the money is. The Armed Services Committees, though, which are now Armed Services Committees, because we've had, you know, the, the national security Act of 1947 established DoD, now we have Armed Services Committees. They want to claw back a little bit of power from the Appropriations Committees. And this is the ongoing tension, which is true for all aspects of Congress, but it's really true for defense. So then 1959, they pass a law that effectively says in two fiscal years, we will, or actually start in three fiscal years, in FY16 or 62, we will have the ability to, quote, authorize spending for the Department of Defense. And that was the first National Defense Authorization Act. Interestingly, it was like three pages long. The current one's like 2000. And so the historical bill, or the first National Defense Authorization act, literally just authorized the spending it was very, very straightforward forward, very high level. Literally you have this many hundreds of millions or billions of dollars for a Navy, some for an Air Force, build some bombers, buy some aircraft carriers, whatever. So that kind of construct goes fourth through the 60s, through the 70s. Again, pretty straightforward. Obviously there's some, some we'll say debate over Vietnam with regards to the Congress. But honestly, even that doesn't really apply to this because that was even very generally here kind of a agreed upon thing in the Congress. But it wasn't like you had one side in Armed Services saying, oh, we really want the war to continue and the other side and Appropriations saying we want to zero the war out. Congress is kind of for the war until they pivoted and said actually we're all against the war. And they kind of all decided more or less at the same time that now they were against the war. So that brings us to the 80s and by the way, please jump in with questions or stop me as I continue talking. So that brings us to the 80s. Yeah, and I'll just call up 80s and 90s and together because again, very, very similar. You have this authorization now. By this time the NDAA has gotten a little bit bigger. It's certainly become more of a policy bill at this point. So now we're talking like two to three to maybe 400, 500 in length. It includes policy stuff, but of note, it only includes defense policy stuff. It's the National Defense Authorization Act. Defense is in the name. So it's whatever Armed Services Committee wants to include in, in this, this iteration of the bill, they include it. And then, oh, by the way, it still includes the, the authorization stuff, kind of the core fiscal nature. And even at this time, 80s, even in the 90s, Appropriations Committee more or less said, okay, what, whatever the, the authorizers in the Armed Services Committees said, we will probably go with that because, you know, to be blunt, we're appropriators and really I know what we're talking about. I said it was gonna be nice Armed Services enough that was going to be nice to the Appropriations committees, which is, we can talk more about that later. But I think most people, particularly in defense policy space, would agree with that. However much you disagree with somebody in Armed Services about whatever Armed services, a whole is much better position in either chamber. Even the House, for, you know, God love them, is much better positioned to understand defense issues and understand the influences of budget and just all things defense as opposed to the defense appropriation subcommittees in either chamber.
• 15:44
  Propter: Right. So my understanding from kind of the civilian non military associated angle. Is that DOD stuff or I guess it's Dow stuff now.
• 15:57
  Mike Black: No, no.
• 15:58
  Propter: DOD stuff is, is just because they
• 16:02
  George: slap some fresh paint up there, Proctor, doesn't mean we have to give them what they want.
• 16:06
  Mike Black: The NDA goes through. There is language in it that actually does form we change the name in which case we'll all have to. Okay, fine Pete. It's, it's do finally.
• 16:15
  Propter: But, but right now still dod. Okay, gotcha.
• 16:18
  Lowtax: So isn't there. Doesn't that cost like a hundred million dollars or something too?
• 16:23
  Mike Black: Yeah, give or take. I mean granted there's already like I don't know how much but a large chunk of that has already taken place because. Right. Told. Change the name, change your letterhead. But yes, there's, there's lots of other stuff that know signs other than the one on the door the Pentagon, which they obviously know he made a big show of changing. But yeah, yeah, no it's, it's yeah. 100, 150 I think something like that. 150 million.
• 16:46
  Lowtax: Yeah, yeah.
• 16:47
  Mike Black: I want to say something, something around.
• 16:50
  Propter: So this stuff is, is, is a highly technical and B super path. Super path dependent. There are, there are decisions that you have to make now that are downstream of decisions that got made 15 or 20 years ago. And there's a tremendous amount of institutional knowledge that goes into kind of keeping these long term plans operational that you really need people who have some contact with at least those information surfaces to be able to keep the plate spinning. Is that, is that fair?
• 17:23
  Mike Black: Yeah, yeah, that's 100% fair. And, and I think it'd be a fair statement that most defense policy folks would agree. The biggest complaint we have with appropriations is exactly that that armed services, as much as a lot of us disagree with a lot of stuff that a lot of people in armed services honestly bipartisan basis think or don't think. You can usually at least depend on the folks in armed services to like understand second and third and fourth and fifth order effects over the course of a three to five to eight, 10 year time frame. And yeah, the appropriators rarely. Certainly these days the appropriators rarely. It's just not, it's not how they think, it's not how they operate.
• 18:03
  Lowtax: So.
• 18:04
  Propter: Right. Like I mean it's a, it's a different budget cycle than we use for most other things.
• 18:08
  Mike Black: Yes.
• 18:08
  Propter: In the federal government that you know,
• 18:10
  Mike Black: these are not the almighty fight up futures year defense plan, five year plan. So yeah, a DOD, you know, communism and Marxism and whatnot. DOD has run on a five year plan ever since the 60s. McNamara instituted that. And that's a whole nother topic of folks have thoughts about the fight up. But yeah, yeah, the, the, I mean the, the, the budget year of execution obviously is the only one that actually matters. Right, because that's what being spent. But there's a reason that DoD has a five year plan and then they develop another five year plan outside the first five year plan, you know, on a rolling decade cycle. Because I've mentioned shipbuilding before, even back when we could build ships in a timely manner, which we can't now, it was, you know, did not take a month to build, you know, an assets class carrier in, in World War II. We started building them in 1940, 41, we had them by 43, 44. So yeah, it's, it's a very different time cycle, which is why armed services at least, you know, as much as anybody on the Hill can get it, they at least get it. So yeah, that, that kind of speaks to the, the previous appropriators that, you know, certainly in other aspects they, they exerted their influence, but usually with defense, with, with very few exceptions they tended to, to defer to the Armed Services Committee. So now we move into the 2000s and obviously we've had the, the revolution on, on the Hill. We're kind of getting into, you know, whatever we call the current construct of, of, of Congress and just the, the party, party relationship in general. But of note, Even in the 2000s, with everything else that was going on on the Hill, particularly with defense, particularly with the war in Iraq, defense was still very bipartisan. The NDAA was still very bipartisan. Defense appropriations was so very bipartisan. Typically you would get, from a House perspective, you would rarely get more than 50 votes against. Even in the 2000s, the Senate was sometimes passed the NDA by voice vote. You know, imagine doing that today.
• 20:21
  George: Right.
• 20:21
  Mike Black: So the next kind of real big breakover point with regards to specifically the aaa, now that hopefully folks broadly understand this distinction between authorization and appropriations, it's kind of the 2010s. So by way of example, I had to go back and do a little bit of historical research and some folks on Blue sky helped me out of.
• 20:43
  Ed: Oh no, we don't, we don't do research here. You, you're here under drastically incorrect pretenses.
• 20:51
  Mike Black: False breed. Sorry, sorry, I, I keep. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, it was like two seconds of research, so I feel like that doesn't really qualify.
• 21:02
  Ed: That's more like a Proptering. It's fine.
• 21:04
  George: Yeah, as research. I'm sorry, someone else did the research, but it still counts to be reading it.
• 21:12
  Propter: Look, man, Mike, Mike, Mike didn't show up with a PowerPoint today, and I think we should all recognize that he's, he's floating a little out of the professional comfort zone.
• 21:21
  Mike Black: If it's, if, if I, if, if it was a visual medium, I probably would have slides.
• 21:26
  George: I probably. We do appreciate the restraint regardless.
