Transcript of Force Recon in Vietnam & Is WW3 Actually Possible? | Bing West

Hey everyone, welcome to The Team House. I'm Jack Murphy here with tonight's guest, Bing West. Bing served as a Marine Corps colonel and went on to have government positions such as serving as the Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs during the Reagan administration and is the author of many, many works. A lot of, you know, boots-on-the-ground accounts that he did from traveling to war zones and writing about them. One of the more pivotal works of his is The Village, which I believe we'll talk about, but I mean, it's based off of your experiences in the Vietnam War and reminds me actually in some ways of Jim Gantz's work, One Tribe at a Time.

Right.

And in the sense that the work is widely well-regarded and everyone agrees this is how it should be done, but then we do something totally different. So Bing, thank you for joining us on the show.

Well, it's my pleasure, Jack.

So let's start at the beginning because I really want to talk a bit about your service in Vietnam. Can you tell us about kind of like how you came into the service, why the Marine Corps, and kind of what your pathway was?

Well, I was born in 1940, so I missed the Civil War and World War I, but I got the others. So My uncles, 2 of my uncles were platoon commanders in the Marine Corps and they were on Guadalcanal. And then they come back from the island and I was 2 or 3 and my mom was having another baby. So she sent me up to the attic where they'd hang out with their group. And then she thought, well, they're my brothers, they're the babysitters. And the group, whenever they were coming home from the battles, They didn't know how to explain to their parents what they were doing. So they stayed in the clubhouse they had in our room, in our top of our house. So between the ages of 3 and 7, I was raised by Marines. Different groups of Marines would come in. I was filled with all the stories. And my mother said she knew something was really going on when the Battle of Okinawa was going on. And both my uncles were in the battle. And she was scared to death. And I had a favorite blanket that I used to hang on to.

And she said, you have to do something to help Uncle Wally and Uncle Tommy. And she said, with that, I opened up the window and threw the blanket out and said, that's for the dirty yellow baskets. And then she knew something was going on up in that attic. And when I got out of college and I was supposed to go to law school, I walked down to the South Station in Boston to get on the train. And there it said Marine Corps recruiting across the street. And I walked over and walked in and said to the captain behind the desk, I'd like to join the Marine Corps. He said, well, it's very rare I see somebody come in with a suitcase. You're really in a rush, aren't you? And that's how I joined the Marine Corps. It was ingrained in me.

So you didn't, you didn't have to get drafted into the war. You were ready to go.

Yes. Yeah.

Did you go in enlisted then?

No, I went to OCS. I was a grunt. I had a platoon and then an 81mm mortar platoon. And the war was in '65 and '66 just heating up. And, and the, the Marine generals knew they didn't know how to fight it, which was really interesting. I had some education in writing. They said, Lieutenant, we would like you to go out into the combat with the different units because you are a grunt and then write them up so other lieutenants and sergeants going over will know what the firefighting is all about. So I wrote the first book called Small Unit Action Vietnam where I took 12 firefights I had been in all over the place with different units and put them together and tried to explain what was happening, what was happening, what was happening. And one of them, we went into the DMZ, we being Force Recon, 5 of us. We were deep in the DMZ and it was the summer of '66 and the North Vietnamese were attacking, but they were assuming that we wouldn't go into the demilitarized zone. And we found an entire battalion. I mean, we were there looking at them and they didn't know we were there.

And we hit them with everything we had. We must have dropped 200 rounds of 105 and 155 before they found our position and came up. And then an F-8 was going up north to drop on a bridge and he dropped 2 2,000-pound bombs and just scared the hell out of us, knocked us down. But that was the end of those coming after us. And we got out next day. So I saw a lot of the heavy action. And then they sent me into a village, which was quite different.

This is with the CAP platoon?

Yes, it was. They were just starting. And this one village had 5,000 villagers, and they had sent in a Marine squad, all of whom had combat experience. And they were fighting every night. Every single night they're in a fight. And the colonel said, I want you to get down there and find out what's going on. Well, I went down there and the villagers were scared to death, but they, they, they just wanted to be left alone. And the North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong were putting great pressure on them. And the farmers wouldn't fight back. And these 13 Marines came in and typical Marines, they said, come on, we're going to, we're going to go out and we're going to fight. Well, the first night I went out with them, and it was about the 5th night, 6th night they'd been there. We're going down the main trail and we have the farmers whom we call popular forces with us, but they had no training and, and there were brambles on the road, on, on the path. And that was the signal that the Viet Cong would use that they were in meeting with their girlfriends or their family, whatever they were doing, and to stay out of there.

So the farmers immediately turned around and started going back. They wanted nothing to do with this. And the Marines dragged them through the brambles. We got to the other side of the brambles and we fought for the rest of the night. And night after night after night we fought. But during the daytime, we'd wander around the village. You'd have duck eggs. Occasionally you'd have a beer. You'd have a lot of peanuts. People gradually began to recognize these 13 young— just teenagers. These 13 teenagers with their cocky attitude are keeping us from having to pay the taxes to the Viet Cong. The first time that they had some freedom. And we were there for almost 400 days in that village.

