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[SPEAKER_01]: Welcome to another edition of Spaijok, Mike Iskoff is off this week.
[SPEAKER_01]: Lots to talk about in our corner of the world again we've been a mess at the top of U.S. intelligence with this guy Bill Pulti taking over his acting director with orders to clean the place out.
[SPEAKER_01]: Maybe he'll look at election irregularities.
[SPEAKER_01]: per usual with a Trump theme.
[SPEAKER_01]: And maybe, you know, just rifle through all the files for anything that Trump might find interesting.
[SPEAKER_01]: What do you think, Karen?
[SPEAKER_03]: I think it's dangerous.
[SPEAKER_03]: I think the, when you say what he might find interesting, how would he know what to find interesting?
[SPEAKER_03]: We don't need to know what he knows about the intelligence community or not.
[SPEAKER_03]: So the idea that it would just be find this person, find this kind of information as a little different than looking at something comprehensively and looking for what the director of national intelligence should be looking for.
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, exactly here, and he has zero experience in national security, much less intelligence.
[SPEAKER_01]: He never wore a military uniform for a day, and he's fired 50 people so far, including William Ruger, a deputy director of national intelligence for mission integration.
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, this is why the DNI, the ODNI was set up was to integrate the missions of the 18 spy agencies.
[SPEAKER_01]: So, I wonder, who's advising Pulti?
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, does he have some sidekick who's showing him who defy or he just walk into the room and say, you know, you 50 step forward.
[SPEAKER_03]: Or did he inherit the guru from Tulsi Gabbard, who was telling her what to do as those 25,000 documents showed that were unearthed by the Washington Post writer John Swing?
[SPEAKER_03]: So I mean, it's the same thing we don't know.
[SPEAKER_03]: really what's going on there.
[SPEAKER_03]: We see parts of it being dismantled.
[SPEAKER_03]: Some of the most important you know, missions that the, that the DNI has had.
[SPEAKER_03]: And, and just so you know, this is something that constitutional scholars, civil liberties advocates and others warned about from the time ODI and I was set up, which is how it could be abused if it was not maintained in a way that was transparent, not about the information it was collecting, but about what it was doing,
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, absolutely.
[SPEAKER_01]: To be clear, that thing, as many Democrats as well as Republicans have noted over the years, that thing as swollen and swollen and swollen and swollen are so well and so well and to this sort of monstrous bureaucracy.
[SPEAKER_01]: that was well beyond the size that it was originated for it.
[SPEAKER_01]: So most everyone has agreed that some cuts were necessary over there that it was duplicating agency missions and so on and it become a self-properature waiting for you.
[SPEAKER_01]: There is that.
[SPEAKER_01]: But let's talk about Tulsi Gabbards Goodbye gifts to Trump.
[SPEAKER_01]: uh one of the most troubling uh is her finding or her report or whatever we want to call her term paper on Anthony Fauci uh denigrating him.
[SPEAKER_01]: What do you say about that?
[SPEAKER_03]: I thought it was an interesting parting shot to do release these never before seen or so we have told never before seen documents on Fauci about how he influenced and manipulated.
[SPEAKER_03]: I think we're the words used, the COVID period and I and the intelligence assessments community of COVID.
[SPEAKER_03]: I'm not
[SPEAKER_03]: really sure where that is going, whether it's going to talk about things that were happening abroad or whether it's going to be talking about things are here, but it sort of came out of the blue and really did surprise me and yet it looked like at the end, can I just try one more time to do to show that I'm loyal, to show that I'm really doing what I need to be doing here for the president.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, and and analysts have looked at this more closely to documents that she put forward Don't support the points that she's trying to make is that Fauci
[SPEAKER_01]: skewered intelligence reports, tried to absolve the Chinese for any responsibility, tried to cover up what was going on inside that Wuhan lab.
[SPEAKER_01]: The fact is, and I did look this up just before we came on the air, so to speak, is that the findings on the Wuhan lab and COVID are still
[SPEAKER_01]: uh... we don't know if it came from a wet market or it was from some kind of illicit research in the lab and the reason for that is the chinese won't release documents themselves uh... there the cover up artists not anyone in the u.s. government much less uh... built uh... Anthony Fauci uh... the other thing the other thing that she's left on the doorstep
[SPEAKER_01]: was a kind of a phony, a very phony report about the U.S. establishing biowar fair labs in Ukraine.
[SPEAKER_01]: And again, people who looked at this much more closely experts, NSA, this is nothing more than a Russian propaganda line that they've put out for years now as part of their justification for.
[SPEAKER_01]: invading Ukraine.
[SPEAKER_01]: So here she's a man's servant of Putin in every way and of course we know from the in-depth profile the last week that that in the Washington Post that she has been taking orders from her guru, her kind of rogue Hindu guru in Hawaii,
[SPEAKER_01]: all very, very disturbing Chris Butler of the Science of Identity Foundation.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, you know, we wrote about him a couple of years ago.
[SPEAKER_01]: We did a two-part series on him and Chelsea Gabbard.
[SPEAKER_03]: Well, you know, I think we could focus on either one of these things, whether it's Bill Pultier tells a gathered or Chris Butler, but I think the ultimate takeaway is we have a position that's actually crucial to, as we would say, in the wake of 9-11, connecting the dots and to, as you referred to before, mission integration and sort of information integration.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_03]: And now we're just seeing it's fragile, it's abused, and we really wonder if the kind of administrative efforts that are being made are enhancing our national security or not.
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, it's kind of doffled this work because we have a guy who doesn't know what he's doing over at D.N.I.
[SPEAKER_01]: knowing Bill Poldier has no idea.
[SPEAKER_01]: He doesn't have the slightest connection to or understanding of the U.S. intelligence.
[SPEAKER_01]: We may presume because he's never worked in that field whatsoever on a brighter note.
[SPEAKER_01]: in an odd way.
[SPEAKER_01]: We've learned that U.S. intelligence function pretty well in regard to attacking Iran.
[SPEAKER_01]: They warned the president again again as have many previous intelligence leaders here that Iran would almost certainly respond by blocking
[SPEAKER_01]: the straight of hormones and that they had missile and drone capabilities that could inflict some pretty devastating damage on the Gulf region.
[SPEAKER_01]: So he was warned by US intelligence even by a guy, you know, John Radcliffe was one of his accolice running the CIA.