• 21:31
  Mike Black: So I, I went back and looked Googled. Didn't research Googled. And there was two times historically prior to this, this past, past couple weeks ago where the NDA failed cloture, which, you know, not until your audience. Cloture. It's the whole filibuster thing that you need 60 votes to, quote, pass something in the Senate which isn't really passing, but it's neither here nor there. So fail cloture a couple weeks ago and obviously we'll, we'll talk about that here in a second. Historically, though, there's only other two other times in the history of the NDAA that failed cloture in the U. S. Senate, and both of those times they were the early 2010s. I think one was actually 2010 itself, and I think one was, was 2013. It was a. Well, what I'll describe as a pissing match over amendment policy. Now, why that matters. And this kind of is now circling back to what the NDA has slowly become is up until the 2010s, Congress, you know, still passed laws, you know, substantive and, and about things. Congress used to do that once upon a time that really, for like most of the latter half of the 20th century, there were kind of three kinds of substantive laws that Congress would pass. They would have authorizations, they would have the appropriations bills, and then there'd be laws that would be discussing stuff and things and governing and using.
• 22:55
  Ed: Oh, right, that's the thing where they rename post offices.
• 23:01
  Mike Black: Yeah, yeah, yes, yes, correct. That's. That's the idea of a substantive bill now.
• 23:07
  Propter: So, so the NDAA has, has, has. I think for the last. I think this is, this is the direction you're headed with. This has, has for at least the last several decades been kind of the, the Christmas tree built and all Christmas tree bills in the sense that. And lots of different ornaments on it because it's a must pass bill and so it gets passed.
• 23:25
  Mike Black: But yes, although I would say that's only been the case for maybe the last 15 to maybe 20 years.
• 23:32
  Propter: Okay.
• 23:33
  Mike Black: So prior to that no, prior to that. Like it was, it was a big bill, it became a big bill. But up until we'll say 2010, kind of an arbitrary, arbitrary line of sample, say on around 2010, it was still very defense focused. It had lots of things in it, it had lots of policy in it, it had other stuff. And to your point, you know that that was very much a slow burn over time. So yes, certainly there was stuff that, you know, in the 1980s probably would have been a standalone bill about, you know, defense thing, whatever that was, you know, circa 2005 looped into the NDAA. But it wasn't really until 2010 and beyond that it started to become this non defense complete. It's, it's, it's one of three bills or three types of bills that Congress is guaranteed to pass in a given year. The reconciliation bill, the appropriations bills and the ndaa, that's about it. At least bills of substance. We still rename post offices. So in, in 2010, 2013, the amendment thing was so important because at the time the, the Dems controlled the Senate and they were kind of having some thoughts about how much, give or take, they wanted to give to the Republicans in order for the Republicans to have the ability to hang or not a bunch of amendments into the ndaa. And so the, the fact that they did, they didn't get close to those two. It was not this big substantive disagreement on the NDA writ large. Both years. The NDA still passed like 85 votes in the Senate. It was just Republicans saying, okay, we don't agree with what you're doing with, with the amendments. We want the ability to hang more amendments in it and we're going to, you know, cross our arms and stomp our feet to deny cloture until we get that. So the point that I'm trying to, the point I'm going with on that is even in a relatively dysfunctional congress of the 2010s, certainly, you know, 2014 and beyond, and certainly the first Trump administration, the NDAA was still by and large a very bipartisan, very like not even must pass is just kind of, it was a thing that we would pass because we're serious about defense. Even House Armed Services, you know, that the House has gone kind of lost their minds on the Republican side. The, the last, you know, decade and change. It was still a very reasonable bill and there was stuff people disagreed with, but there by and large wasn't any corporate culture war stuff in it. That kind of change circa 2021 22. The House bill, actually. Sorry, not 21. It would have been, actually would have been the FY23 bill. It was after the Republicans were getting control of the House for, you know, the midterms of the Biden administration. So they threw some culture war stuff in there, but it was still fairly minor. And then the Senate just, you know, stripped it out, as the Senate usually does with, with the things that are passionate, I. E. Insane from the House. And so you. Even through. Throughout the Biden administration, by and large, the NDA, yes, it became more partisan. To be clear. They're. They're both, both in committee and on the floor for the final vote in both chambers. Now you're starting to look like 125 to 150 votes against it. But, but even, even in committee at that time, it was still usually a handful of people that vote against it. One of them was Ro Khanna, who would always offer like a bajillion amendments, get most of them in the bill, and then still vote against the bill because that's Rokana.
• 27:24
  Lowtax: Okay, but it's so about 2022. Right. Which is when Russia launched the Ukraine war. And that is when the meme of the, the purple haired girl going, combined arms are such a Gemini thing.
• 27:41
  Mike Black: Yes.
• 27:42
  Lowtax: And so, you know, maybe this sent them, that sent them on a downward spiral on the culture war stuff. And it's just, it's just gotten worse ever since.
• 27:51
  Mike Black: I mean, well, that. And then, you know, the, the, the portion of them that are, you know, think Russia's bad would probably oppose that, but they're certainly the, the Russian Caucus, of which there definitely are some on armed services now more than even then,
• 28:05
  Lowtax: although probably fewer now that Orban is gone, seemingly.
• 28:09
  Ed: Are we gonna have to talk about Laura Loomer today?
• 28:12
  Propter: Okay, yeah, we might actually.
• 28:14
  Ed: Yeah, I think we do. Sorry in advance, please.
• 28:21
  Mike Black: So all that is, is the run up to what was, what was the big thing that happened with, with the ndaa.
• 28:28
  Ed: Are we actually getting to the fireworks
• 28:30
  Mike Black: factory a couple weeks ago now? So. Yes, yes, we are. I mean, everything before was. That wasn't fireworks. That was, that was extremely exciting. So you had you, you, you, you. Okay, so, so you have two, two versions of the ndaa. One, the center, one house. Of course, the House bill is, to put a word on it, insane. It has heretofore never before foreseen amount of insane culture war stuff. Like there was some culture war stuff like I've kind of alluded to over the last, you know, three to Five maybe years. This one is absolutely insane. To the point in the House where even so I went back and looked the, the 25 NDAA the fiscal year 25 NDA. So just a year ago had an equivalent level ish of, of you know, insane ish culture war stuff. Didn't get a ton of Democratic votes but it did get 17 on the floor man. And it got a fair amount of support out of committee. The big one being Adam Smith chairman or one of chairman ranking ranking mayor. But the, the, the, the, the, the primary Dem or the senior dem on House Armed Services. He actually voted in favor last year out of committee. I probably wouldn't have, it was insane. But he did because bipartisan blah blah blah. He did not this year. And in fact the only Dems that voted for on the floor were the usual six suspects. MGP Jared golden couplers I'm forgetting but it's the usual people that have the usual brain worms about things like this. So that's the House. In the Senate you had something that's as far as I can tell never before happened. There's those two times where cloture was denied but it was not on a party line basis. It was just enough people that said they wouldn't vote for it because of the amendment thing. This time you had every single dam in the Senate with the exception of Fetterman who was not there. He probably would have voted in favor but I don't know. Maybe not every single Dem in the Senate denied cloture which is separate but related to the fact that every single damn on the committee voted against it coming out of committee. So this is, this is a degree of quite literally never before seen. I'd say opposition but I, I don't even know if that's the right word to use but certainly something that historically has always been bipartisan and very heated national environments I. E. The war in Iraq that now is, is the, the Dems in the Senate have drawn what's a pretty clear line in the sand that I think it's mostly over the war in Iran. There is the whole Israel thing that we can talk about if folks really want to but I, I don't think that was a driver of either the votes in the Senate or the House. I think that's more of a kind of Internet meme thing. Certainly AOC has talked about it. So yeah, I guess it has some attention on the Hill. But I, I, I, my, my, my personal professional opinion would be that opposition is almost entirely due to the war in Iran. Certainly everything else that has occurred would not really have engendered much support from the Dems on the ndaa. But I think the war in Iran and how it's just kind of continued to drag on, this was kind of their, their view of, of a message to send. And last thing I'll say on that for now is because it's not an appropriations bill, it actually doesn't really hurt, quote anything to not pass it. Which is why I suspect they decided to kind of dig in on this one. If you don't pass the NDA, you can still go past the appropriations. Like it's weird. It's never, it's never happened before. I'd probably need to go back and dig up the relevant law just to see if there is some weird gotcha. But by and large certainly there's nothing that would, that would restriction from passing a continuing resolution like that. That's happened before that you've, you've, you've passed. You know, the NDA has been delayed. Certainly. I, I can't remember the last time it was actually passed before the fiscal year that it was supposed to be covering. So all that is to say that I, I think the Dems were, yeah, they were drawing a line in the sand on Iran and other things, but mostly Iran in a way that they knew like, like it was impactful from a, you know, inside baseball kind of perspective. But it also doesn't really matter because like I'll still get a paycheck come one October if the NDA is not pal. They just need to do something with appropriations.