Wow.

And when we went to leave, they wanted nothing to do with us leaving. They said, no, no, no, you have to stay, you have to stay, you have to stay. And every year, I spent 4 or 5 years in Vietnam on and off, every year I'd go back to that village, Binh Nha, to find out how things were going. And they kept insisting, They're still there. They're out in the hills. They're waiting. We know they're waiting. And it— and I went back in 2000, about 2000, with my interpreter, who was a great guy. And when we walked down the trail, everything was the same except for one strand of electricity that they had, one for the entire village, and everyone could have one small light bulb. They began to yell to one another. who are they? And somebody said, it's the kindergarten Marines. And I thought they meant we were that young, but what they meant was that the North Vietnamese, after they had taken over the village, changed the name of the village, exhumed the bodies of the popular forces that had been killed, and put in the bodies of the Viet Cong and North Viet.

And I looked at that cemetery, and they must have had 200, 300 bodies in there. I thought, wow, I never had any idea we were doing that much damage at night in those fights. And everyone clustered around. Everyone wanted to know. And I had my book that I had written called The Village. And all these old moms and pops came up and were looking at the pictures and identifying the individual Marines.

Wow.

That Phil, that Terry. And I said to my interpreter, Charlie Benoit, who was a great guy, I said, Charlie, this is amazing. He said, what's amazing, Bing? He said, if you were a villager and you had 1/2 acre of rice that every day you just picked up pieces of rice, that's all you ever did in your life. And for 1 year you had this group of Americans there talking with you, wouldn't you remember them?

Yeah.

And the thing that struck me is they looked at me and they said, you've gotten old, Dai Wei, meaning captain. And I looked at them and I thought, I've gotten old. You should look in a mirror. But I didn't do that.

Ben, could you explain to people who aren't familiar what the CAP platoons were? Because, I mean, it's fascinating. It's a kind of program that most people probably associate with Special Forces, but there were conventional Marines doing this during Vietnam.

What the Marines had the idea, and now we get into the whole issue of the warfighting, and then I'll get into the presidents in a minute.

Sure.

But General Westmoreland, who's in charge in all of Vietnam, is the standard old Army 4-star general. And he said the way to win the war was to go out against the North Vietnamese up in the hills and beat them in combat. And then eventually we would kill so many of them, they wouldn't fight anymore. And the Marines under a general by the name of Waltz said, no, no, no, no. What we should do is we should go where the population is, protect the population, and let them stay out in the hills forever. What do we care? And they never— they didn't like one another. I was really surprised in those days. Wow. The antagonism of the generals toward each other was something to behold. And they could not agree. So in the north, where I was initially with General Walt, he said, I don't have the manpower to be doing this, so I'm going to take individual squads once they have 6 months on the line, and I'll take volunteers who want to be with the Vietnamese, and I will put 13 Marines, one squad in one village, and they will stay there until they can train the farmers, which generally took a year or a year and a half.

So it wasn't short. You spent— you were there the entire time. Eventually there were 118 of these combined action platoons. And we were protecting about 300,000 or 400,000 Vietnamese up in the north. And not one of us, not one village was ever taken by the, by the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese. Not one of 118.

And a key facet of counterinsurgency strategy, right, is safeguarding the population.

Yes. But what we, what we stumbled on, we didn't know jack, but what we stumbled on was Everyone loves to gossip. Everyone talks to everyone else. So if you have 5,000 Vietnamese and they're chit-chatting away and they're going to market, they're doing a lot of things, there's no way you're going to have a Viet Cong or a North Vietnamese battalion from the hills beginning to come back, come down with its guards and its outflankers and everything without your knowing about it. I mean, you just, you just don't move you know, 500 armed soldiers into an area without one farmer saying, holy cow, and passing it on to another and another. So we always had an early warning system of when things were coming. And when Tet hit, Tet in February of '68, when they massively attacked everywhere, the North Vietnamese coming down into the area. Now, nobody had night vision devices back then? Nobody. I mean, so you fought pitch black every night. Well, that gave the North Vietnamese an advantage when they were moving. But on the other hand, once the villagers began to say, whoa, there are people out there, and came to the individual combined action platoons, these squads who were scattered, the North Vietnamese had no idea where we were.

as they're coming down. And as a result, they kept bumping into these small groups, all of whom were well armed, and then having to shift. And they never got the attack against Da Nang. They got bogged down out in the rice paddies. But an awful lot of coast fighting. And the big difference in the coast fights at night— well, 2 things. First, I've never looked why, but our tracers are red. And so we had about 1 out of every 5. there's a green.

Yep.

And so at night sometimes it was like you were watching and you didn't want to become mesmerized by it, but it's like Christmas time. All these lights are flashing by you both ways. But the big difference was, and the Vietnamese called them bombs, we could throw a grenade. Do you know that, I guess, with the exception maybe of the Dominican Republic, because they have good baseball players, And no, no other country in the world knows how to put your body behind you. And then when you're throwing a grenade or a baseball or football, everybody else has soccer. So they have no comprehension how to throw something. So when we get into these fights at night, when the adrenaline was going, we could throw it. We could throw a grenade 35 yards. They couldn't throw a grenade 20 yards.