[SPEAKER_01]: Apparently the CIA can function even with the kind of
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, I do put you kind of term it up on a bootlegger running CIA.
[SPEAKER_01]: That was his experience when he was at the O.D.
[SPEAKER_01]: and I, Radcliffe just did favors for Trump on the Russian investigation stuff.
[SPEAKER_01]: So it shows that our institutions can function even with these mischievous at the top of them.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I suppose that's somewhat good news.
[SPEAKER_01]: So what else is on your mind, Karen?
[SPEAKER_03]: Well, speaking of security or the lack thereof, we heard reports this week that the first that the allocation for the East Wing ballroom that Trump has been building for the past however many months.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's going to be paid unlike what he originally said, but with taxpayer money, but interestingly enough that it's now seems to be money that is coming in part from the budget for the secret service, which is supposed to be for training and everything affiliated with training and administration of that elk.
[SPEAKER_03]: And the question is, how do you balance the word security?
[SPEAKER_03]: Do you have, what does it mean to reduce the funds for training and keeping intact the social, the secret service?
[SPEAKER_03]: Because security is their primary goal.
[SPEAKER_03]: And to take that away, in the name of security, seems to me something that is really confounding in a way I can't figure out.
[SPEAKER_01]: It just seems like more crimey behavior from the president and his cronies, and remember, Trump, the reason that the secret service was given lots more money for training is because of the multiple assassination plots or attempts against President Trump.
[SPEAKER_01]: They need this money.
[SPEAKER_01]: And God knows where it's being siphoned off to, I don't know, maybe it's used to part of it's used to build a fence around the reflecting bull.
[SPEAKER_03]: I wouldn't know.
[SPEAKER_01]: That's the latest outrage for those of us who have to live here in Washington.
[SPEAKER_01]: Anyway, let's get onto the business and hand today, Karen.
[SPEAKER_01]: You scored an interview, which you have for Stern, who is a very highly accomplished journalist.
[SPEAKER_01]: He's been writing everywhere for years.
[SPEAKER_01]: He's got a new book outer, a new ish book called The Warhead.
[SPEAKER_01]: The quest to build the perfect weapon in the age of modern warfare.
[SPEAKER_01]: Unfortunately, it was not able to participate in that interview.
[SPEAKER_01]: But tell us a little bit about Jeff Stern before we go on to your interview.
[SPEAKER_03]: Well, I think what's really interesting, as you say, he's an award-winning author, journalist, he's written for the New York Times Magazine, the Atlantic Fandity Fair.
[SPEAKER_03]: This is his fifth book, his interests are wide-ranging, but this book in particular is really interesting from the point of view that it is, it's called Warhead, and it's really about war.
[SPEAKER_03]: and about, you know, balancing the equities and war and how we understand the intelligence community, the technological community, and takes us all the way from Vietnam, all the way up to a 2017 terrorist attack.
[SPEAKER_03]: So it's really quite a broad swath, and he does it in an unusually unique way by- A novelistic form, I'm saying.
[SPEAKER_03]: I mean, you're sitting on the edges your seat in certain parts of it.
[SPEAKER_03]: So I'm really looking forward to this interview.
[SPEAKER_01]: Right, right, and me too, he starts right in the cockpit with Joseph P. Kennedy, the older brother of John F. Kennedy, who died on a top secret bombing mission on Roots of Germany.
[SPEAKER_01]: So anyway, I'm really looking forward to your interview and well, let's, let's get right to it.
[SPEAKER_03]: Jeffrey Stern, welcome to our podcast spy talk.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's so nice to have you here and to talk about your new book, the Warhead.
[SPEAKER_03]: I just have to tell you this book pretends to be about one thing, but it's actually about many things.
[SPEAKER_03]: And you cover a tremendous amount of territory, both time-wise, personality-wise, and issue-wise.
[SPEAKER_03]: So I wanted to get started because I have a lot of questions that I think our listeners will really like to.
[SPEAKER_03]: The first thing I really want to talk about is the central character of the book.
[SPEAKER_03]: which is not a human, which is pave way.
[SPEAKER_03]: And so just without getting too technologically specific, tell us what pave way, which has evolved over the decades, what it actually is.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, well, thank you for that introduction.
[SPEAKER_00]: So, Pavelay is arguably the first smart bomb, at least the first kind of widely effective, useful smart bomb or precision guided bomb.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was a laser guided bomb.
[SPEAKER_00]: It came online for the first time in Vietnam.
[SPEAKER_00]: And there of course had been lots of attempts before that to essentially build a bomb, a weapon that could steer itself.
[SPEAKER_00]: But for the most part, they were too complicated or too expensive or just didn't work that well and this was really the first one that was extremely effective relatively easy to use and sort of revolutionized air power because for the first time you could reliably hit a precise target from relatively far away and that that began to eventually sort of shape war planners to its will.
[SPEAKER_03]: So when you say, you know, it was a smart bomb.
[SPEAKER_03]: One of the things that you point out in the book without saying it exactly these words because you're kind is that a smart bomb in part relies upon smart people to be able to know where to direct it, when to use it, how to use it.
[SPEAKER_03]: And one of the things that you talk about a lot is the way in which you really do have to have degree of depth and the skills that you have that understands what can what can detect a smart bomb, what can dislodge a smart bomb from its purpose, et cetera.
[SPEAKER_03]: So in terms of the biggest failure that you have seen that you write about in the book in terms of who was not smart enough to use a smart bomb in the way they intended, is there an incident that comes to mind?
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, a lot come to mind.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think perhaps the most spectacular example is the bombing of a bunker during desert storm.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it has echoes to at least one incident in almost every conflict, probably most recently opening gaze of Operation Epic Fury when we very precisely hit what would turn out to be
[SPEAKER_03]: which is what it made me think of right away.
[SPEAKER_03]: I mean, when I was reading this and the disaster you're about to tell us about, it was just such a, such a predecessor to it.
[SPEAKER_03]: It was amazing.
[SPEAKER_03]: Anyway, go ahead, tell us what happened.
[SPEAKER_00]: So this is, I mean, arguably, this is an example of the quote unquote smartest weapon, the most precise weapon, is that best only as precise as the intelligence on the ground.
[SPEAKER_00]: And arguably, you know, Iraq in the 90s and and during shock and awe, is there is a direct line between that and, you know, Iran now in that, there wasn't a lot of human intel on the ground.