• 33:14
  Lowtax: Right.
• 33:15
  Propter: So I mean as long as, as long as we continue to have government funding bills, the at least short term harms of dragging feet on the NDAA are not in your opinion, gigantic.
• 33:30
  Mike Black: Okay, Nothing like that.
• 33:32
  Ed: We're.
• 33:32
  Mike Black: Oh, well, okay. I shouldn't say that entirely. There, there are, there's probably some policy stuff that I honestly haven't gone and looked that yes, like somebody wanted to pass it for a reason and it not passing in timely fat. But even from like a new START perspective, not the, not the nuclear treaty, but the, the idea of New START acquisitions that's all tied to appropriations. You can authorize it all day, but you can't actually take the new money for the new program that didn't exist prior to that fiscal year and put money towards it until you have the appropriation. So that's usually the biggest complaint that you'll hear from armed services in particular. And also just, you know, senior leaders in DoD is the new Start thing is the, you know, we can't move out on this program or that program, but that's not an NDAA thing. That's. This is why full year continuing resolutions are a bad idea.
• 34:29
  George: Right.
• 34:30
  Mike Black: Nothing to do with the NDA.
• 34:32
  Propter: Gotcha. So I mean obviously politically Democrats are as unified as. As Democrats get against the war in Iran and that's, that's driving a lot of the opposition to this. So you've got a sense here that this is a suicidal for most Dems to vote for politically because it undercuts a significant rationale for the party campaign and B as we move on, I think we're in officially the second Iran war right now, but we'll probably be on the third pretty soon since they keep restarting the clock every 60 days. So you know, as we, as we move towards what seems like a situation that's going to be difficult for us to extricate ourselves from, there's a lot of reluctance to hand additional monies or authorities over to the Department of Defense to prosecute this without significant, significant concessions in terms of oversight that have not thus far been forthcoming. Is that
• 35:42
  Mike Black: it is what. Although that, that brings up something that, that I said the other day on, I think on, on Blue sky when kind of this all went down in the Senate that I'm not entirely sure what the Dems what their end game is specifically with the NDA. So certainly with Appropriations try to straightforward. You have demands. If your demands aren't met, you go into a shutdown and then you know, it's, it's a game of chicken which they've, you know, played to varying degrees of success over the last, over the last 18 months with the NDAA. I mean I, I am kind of of the mind that I, I think this is their line in the sand is just kind of punting until the next Congress.
• 36:23
  Propter: Yes.
• 36:25
  Mike Black: Which isn't really a terrible plan. I and I, I kind of get the sense that that that is at least a coin flip probability for Appropriations as well because the, so the CR. That that I'm pretty confident it's going to pass now because it's, it's gone through the House and it was mostly clean. I think they threw save and although I don't. I'm kind of trouble keeping track of which bills have save in it and which don't because kind of. See, I mean I, I don't think it's been literally every build that the House has passed within the last couple weeks, but it feels like most of Them had the save or save related things attached to it. In any case, I, I feel pretty confident that Mike is thrown in the towel on, on, on as far as a clean cr you know, whether it has save or not saves not yet through the Senate. So ultimately clean CR but they set the date on that of early December. So I, I'm, I kind of think that that's the last gasp from the, the GOP on maybe trying to jam the Dems in December going into the holidays. But I, I think even they probably know that's not really a likely thing because now you're talking about lame duck Congress. You're talking, you know, less than a month. Yeah, it's the holidays. But the other thing is nobody really gives a. About anything other than the troops and they're going to get paid regardless because we do that illegally now. Kind of gave up leverage on that one fear of the Republicans. So I won't get paid, but nobody really.
• 38:09
  George: What's the legal mechanism for running that down in the next Congress or the next time the executive changes hands? Like is that something that a U S. Attorney could go after? Like, like how does that work technically?
• 38:22
  Mike Black: So technically speaking, yes. Now what are you is trying to go after it? I don't know. It's, it's, it's a.
• 38:27
  George: But it is political question obviously.
• 38:28
  Mike Black: But yeah, correct, correct. It is but yeah, so it is technically a criminal violation. So the anti Deficiency act is a law that has actual criminal penalties associated with it. Now those penalties are fairly minor and also it's kind of untested because I, as far as I know, nobody's actually ever been criminally charged with it. It's, I think the most they've done historically is you know, an ID looks into it, says yeah, you broke the ada, you know, slap on the wrist bad. You, you know, maybe people get fired or whatever, but no criminal action. But that said, yes, it does have criminal penalties and I don't see any credible argument that that was not a very blatant anti deficiency act violation. Like I, there's probably some Republican lawyers out there that would disagree with me and would file this 500 page amicus brief on whatever court case is about this. But, and then there are, there are
• 39:28
  Lowtax: 27 liberal law professors who would disagree with that amicus brief but say that my, my good friend hitler hitler88 makes a fair point
• 39:43
  George: and disagreeing with him would be some sort of massive violation of norms that are very important.
• 39:49
  Lowtax: That's right.
• 39:50
  George: Everyone outside of the legal professor occupation which I belong so those are more important than whatever else is going on here. So.
• 40:00
  Mike Black: Yes, but yeah, the, the, that, that particular thing. So there's other stuff that occurred with, with last appropriations that. Yeah, I don't know. I mean, I, I would argue it was. But you probably have a better case for being like, yeah, maybe it was, maybe it wasn't. But yeah, the whole pay the troopies thing, using appropriations that were not in any way, shape or form for paying the troops and like, not even within the same color of appropriation, you know, if you're moving one. One Milpers fund to another. Milk. Yeah, okay. I wouldn't do it because, you know, I believe in things like the, the law, but I could at least, you know, kind of squint and get to. Yes, but yeah, and I take in research and development funds to pay the troops and then presto changeo, you paid back the fund that you took the R D from to pay the troops with the troop money when you got the troop money to repay. Yeah, no, that's, that's quite literally what the ADA was written and signed into law to prevent.
• 40:55
  Lowtax: So. But then you'd have, you know, an assistant AG who's got to prosecute somebody for paying the troops.
• 41:04
  Propter: Right?
• 41:04
  Mike Black: This is true. Yes. The, the political question of all that boils down to you are prosecuting somebody for paying the troops.
• 41:13
  Propter: Yeah.
• 41:13
  George: So, I mean, you're not prosecuting the troops. I think you're fine.
• 41:18
  Mike Black: It wouldn't, I mean, so that's a fair point. It wouldn't be the troops. You know, it would be certainly some politicals that, you know, would be out of the department by, by this, by this juncture. But there certainly, There are some GSS, there are some civil servants at DFAs and, and elsewhere that would almost certainly, if you took a very, you know, as strict as reading of as possible, they would have some, some liability here. So, and like I said before, nobody cares about us. You can, you can prosecute civil servants don't pay us all day. Yeah. Nobody nobod.
• 41:55
  Ed: Right.
• 41:55
  Propter: I mean, like to the extent, to the extent the hammer's ever coming down on that, it's going to require both Congress that is unified and mad about it, and an executive that is different than the executive that did it in the first place. So, yeah, like you're, you know, you're going to have to, it's, it's not, it's not impossible that there could be some consequences down the line on that at some point, but not in this current Congress.
• 42:21
  George: Oh, sure, yeah. That's that's sort of what I was asking because, I mean, look, when, when President Ossoff takes office, this feels like something that there should be marching orders on by at least the end of February 2029.