Yeah.

So it was like we had our own mortars because we'd be lobbing them and lobbing them. Every one of us carried 6 grenades every place we went, and we could lob them and all they'd hear is boom and then a boom. So that was the great advantage we had at night was the grenades.

One of, uh, one of my favorite stories is from a Phoenix Program guy who told me how the, uh, Vietnamese would pull the pins on the hand grenades and then throw them to him. They were helping him out by pulling the pin first. It was the ultimate game of hot potato. Oh, so were you in the village when the Tet Offensive happened?

No, I was, I was out of the village at that time. We weren't hit that, that hard on that village, but they hit us one night with 200, and I wasn't there when it happened, but of the 13 Marines, 7 were killed in the village. And then in one night, and of the first 13, altogether 11 were killed. I stayed in touch with a lot of the families for generations. They'd ask about their uncles or about their grandfather. My God, I thought, you know, now I'm a grandfather. But, you know, eventually it was going to happen. Yeah.

Um, and oh, and I wanted to ask you about The Village. Like, did you write that as part of a Marine Corps study? Like, how did that come about? And, um, how was it sort of received during the war?

Well, after I had written, uh, the tactical manual, Small Unit Action, um, and I, I always liked to write, um, some agent picked me up. And they said, you know, no one's— it was in 1970, it was when I was writing and I was at the RAND Corporation at the time. But the bitterness Jack Tordaso had fought in the— in the— I was out in California at the time, but the bitterness was just something. We haven't seen the likes of that since. And in the intellectual community, the colleges, the literary community were 100% against. And somehow my first manuscript was returned to me. They said, we're not going to publish this. And then Hopper decided to publish it. And the first review came back and said, Captain West claims to have lived in the village for 370 days. with the Vietnamese. The question is, why didn't he write about all the My Lais? What are you going to do?

Yeah.

But gradually the book seemed to take on its own life as people realized all I was doing was telling the story about what 13, 18 to 20-year-old Americans did and their sense of decency and their willingness to take a chance. Plus the fact that we initially were using M14s with a 7.62 bullet, not really, tears the heck out of the place. And what people have forgotten about Marines is that in order to qualify on the 500-meter range, you have to be able to hit a target that's about this big. Otherwise, you don't qualify at all. So we didn't have anybody who didn't know how to shoot. And that made a big, big difference in the grazing fire at night.

Yep.

But more than anything, I'd say it was the attitude toward dealing with the Vietnamese and the way they dealt with us. which was quite different, Jack, than my experiences later in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Vietnamese were open. We could go into their families. We could sit down. We could laugh. You could interact in ways we never could in the Islamic nations.

From all of your time that you spent in Vietnam and working on these studies and papers, what are some of your big takeaways at the tactical level? I mean, you mentioned marksmanship. Were there any others?

Well, oh boy, at the tactical level, I hated it with the large units. I just hated it when I had to go with the battalions because you can't move a battalion without people knowing you're moving a battalion. And then you lose the element of surprise. When I was with Force Recon, we went out in small patrols always at night and we always hid. And it was called Operation Stingray. And our ability to find them before they found us was huge.

Yeah.

Because we were out there by ourselves and we had to rely on stealth. So I would have much preferred if, if we had intersected all the different combined action platoons, because each of us had an area that was about 4 to 5 kilometers by 4 to 5 kilometers. So each of us had 15 kilometers, but then you'd have a space before you had another one. And what I wish we had done was we— if we had integrated all of them, Right. We would've saved an enormous amount of money and fought a different war in the populated area. But ironically, General Westmoreland said, no, that was gonna take more troops rather than less troops. So you get back to this huge fight that was going on at the top. And then in terms of the big battles against the North Vietnamese that generally took place in the hills, The biggest problem by far, and was that we— and here I get into the higher level, but I'll just say it. I think President Johnson was a disgrace as a president of the United States and a coward. He got into a war where he was calling up his friends in the Senate.

It's all on the record. I put it in my book, my last book called Cap 5. And he would say, I can't win this war. I can't win this war. Well, why did he send us out there to die then? And his son-in-law, who was a good guy, Johnson pulled him off the lines. Now, you don't do that.

That's, that's what came out of the Pentagon Papers, isn't it, Bing, that they knew they were fighting an unwinnable war?

Well, Don't get me going with Ellsberg. I think the man was a traitor. He was a traitor. But that's, you know, and I know Ellsberg, I knew him from Rand. But if I just stay on the central— the central point was that President Johnson got us into a war that he was afraid to win because he believed that the Chinese were going to come into the war. And he took the lesson that President Truman never ran for reelection because he went into Korea and the Chinese came in and fought him. And Johnson believed that he would be driven out of office because the Chinese were going to come into South Vietnam.