[SPEAKER_00]: We didn't, we didn't have a lot of intelligence.
[SPEAKER_00]: What ended up happening is, and one of the things that I think is interesting here is this was a direct, direct lesson that was applied from Vietnam, where the idea of incrementalism and, you know, the idea that we have to have really restrictive rules of engagement, we have to go lightly, we can't hit too many things that that.
[SPEAKER_00]: At least in this telling, prolonged the war, and ultimately led to more service men and women and more civilians getting hurt, and that when we come to Desert Storm, some of the war planners were really deliberate about trying to be overwhelming, precise, not fall victim to half measures and try to win the war really quickly.
[SPEAKER_00]: And one of the ways I manifested was we need to hit regime intelligence and military targets, but we also need to make sure they can't retrench.
[SPEAKER_00]: So we need to be able to hit secondary targets.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like where might the Mahabharat go if their primary headquarters are destroyed?
[SPEAKER_00]: And there was this network of bunkers around Baghdad, and one of them in a neighborhood called Amiria, which was called Public Shelter 25, which was, and what year are we talking?
[SPEAKER_03]: Just remind our listeners.
[SPEAKER_00]: This is a February of 91.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yes.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so, you know, the opening of the war had gone pretty well, the war planners began in an air ops center, began looking at these secondary targets to make sure that the, you know, the military and intelligence apparatus couldn't retrench.
[SPEAKER_00]: And this was a shelter that was in a neighborhood that admittedly was largely populated by by bathist functionaries.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was a, you know, it was a relative.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was like a middle upper class neighborhood relative to rock by bed at the time.
[SPEAKER_00]: So there were reasons why the thinking was, this would be a place where the intelligence service or military advisors might hold up.
[SPEAKER_00]: And there was some sort of circumstantial evidence.
[SPEAKER_00]: There was camouflage on the roof, but there was camouflage everywhere.
[SPEAKER_00]: But essentially what happened was they...
[SPEAKER_00]: used a relatively new version of the pave way, the bunker buster, the first bunker buster bomb, which was a pave way.
[SPEAKER_00]: And destroyed this bunker and it turned out almost 500 civilians were staying in the bunker.
[SPEAKER_00]: And a lot of kids, and it was just a sort of horrendous, essentially mass casualty event where
[SPEAKER_00]: not only were a lot of women in children killed, but a lot of people had left the shelter to make more room for children.
[SPEAKER_00]: So there were a lot of families that went home to sort of risk the sort of risk what the Americans would do and then they'd bomb the shelter that was full of children.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, and one of the things you point out is that it wasn't when you talk about the intelligence capacity, what the U.S. intelligence services could glean about just who was in this building, you know, in this structure and thinking that it was actually Sedam and his security services, right, is that who was in there or who himself, but yeah, the security service.
[SPEAKER_03]: Right.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's the security services apparatus.
[SPEAKER_03]: And so then, but then you start to talk about just how savvy and unexpectedly, you know, duplicitous the Iraqi intelligence services were.
[SPEAKER_03]: Right, isn't that one of the points that you try to make and that that the United States underestimated just how much subterfuge and deception would be going on on the other side of this for it is that is out of correct.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I think that is yes.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I was actually thinking about this.
[SPEAKER_00]: I was listening to your episode on curveball and this is a different rock war and and not exactly the same, you know, it's not a not a fabricator for the same reason, but essentially a few months into the war.
[SPEAKER_00]: Saddam's senior advisor realized that the only thing going in their favor was, or I should say, the only thing that had the potential to go in their favor was, you know, as the US was showing such dominance.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the population was sort of that risk of just, um,
[SPEAKER_00]: totally fleeing from any loyalty to the Baptist regime was civilian casualties.
[SPEAKER_00]: Was that, you know, if we can make it seem like the Americans are causing a lot of civilian casualties, that works in our favor.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so there were, there was a circular, there were sources that were submitting intelligence that made it to Langley that seemed to back up that some of these shelters were, in fact, military regime targets.
[SPEAKER_03]: Wow, I'm one of the other things that you're writing about in this book is the evolution, as I said in the beginning, the evolution, not just of paved way and of these bomb delivery systems, but also the evolution of the idea of war and repeatedly in this book, you come back to this idea of having war without
[SPEAKER_03]: going to war.
[SPEAKER_03]: And I'd like you to expand a little bit on this because I think it's one of the fundamental takeaways from the book.
[SPEAKER_03]: What does it mean to go to war without having to go to war and and which presidents saw this as as why they were attracted to pave way in the first place.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's a really good question.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm glad you picked up on that.
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, I think it's sort of a natural impulse that, you know, I would like to dispatch of all the bad guys without having to deal with the political fallout getting Congress getting allies without putting, you know, our own young men and women in harm's way.
[SPEAKER_00]: So both for practical reasons and political reasons, it's really a lowering.
[SPEAKER_00]: There's sort of an intoxicating idea that you could push a button to dispatch bad guys, spare the civilians, and spare yourself the cost, both the literal financial cost, and the potentially the political cost, the human cost.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think, I mean, arguably this has always been the case, since we were, you know, using trebuchets or whatever and trying to throw things over the castle walls instead of going up there and risk ourselves.
[SPEAKER_00]: But I think that it, I think that the push really accelerated in the height of the Cold War where, you know, we have, you know,
[SPEAKER_00]: two nuclear poles there is a escolatory risk and everybody knows that as much as we'd like to you know for example defeat the Soviet Union if we confront them too directly it risks escalating and you know nuclear armageddon.
[SPEAKER_00]: So you have to find ways to fight without really fighting and there's a variety I mean there's terrorism there's you know irregular there's there's supporting proxy wars
[SPEAKER_00]: But there's also using precision weapons that can be deployed with relatively little hardware, you know, you no longer need to dispatch, you know, three battalions to, and to carry your strike groups or whatever to, in order to hit a target within a foreign country.
[SPEAKER_00]: So we can begin to, we can begin to engage targets in other countries and do it very precisely and with less risk,
[SPEAKER_00]: best risk, you know, for example, that this weapon arguably was invented as much to solve a political problem as a tactical or strategic one, because the push to invent it during Vietnam was largely because they were restrictive rules on engagement that said,
[SPEAKER_00]: You can't hit migs when they're on the ground because there might be Russian or Chinese advisors nearby and you can't hit the surface to air missile site because there might be Russian or Chinese advisors nearby and it put American airmen in harms away because they didn't have a weapon to engage they had to get really low they had to and those things make surface air missiles or whatever were terrorizing them in the air.