• 42:33
  Lowtax: Yeah. I was sitting here thinking Ossoff is the one who jumps to mind who would probably actually do that.
• 42:41
  George: That's right. That's right.
• 42:44
  Ed: It's just going to be really weird that he's doing it himself. He's supposed to have, like, people for that.
• 42:52
  Mike Black: Like, why do you think he's being elected?
• 42:55
  George: I'm not suggesting he's gonna write the brief set.
• 42:58
  Ed: I am.
• 43:01
  Lowtax: I, I don't think Ossoff's a lawyer. I don't think he can write the briefs.
• 43:05
  Mike Black: He's a talented man.
• 43:06
  Ed: Low tide.
• 43:06
  George: Well, technically, he can write the briefs. He can't. He just can't sign them.
• 43:11
  Mike Black: Yeah, it's true.
• 43:12
  George: Yeah.
• 43:13
  Mike Black: That's what Jones exists for.
• 43:14
  Ed: I actually totally forgot he wasn't a lawyer because, like, listening to him grill the shit out of people in Senate hearings, kind of, he, he has powerful lawyer energy.
• 43:26
  Lowtax: I think he was, he was an investigative journalist or something, was made films and a documentary. And then he also, he also worked for. Oh, who's the congressman, the Lewis Lewis.
• 43:39
  Ed: That's right.
• 43:41
  Mike Black: Yeah.
• 43:42
  Propter: Yeah. We've got, we've got kind of a crush on Ossoff. We'll talk about that later. It's true, you know, as a, as
• 43:48
  Ed: a collective, I think it is one of very few things we all agree on.
• 43:52
  Propter: Yep. So we've got a variety of funny business in the appropriations process, in the, in the NDAA process, but it seems like the likely outcome from here is that we don't pass an NDAA for a while. We, we get a cr and then maybe depending on where things sit in the lame duck, maybe something gets pushed through because deadlines force action. And there might be more appetite for Republicans to compromise when they're about to lose a House. Or there might be more appetite for Democrats to try to get something through before things are irrevocably, you know, cocked in a way that's going to prevent passing a future ndaa. Is that how you'd predict things playing
• 44:37
  Mike Black: out from here or. I think that's true for appropriations. I, I, I don't foresee a world where the GOP successfully jams the Dems on, on approach to, you know, get the GOP's quote unquote favored appropriations through in the lame duck.
• 44:56
  Propter: Right.
• 44:57
  Mike Black: So worst case, we have a shutdown for, you know, three weeks, four weeks, whatever new Congress gets sworn, they pass some bills and then, you know, that's a different game of chicken now between potentially both, you know, one of those chambers and, and, and, and, and the White House now in the ndaa. I honestly don't know. So the, the wrinkle with that is. Well, one of, I say the wrinkle one. An additional wrinkle with that is the Senate version even includes a fair bit of culture war shenanigans. So not to the same degree as the House, but for instance, the renaming of the department to its preferred, preferred term is in both bills. So that is not, I mean, so you, you ultimately, you can do anything you want in conference, right? You can, you can always, you, you go to conference, then you could completely rewrite the bill if you want to and then just go back to both chambers and repass it. So, so maybe that happens. But I, I certainly, I, I think it's even more unlikely than with the probes that the NDAA goes through in the lame duck just because I, I don't see any reason why the Dems would want to go for it and the Senate. And then it would be a question of, and this is where it gets weird because you, you can't do a continuing resolution for the ndaa, at least I don't know how you would or why you would, which is usually the get out of jail free card when, when something comes up like this on the appropriation side is like ultimately worst comes to worse, you just punt and do CR and everybody complains about it, but at least people get paid. There's not that option really with the ndaa. So then the question becomes if you don't like the NDA that was drafted and you now control one or both chambers, like, do you, do you go back and rewrite an NDA? Do you just not pass it at all and you just table it and start on FY28? That I honestly don't know because that, that'll be a very, I think, I think it'll depend on two things.
• 47:03
  Ed: A,
• 47:05
  Mike Black: do the Dems gain control both House, both chambers or, or just a House and then be kind of what's the inside baseball on the Dem caucus and what they care about doing, what the investigative priorities are and how does that align with, you know, do we bother to go back and do the NDA? Do we just shut up and you know, strip out the Department of War stuff and then pass it as written? Or do we just not pass it. And then we just have a year without an NDA.
• 47:35
  Propter: How bad is it if we have a year without an ndaa?
• 47:41
  Mike Black: So assuming I've not missed something on the authorization bit, which I don't think I have, but I'm going to throw that caveat out there because I've not dug wholly into it and it's unprecedented. I don't really see it as that big of a deal. Like it. It's not good. It certainly speaks to a level of. Of. Of lack of bipartisan. This lack of. Of whatever you want to, you know, good, good word you want to use for defense, which is a change. Which is something that I, I certainly think that senior leaders, uniformed leaders within DoD do not understand and they are going to be in for a rude awakening here over the next couple years and then certainly starting in 2029, hopefully. But in terms of like, nuts and bolts, there's some policy stuff, like I said before, there's some policy stuff that was probably good that now won't be enacted into law. Okay. But it's not, it's no. Nowhere near on the level of, of a lapse in appropriations or, or even the, the, you know, the fact that we hate it. We hate the full year CR. So much. Nowhere near that level. Which is another reason why I kind of. It certainly a live issue to the point of it being like, possible that the Dems just punt entirely and we have a year without an ndaa. There'll be much wailing and gnashing of teeth about it on armed services. Oh my God. We've done this every year since 1961. Bipartisan tradition, defense is dead. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But other than that, I, I struggle to see the, the, the significance.
• 49:32
  George: Can you just unpack the comment you made about uniform leadership and their lack of understanding that politics exists? Because that's kind of funny that. That's, that's an amusing little, little thread to pull on.
• 49:47
  Ed: Should we just move to section two? Because I, I think this is.
• 49:52
  Mike Black: We're.
• 49:52
  Ed: We're heading towards topic like another entire, like, ball of wax here.
• 50:00
  Mike Black: I can be as quick or as lengthy as you'd like me to be.
• 50:04
  George: 49 minutes of recording time so far, and I think I've only talked for about three minutes of it, which is a really nice treat for everyone involved.
• 50:09
  Ed: So, yeah, one of the really funny things is like every. We go put this, you know, up pulling behind the curtain every time we go do this, I compare the file sizes of everybody and George and Proctor are like twice as much as me and low tech some weeks. And this one, it will be a change.
• 50:33
  Mike Black: So good that we got my audio to you know, not be complete. Complete ass. Yeah. Okay, so.
• 50:39
  Propter: You sound great, buddy.
• 50:41
  Mike Black: What's that?
• 50:41
  Propter: You sound great.
• 50:43
  Ed: Oh, you didn't for the first 25 minutes, but we'll fix it in post.
• 50:47
  Mike Black: Face made for radio. So the. The uniform or the. The uniformed, you know, leaders not really understanding the politics. So the. The analogy I used fairly recently also on Blue sky was they are like flightless birds on an island that is just. Or is about to have some very nasty predators unleashed onto them that they have no idea. No antibodies, no anything to deal with. And the reason for that is primarily what I've kind of alluded to throughout this whole. This whole line of discussion that defense has historically been bipartisan on the Hill, going back decades. But even. Even through the, you know, the relative angst and upsetting and whatever word you want to describe for the last, you know, call it decade, the age of Trump, as it were, for most of that, defense has been bipartisan. You. You are in the military. You strictly stay away from partisan politics. That's bad. You're apolitical if you, you know, don't know what you're talking about and you haven't read your Clash. But beyond that, you go to the Hill, you ask for money. The Hill mostly nods and says, yep, you know, that sounds good to me. We need more fighters and Chinese are bad and we need more nuclear. Nuclear weapons and nuclear this and oh, yeah, Ukraine, yeah, we need to fight Russia. Okay. And they basically give you your money and you complain about some things in the margins, and you're certainly. Your severe leadership complains about some things in the margins. Oh, you know, you only gave us, you know, $10 billion for this fighter jet when we really wanted 12. That sort of thing. But by and large, there really. I, I struggle to think of any like, really. Yeah, I'm gonna say Vietnam era and even that. Like, I hesitate to make that comparison because I don't even think that is. Is a true idea of the reckoning that is going to come down upon the uniformed leadership. Because the Vietnam thing, yes, the. The dams on the Hill were certainly not happy with what transpired. It quickly became bipartisan. But at the end of the day, that was less a. We have a fundamental problem with the entire Department of Defense, and we hate you, the troops, or at least the senior troops, because we think you've done terrible things, crimes even. We just think it was A really bad foreign policy decision, and we need to cut bait. And honestly, at the time, most of dod, we're not most, but a lot of them were like, yeah, you know, we kind of agree that war sucked anyway. The Soviets are still here. They're bad. So give us money because, you know, they're. We're behind and they're going to invade Central Europe and, and we need to defend the, the beer in Germany,
• 53:23
  Ed: which
• 53:23
  Mike Black: was the, that was the, the priority reason for the Cold War right there. That's, that's why we had, we had the forces in Germany that we did. No. So can we, can we go back
• 53:33
  Lowtax: to Russia and let them know they can have it?
