The Military Industrial Complexity

Hello, everybody, and welcome once again to the weekly show with John Stewart, the podcast that happens once a week because of, well, that's the, that's the title. Obviously, I host the daily show also once a week. None of this makes any sense, people, none of it will make any sense, but I'm delighted. Hopefully we will have a lovely conversation. Again, you remember, last week, we sort of talked about the soft threats to democracy rather than the autocracies and the authoritarians and the demagogues, just the way that democracy functions and what role that plays in making us vulnerable.

Let's do it.

Come on. Who's better than us? All right, here we go. Let's get them.

especially the Hawks, who say every problem it's military first, you know, in world war two, we beat an aggressor. It was one nation against another. conventional warfare. Our industrial might was a big factor, courage of our troops. And of course he was doing unspeakable things to the Jewish population and he looked like he could make good on his threats, uh, to dominate the world.

And we needed to get into it, to be fair to, uh, the world, we needed to be attacked before we jumped in. Right. We were, we were very reticent. We, you know, we were arming Britain, I guess, and, and other areas, but we were not, we were not in any way jumping in until we were attacked at Pearl Harbor. Right.

It was late in the day. And some members of Congress didn't even want to arm the UK. So it was, there's really a, quite a, a sales, uh, that, uh, Roosevelt had to do. But you know, the problem is, I think, a lot of people. now, that's their template.

That's right.

Uh, but not every opponent is Hitler, they don't have that kind of power. Right. Not every war is conventional. So if you look at Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, although the rhetoric was used, you know, Saddam was Hitler, Putin is Hitler, uh, the axis of evil under George Bush was kind of, you know, reminiscent of the Axis powers and World War II. And I think part of that is motivational, but part of it, it changes your approach.

Careful about where we use it. There's a bumper sticker. Careful, careful about where we use it. Let's talk about, you know, uh, I was fascinated. The general military spending during World War II was, uh, they say it translates into today's dollars to about $5 trillion, uh, in, in spending, uh, over the same amount of time.

Yeah, we have.

Which shows that we don't really have this judicious approach. Uh, there was this idea that we're very reluctant to use military force. Uh, we have 800 military bases projected around the world. That's probably more than twice the amount of embassies and consulates and all the other things there. Uh, the state department budget is a pittance.

I think, I think you're, you're right about that. Um, and in fact, the national defense budget is $895 billion.

Your, your smart weapons, your stealth fighters.

And what happens is you only have a very, a handful of companies that can build them. They're the companies that basically cater to the government. They don't have many other customers. They're not commercial companies. And so it becomes giant.

And, and those, and those companies have a gigantic lobbying efforts that go on in Congress. They spend hundreds of millions of dollars lobbying Congress to get those contracts, to build those weapons. Uh, and, and we should make clear out of that a hundred or $890 billion defense budget, about half of it goes to defense contractors. You're talking about $400 billion, $450 billion that goes to these defense contracts.

More or less. I mean, you still have money that goes on training and operations and logistics. And so that, that's also very, very expensive to do. right. Um, but the contractors, um, so you have this specific focus, but at the same time, the bureaucracy at the Pentagon has grown significantly.

Wait, during World War II, it was one page long?

Yes. What did it, it just said fund the war? Yes. Basically, this is how much money would go, to, you know, to aircraft. This is how much money would go to shipbuilding and all of that.

It's a jobs program. It is. The military industrial complex, is a jobs program for many districts.

And oftentimes those jobs are much higher paid than other regular, you know, blue collar jobs. And so, so they're very attractive. And so you, you get into a very hard time trying to cancel or cut money and programs because there's, you always take money away from someone else in Congress. And so, and then you have the whole argument about how, um, you endangered national security. And again, it's an unassailable term.

So that's the complexity. Once, once, the tentacles of this military industrial complex start to grow, you can't cut the jobs, because those jobs are purposefully spread out throughout a lot of different districts so that the money can be spread around really well. And people will argue not to do that. National defense is a very loaded term, so you can't do that. So this brings us kind of to the crux of the conversation, which is twofold.