[SPEAKER_00]: So we end up developing this weapon that allows us to stay really high and still engage those precise targets on the ground.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then we begin finding more ways to use it.
[SPEAKER_03]: So that's just getting around the rules of war and the rules of engagement.
[SPEAKER_03]: But also, if in this kind of weaponry, what does the American public know about what's being done in its name?
[SPEAKER_03]: And you want to talk about that a little bit?
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I think that's a really, like really salient point, especially now.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think this really started with Reagan after the LeBelle bombing in Berlin in the 80s when he launched this relatively large air raid on Libya and because of paved way and other weapons that did sort of evolve from the paved way revolution.
[SPEAKER_00]: was able to carry out this right, you know, very far away with not even, it wasn't just that he didn't need congressional approval.
[SPEAKER_00]: Practically didn't need, I mean, legally, I would ask you that question, but practically he didn't need congressional approval.
[SPEAKER_03]: Well, that's one of the reasons I brought it up is because of the war powers act and the can you go to war without telling Congress, which he did and it's so interesting to see this in the past when it's so much on our plate in the present.
[SPEAKER_03]: But yes.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, yeah, so this was the first quote unquote, preemptive strike and it came out of national security decision directive 138.
[SPEAKER_00]: which essentially will set the groundwork for being able to engage a target in a country with which you're not at war.
[SPEAKER_00]: If it has carried out or is threatened to carry out, you know, acts of terrorism.
[SPEAKER_00]: But because of this capability, because of that, but also largely because of this practical capability with paved way with long-range aircraft and with other guided weapons, he carried out this attack.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's not even that he didn't let any allies know except for the UK because some of the planes took off from the UK.
[SPEAKER_00]: No other allies, no one in Congress and even the majority of White House staff and even national security staff to know is happening until the planes were already on the way back.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think the ability to, so again, I keep talking about the practical, but a few decades before that, aside from the political question, it just wouldn't have practically been possible.
[SPEAKER_00]: You would have had to put so many troops, so much hardware in order to engage any kind of target.
[SPEAKER_00]: There wouldn't be an argument available, you weren't at war with a country, and you couldn't do that in secret.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now we have this capability, it's beginning to argue for its own use.
[SPEAKER_00]: And every president since then has used that to some extent.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think that right now, the beginning of the second Trump administration is the sort of caricature of what this means, where
[SPEAKER_00]: Oh, we have this ability.
[SPEAKER_00]: We can do it.
[SPEAKER_00]: We can do it almost unilaterally.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's war without war.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's magic.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, we won't hurt any civilians.
[SPEAKER_00]: We won't put any American troops in harm's way.
[SPEAKER_00]: We'll go into Iran.
[SPEAKER_00]: We'll get rid of the IRGC.
[SPEAKER_00]: Whatever.
[SPEAKER_00]: And we'll be back, you know, by breakfast.
[SPEAKER_03]: But you also point in the book as we discussed a bit about how important it is to have experts in charge and experts who know what they're doing.
[SPEAKER_03]: And so, I mean, that's one of the big concerns about national security in general warfare.
[SPEAKER_03]: Just who do we have the right people calling the shots technically as well as strategically?
[SPEAKER_03]: And so I'm just putting that out there.
[SPEAKER_03]: Do you think that that's a concern?
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, and I think there's a tension here.
[SPEAKER_00]: I remember a general saying something one time.
[SPEAKER_00]: And you know, you don't want to be an 8,000 mile screwdriver.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think was the idea of like we should develop more authority into the people who are on the front lines.
[SPEAKER_00]: And yet, part of the thing that this capability allows in a very technical sense is the thing dynamic targeting, which means that
[SPEAKER_00]: especially the modern pave ways are capable of doing all sorts of different things.
[SPEAKER_00]: They can engage different targets.
[SPEAKER_00]: They can engage this kind of target.
[SPEAKER_00]: They can be bunker busters.
[SPEAKER_00]: They can explode above the target.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so what it means is you can now put people on station or just doing sort of recon.
[SPEAKER_00]: But if they see a target, they can very easily engage it.
[SPEAKER_00]: So in some sense, that's probably good.
[SPEAKER_00]: But in some sense, that means that you have younger younger people with less and less authority and training, making lethal decisions.
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, the one of the ways you organize this book or the way you organize this book is really quite unusual.
[SPEAKER_03]: And I think works very well, which is to pick certain individuals and to just let them take you through different parts of the stories from different perspectives.
[SPEAKER_03]: And I wanted to talk about two of them in particular just because they're the trajectory of their experience is so unexpected.
[SPEAKER_03]: And so I wanted to start with Luis Raida and maybe you could just tell us a little bit about his story and why you focused on him, although once you tell the story, you're like of course he should focus on him.
[SPEAKER_03]: But anyway, how are you figured out to focus on him and tell us about him?
[SPEAKER_00]: So there was a very technical reason to focus on him, which is that I thought the near myths of Saddam in the opening days, actually the day before Shokhinah was supposed to start and there was a decapitation strike against Saddam with what was at that time the newest version of paved way, which was both laser and GPS guided and a bunker buster and it meant a lot for Raytheon, which had recently taken over a paved way.
[SPEAKER_00]: So, I wanted to be able to tell a story that intersect with that.
[SPEAKER_03]: And just so to make it clear, this is a different episode with Saddam Hussein.
[SPEAKER_03]: This is the war on terror moment, rather than the earlier moment you talked about.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: Then part of the way I thought to try to make this so, you know, it was engaging to read an interesting rather than just rather than just sort of a military history, was to tell individual kind of character-driven stories about a conflict we all know about, but an angle that most of us don't know about.
[SPEAKER_00]: I before looking into this had no idea.
[SPEAKER_00]: I knew this was probably something that you were very aware of.
[SPEAKER_00]: But I had no idea that there was the strike that became very close to a killing Saddam, which would have meant arguably avoiding the rest of Shakenah and everything that derives from them.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's interesting counterfactual, arguably wouldn't really have ISIS.
[SPEAKER_00]: We wouldn't have an ascendant Iran.