• 53:39
  Ed: I feel like the Germans these days would have their own opinions on this.
• 53:44
  George: Polls you got to go through to get to the Germans.
• 53:46
  Mike Black: Yeah, there is the, the, the, the. The geopolitical border did shift east.
• 53:52
  George: Given how things are going in Ukraine. I can think of. I've made this joke before, but I got to do it again. I can think of very few better days for Poland than the news that they were at war with Russia.
• 54:04
  Mike Black: They'd be, they'd be. They'd the stoked that word comes to mind. But yeah. So Article five.
• 54:10
  Lowtax: Article five tonight.
• 54:11
  Mike Black: Queen. But if you. So if you take all that as like the input condition, I can legitimately not think of a world in which you have the
• 54:29
  Ed: upper.
• 54:30
  Propter: This way.
• 54:30
  Mike Black: The, the, the letter that the both chairs and ranking members of the Armed Services Committee sent over to Hegseth, I believe it was either late last year, early this year, about the boat strike and specifically the first one about how they wanted the video. Ultimately they kind of backed down. That wasn't quite the like breaking point that I, I thought it might be. I wasn't fully convinced that. But the fact that you had that letter coming from both the chair and the ranking members of both Armed Services Committees, and it was extremely by Armed Service Committee standards, strongly worded. I again, like the only thing I can maybe think of what would be equivalent kind of letters that were sent between Abu Ghraib and CIA torture. And you know, I'm crossing streams there because that's, you know, the intelligence committees, but, you know, it rhymes. Other than that, I, I can't think of anything this clearly in the defense space. That's basically we. We think you did crimes. We are aware of just how bad the crimes were. Now whether, you know, how bad we think they are, you know, somewhat depends on what letter is after our name. But we, the Dems, like we, we know you did crimes. We know how bad they are, we know how bad we think they are. And we have been getting the vibe from DOD that the uniformed leadership doesn't really mind doing these crimes. Now a quick counterpoint on that or not really counterpoint, just another thing. And it's something else that I've made the point on Blue sky about is specifically the boat strikes. It's a really small portion of people. It's really not as big as a lot of folks. You know, I'll say I'm Blue sky because I really don't think the average American cares that much one or the other, but think it is.
• 56:21
  Ed: So.
• 56:21
  Mike Black: So you're really talking about a fairly small group of folks. Now that said, that's just one example. You have the, you know, firing, at least the Franchetti firing CQ Brown. Jim Slife is. There's some real inside baseball on that one with regards to the Air Force. So I'll just say you had the frying. Elisa Franchetti, the firing of, of CQ Brown. It was clearly for, you know, gender and racially based reasons.
• 56:46
  Propter: These are, these are, these are senior leaders in the armed services who got
• 56:51
  Mike Black: removed from command basically because of Machete was the chief nail operations. So the, the senior most officer in the Navy C. Brown woman obviously. And then TQ Brown was black man. He was chief staff of the Air Force and then he was chairman of the Joint Chiefs for about two months before, before Pete fired him without reason. And you know, we all know what the reason like it's not, it's not even that Pete tried to make it a secret. He wrote about in his book. He said he was going to do it in his book. He's done basically everything he said he was going to do in his, in his big dumb book. So I, all that is to say really and again I keep saying those are, those are just two examples. There's many more I can think of that I think are without historical precedent in the sense that usually if there was something of that magnitude, it was almost always. You could at least frame it through a policy lens. And so even if you could kind of have a plain look at it and be like, okay, like that was unethical, people in uniform did bad stuff. Iran Contra kind of maybe comes to mind is a very loose comparison. But ultimately you could basically, if you're the Congress go okay, that was bad. But it was basically, you know, people in, people in the White House, people in the E ring of the Pentagon, not uniform people we can deal with it, but it's a political problem. The uniform folks, you know, you did what you were ordered to do, or maybe you did whatever, not that big of a deal. I, I don't think that's the case now. I think the Dems in Congress with a lot of justification, will be gunning for senior DoD leaders in a way that we've not seen for really ever. And do these leaders have, have no way to, to deal or they have, they have no frame, they have no lens to even deal with that because again, they're used to. I go to the Hill, maybe I get yelled at because Senator so and so didn't get, you know, the barracks built in his district or whatever. But by and large I ask for stuff, we have some exchange and then they give me money. And this is going to be a
• 59:04
  Propter: big change and, and maybe I'm, maybe I'm getting out over my skis here, but it seems somewhat unlikely that this administration is going to be willing to spend a lot of political capital to protect individual generals unless they're very, very much in the club.
• 59:20
  Mike Black: No. Well, I mean the, the, the pardon question, that would be the, you know, the $64,000 question. But no, I, I certainly don't think from a investigative perspective. Right. Like it's, it's, it. I know what will likely happen is they'll be subpoenas, the subpoenas will be ignored and then it'll just be the, the, the usual game of chicken butt on steroids of we subpoenaed you, you didn't comply with the subpoena. So we in the Congress are just going to keep cranking up the, the temperature ultimately, you know, impacting funds, availability, appropriations, so on and so forth. The criminal piece I think is interesting, but not entirely disputive to this. And I say that because like you can't pardon away an investigation, right? You can pardon somebody and Congress, you know, then may decide to not investigate because they, well, okay, it was part of this week. Nobody can prosecute him. But the, the flip side of that is, I mean, A, that assumes that you pardon literally everybody, which that has, you know, political ramifications of itself. But then B, even if you do that doesn't mean the Dem still can't come in and do all sorts of investigations. That will be extremely painful for senior leaders, senior uniformed leaders in dod. And I, I guess maybe, maybe the, the biggest thing or like the, the one sentence way I can try to try to frame this is. So Pete was on the Hill in front of Sun Appropriations Committee I believe this previous week that didn't go well. He was just getting lit up. Justifiably so. But also his performance was, was terrible. Just from a, from a former TV host perspective, like 1, like, like 10 of that treatment would be unfathomable to imagine directed at any uniformed senior officer, any general officer, any flag officer. And that's going to be the reality. Yeah, like, like what, what pain got in that hearing, which again was not nearly what Pete got. That's going to be increasingly, I think, what more than a few uniformed GO fos are going to get to deal with and that they have no frame of reference for how to deal with that.
• 1:01:38
  Lowtax: In fairness to Pete, he was out of tankeray that morning and he had to settle for beef eater.
• 1:01:48
  Mike Black: I think you saw that with, with the way Kane kind of gave some deer in the headlights ask. And granted some of that's just because of his background and like he never should have been chairman in the first place, but a lot of his responses were very much like, no, I'm, I'm apolitical, I'm, I'm non partisan, I'm, I'm in uniform. Why are you asking me these questions? This is very uncomfortable. Well, yeah, yeah.
• 1:02:14
  Propter: I mean some of this has a certain odor of you bought the ticket, you take the ride.
• 1:02:18
  George: But literally the quote I was about to drop.