Right.

That was his— and he was afraid, yet he sent us there to fight. Now, the interesting thing is that the CIA had proof positive that Mao Zedong had been so beaten up by the experience of fighting us in Korea that he had set a demarcation line for all the supply troops that he was sending into North Vietnam and said, under no circumstances will you go farther south because I don't want to tangle with the Americans. So ironically, if Johnson had had the courage, we could have won that war because the only way to win it operationally was to go into the north, use the sea, then shatter— they had no industry, no industry in the north. They were getting all their supplies from the Soviet Union and China through one port, Haiphong. Johnson wouldn't close the port because he was afraid of insulting the Chinese and the Soviets. So if he had fought a war, we could have won that and saved a lot of American lives. And, and I watched that and I watched that, Jack, in other wars I was in. I did not know Johnson. I knew Nixon. I knew several of the other presidents.

I didn't know Johnson, but I knew all the people who were advising him. And I knew the general who went in to, to brief him on the strategy at the beginning of the war, where we were going to go by amphibious landings, cut the North Vietnamese off at the top and enclose Haiphong. And President Johnson looked at the Joint Chiefs of Staff and said, you sons of bitches, get out of my office. I never want to talk to you again. You're going to get my ass into a fight with China. You don't know what you're talking about. I never want to see you again. And he rejected his own military advice and let us die. Shame on him.

They want to— they wanted to do what MacArthur did in Korea at the Inchon landing.

Correct. Right away. Right away. Boom. They weren't going to fool around about it. They had learned their lesson from Korea. So I do not have any respect for President Johnson and what he did. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, who fought in the Civil War, afterwards he said, if you go to war, you have to believe in something and fight for it with all your might. And I believe that any president, when he decides he's going to send us out to die, and to kill others, he has to imagine that he personally and his policymakers are picking up a sword and they have an enemy and they're going to decapitate him. They're going to cut his head off. That's the attitude he has to bring because war is killing. War is killing and destroying until the other side agrees to your terms. And if you don't understand that, You should not be sending others in to die when you don't know what your end state is. And that's— that was Johnson. He— and we died because of him.

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I mean, there's a lot more that we're— I think we're going to talk about in a little bit. But I mean, the more things change, the more they stay the same, right? Yes.

Yes. Okay. I'm at that level. You want me to stay there for a minute, then we can go back down to the tactical level of the other wars?

Yeah. Let's try to conclude at least our tactical-level conversation about the Vietnam War. I think the last thing I wanted to ask you about that is, was your feeling that this conflict would be won at the squad level, but that didn't quite brief well in the big military machine as far as their approach to war, which is probably they were still thinking of World War II, Korea, and so on.

The answer is yes, but the evidence was before them. And I used to be flabbergasted. In fairness, they would ask me to brief. In fairness, even General Westmoreland asked me to brief, But I got nowhere with them. But at least— but the evidence was overwhelming that when we were working with the Vietnamese, sleeping next to them, eating next to them, fighting with them, that less of us were dying because more of them were dying. They then had a feeling they could win because we were there with them. Then they became more courageous and you get the whole thing working in your favor. But instead, we wanted to keep them away from the war. President— General Westmoreland thought he could win the war without big battalions. Then we sent them under President Nixon. When General Abrams was there later in 1970, we sent them into Laos, the, the South Vietnamese, without any American advisers. And they felt we had abandoned them. So they didn't fight that well. So the answer is, Jack, yes. If we had at first done what the Special Forces did, what the Marine Corps combined action platoons did, and work with them, not just for a week.

I mean, you have to be willing to stay there. But it was more— it was more enjoyable. That's a strange word to use about war, but you feel much better if you're with a group that's like you.

Right.

You feel you're doing something. You're sharing the, the death and you're sharing everything else together. So my belief is, yes, we could have done a much better and we could have kept South Vietnam intact. But the other thing, Jack, I will say at the end, we would have had to do, which we did in Korea and everyone forgets about it. We would have had to cut a line across from the sea to Thailand, which is shorter than the demilitarized zone we have in Korea. We would've had to do that and then solidify it. But we've done that in Korea and it's worked. But again, when the Joint Chiefs in 1965 recommended that, Johnson threw them out of his office.

At a strategic level, do you think there's anything to, like Henry Kissinger suggested in his book, that in hindsight, with retrospect, it would've made more sense for us to hold the line against communism in Thailand rather than in Vietnam, considering that the country was already partitioned and was seeking unity, reunification? Do you think holding that line against the Red Menace would've made more sense in Thailand?

Well, let me— excuse me for laughing. We can all come up with different histories that make us look better.

For sure.