[SPEAKER_00]: Um, but Rweta, I know you've talked to him, so he's just such an interesting compelling person to talk to, but his story was almost, you know, Shakespearean from, so he was born in Cuba.
[SPEAKER_00]: He was, I think, three or four years old during the Bay of Pigs, and so has this, has this experience of sort of a, you know, not quite formed, you know, intelligent being yet who sort of witnessing
[SPEAKER_00]: And of course, the Bay of Pigs is arguably one of the biggest intelligence failures in the CIA's history, and it's partly because of that.
[SPEAKER_00]: So he goes, he bends up, you know, as a refugee in the US, his family, except for his mom, are all, you know, ardent kind of cold warriors, even more so that, you know, he's like,
[SPEAKER_00]: These Americans, the families like these Americans, they know that communism is bad, but they have no idea what it's really like.
[SPEAKER_00]: And we got to do our part.
[SPEAKER_00]: So everyone in the family joins the military.
[SPEAKER_00]: He wants to do coal, you want to do James Bond stuff.
[SPEAKER_00]: Lee joins the CIA.
[SPEAKER_00]: He wants to do the denied access stuff, because that seems coolest, but he gets sent to the LA division to the Latin America division because he speaks Spanish.
[SPEAKER_00]: And ends up doing seven tours in the field, which apparently is
[SPEAKER_00]: get sent back to headquarters and he's like dying because he's so bored.
[SPEAKER_00]: He ends up as essentially the second to John McLaughlin.
[SPEAKER_00]: And, you know, so he's on the 7th floor, which I guess should be kind of cool, but he's just so bored, he wants me in the field, he's looking for something interesting to do, the Bush administration comes in.
[SPEAKER_00]: He starts seeing these memos for meetings on Persian Gulf Affairs, and he has no idea what this means.
[SPEAKER_00]: And this is obviously well before 9.11.
[SPEAKER_00]: But it's a, it's, it's kind of Lisa Rice and sort of the neocon establishment within the Bush administration who are already trying to set the table for some kind of engagement in Iraq.
[SPEAKER_00]: Once he finds out what this is about, he volunteers because he figures, okay, if we're doing something in Iraq, we're going to need, you know, there's essentially no intelligence presence in Iraq at the time, so he figures, you know, they're going to need to build something.
[SPEAKER_00]: So long story, slightly shorter, he ends up becoming the director of the Iraq operations group.
[SPEAKER_00]: and finds that there's just nothing on the ground.
[SPEAKER_00]: 9-11 happens, everything gets reoriented towards counterterror.
[SPEAKER_00]: I also found this interesting because I think the narrative that I and most of us have is some sort of cartoon version of like the CIA is pushing for a rock.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it's all the CIA's fault.
[SPEAKER_00]: And he talks about being in Langley and everything is going to counterterror and when he tries to get resources for a rock, everyone's like, what are you talking about?
[SPEAKER_00]: There's no way we're gonna do anything with a rock.
[SPEAKER_00]: So he's sort of fighting.
[SPEAKER_00]: He's doing the sort of bureaucratic fight within lying lead to try to get resources.
[SPEAKER_00]: He's trying to figure out how to stand up a covert action program in Iraq where there is nothing.
[SPEAKER_00]: And ends up.
[SPEAKER_00]: He's largely just in Langley travels a little bit, but his team ends up coming across this group of Sufis in Iraq, called the Cousinazonis.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it's this, you know, they're, they do this sort of self-mutilation routine.
[SPEAKER_00]: They cut themselves.
[SPEAKER_00]: They, you know, it sort of brings them ecstasy and closer to God.
[SPEAKER_00]: And they have a sheik who had been at one time close to Saddam and was sort of part of Saddam's way of
[SPEAKER_00]: kind of pacifying the Kurdish areas because they, the cousin'sanis have a lot of influence in the Kurdish areas.
[SPEAKER_00]: There had been a big falling out and the cousin'sanis essentially fled, but they don't, they don't necessarily look different from, you know, any other sort of SUNY or path or whatever, there's no like visual.
[SPEAKER_00]: The only thing that's really distinctive is their religious practice.
[SPEAKER_00]: So a good number of them just kind of put their heads down, stopped practicing in public, and continued to rise up in the military intelligence apparatus within Iraq.
[SPEAKER_00]: And long story, just slightly shorter again.
[SPEAKER_00]: Rueyta's team is able to turn them into assets.
[SPEAKER_00]: And a lot of them are really close to Saddam.
[SPEAKER_00]: And suddenly, he has this essentially pre-built network intelligence network within relatively highly placed within the regime.
[SPEAKER_00]: But the moment they begin providing intelligence,
[SPEAKER_00]: related begins to worry.
[SPEAKER_00]: First of all, he sees sort of cold feet within the Bush administration.
[SPEAKER_00]: He thinks they don't understand.
[SPEAKER_00]: the risk that the assets are at, you know, in real estate telling, this is the most ruthlessly effective regime protection mechanism that ever existed.
[SPEAKER_00]: It makes Russia look like, you know, JV.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I'm perhaps projecting a little bit, but he talks in a way that he's been there.
[SPEAKER_00]: He's been, you know, the the Cuban emigries who agreed with this CIA and
[SPEAKER_00]: agreed to go invade Cuba with the understanding that there was going to be a, you know, a couple of naval destroyers backing them up, but then once they started losing never came and they were slaughtered and arrested on the beach, he sees that happening again.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so, because Royita, for all of his, you know, he's he's profane, he talks fast, he's sort of, he's in polite, but you can tell he's like, he has a, he's a really ethical, you know, kind of moral person.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so I end up in a position as I'm sort of hearing his story of like, man, I hope we invade.
[SPEAKER_00]: Man, I hope we invade Iraq.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like I'm worried about what's going to happen to his people.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so that's sort of what I'm trying to convey is like have the rear find themselves weirdly hoping that, you know, we invade Iraq so that our, our, these people have done nothing except help us.
[SPEAKER_00]: We're going to turn into the human emigrays on the beach and pay a pigs.
[SPEAKER_03]: we have to take a break, and then we will come back to hear more about all these interesting individuals that you sort of unearthed for us.
[SPEAKER_03]: So we are back, and Jeff, you kind of left of hanging in that story.
[SPEAKER_03]: Could you just tell us a little bit more about it?
[SPEAKER_03]: What happened?