• 1:02:22
  Propter: But I mean, Thompson for the win, baby. You know, these guys, these guys are all, these guys are all under the ucmj. So if there are criminal consequences down the line, that plays out a little bit differently than it might in civil, in, in, you know, civilian criminal court.
• 1:02:36
  Mike Black: Well, so it does. But there's a, there's another interesting thread that I hope somebody with, you know, a law degree that's actually competent, that works for Dem politician somewhere is pulling on. You wouldn't necessarily have to try them in a court martial depending on the crime. So in specifically I'm thinking about the boat strikes.
• 1:02:55
  Propter: Gotcha. You can do it either way.
• 1:02:57
  Mike Black: Yeah. If you know, certainly they're the most stuff you, you know, either you're required to because of statute and the way that the law is framed or you just buy custom. Like, okay, it was a military crime. Yeah, yeah. Court martial. But because of the specific nature of those. And this is also another caveat, not a liar, but I've, I've talked to some people who, who are at least or adjacent to it. I, I think you could make a pretty cogent argument if you so wanted to, to conduct those prosecutions in civilian federal court. And not do a court martial.
• 1:03:35
  George: That strikes me as extremely bad news for anyone on the receiving end of that particular decision. Am I right in saying that?
• 1:03:43
  Mike Black: Have long had questions about what some mid rank people that are involved with those had been thinking. There's not very, again, it's not very many people and it's, it's and, and I say that why I keep hammering that for a couple reasons. A, because it's actually not that hard to prosecute all of them. Right. You know, it's one thing if you're talking about prosecuting, you know, all of centcom, for instance, but then that's not a bad idea.
• 1:04:12
  Ed: We used to think big as a country.
• 1:04:15
  Mike Black: No, we're just gonna just establish it and then they, but right now, mutually exclusive.
• 1:04:20
  George: You know, we can disestablishment this, disestablish it and then go through the wreckage and charge everyone with every conceivable crime.
• 1:04:28
  Lowtax: I told y' all not to put, not to put a military headquarters in Tampa.
• 1:04:35
  Mike Black: There's two of them.
• 1:04:37
  Lowtax: Yeah.
• 1:04:38
  Mike Black: Three in Florida is a whole like
• 1:04:40
  George: what, it actually explains a lot about the modern military.
• 1:04:44
  Mike Black: It does explain a lot. But yeah, so there, there's that piece and then the kind of the related piece is like, I don't know, there, there's, it's just one of those things where I'm like I, I, there are a lot, not a lot, but the, the of those people that have command responsibility, A, there's not very many of them. B, they're not going to be hard to track down like it is. It is fundamentally. Because again I'm, I'm not talking about you know, the people that fix the planes that did the strikes. I'm really not even talking about like the people that were on the plane that just were doing stuff on the plane but didn't actually pull the trigger. I'm talking about like the direct line of command responsibility from Pete all the way down to the aircraft commander who would be the one that would have ultimate command responsibility for, for legal purposes in terms of engaging.
• 1:05:38
  George: Okay, no, add the button pusher too. I don't think we need to cut it off at the guy in command of the plane. And you know, I'm serious though. Like I, like, I am, I am 100 serious. If it's.
• 1:05:50
  Mike Black: Well, so there's a, there's a, there's, there's, there's certainly a continuum here. I would, and I, I, I think I, I said this the other day on Blue sky as well that there's the Way I frame the container is like there's three kind of bins. There's the command responsibility bin, which is kind of what I've been talking about. Then on the other end of the spectrum, you would have like the dude that was making burgers at the base that the plane took off, right? And then in the middle, and this is kind of what, what you were getting at, you would have like the guy that actually pulled the trigger that wasn't necessarily the, the pilot in command. You would have, you know, the other people on the plane, you would have the dudes and dudettes doing some of the intelligence support maybe. But regardless of that, even if you
• 1:06:33
  George: just command command and whoever pressed the button, that, that, that's, this just strikes me as very simple. Like you hit the button that ends in a murder, like that's it. You get charged like, or if you tell someone to tell someone to tell someone, whatever. However that chain works out, that's it. Burger flippers, you're safe. I mean, you know, even the intel weenies that are coming up with this stuff, like, I don't, I don't.
• 1:06:57
  Lowtax: Whatever the command, the guy who pressed the button and anybody in Tampa,
• 1:07:06
  Mike Black: you
• 1:07:06
  Propter: know, this, this particular sort of chain here has had a couple of high profile resignations or force outs over the course of this whole affair also. So, you know, there's, at least from where I'm sitting, it seems like some people saw either liability or moral problems come in and got out of the way or got fired because they didn't want to do the thing.
• 1:07:26
  Mike Black: Is that so? Yeah, specifically southcom. So there's a. Without going way inside baseball, you're gonna
• 1:07:36
  Ed: have to explain South Common Sencom, aren't you?
• 1:07:40
  Mike Black: Pretty much back to, back to Florida. So the, the very, very, very initial strikes. I think there's enough that's been reported open source, it's fair to say those were primarily run out of SOCOM and then JSOC and some other softy stuff, which ultimately still Tampa's fault. But pretty shortly after that, and this ties in with the firing or not the firing, the resignation, that was really a firing of the previous southcom commander, whose name escapes me, who was also a black man. Although I don't think that had as much to do with it as it did with CQ Navy Admiral. He kind of suddenly resigned pretty quickly after the first couple strikes. A lot of speculation. It was just alluded to in the press of that. And then there were some other, some other people, some, a couple jags, I believe, which is you know, not great from a overall legality or consciousness of guilt, perhaps. Not, not the best look.
• 1:08:46
  Propter: Yeah, I mean, just, just as a canary. Like, like that's. It tells you something when the lawyers start heading for the exits.
• 1:08:53
  Mike Black: Yeah, yeah.
• 1:08:54
  Ed: So.
• 1:08:54
  Mike Black: So there's that. Although the, the flip side of that is he hadn't said anything publicly, which, you know, that's obviously very. Well, I was gonna say very nuanced. It's actually not nuanced at all. But it is indicative of the mindset of the GOFOs that he just kind of defaulted to. Well, I quit because, you know, I was being ordered to do crimes, but I don't need to talk to anybody about that because that would be partisan and I'm apolitical. But then so the, the, the, the second piece of that is specifically the individual who took his place. So. And this is, this is inside baseball. But not, I mean, there certainly there's other folks than me that in the defense space are aware of this guy by the name of Donovan. He's Marine Corps general, and he has long experience with running strike cells in SOCOM and elsewhere. And the suspicion that I think is probably well founded just outside looking in, is he was likely chosen for that position specifically because of that experience. And when I. To give an idea of what I talk about when I say strike sales, as you remember, Talent Anvil that made the news a while back in Syria was a group of soft.
• 1:10:11
  George: Yeah. Can you just explain talent a little more?
• 1:10:13
  Mike Black: So, so the, the Talent Anvil example, I think is instructive. So historic or not historically, doctrinally, the way an air campaign is supposed to work is you have the Air Force air component that works for combat command, and they do strikey things and they plan the air war and execute the air war. That was most of what happened during Operation Inherent Resolve, which was the Counter Access campaign. However, there was a different wrinkle with that. That is a kind of a good example of how strike cells, what strike cells are. And then also they can pretty quickly go off the rails, is there's an entity called Talent Anvil. It was run through. I'm just going to say SOCOM generally because I honestly can't remember if it was truly jsoc, if it was JSOC adjacent. But you had.
• 1:11:00
  Propter: I'm going to jump in for one second because we're going to have to stick a glossary in the show notes to disambiguate things for people who don't know this. But, but just. Can you, can you very Quickly clarify
• 1:11:14
  Mike Black: four terms for me.
• 1:11:15
  Propter: Socom, southcom, JSOC and goo. I think if we get those, we'll have. We'll have most of the picture.
• 1:11:20
  Lowtax: This is how. This is how, you know, Mike is
• 1:11:23
  Mike Black: a proper federal worker.
• 1:11:25
  Lowtax: The man can hold entire conversations in acronyms.
• 1:11:29
  Ed: Absolutely incomprehensible.