Uh, yes, to a large degree, unintended, but, um, it seemed like a logical thing, you know, we're arming. these people, expel the Soviets, but a lot of the aid went through Pakistan and they tended to give it to the most extreme elements, uh, within Afghanistan. And then you had people like Bin Laden, who was, they were recruiting foreign folks to go in there and fight. Uh, and so, you know, they said as much, uh, many of the extremists, uh, first the Soviet Union, then America. So, even as we were arming them, they had rhetoric, uh, about coming after us.

So, well, it almost seems like, how could you not lose? How can you go over to a land that is inhospitable? I remember going over there and thinking, oh, this is like fighting a war on Venus. This was probably, I'd say, five years into the war, everything in the United States was segregated. If you went anywhere, they were in large military caravans.

But I think also, John, we have to take into consideration that the military, in large part, right, they could give, uh, you know, the advice and consent to, to the commander in chief, to the president and to Congress. But in large part, the military is being used as a tool, and it's being used as a tool by the politicians. Um, you know, whoever is in the white house and whoever is in Congress, and, um, you know, they will tell you that they will do what they're told to do.

Well, that, that's terrifying, that that's what they would, that that's what they would tell you. Yeah. And, and the other thing is, don't we have any other tools? Does anybody have, you know, let, let's go into the garage. It seems as though every time we find ourselves in a situation where we think we have to defend American values and democracy, the only tool we seem to have is force, amplification and projection of American power.

Well, the, sometimes the state department is just used as an adjunct to clean up the mess of the intervention. Also, for example, when Bush went into Iraq, they purposely got rid of people who knew about the middle East because they thought they'd be soft, they'd be too close to the regimes. So instead they put a 25 year old Bush supporter to redo the Iraqi currency, you know, things like that. So it was almost designed to fail.

I think it, it, it must be designed to fail, uh, and, and, and keep things going. But it can't be that cynical, I guess, you know, in Vietnam, I always wondered how many people were true believers that somehow, uh, Vietnam was the crux of the free world's defense against communism, and how many people understood that this was a cynical exercise in, uh, American power.

Yeah. I think it's always a mix. I think the problem is the dissenters, the people who want to go in a different way, get squeezed between the two, between the true believers and the kind of profiteers. So their voices often don't come out for many years. And even though it's, it's not that satisfying to be correct after everything's gone south.

All right. Uh, let's hold that there. We shall be right back.

I just think there's like maybe a lack of understanding of, I guess, geopolitics and history in large part as well. I mean, you know, Afghanistan is the best example of that. So I think in large part, the US, and particularly the US military, is very reactionary. They don't, you know, they react to the situation in front of them. They don't, you know, it's not prospective, right?

Well, not only have we not, you know, what you would consider kind of the win, the battleship, you know, and everybody goes out and they sign the peace treaty. And then we go, and again, not only did we take the wrong lesson, I think, from World War II, I think the Marshall Plan post-World War II also gave America the wrong impression that we can throw a bunch of money at other countries and build them up in a more freedom and democratic and United States friendly image. And we can control the world, not just influence it, but control it to some extent. And so we can look at our interventions, you know, Iraq and Afghanistan, it's been estimated that that created probably 40 million refugees. What are those 40 million refugees do?

Yeah, well, the, you know, the slogan, you know, democracy or autocracy really falls apart when you look at arms sales, arming Saudi Arabia, arming Egypt, arming the Philippines, arming Nigeria. And the reasons are, well, we're fighting, there's reasons, we're fighting terrorism and so forth. But often those cause instability, they enable slaughter, they hurt the U.S. reputation in the world. But the flip side is, well, you know, it actually keeps our prices down because we're producing more weapons, better scale, and we're going to work better with foreign militaries, because our weapons will talk to each other.

So the idea is, it's volume? This is a volume business?

Well, actually, there's a bureau in the Pentagon, a bureau that brokers these things. And they sort of measure their success by how many deals they make, which is really not the way to do it, you know.