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, so one of the, one of the Kazunazani assets that had originally seemed kind of worthless was an officer who was stationed at the telecom's ministry in Baghdad.
[SPEAKER_00]: And at a certain point he noticed, so there was a board there was essentially a switch board with lights that represented different, different, the telecom network and different parts of Baghdad.
[SPEAKER_00]: And he noticed that one of these lights kept switching to, I think it was from green to red.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think green is like the network is working well and red mean the soft line.
[SPEAKER_00]: And at a certain point, he put together that
[SPEAKER_00]: that the region of the board, the turned red, he always found out a day or two later that Saddam had been in that region.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it turned out was likely happening was that, when Saddam traveled, they were jamming the telecoms signal in order to prevent someone close to him from informing on his position.
[SPEAKER_00]: But what the telecoms officer realized was that it was essentially doing the exact opposite.
[SPEAKER_00]: So, other assets were, the, the, the relayed his network that was based in northern Iraq and in Kurdistan was starting to put this intelligence together.
[SPEAKER_00]: They had another asset who was traveling with a, with Saddam and eventually realized that they now had a beat on his almost real time location.
[SPEAKER_00]: And there was some intelligence that there was going to be a meeting at a, at a, at a place called, who's Durya, essentially an orchard complex where he had one of his homes was that there was going to be a meeting, and this was going to happen a day before, a day before Shokanau was, was set to start.
[SPEAKER_00]: So this intelligence gets packaged sent to Langley, and then from Langley to the situation room, and then from the situation up the oval office.
[SPEAKER_03]: You tell this great story of everybody hopping into their cars, you know, Georgetown at Donald Rome's failed hopping into their cars to get to the White House as quickly as they can to discuss this, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, right, and so they end up, and so Rida is in this very surreal position.
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, this is the kind of thing you see at movies.
[SPEAKER_00]: It doesn't really happen, where everyone's in the oval office talking about what we do, what do we do as intelligence is coming, and it's also, I mean, this is, you know, 2003.
[SPEAKER_00]: But it's so,
[SPEAKER_00]: I find it really remarkable that it's coming from this portrait complex to the telecom's ministering bag that up to the headquarters in Kurdistan across to Langley to the situation room where someone is running up like little sheets with the latest to Roeda and he's telling Bush in real time.
[SPEAKER_00]: They start talking about how they're going to attack and it seems the most obvious way is cruise missiles.
[SPEAKER_00]: But a certain point, the chairman of the Joint Steve is there, the Joint Chiefs is there and says, I don't think that's going to work.
[SPEAKER_00]: This is a, there's a bunker.
[SPEAKER_00]: One of the assets had reported seeing some kind of cable being unrolled and then taken down into the, taken down into a bunker.
[SPEAKER_00]: So if it's a reinforced bunker, cruise missile isn't going to work.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so what they decide, they decide they need some kind of weapon that has bunker busting capabilities.
[SPEAKER_00]: the newest pave way, which is this, it's the one that's laser guided, but also GPS guided is the ideal weapon for it, but it's not ready yet.
[SPEAKER_00]: It hasn't, it's, it's, it's, it's, it they pre-positioned them.
[SPEAKER_03]: Was that paved way three?
[SPEAKER_00]: That's, yeah, it's payway three.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yep.
[SPEAKER_00]: The designation is E, so the designation for the bombs is G-B-U, a guided bomb unit, and then a number.
[SPEAKER_00]: And this one is E-G-B-U.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I think it's enhanced G-B-U.
[SPEAKER_00]: The bunker buster that was used in desert storm was also payway three, but this is like the latest and greatest.
[SPEAKER_00]: So they're getting, there's a call that goes into the testing facility, the air force base that's like, is this can we use this?
[SPEAKER_00]: It hasn't been certified for combat and essentially it's certified in combat like in real time.
[SPEAKER_00]: The last testing is just happening.
[SPEAKER_00]: So they dispatch stealth bombers.
[SPEAKER_00]: armed with this latest paved way over Baghdad and and strike this target where Saddam is supposed to be meeting with his with his sons and some other regime officials.
[SPEAKER_00]: The the Cosnesani asset that the crypto name is Rockstar called EB Rockstar.
[SPEAKER_00]: The Rockstar that's there report seeing you know roughly six foot tall guy with a mustache being being wheeled out on a
[SPEAKER_00]: it seems like what they got set up, but it's not confirmed and the intelligence isn't isn't certain enough to call off this sort of massive shock and awe campaign that's about to start.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so the campaign begins obviously it turns out that Saddam hadn't been there, he'd apparently left like just before.
[SPEAKER_00]: So they just missed killing Saddam in the before shock
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, and you, you tell that really well and it's worth reading and it's entirety.
[SPEAKER_03]: Um, a, one of the themes through the book before we get to another one of the characters is the, um,
[SPEAKER_03]: the defense industry.
[SPEAKER_03]: So, you know, you start out with technology with Texas instruments, which is the company that really designs the first pay-way, is that right, pay-way one?
[SPEAKER_00]: Correct, yep.
[SPEAKER_03]: Right.
[SPEAKER_03]: And then, but then, as things get bigger and pay-way gets more important, and companies grow, and the technological advances become more and more and more,
[SPEAKER_03]: in these first decades of the 21st century, there are other companies that are brought to the table by the U.S. government and that want part of this, and one of them is Rayceon, right?
[SPEAKER_03]: And there are ways in which Rayceon missteps when they first have this, in their basket of things to pay attention to.
[SPEAKER_03]: And I just wondered if you wanted to talk a little bit about just how long it took for the military industrial complex as we call it to begin to see what what payway was and to want a piece of it and how that was both a plus and a minus when it comes to thinking about the arms themselves, the weapons themselves.
[SPEAKER_00]: really interesting question.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, one of the things that really distinguishes his pave way, a side from the fact that it was so effective, is that it always been kind of remarkably inexpensive.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that was by design.
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, from the very beginning, the team developing, it said this has to cost, you know, roughly what a mid-sized family said and costs.
[SPEAKER_00]: And for the most part, it held true to that.
[SPEAKER_00]: One of the guys Steve Romerman, who was an early Texas instrument engineer, who was very helpful in putting the book together, I think it was a Doritos tagline or some chip company.
[SPEAKER_00]: He does as much as you want, we'll make more.
[SPEAKER_00]: So that was sort of the idea.