• 1:11:31
  Mike Black: Trying not to. That's the worst part. Like, I just fired from the hip at work. That's one thing I'm like, no, like I'm, you know, talking to normal people.
• 1:11:39
  Lowtax: I used to work for the Census Bureau, and it was frightening to me that people could do this for the first, you know, years.
• 1:11:46
  Mike Black: General officer, flag officers. Just a general term used for generals. We, we just don't say general. Hey. Because there's an acronym. Why would we use a word? We have an acronym? And also etho, Flag Officer. Because the Navy doesn't call them officers. They call them or generals. They call them admirals. God damn. They're not general flag officers. Okay, so that's gofo. Southcom is Southern Command. CENTCOM is Central Command. They're the geographic combatant commands associated with the South America. Basically all of South America and Latin America and the Caribbean other than Mexico. Mexico is part of northcom and socom.
• 1:12:25
  Propter: SOCOM is different.
• 1:12:27
  Mike Black: Right, yeah, sorry, I said geographic. Good catch.
• 1:12:29
  Ed: So.
• 1:12:30
  Mike Black: Or no, I was talking about CENTCOM and stuff. Yeah, right, sorry. Centcom, southcom, Geographic Combatant Commands. And then SOCOM is. I have a. I have a very good thread on Blue sky, actually that explains there's an excruciating detail. So it can be linked somewhere if we want it to be. But SOCOM is a. What's called a Functional Combat Command. Short version of long story with that is it is a combat command that has combat command authorities, but it is not geographically bounded. It is aligned by function. The three functional Combatant commands we have right now are SOCOM for Special Operations, transcon for Transportation, and STRATCOM Strategic Command, which is the nukes and nuke things, and Omaha. Interestingly, spacecom is actually a geographic combat command. Oh, that just makes sense because its geography is defined as. I'm not making this up. It's in the unified. The. The Unified Campaign Plan, which is what lays out the boundaries for all the. The different Combat Command AORs. It is the, you know, I'm going to say the Van Carmen line. I can't remember if it's actually that it's a different one, but it's literally the line that we defined as space and then out.
• 1:13:41
  George: Mike just used the term AOR Area of responsibility.
• 1:13:44
  Mike Black: Area of responsibility. Yep. I, I almost caught myself with that one. So yeah, space is a geographic combatant command.
• 1:13:51
  George: Both Proctor and I are getting, starting to get really good at catching each other's acronym use and, and term of heart use. So you know, we got your back man. We're here for you.
• 1:14:01
  Mike Black: Oh, jsoc, JSOC and then jsoc. And actually I talk about this as well in the, in that super awesome SOCOM Functional Combat Command explainer thread. So JSOC is Joint Special Operations Command. They were the SOCOM before SOCOM existed. Then SOCOM came into existence and they said well now we don't need JSOC because we have socom. What are we going to do with jsoc? And they, the answer have two kind of. So it didn't start out that way. It started out that they will be the home for, for the, the super awesome high speed tier one units Delta and SEAL Team six and, and guys like that. And we'll give them some other random tasks that are like basically the There, there, there's, there's a, a handful of global responsibilities that SOCOM was given is. They're called Title 10 responsibilities just because they're one of the 8 billion lines buried somewhere in, in Title 10 U.S. code, which is where most of the majority of military stuff is. And there were things like counter wmd. And so JSOC was, were the folks at SOCOM said if we have to go somewhere and like, I don't know, steal a bunch of uranium, not that that would ever be pertinent in the history of, of the world. We tell you guys to go do it. And then the big one was, was counter terrorism, which is how SOCOM or sorry how JSOC turned into SOCOM's assassination agency was right after 911 there's this thing called the counterterrorism X word that basically said hey socom, guess what? You're the guys that we're gonna say you just go anywhere you want in the world, there's terrorists, go there and kill them. And I'm only exaggerating by like 5% with what the action expert said.
• 1:15:49
  Ed: This sounds very Texan.
• 1:15:50
  Mike Black: So JSOC, that's how JSOC became SOCOMs and you know, go all the way up to chain the presidents assassination Agency was what sprung out of that CTX sword. They did other things too but like they were primarily known for basically if there was any drone stuff, other air strikes, boots on the ground, doing spooky snake eater special operation stuff, Somewhere outside of Iraq or Afghanistan at any point from like November, September 12, 2001 until now, that was J. Soccer.
• 1:16:29
  Lowtax: Like say, like say Abbottabad, Pakistan.
• 1:16:33
  Mike Black: Yes.
• 1:16:34
  Propter: Yeah.
• 1:16:34
  Mike Black: Well, yes, except they were technically working for the CIA when they did that. Oh, okay. Which is a whole nother. We don't need to get into Title 50 authorities cameras, but I have a
• 1:16:46
  Ed: threat putting the flowchart in the show notes.
• 1:16:49
  George: Yeah,
• 1:16:52
  Propter: we already, we already committed to the no power points rule. So. So now I mean, I mean you say that they're mostly known for the assassinations, but there's, but there's a certain amount of rule of goats that applies here, right? Like, like you do. You do a little bit of assassination squad work. That's, that's going to be what drives your reputation.
• 1:17:09
  Mike Black: And point, point, point of, of.
• 1:17:11
  Ed: Of.
• 1:17:11
  Mike Black: I. Not really. Well, yeah, point clarifications. I, I bend out Iraq and Afghanistan. They were also in Iraq and Afghanistan a lot too. It's just if it was outside Iraq and Afghanistan like 10 million percent it was somebody in some form or fashion that JSOC was involved. They just also did stuff in Iraq and Afghanistan. Which brings me back to the strike cell discussion. So talent anvil with a group of we'll say JSOC or JSOC adjacent people. I honestly can't remember not really important soft guys that were on the ground in Syria or thereabouts and they were working directly with the folks on the ground who were primarily Kurdish, also other people, but mostly Kurds. The Syrian Defense or the Syrian Democratic Forces sdf. That was our surrogate force that we were going to use to wipe ISIS out of Syria because we didn't want to actually use, you know, put US boots on the ground, so to speak. So what town abel did was a very aggressive air campaign. And the strike cell is, is very flat. So if you, you know, the example I used before that, you know, the doctrine way would be the Air Force. The Air Force has an air operation center for the whole long air tasking order and a whole bunch of military planning stuff. It's all very good. It's the proper way to fight an air war. But it is somewhat hierarchical and there, there's a lot of planning and preparation that goes into it. Strike cell. I'm going to be a little bit flippant here, but not really a group of like eight dudes sitting in a, in a plywood bee hut somewhere in Syria that have Predator Reaper, you know, FMV footage pulled up. They have radios, they have Merc chat because the military Literally has Merc or I should say IRC monoclassified network. And that's how we type to communicate. And you, you have airplanes that are in the stack above you that the, the air component has said hey, you're a B1, you're a F15, whatever, you're this that go fly here, talk to Talon amble town AM will tell you where to strike. And you're just eight dudes in a B hut. And you've got planes above you. You got FMV that you think you know. You have some SDF curves that are telling you hey we, you know there's a roadblock over here on this, on this street leading into Raka. Go blow it up. And you're just like hey bro, these are the coordinates. Drop a couple 2,000 pounders on that. And like marginally more professional. I'll give them some credit. Like they would actually send an actual nine line. Not what I just said but kind of that mentality, not really near as formal. As near as formal as you would get with the, with the traditional air campaign. And why does that matter? On the one hand it was very effective at killing isis. It telling Anvil to their credit because they got a lot of flack in the media after the fact, understandably so form about to say, but they were instrumental in, in the SDF's ability to kick ISIS out Iraq and ultimately get them more or less removed from Syria at least as a coherent, coherent fighting force. The downside of that though is you have a lot less checks and balances.
• 1:20:17
  Propter: Yep.