So there's basically, this is like Glenn, Gary, Glenn Ross. And there's a bunch of guys in the Pentagon, and they've got a big billboard, and they're like, always be closing. And then they, you know, the winner gets to keep his job at a set of steak knives.

That's more, the State Department, actually. Weapons sales go through the State Department and Congress. The Pentagon has, obviously, yes.

The Pentagon kind of is logistics, and the State Department is part of it.

So the State Department, not only do they have the smaller budget, but a lot of that budget is spent on them figuring out what our weapons sales will be. It's that we're not even using the soft power to the extent that we're funding it. Some of that funding is going to figuring out how to funnel weapons.

Yeah. And, you know, there is a Human Rights Bureau.

Guys, you're bumming me out here, man. You're bumming me out.

We'll come up with a happy ending, but it'll be after the podcast. All right. Yeah. You know, the Human Rights Bureau and State often makes good recommendations, but they get overridden by the other parts of state, the Pentagon, because of, quote, pragmatic reasons. Pragmatic people often get us in the most trouble, you know, the so-called pragmatic.

So let's talk about this, because so the United States, the whole idea of the United States, is that we are exporting democracy. We are exporting freedom. We are exporting a philosophy of human existence that is more actualized than these autocracies. But democracy doesn't seem to be as vital a product for the United States to be selling as bombs. It seems like bombs are our most popular sales item.

One is the state of our democracy. We probably need to import one before we export.

You're saying we got to live up to it first before we can. we got to polish it before we can. Yeah.

And we're kind of heading in the wrong direction, it seems. And then, you know, Obama's a concrete thing. You can make it. You can do it to, you know, foster democracy, even if that's your intention, is a very difficult thing to do.

So I've heard people say America is great, because America is good, is the idea that no matter what we sell, no matter where we put it, it has to be for the greater good, because it's us. We're a shining city on the hill. We wouldn't sell weapons to be used in nefarious causes, because we're us.

Well, I think a lot of the ideals of America would make sense if we could better live up to them. And there's certainly been positive things done. But, yeah, I think a lot of people feel like we're the good guys and the military is almost like a form of foreign aid. We're helping out these folks and they don't look so much at the downsides, you know.

And you've heard the term peace through strength, right? They talk about peace, and the strength part is the weapons, right?

But do we believe these strategies are working, I guess would be my, you know, there are very few metrics that you can place on if these strategies are working. But if one of the metrics is military might not being needed for many interventions, well, we're failing that miserably because I think I read something somewhere, there's been only 11 years in American history where we haven't been at war.

Yeah. Well, it's interesting. You know, when you did your interview with David Petraeus, I believe you kind of walked through what a disaster Iraq was. I think his answer was, well, we're not supposed to try. And the answer is yes, that was not the thing to try, you know.

That's what I meant by when I was talking to David Petraeus, I said, is America a bit too cavalier when it comes to these interventions and not taking into consideration the catastrophic effects that our militaristic policy may have on those areas? And he said, well, you know, if it weren't for us, we wouldn't be, you know, as successful. I said, well, where are we successful, Afghanistan, Iraq, Vietnam, where? And he goes, well, I think certainly World War II. And I was like, if the last thing we can point to that was a smart, effective use of our military force.

I think it's ideological and there's profit to be had. I think that notion of America, peace through strength, we're the strongest nation in the world. If we pull back, you know, the kids in the other countries aren't going to behave. You know, all that is very strong. And I think, you know, even, you know, Trump supporters, a lot of them, they like the fact that he was beating up Jeb Bush and Hillary about Iraq, even though during Iraq, it wasn't clear where he stood.

Is there any kind of incentive that we can use for the military or the people making the decisions for the military that could give us a lighter footprint? I mean, how are we supposed to sustain, as a country, 800 bases and a force projection all over the globe and into space?