[SPEAKER_00]: Also, if you can make it inexpensively enough, then the military could practice with it.
[SPEAKER_00]: And if it practiced with it, it would be more comfortable with it, and then it would be used more.
[SPEAKER_00]: And after the Cold War, there was this big consolidation because the defense industry had had this reliable adversary and part of the push from the defense industry, from the Pentagon to the defense industry during the Cold War.
[SPEAKER_00]: was sort of anti-pavoy.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was as much, how do we deliver as much mass as deep into enemy territory as possible?
[SPEAKER_00]: So Pavoy was sort of outlier.
[SPEAKER_00]: But there began to be talk of the peace dividend that it may be that the reason we defeated the Soviet Union was not that we outfought them, but that we outspent them, that we baited them into bankrupting themselves because we built so many
[SPEAKER_00]: big fast planes and big fast missiles and nuclear weapons or whatever and they try to keep up and bankrupt themselves.
[SPEAKER_00]: So now it's time that American citizens get the benefit and we have to reinvest in the American citizens and also if there's not this reliable app, very then what are we building weapons for?
[SPEAKER_00]: So the defense industry began to consolidate.
[SPEAKER_00]: And over-simplify a little bit, one of the categories that was sort of projected to still be valuable, even if we are contracting is high technology, because even if you aren't at war, of course, you want to maintain an edge, and precise weapons, you know, smaller precise weapons, because as we learned even during the cold war, we were still using them.
[SPEAKER_00]: So that made Texas Instruments, their technical instrument to missile systems, of which payway was arguably kind of the flagship, actually a really valuable acquisition target.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so there was a bit of a bidding war, rafion and a winning, and a choir, not all of Texas Instruments, but it's defense systems, it's missile business.
[SPEAKER_00]: But Rafion had also acquired the Hughes, the Howard Hughes company, Hughes missile systems, I think was a name of the company.
[SPEAKER_00]: They had their headquarters out in Tucson, and Rafion wanted to kind of consolidate their acquisitions.
[SPEAKER_00]: So they wanted to move pave way first out of the part of Texas where was being built to another part of Texas, and then all the way to Arizona.
[SPEAKER_00]: And in the process, they just kind of lost the recipe, a lot of people who would work on pave way, besides why would I want to travel?
[SPEAKER_00]: I'll stay here at the time.
[SPEAKER_00]: There was kind of a booming tech sector in Texas, and so there was a lot of jobs.
[SPEAKER_00]: So a lot of people stayed.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the rest
[SPEAKER_00]: The pave way start coming off the line with problems, production collapsed, the defense department knew that they even even in the, you know, the even post-cult ward, they wanted to have a lot of this weapons and so they opened up the license to Lockheed.
[SPEAKER_00]: Lockheed began to make a pave way as well.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it was partly because of that that
[SPEAKER_00]: uh, Raytheon decided to put a lot of chips behind the new enhanced paved way three.
[SPEAKER_00]: Look at a new flagship thing that's really special that, you know, that no one else has as a way to almost, you know, sort of restore the luster to the, to the, to the, to the paved way brand and, and, and to Raytheon who would kind of bungled the transition.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that's why we end up with this weapon that almost takes a dom out on the eve of
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, there's another character in the book and I know we don't have time to talk about everyone.
[SPEAKER_03]: I just like it because it's, you take us basically from an incident in World War II, right?
[SPEAKER_03]: Where they didn't have paved way, right?
[SPEAKER_03]: Where Joe Kennedy, John of Kennedy's brother, is killed, essentially.
[SPEAKER_03]: I mean, effectively.
[SPEAKER_03]: And then to all the way to the war on terror and some of the more recent incidents in the war on terror.
[SPEAKER_03]: And I think the story of Salman is really interesting because it's so different in terms of thinking about countries, you know, national security apparatuses and different countries, etc.
[SPEAKER_03]: So how does his story tie to the evolution of what you call generically the warhead?
[SPEAKER_03]: And if you could just tell us from
[SPEAKER_03]: experientially, from who he is, you know, as a younger person, and then who he becomes when he becomes the bomber in the Manchester bombing in 2017 at the Ariana Grande concert.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, so Salman is a Libyan-British kid living in Manchester where there's a big Libyan population, I think the biggest outside of Libya.
[SPEAKER_00]: And in a way, having somewhat stereotypical second-generation immigrant experience,
[SPEAKER_00]: The, you know, the school he goes to is under construction is sort of dilapidated and is just deemed unsafe, there's not a ton of opportunity.
[SPEAKER_00]: They are whispering starts and there's protests in Libya, like, you know, like everywhere else in the air world, essentially and and good off of course cracks down really brutally.
[SPEAKER_00]: Obama, at the time, is of course trying to draw down.
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, he's come into office trying to end wars, not start them.
[SPEAKER_00]: The British are concerned about what's happening and want to engage.
[SPEAKER_00]: And essentially, what they agree and they get a UN resolution to institute a no-fly zone and air support to combat good coffee.
[SPEAKER_00]: But part of the sanction is that there can't be any NATO boots on the ground.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that's not really perceived to be a problem because we have precision air power.
[SPEAKER_00]: We're just going to go and destroy regime technicals and facilities.
[SPEAKER_00]: We don't need to have boots on the ground.
[SPEAKER_00]: that this is, to me, this is sort of war without war.
[SPEAKER_00]: And this is also what we get the sort of leading from behind the idea that we're gonna help with Libya, but we're not gonna be, we don't, of course, we don't even need to invade.
[SPEAKER_00]: Why would we,
[SPEAKER_00]: But what they find, but the general start finding is that, yeah, we are pretty effective at destroying regime vehicles and driving was going to course is back from from their positions, but then they just come back and we actually you actually do need boots on the ground and if you're going to preserve any of the games you made.
[SPEAKER_00]: But we are prevented from putting NATO boots on the ground, even if we had the domestic political will, it's not, we don't have the legal cover to do it.
[SPEAKER_00]: And what ends up filling the breach is people like Salman, young Libions, living abroad, primarily in Manchester, who travel to Libya and become rebels.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so they're on our side.
[SPEAKER_00]: But a lot of them are beyond untrained.
[SPEAKER_00]: They're seeing really her horrible things.
[SPEAKER_00]: They're not prepared for.
[SPEAKER_00]: And like every other conflict, we sort of eventually move on and lose interest.