For sure. Henry is a master at that. I mean, Henry Kissinger was on, and I knew Henry. He had a way of getting on every side of every issue when you really stood back and tried to figure out who was Henry Kissinger. And he was very devious with the press, but the press loved him because he'd give little tidbits to them. So comparing Jim Schlesinger, who was— people don't remember who he is now, but he was the Secretary of Defense at the fall of Vietnam, and I was his special assistant then. So I watched him interacting with Henry and President Ford, and it was an education. because Schlesinger stayed with the troops. He said, we have to continue to support South Vietnam. We have to continue to give them aid. We have to continue to have a strong military ourselves. We have to continue to bomb in the North. And Henry had gone over to this idea that we were going to have a détente with the Soviet Union and that Vietnam was something we just had to get rid of. And President Ford was not a bright person. So he went along with Henry.

And I watched this clash. And when we— when Saigon fell, only Secretary of Defense Schlesinger, among all the top people, stopped right then and there and wrote a letter to all the troops and said, you can be proud because you did your duty and your loyalty was to your country and your cause was just. No letter from President Ford, no letter from Henry Kissinger. The letter, and the heartfelt, was from Secretary of Defense Schlesinger.

Do you think that's because of, you know, his sort of intimacy with the soldiers that came over the years?

Yes.

Yeah.

Yes. Um, Jim Schlesinger also had been director of the CIA. But his, his 2 favorite people was Creighton Abrams. And, and he became chief of staff of the Army after he'd fought in Vietnam. And General Lou Wilson, who was a Medal of Honor winner, he had fought in Vietnam and then he became commandant of the Marine Corps. And he somehow— Schlesinger just had this natural affiliation for the grunts. He really liked just being with the infantry. That's what he really liked.

When you sort of zoom out, what you're describing with Vietnam, that the bureaucrats saw it as something to get out of the way, to get it over with, that's something— we did that in World War I, World War II, Vietnam. We see all of these conflicts as just kind of an annoyance as a country, something that we just need to get out of the way, and then we move on and forget all about it. Well, why do you think we approach war that way?

Well, I have a theory.

Please.

My latest book is called Category 5, Cat 5: The 2033 War, because I think this is going to catch up to us and bite us in the fanny. But my theory, after watching from the top and being on the ground in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, When you go into the White House, the, the aura of the power is overwhelming. The carpet alone is this thick. The Secret Service are standing there, as the Secret Service will. And you walk into that Oval Office and you know, this is the power of the universe. But what happens if you're in that kind of an environment? And I believe this happens at the top of Well, the Catholic Church with cardinals, they begin to get this attitude. All senators have this attitude. Most CEOs, you really begin to think you're smarter than the other people.

Yeah.

Because you have people around you, you're surrounded by aides who keep, you know, kissing your ass. And after a while you think, well, my ass doesn't smell as bad as other people's does. And you get this, This, this cockiness that is reinforced by America being so wealthy, so powerful that at the top you get into a war and you believe you don't have to think that you have the bloody ax and you're going to chop somebody's head off because the other side eventually is just going to recognize our power and stop really fighting us.

Right.

That's what we did in Korea. That's what we did in Vietnam. That's what we did in Iraq. That's what we did in Afghanistan. That's what we did in Iran. That's, that's 6 for 6 with that attitude. And I call it the Jupiter complex. Zeus, of course, was the Greek god that became Jupiter with the Romans, but he was king of all the gods. And He'd throw thunderbolts at people whenever he got mad at them. He was irresponsible, but he was so strong, no one could ever stand up to him. And I believe that our presidents and policymakers and our Congress has a Jupiter complex because we are so wealthy. And that's what really worries me. And, you know, toward the end, I'll get into why it worries me going forward. But yes, you're absolutely correct. It's the cockiness that we're so strong. Once the other guy knows we're that strong, we don't, we don't really have to fight that hard. I mean, that's how, that's how it is at the top. And there we are down at the bottom. We're still slugging it out because no one forgot to tell Joe Smokes on the other side that we were the tough guy.

He thinks he's the tough guy.

You know, Bing, I'd like to ask, you know, on, on that note, your perspective about General McMaster. who wrote his thesis paper about how— I believe it's about how the generals betrayed the troops and they misguided the president. But he examined the issue of the military failures of the Vietnam War in detail. But then when he got into a position where he could do something about it, it seemed like he made the mistakes that he— it's like he studied our mistakes so that he could replicate them.

I have to say that first, H.R. is a fun guy. I mean, he's, he's, he's a fun guy. So, and he too, like all of you guys now, are younger than me. But we're— I'm at Stanford Hoover, and so is he, at the Military Historians Group that Victor David Hanson chairs. And I knew H.R. I knew him in Iraq, then I knew him in Afghanistan. So I know him for a long time. And I have more fun with him, Jack, about that than I do anything else. I keep zinging him and saying, you know, come on, HR, you know, there you were, you were saying all those guys in, you know, my era were all screwed up. Now look at how badly they screwed up your buddies from West Point in Iraq and Afghanistan. Oh no, they didn't. I said, come on, they did, you know? So when are we gonna see how they did compared to what their grandfathers did, people my age? And so, yes, I have a lot of fun with H.R., and I'll be on his podcast eventually. But H.R.— and he has a good sense of humor to acknowledge I'm on to something when I indicate it's one thing to criticize people when they're away from you and you don't know them.