I think one of the bigger test cases, at least in my opinion, would be Ukraine, right? And that's where I think it's important for the United States to prove its might, to prove, you know, its democratic values and not actually have, you know, US troops on the ground there. I think that is one of the bigger tests in terms of seeing, you know, sort of all the elements of power for the United States, not just, you know, a military operation. And I'm not exactly sure how it's going to turn out, given that, you know, in the House of Representatives, which is run by Republicans, there is a strong reluctance to help out Ukraine or a strong reluctance to put money into weapons that are in fact needed for the war there.

Well, but isn't some of that less about? who are we actually allied with? I think there's many people on the right who would suggest, actually we're allied with Putin. He believes more in our, you know, woke versus unwoke ideology. He is a defender of Christian orthodoxy.

Yeah, but they're basically taking the autocratic side. They're on the side of autocracy, right?

Which we do all the time.

Yes, we do like to prop up strongmen.

I mean, we give all those weapons to Saudi Arabia.

Yes, that is absolutely correct.

Well, that's why Ukraine is sort of a model. There we're helping somebody repel an invasion. Saudi Arabia, we enabled an invasion, which was quite damaging. So if there were more consistency, that would be huge in that sense. Also, Ukraine is much more transparency.

Do they understand? it's embarrassing? Because, as you said, they just keep doing it. Look, there are two avenues to go down here. One is moral, which I absolutely object to the way that American power has been used in that situation morally.

It's definitely been ineffective, John. I mean, that's why I'm saying I think Ukraine would be a great sort of test case to see whether all of this coming together, whether this would function, whether we can support democracy, whether we can export our democratic values to a country that is fighting basically an autocrat who invaded them. It's basically everything that the United States stands against, right?

I'm not suggesting that there is never any room for military intervention or that sometimes it's absolutely necessary and it has been forced. But what it does seem is that, you know, let's look at American strategy over these past years. So the one strategy is we send all of our troops into an area where they are utterly viewed as a foreign invader or hostile organization. being within there. We fight there for 10 years, 15 years, or we take it over and then try and hold security there.

Well, yeah, exactly. You know, I think, as Roxanna noted, it's hard to shift, even to build the right weapons for that strategy, because of the pork barrel politics. But the other thing is, you know, every generation there's miracle weapons, electronic battlefield in Vietnam, the Star Wars impenetrable shield. Revolutionary military affairs achieved some things that wasn't relevant to fighting, you know, non-state groups in Iraq and Afghanistan. So there's that thing.

So they look at AI and technical advances as the new frontier in weaponry and military. We're going to employ the same strategies for our military, but we're going to do it through Siri as opposed to power.

They think we can overwhelm China with technology and swarms of drones, or at least intimidate them. But that assumes China's going to sit on their hands. instead of... What? You know, I mean, it's kind of a recipe for an arms race.

But see, this is what's so troubling to me, Bill and Roxana. You know, we come out of Iraq and Afghanistan, and there's sort of a humbling, a feeling of, boy, that was 20 to 25 years where we bled out so many of our most valuable resources. And to what end? And what is the lesson that we can take from that? Oh, let's just pivot now and militarize against Russia and against China.

So I think with China, it gets a little bit more complicated, right? So, like China has been flexing its muscle in the Pacific and the South China Sea. It's going to be a big test actually for the United States strategy here in policy, right? We're trying to work more on the diplomatic side with the Philippines and try to build up our allies in the region to basically curb any of China's incursions.

But who are we to curb all of China's incursions, I guess, you know, when our interests are over there? I don't think they're high moral ones.

It's to allow the allies to do that themselves, rather than have the United States be involved. At the same time, China has been...

Proxy, like a proxy war.

Basically. China has been building up its military. It has way more, probably not the best quality, but it has way more ships than the United States, which is a big deal for the Pacific. It's putting a tremendous amount of money into their weaponry, into hypersonic weapons, where the United States, unfortunately, because it's trying to test out all this high tech, it's not working out for the United States as well as it's working out for China and Russia. You know, they're developing...