[SPEAKER_00]: Libya becomes, you know, from one of the most hopeful examples of the Arab Spring becomes a failed state with a really brutal civil war eventually becomes as we are, as we are carrying out an air campaign in Iraq and Syria against ISIS.
[SPEAKER_00]: excuse me, I'm carrying out an American in Libya and Iraq against ISIS.
[SPEAKER_00]: ISIS is looking around for other safe haven and Libya is a perfect place because we've, you know, we've helped to destabilize it and it's not totally chaotic.
[SPEAKER_00]: As Salman goes back and forth, he becomes radicalized.
[SPEAKER_00]: He probably comes across ISIS in in Libya.
[SPEAKER_00]: And another thing that's happening is, despite the fact that the, a lot of NATO countries were really salutary to the, to the rebels, to the, to the young men and women traveling from, especially in Manchester, to Libya initially.
[SPEAKER_00]: There was even, after a good offie, there after the regime fell, before a good offie was killed.
[SPEAKER_00]: But after the regime was driven out of, out of Tripoli, the French and British,
[SPEAKER_00]: prime ministers came and gave a speech where they said, you guys are an inspiration and hopefully in Syria they can take a lesson from what you guys have done.
[SPEAKER_00]: But a lot of people came back and within a couple of years found themselves at odds with Western intelligence services.
[SPEAKER_00]: A lot of them at least claimed to be following up on that on that pledge and helping to support rebels in Syria
[SPEAKER_00]: So Salman had friends who had been paralyzed from the waist down, fighting Gaddafi in Libya, who then was imprisoned for material support of terrorism in Syria.
[SPEAKER_00]: So Gaddafi is now in contact with members of what's essentially kind of the ISIS
[SPEAKER_00]: and you're up in the West and ends up carrying out this terrorist attack against the Ariana Grande concert, the Manchester Arena.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, I mean it's one of those stories of just sort of how they you track, how this actually happens and how impactful world events can be on an individual who can start out helping one agenda and then end up helping
[SPEAKER_03]: the other agenda and it's sort of, you know, your idea of there's so many different consequences of what happens because of this warhead that's developed and that it's hard to really follow follow everything and you have and I think that's really good.
[SPEAKER_03]: I want to ask you a question before we close, which is
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, we're living in a time where we are at war or on a pause for more and about to, you know, have a treaty or a member of understanding with Iran.
[SPEAKER_03]: We have simmering conflicts elsewhere around the world, not to mention the war in Ukraine and the war in Gaza.
[SPEAKER_03]: So my question is, what do you think the lessons?
[SPEAKER_03]: And why does I don't mean the technical lessons?
[SPEAKER_03]: What do you think the political and moral lessons are from your book for where we are at this moment in time?
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: Thank you.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think it's a really good question.
[SPEAKER_00]: And one of the lines I draw from the Salmon story to Iran is...
[SPEAKER_00]: we have this capability that purports to prevent us from having to put our own put troops boots on the ground.
[SPEAKER_00]: And one of the things I think Selman's story
[SPEAKER_00]: really illustrates is that not only does that not always happen, but it can draw boots on to the ground.
[SPEAKER_00]: It can create the need to, and this seems like a million years ago, but a few days into Operation Epic Fury.
[SPEAKER_00]: There was real discussion about putting a significant number of troops on the ground in Iran.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, I don't know how close we're doing that, but that was inconceivable, you know, a few days before we started bombing.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I think one of the lessons is there often is just not a substitute for boots on the ground and we should probably plan.
[SPEAKER_00]: We should probably take into consideration that if we're going to begin any kind of kinetic exercise anywhere, we should be prepared to put boots on the ground.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I suspect that might often mean we don't engage, and that's probably the right decision often.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think that the other one of the lessons is just in general, technology, military technology, but really, I mean, application does seem to have this ability to kind of argue for its own use.
[SPEAKER_00]: It sort of has this sort of like,
[SPEAKER_00]: the idea of like the trigger can pull the finger.
[SPEAKER_00]: We have this thing, we should use it, or we have this problem, what we have this tool that's perfectly suited that we could use essentially without cost.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that is a fallacy, it's always a fallacy, because even if it's a kid in a air condition trail or a creature for space, pulling the trigger that's launching something from a drone, that bomb is exploding somewhere.
[SPEAKER_00]: And even if it hits a bad guy on the top of the head,
[SPEAKER_00]: There might be a good guy standing nearby often.
[SPEAKER_00]: There is, this is a bit of a tangent, but of course, like in the drone wars off in the way we determine Militants is just military age male.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's a relatively imprecise way of evaluating and I suspect that a lot of the military age males that weren't militants.
[SPEAKER_00]: eventually became them.
[SPEAKER_00]: There's at Rumsfeld memo during Shakenau where he says, are we creating more terrorists than we're killing?
[SPEAKER_00]: So I think there needs to be a reverence, not just for the technology, but for the technology's ability to sort of bend us to its will.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then I think that there's, I think that there's just no substitute for deliberation.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think that there,
[SPEAKER_00]: with just a little bit of awareness that the practical ability now that we have to essentially fight wars without declaring wars or without doing a lot of the things that require a lot of support and therefore a lot of deliberation before going to war no longer necessary.
[SPEAKER_00]: That doesn't mean that those decisions don't require deliberation.
[SPEAKER_03]: I mean, that's what, so thank you for that, and I think those are the lessons and the takeaways from the book, but it's basically a book about war in all of its capacities that have been built up around war with sort of a current running through of
[SPEAKER_03]: why we should avoid war at any cost, and that that definition of war includes strategic bombings, includes moments where we haven't declared war, et cetera, and that the consequences are just so more vast than we imagine, and that they come down to the personal, and that the personal can have ramifications that we might not think about.
[SPEAKER_03]: Anyway, thank you so much, Jeffrey Stern,
[SPEAKER_00]: Thank you so much, Gary.
[SPEAKER_00]: Let's break.
[SPEAKER_00]: Thank you.
[SPEAKER_01]: And that's it for this week's by-talk.
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[SPEAKER_01]: This edition of the Spy Talk podcast was smoothly produced, as always by Cani, and expertly edited by Molly Hawkey for MSW Media.
[SPEAKER_01]: That's it, see you around, I'm Jeff Stein.
[SPEAKER_03]: I'm Karen Greenberg.
[SPEAKER_01]: Thanks for listening.
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