It's another thing when you went to West Point with them and now you're criticizing them. But in fairness, in his last book, Wow. He really went after Jim Mattis, who's a dear friend of mine, and some others indicating that the, the cult inside the military— and he put it right in the book, which I gave him credit for— is that a 3-star is considered lesser by the 4-stars.

Yes.

And that the 4-stars only talk to each other. And because H.R. was a 3-star, They looked down on him.

Yeah.

Yeah.

You know, I mean, I think in that there's something a little dark about how you can study these problems so closely, but you can't escape them. And maybe, you know, like, H.R. seems like he's a smart person. And maybe if it was me and I was put into that position, I would make all the mistakes too, because, you know, you're being told something, certain information, and you're like, well, Well, okay, let me jump all the way up to today. Go for it.

And see what's happening, which is, because this is going to play out over the next 3 years. There are 2 things that are occurring simultaneously, and we don't know how to control them. The first is the Jupiter complex. Our Congress every single year spends $2 trillion more than it has. Why? Because they now have 200 million Americans now receive more entitlements than they pay in taxes. In other words, somebody's giving them money and that buys votes. You cannot get elected in America today if you try to change Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, any of them. As a result, by about 2033, and it may be 2032 under the next president, the amount of money that we have to pay out of all our revenues to pay for the debt that we already have is going to be more than 25% of all the revenues we have coming in, and the other 75% go to entitlements. That means there is zero money for defense, the FBI, or anything else by 2032, which means we have to continue to borrow another $2 trillion. Now, people say it's an unsustainable debt. What do they mean by unsustainable debt? Unsustainable debt means Right now you are getting paid 5% for the 10-year federal bond and you have— and you corporations will pay you 6 or 7% for their bonds because they need the capital for AI, etc.

Once you get to 25%, there is no known case of debt service where a country or a corporation has not gone bankrupt. And that means the definition of bankrupt is very simply that the Federal Reserve, because the Congress insists on it, they just create much more money, but there's nothing behind it. The taxes aren't coming in. So you have an increase in inflation, you have a decrease in productivity because the amount of money you have to pay somebody to hold a bond has gone up. Therefore, there's less capital to be put into equipment and your standard of living goes way down. That, that's just mathematics. That's going to happen about 2032. Now, when it does, the Congress is going to explode and we're going to go one of two ways. Either we're going to have to cut back on entitlements or we're going to say we're going to continue with the entitlements. And we're just going to go the way of Argentina and just print money. That's a huge crisis that's coming. Now, I'm tying this to the military. Okay. We have an enemy. It's called China. I don't care what the president says. China is our enemy.

It's not— it's an autocratic system that wants to replace us. You come now to the military today. And if you look, they're trying to get a big budget for this year. They'll get something, but not that much. But then, Jack, over the next 5 years, the amount of money for procurement is going to go down because it's going to get squeezed out because more money is going to debt service. So we're at a high watermark and now be less money for procurement. So what do you then do? Well, you either stay with your legacy systems, which is tanks, aircraft, aircraft carriers, destroyers, battleships, or you radically change to artificial intelligence, autonomous systems, beginning with the drones.

Mm-hmm.

Which Ukraine has shown is the future. Now, which way is the services going? Even today, as we talk, there's a huge fight going on. Ironically, Secretary Hagel has terrible press. But the fact is, within the Pentagon, and he has authorized it, there are about 5 people at the top who are all former CEOs and traders at a very high level. who took one look at this coming in and they said, we don't have the money to continue with these old systems and buy these new AI autonomous systems. There has to be a trade-off.

Right.

And you're gonna have to give up something because we don't have the money. And right now it is an open question whether we change or not. And if we don't change, we're gonna get our ass handed to us in a war in the future. Because there isn't enough money. We have to make the change. But the services, the services are really hard to change. Chief of Naval Operations just had an interesting article in the Washington Post. He said, oh dear, the battlefield is changing. We have artificial intelligence, we have these autonomous systems, we have all these cheap drones. Look at what Ukraine is doing. So we have to come up with a laser system in order to protect our destroyers and battleships and aircraft carriers.

Mm-hmm.

I'm thinking, wait a minute, wait a minute. You define the problem, and immediately you wanted to keep your legacy systems that are huge targets by investing all this money in a laser. And it, to me, illustrated It's very hard for the generals and admirals to recognize they have to radically change because we don't have the money to do both.

Like taking the pilot out of the cockpit. I mean, that must scare the hell out of them.

Exactly. Yeah. Now, the Air Force, I have to say, of all the 4 services, the Air Force seems to get it more than anybody else. But even they, my God, the F-35 is costing what, something like $100 million a copy? One aircraft, you get scared about anything happening to that thing.

You know, on that, I think something that I wanted to ask you is, you know, any further insights about why things don't change, that you've been around long enough to see us repeat the cycle in Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, and you described a little bit of what the problem is with sort of the reality distortion that takes place in the White House. But do you have any further comments about why it's so hard for us to change our tactics, to change our strategy? Why don't we learn as a country?