Well, it depends, you know, prepare for what? I mean, China's not going to attack us. So it's really what happens in the region.

I mean, everything is about Taiwan at this point.

Right. And I think for Taiwan, for 40 years, we've kept the peace by having an agreement about how we treat the status of Taiwan. That's changing. I think that's more important to preventing a war than war weapons. And then we do the war games about Taiwan.

So, you know, I mean, look, our secretary of defense worked for Raytheon. I mean, there is a revolving door around those contractors and around those things.

But I think there is also now and, you know, in large part, Elizabeth Warren has fought very hard to try and sort of slow down the revolving door. So there's, you know, they have to basically recuse themselves for any kind of business on the companies that they worked on or worked for. It's the same thing in lobbying as well. You know, there's a cooling period. So there are some, you know, some reforms in place that have straightened things out a little bit more.

I mean, what's missing is, and Eric Lipton did a thing in The Times, a lot of the military folks are going to work for venture capital firms that are funding this tech. And they're, for the moment, outside of that regulation. Senator Warren wants to broaden it to include them. So there's, you know, there's still kind of a loophole that exists.

And no one is suggesting the United States be naive about the various threats. But it does seem as though much of what we're doing is trying to protect our economic supremacy. And my position is that these wars, oftentimes amoral, are also strategically at odds with protecting American economic supremacy and keeping those supply lines flowing. But I want to get to in our final little bit here, it gets to the next stage of this, which is the military's attitude towards any kind of oversight when it comes to this $880 billion budget, and when it comes to the lack of efficacy for a lot of our efforts. Okay, let's just, we're going to take just a very small break.

They failed their audit for the sixth year in a row last November, and it's very likely that they're going to fail it again this November. Correct. Just to put it in context, some of the services actually have a clean audit, so it's working its way up into more oversight, but you're talking about $3.8 trillion in assets for the Pentagon and $4 trillion in liabilities, so it's a lot. They didn't do an audit for a long time until they were pressed to do it, so I think there's a lot more work to be done, but I would push back a little bit on the fact that they are a little bit opaque, but I think there is significant oversight over the Pentagon as far as it's a little bit like the wolf watching the chicken coop, but Congress does do a lot of oversight, and there's a lot of well-intended lawmakers out there that are trying to keep the Pentagon honest and open and trying to make sure that money isn't wasted, but there's also obviously a lot of parochial interest in Congress, and that makes oversight or preventing waste of money a lot harder as well.

There's conflicting forces, but there's also smaller things or less known things, like fewer contract officers seeing what they're doing or not enough information to avoid price gouging, all of which is being discussed in Congress, but then you come up against, well, yeah, as long as I keep getting a piece of the F-35 in my district, so that's got to be battled out.

And then it's just priorities. I mean, the F-35 works, what, 20% of the time?

Oh, yeah. I mean, it's currently stacked up in a tarmac, Lockheed Martin tarmac, because they can't. be...delivery cannot be accepted on them because the software doesn't work.

1.

1.

Right. Right. A long time.

And we had a child tax credit that cost $94 billion, the child tax credit, that reduced child poverty by 30%. We couldn't keep that going as a country, and yet we have this $1.7 trillion boondoggle and they can't, what, get the Sonos to work on it? Like, the software doesn't work.

So that's insanity. So, basically, just to build the F-35, right, just to design, research, it, produce it, it's over $400 billion. $1.7 trillion is over its entire lifetime, which requires a lot, logistics, maintenance, all of that. So you have all of that in. So, obviously, it's a stealth fighter jet, and no one else in the world has this amazing technology that they're trying to promote with this F-35..

That's unbelievable.

I mean, I think, I would like the government to worry about our lifetimes, not the lifetime of this dysfunctional airplane.

I mean, you've seen- I think that's dead on, right?

You've seen in Congress. I mean, it was a tremendous crisis when John McCain decided to cancel the F-22 fighter jet program. He would call it a corroding queen because it was corroding, literally, a fresh aircraft that was dealing with corrosion that we had already spent billions of dollars on.