• 1:20:18
  Mike Black: As you would with you know, the traditional way. You know, I'm not going to say they were doing flagrantly illegal stuff, at least talent Anvil wasn't really. But they were certainly bypassing certain things that weren't a low act violation. So they weren't a law of law of armed conflict violation. They weren't a quote war crime. They did probably violate the rules of engagement that the US had set I. E. The ROEs and OEF in the counter ISIS campaign speak very generally. You were required to do a CIVCAS civilian casualty. Caught myself assessment of you know, given strike and okay, this weapon with this trajectory, whatever and what we know about the surrounding area, we would expect, you know, five civilians to be killed. And you know then that, that, that that assessment would have a degree of, you know, who could ultimately approve the strike. There's good reasons for that. You know, you could argue that maybe it's a little bit too bureaucratic. Certainly the town amble guys did but Be that as may, you know, that was the rules of engagement. That's what the ROE Was. In a lot of instances they didn't do that. They would just be like, hey, the SDF guys on the ground. So they're getting shot at from building X. We know there's. There's ISIS in there. We can see them shooting at the Syrians. Send it, drop a 2,000 pounder on the building because we just need to get the ISIS guys out of the way.
• 1:21:43
  Propter: And you're skipping, you're skipping the proportionality analysis there.
• 1:21:46
  Mike Black: Yes, skipping the, the. Well, and I just said to be just, you know, proportionality is certainly a, A word that means things.
• 1:21:57
  Propter: Yeah, okay, fair enough.
• 1:21:58
  Mike Black: You're. You're not necessarily skipping any proportionality analysis. Maybe you were, maybe you weren't, but you're absolutely skipping the defined per the ROE Actual, you know, drawn lines on the graph with the circle and the. In the planet, whatever that. Yeah, that certainly would. For the purposes. Right. For the purposes of like we people in very senior positions made that call.
• 1:22:22
  George: Right.
• 1:22:23
  Mike Black: Whether you agree with it or not. E6 Snuffy and Strike Cell talent Anvil. That's not your call, man. Yeah, like, I'm sorry. So that when I say Strike Cell, that, that's kind of the, the. The, like the, the high level discussion of kind of mentality. And so Donovan, whose first name escapes me, who's the current commander of southcom, who was brought in to replace the. The previous guy that was, you know, resigned, was fired. He has extensive experience, I'll just say in that world. I honestly don't remember off the top of my head how much of it was direct JSOC versus SOCOM adjacent versus other stuff. But certainly he's well known for just being a quote, Strike Cell guy, if that makes sense. And so the, the suspicion amongst a couple of us that we've kicked us around on Blue Sky a little bit is that. Yeah, he was probably brought in primarily to develop more of a Strike Cell focused mentality, slash process for the boat strikes and then kind of part and parcel of that to take southcom from what it was and what it probably arguably should be, which is primarily a security cooperation focus command that you do healthcare exchanges and kissing babies and then you give the Colombians money to go, you know, do whatever they're going to do against the cartels into like a quote, war fighting command.
• 1:23:59
  George: Right.
• 1:24:00
  Mike Black: So which historically not been. Because, you know, historically, at least since 1947, we haven't, you know, fought wars in South America mostly. Right.
• 1:24:29
  Propter: Okay, we said we were going to talk about Laura Loomer, so let's, let's get. Let's get three minutes of Laura Loomer discussion on the. On the table here. Now that we've already saved this for
• 1:24:39
  George: last, because we know this will be what draws people in, we can sit through Mike's PowerPoint presentation for the past hour or so, and I'm just proud
• 1:24:49
  Lowtax: that I broke the discourse bot propter.
• 1:24:54
  Ed: I was making an empty threat.
• 1:24:59
  Propter: No, I mean, this is. This is. This is the Loomer Tower here. Right? Like, this is.
• 1:25:02
  Mike Black: We've.
• 1:25:04
  Propter: That's. That's a war on terror joke. Never mind, Never mind.
• 1:25:08
  Ed: Arguably, low taxes account is the house that Loomer built.
• 1:25:14
  Propter: So. So Laura Loomer's been in Ukraine for the past, I guess, week or so and has been singing a different tune than she has for the past several years about Russia in particular. And we have some speculation as to why. Low tax. You want to talk us through what's going on there?
• 1:25:33
  Lowtax: So I didn't really keep up with it. I guess, like, she took the tongue ring out and went over to Ukraine and, I don't know, made. Made nice with Zelinsky or something. I mean, presumably, like, she's no longer on the payroll of Orban.
• 1:25:49
  George: Right.
• 1:25:50
  Lowtax: And I think. Wasn't Tim Pool over there too?
• 1:25:53
  Propter: Yep.
• 1:25:53
  Lowtax: With his, with his little ski cap. Because he. He can't. He can't. You gotta let it go, Tim. Like, we met many of us. Many of us feel your pain on the hair thing. You gotta let it go, buddy.
• 1:26:08
  Ed: I'm just really glad I got on the good drugs at like 22. Just saying that.
• 1:26:14
  Propter: Save that for next week. We can do a whole segment on Reddit slash bod.
• 1:26:21
  Mike Black: So.
• 1:26:22
  Propter: So oral rumor. The speculation is that there's no more Orban money coming in and therefore there's no more Russian Axis money coming in. So all of a sudden, she's discovered religion, so to speak. We'll get to that in a second. On Ukraine, she had a sit down with. With President Zelensky.
• 1:26:37
  Ed: What is Ukraine money?
• 1:26:39
  Propter: It could be Ukraine. I mean, like, not. Not a bad idea.
• 1:26:43
  Mike Black: Yeah, no, I would.
• 1:26:45
  Propter: To get in on the, On, On. On the influencer op game. If you're, if you're Ukraine or, or for that matter, if you're the rest of NATO, that. This apparently is how these things get done at this point.
• 1:26:56
  Ed: We really screwed up with this podcast, giving that one away for free.
• 1:27:03
  Propter: She did also say some extremely racist things while she was over there.
• 1:27:09
  Lowtax: Yes, of course. You week. They should smuggle the money in through Peter Hungarian just for. Just to keep the. Keep the whole show going. Like. Like we're doing money laundering now, but for woke.
• 1:27:24
  Propter: Yeah, I mean, you've got. You've got the lines built. It'd be a shame not to use them.
• 1:27:29
  Ed: Yeah, we. We will have Tucker Carlson turning coat by the end of the week.
• 1:27:37
  Lowtax: We're gonna put, like. We're gonna put, like, Hassan in charge of that. That. That institute thing that they've got over there.
• 1:27:44
  Mike Black: Sure, yeah.
• 1:27:46
  Lowtax: Piss pig.
• 1:27:47
  George: Granddad's gonna be leading the charge into the contested zone in Eastern Ukraine. Brace Belden for those who aren't real heads.
• 1:27:58
  Propter: All right, Mike, thank you so much for. For dropping by. This was. This is a.
• 1:28:04
  Ed: This was.
• 1:28:04
  Propter: This was a fun conversation and I learned, frankly, a lot.
• 1:28:08
  Ed: Yeah.
• 1:28:09
  Propter: Most of which was not acronyms, but
• 1:28:11
  Mike Black: some of which was so people weren't sleeping, at least not here. So we'll see if the audience is not sleeping.
• 1:28:20
  Propter: Well, thank you. Thank you for coming by and putting the full range of normal men on display.
• 1:28:26
  Lowtax: Yes. Please come back sometime, Mike, with fewer PowerPoints.
• 1:28:33
  Ed: We'll have a conversation about an actual topic this time.
• 1:28:38
  George: All right, that's our show for this week, everybody. Thanks for hanging out. Thanks for learning some stuff. And if you get a chance, give us a rating or review wherever you read or wherever you're listening to this. If you're reading this, I don't know what is wrong with you. Although Proctor's done some magic stuff with that bot, so I don't know, you might even be seeing this in a clip on everyone's favorite niche social networking site, wherever you're seeing it. Rate, review, share with a friend, whatever, that'd be great. So for normal men in Charlotte, a very tired George is done for the week.
• 1:29:06
  Ed: I'm out.
• 1:29:07
  George: I'm George.
• 1:29:08
  Propter: In dc, I'm Proctor.
• 1:29:10
  Lowtax: In outer Florida, I am Low Tech Speedrun enjoyer.
• 1:29:13
  Ed: And in Boston, the Med.
• 1:29:15
  Mike Black: Stay normal, y'. All.