Well, but I'll come all the way back to being Jupiter. Okay. Because as a capitalist system, we do fantastically well. We live so, so incredibly well compared to any other country in the United— in the world. Nobody's close to us. England, Norway, nobody, nobody, nobody's in our league. They're 20 to 40% less in the way in which they live by any standard you have. The amount of room we have in houses, the cars we have, the electric watches, you know, the iPhones, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And people say, well, we have an affordability problem. So we're always saying, oh dear. And what's the solution? We always say, I'm going to give you more money. That's what we're going to do. We're going to give you more money. So this— and yet I was just talking with a gentleman today and he was saying, but it's, you know, Bing, you described there's an end of the road, but we've never seen the end of the road. Somehow America always has overcome it. But I've reminded him that, do you know that Rome fell in 70 years between— in the year 400, Rome was the colossus of AD.

Rome was the colossus of the world. 476 AD, Rome no longer existed as an empire, and Rome itself had been sacked. and what had happened to Rome more than anything else. And Toynbee was the historian who looked at something like 25 to 31 civilizations and came to the conclusion no great civilization is ever murdered. It's not beaten by another great civilization. It commits suicide. And what he meant was it loses its, its dynamism.

Yeah.

And begins to live off its past. And so far, the United States of America surges forward, surges forward with a productivity that no one can match. It's because of the capitalist system. The capitalist system is extraordinary. Something like of the, you know, the, of the S&P top 20 companies, only 2 were here 20 years ago. Yeah. And 18 have fallen and others have come and taken their places. General Electric used to be terrific. Now people can't remember who General Electric is because we had that dynamism. And the question some people say is, well, if we can continue that, if we have the productivity, then we can put off this debt. But we really can't because it's towering more and more and more. And the other thing I have to just— watching Jack, I mean, I'm flabbergasted to watch The CEOs of AI. I mean, AI is the future. There's no doubt about it. But look at those guys. They are full of Jupiter. 3 or 4 of them came out over the weekend and said, oh dear, I'm worried about my system. So government, you have to do something to help us. And they turned into doomers.

You know, it's doomsday.

Yeah.

And I'm thinking, wait a minute.

We need— give us money. Give us more money.

That's your product. You're going for an IPO and you're telling us, oh my God, I'm going to destroy the world, but I'm unwilling to do anything about it. You have to do it for me. And I thought, talk about conceit. They wanted the spotlight on them because they have so much wealth. They don't care. They don't care. So, oh, I have problems. So now they're central to what people are thinking. That is the conceit of the Jupiter system. And sooner or later, it can fail. I hope it doesn't, but we're testing it.

I mean, people are identifying these CEOs as the problem itself, I think.

Yeah, well, they deserve it because they're pointing— they don't have to go before the public and be doing this stuff. But it's like a moth to the flame.

Yeah. They like the attention.

And all the way back to my— one of my brothers is a Franciscan monk. And they have to every 4 or 5 years elect a vicar, you know, who's head of the— and when that year comes, all of them say, not me, not me. You're so-and-so, Father so-and-so is much better than me because the Franciscans, after you serve your service as the vicar, send you down to clean the pots and pans in the garbage in order to wash away that conceit that you have.

Wow.

Developed. So if we could have every one of our congressmen and senators once a year have to get down and clean the garbage and our generals and our CEOs, It may— we may be able to shrink that Jupiter arrogance a little bit.

You know, I mean, I guess this is a sign that I'm entering middle age, Bing, but I've got this interest now in the Roman Empire and I've been watching these films. And I mean, the comparisons are just impossible to avoid at this point.

Look what they did with their silver compared to what is now called inflation. Beginning in about 400, they had ransacked the rest of the world. There was no other place they could— they couldn't grab any more money from anybody because they controlled everything. They had a huge tax system, but it wasn't bringing enough because the Senate was doing 2 things. They were— they had entitlements for the population in Rome. That is bread and circuses.

Mm-hmm.

You know, that was given to the population every day. The population population didn't have to work that hard. They gave them the bread and the gladiators to go out and whack each other. And the Senate lived in great splendor, as we now see from all their buildings. So how did they pay for it? Well, they took the coin of the realm, which was a silver coin, and they had some expert shavers, and they shaved a little bit of the silver each year from each coin and minted new coins. And this went on year after year after year. That's called inflation, you know.

Yeah.

You depreciate, you depreciate, you, you, you build more dollars because you depreciate every dollar. Well, it finally got by about 460, uh, AD that the, those, the legions out fighting along the German border They now had wafers that were worth nothing. So they had no money. So they walked off the job. When they walked off the job, the Senate had no money to bribe the barbarians. And the barbarians said, we're coming in and take over Rome. That's the cause of when you have too much inflation.

And I'm sorry to really jump through the timeline. We're going from 40 AD back to the 1980s. But I didn't want to gloss over this appointment you had during the Reagan administration. And it sounds like you really were pretty busy during that time period. If you could tell us about that.