And, by the way, you talk to any of the guys that are on the ground, they love the Warthog.

Yes, absolutely.

They don't give a crap about this 1.

Go ahead.

Give me your explanation. I don't mind learning. No, I don't mind learning. So what I would suggest is that the audit that they have in the military doesn't really look at whether or not there's efficacy. It's just whether they got delivered the thing that they ordered.

Yeah. Well, I think, you know, first of all, it was amazingly condescending for a public official. And I think it's because she was trying to muddy the waters, but yeah, the audit itself isn't what causes the corruption, but it can enable it. Because if you don't know how your money is being spent, how do you know if it's going to be in ghost companies or whatever?

Well, that's what I was trying to say to her, is if you don't know where $400 billion is, how do you know it's being spent effectively or the way it was intended?

I mean, at the very least, you can argue that there's a waste, because if you can't keep track of where things go and whether they're being delivered and how many, there is a very strong chance that there is a waste. It's just logical.

I believe they're spending it on what and in what way, how much is wasted. Much harder to figure out without that. But I mean, if we had clean books, we get all the receipts, it could still be a problem if we're building the wrong things, we have the wrong strategy. But if you care about at least knowing how your money is spent, then you need that.

But I was more struck by, to be quite frank, the attitude of the audacity. Now, look, she's an expert there, and obviously I am not, so the frustration that she might have with somebody walking in and going, where's that $850 billion? But, to be fair, it's taxpayer money. Some of it's my money, so when you say you seem awfully concerned about it, yeah, and I think we could be using this better. But what really bothered me was this idea that even questioning it is seen as a hostile act, that, given the history of our interventions, given the record of corruption, given the of ineffectiveness, given the record of a $1.7 billion plane program where the software doesn't work, where the software in the VA, the Veterans Administration, doesn't talk to the software in the DOD, even the idea that you would question that was viewed as how it almost felt like the McCarthy hearing, where it was on the reverse, where she was saying to me, sir, at last, have you no decency to say to me that we don't know where the money is and that that's corrupt?

Well, I think there's an undertone of, it's an anti-democratic strain. It's like, we know about this, you don't know about this, you don't have standing to ask about this, just trust us. And given everything you've described, why would you trust it? And now she's a big advocate of going all in on tech, how it's going to be cheaper, better, we're going to do it quicker. That has to be proven.

And that the strategy that they're going to be deploying in terms of making these weapons seems considered not just from a military standpoint, but from a more balanced standpoint of statescraft and other things.

Oh, Lord, help us. They had a hearing on this commission that wants to build more nuclear weapons. And I made the mistake of watching it. Most of the members didn't ask about nuclear strategy, they said, hey, there's this nifty thing that's built in my state, don't we need more? Which was kind of shameful.

But you see, Northrop Grumman has the contract to basically modernize the one leg of the nuclear triad, the ground-based, it's a program called Sentinel. And it's already over cost and delayed. The Pentagon is actually reviewing it. It's a non-McCurdy breach, basically, when it goes over the threshold and trying to redo it.

Well, Roxana, don't ask about it, because they'll get very mad at you.

But I do think maybe the deputy secretary took issue with the use of the word corruption because it's reminiscent of, you know, worst times for the Pentagon, when corruption was indeed a lot, a lot bigger, right?

Well, I use the word waste, waste, fraud, and abuse, but that's still happening. They're still spending, you know, 4000% above cost for certain items. But beyond that, you're talking about an organization where, with all the money we're spending, soldiers often live in very poor quality condition housing. And there's also food insecurity on the bases for enlisted people. So if that's not corruption, I don't know what is.

You brought up the defense authorization bill. The House Armed Services Committee made it a priority to boost the quality of life of troops. They are proposing a 19.5% pay increase for the junior enlisted people. They are making changes to allowances so that there's no, you know, no more food insecurity. But it is astounding that you have generations of people, right, who are volunteering for the military, who live in really bad conditions, you know, moldy, you know, housing.

Is there anything here? in a solutionary sense? How can we bring more attention? Because it feels like this all survives in opaqueness. It all survives in the dark.

I mean, I think I'm going to make the case for journalism, right? I think, like, reporting is extremely important. I think it really is. It's on us, in large part, to blow this open and to explain to people how things work and why they work a certain way and what could potentially change. And I also think, in large part, right, I mean, I don't know, I don't have a solution for Congress.

Do you feel supported, Roxana, in your newsroom in the way that they amplify your stories on it?

I do. I really do. And I think they do encourage us to, the more we blow open, the better. And the more impact we have that can change the situation, the better.

Bill, I tend to think you're maybe slightly less optimistic on it, but what are your thoughts?

Well, I think one problem is, if Roxana can confirm this, I think there's fewer people covering this than there used to be, right? Oh, that's interesting. So that's an issue. Also, when there's a big scoop, it doesn't seem to permeate the larger media ecosystem. Like, I just think part of it is the public.

Not at all, Bill, you're winning.

But on the other hand, I think there is another generation to carry on and I think there'll be a turning. There's always moments like when they roll back Reagan's nuclear buildup or they push Congress to defund Vietnam. But if you look at the time frame, it's daunting. So people really need to have a longer time frame. And also possibly a different way of looking at our role in the world, you know, that being the having the big stick is not necessarily a sign of strength, you know.

Bill, I think that, boy, that gets to the exact crux of it. It's sort of that learning that perhaps the best way to spread democracy and democratic values and stability is not at the working end of a rifle. Let's get out of that World War II mindset. God forbid, there's another Hitler type leader that takes over and that has to occur again. And let's hope it never, never does.

Also, I think about the troops. You know, I think they're skilled, they're courageous, they're committed, but we can't ask them to do impossible things.

But we make them do everything. When they were in Afghanistan, we made them do everything. And in Iraq as well.

And, you know, some of the isolationists about Ukraine said, oh, yeah, we need the money to militarize the border. Really? I mean, is that really where we want to go? You know.

Well, guys, I really appreciate the conversation. I may be coming to you guys again, for we're having some trouble with the K2 veterans at the VA.

Oh, yeah.

We're really getting down to the wire with it.

So how do you, how do you assess that the VA is handling the burn pits?

So actually, they've done a pretty nice job of outreach and they've taken in more VBA and VHA claims up to about a million. So they've done a really good job down the line. Look, these bureaucracies are difficult. And I appreciate that once PAC passed. They really made an effort to implement it.

But I think one sign of hope is we've pretty much solved everything we talked about today.

Thank you guys so much for talking. Bill Hartung, Senior Research Fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. Roxana Turan, Senior National Security Reporter for Bloomberg Government. I really appreciate your guys' insight into this and we'll keep checking in on it.

Yeah, I'm glad we got to have this conversation.

Same. Thank you.

Beautiful.

So knowledgeable. Amazing conversation.

But kind of a downer. You know, last time we got to this sort of nugget of solution that everybody got lit up about, this sort of felt like, I think Bill summed it up with, yeah, I don't think that's going to happen. Here's what could happen. I don't think that's going to happen.

I don't want to be more of a downer, but what Roxana was saying about journalism. So I used to be a national security reporter and the way of journalism then was you were very incentivized for clicks and it was an issue if you didn't get clicks. And national security, not too interesting. So we would have a chart beat of all the stories, and my stories were never the most clicked. So I was told to start covering some other things like VR and crime, so that I could keep my spot.

Holy shit, Lauren.

I'm glad that she has the support she needs at Bloomberg, but it's harder and harder to find that support in journalism.

That's fascinating, Lauren. And if that's happening in like the blood and guts area of military reporting, I can't even imagine what's going on everywhere else. That's really stunning. But anyway, we open up the Twitter lines and Instagram lines to the listeners and the viewers. If you have any stories, let us know, because your comments on the previous one were really helpful and led us into a lot of interesting directions.