Well, I mean, I just thought I've known, not that well, but I have known 6 presidents. And I thought that President Reagan was really my idol. And again, one little story. He had certain principles that he— you just couldn't shake him on those principles. And once people understood you weren't going to shake him on those principles, he had a way of getting things done. And Tip O'Neill was, was the Speaker of the House and very avuncular. Irish Democrat, and they got along quite well. But President Reagan believed in the capitalist system. He believed in small government. He believed in limited taxes, and he believed in a strong defense. That was it, you know. And then he focused on it. So one classic was I was flying over Africa once. I had to go to the Congo or something, and I received a phone call from Secretary of Defense Colucci, I was the Assistant Secretary for International Security. And he said, Bing, you have to drop by Somalia because the president's pissed that you flew over his country and didn't stop to see him. So I flew in. And at the same time, Secretary Colucci told me, he said, you know, I think he's going to let the Soviets come ashore with their resupply of their ships, including their missiles, and recalibrate their missiles ashore.

So I went in to see Siyad Barre, who was about 6 feet 4 tall, in his cabinet. And I said, you know, people are a little bit upset with you about this getting back together with the Soviets. And in front of his cabinet, he sniffed and looked at me and he said, I don't deal with assistant secretaries. The only one who can tell me something if he wants to is the president. I said, all right. I walked out and I called Colucci and we called over and I said, can I get 15, 20 minutes with Barret, with the president? So they— about 2 months in advance. So then I walked back in and I said, you got it. You're on his schedule for 14 April. Well, I can see Barre looked around, was very proud of himself. You know, I said, now remember, we have to deal with this problem.

Don't worry.

Okay. The night before, he calls me from the hotel that everyone stays at. I forget the name right now, but he said, you have to come over. So I came over and I said, what? He said, am I really seeing the president? I said, that's why you're here. He said, I'm seeing him. I said, yes, you're seeing him. And I said, it's you and him. And you've told me you're going to let the Soviets back into your country. So the next day we get there, we walk down that corridor. And Secretary of State at the time had something else to do. So I was just taking the meeting. I walk in. The president knew me just enough to call me Red. You know, he didn't know my name, but, You know, what do you have, Red? And I had a big briefing. I said, sir. He said, no, no, no. He said, what do you have? I said, well, sir, this is President Siad Barre. He's from Somalia. It's on the tip of Africa. And President Barre is about to allow the Soviet Union to come back into his country and recalibrate their missiles on his shore.

And the president is behind his big, big Resolute Desk. And he looks, and he looks up at Barre for a minute. And he said, you know, the Soviets, that's a bad system. Nothing ever good comes of dealing with them. Are you really going to be dealing with them instead of us? Is that what you came here to tell me? And Barre says, no, no, I didn't come here to tell you that. No, no, they're not coming to my country. And President Reagan looks at me for a minute and I could have kicked Barre, you know. son of a gun pivoted just like that and folded like a deck of cards. And then President Reagan very benignly said, well, now tell me what you're doing for your country.

Wow.

And Barre didn't know what to say to him. And so the president said, well, how do you, how do you have money? He said, oh, we sell camel meat to Saudi Arabia. And the president said, well, how do you do that? And he said, well, we drive the camels to the port of Mogadishu. Then we slaughter them and we put them on a ship and it goes to Saudi Arabia. And the president says, the Abilene Trail, that's what we did in 1870. He said, now let me tell you, he said, you can't just have the cattle. You can't just have the camel. You have to find a way of getting your own meatpacking. He said, then you do the whole thing yourself. He said, then you sell it to the Saudis and you get more money. And so by the time we walked out, after about 15 to 20 minutes, when you walk out to the West Wing of the White House, there are 3 steps you go down to get in your car. And as he walks out, he's in such a daze that he tripped, and I just grabbed him before he fell flat on his face.

So that was President Reagan.

Well, I mean, it's a fascinating period of history, and I don't know, like, if you realized it at the time or not, that it was the twilight years of the Cold War. And what did you think of that time and what was going on in Afghanistan, El Salvador, Angola?

Oh, I could go on forever. But the answer is no. And the answer is not at the beginning of President Reagan's presidency. It was not obvious it was the twilight of the Soviet Union. They were thinking of going into Poland. And, and the president actually with the Vatican and with Richard Perle, who was there, was terrific. They put up a big bulwark.

Mm-hmm.

And they, they, they, they basically said they, they helped start the union movement in Poland, which became the cancer inside the Soviet Union, which gradually spread. But all of that took place over the course of about 8 years. It didn't just happen at once. He started from one— he was at maybe the 20-yard line. He went all the way down and scored the touchdown. Now, he didn't score the touchdown because he had left office. And then President Bush. Right. Right.

I mean, but you had kind of a front seat for all of that, or at least much of it.

It was, it was It was fascinating. And whoa, I mean, Central America did not work out well. I mean, that just didn't. And again, you get into personalities, but part of it—

Yeah, I was going to ask, did you cross paths with Ollie and his boys?

Of course. Of course. Of course. Of course. I knew Ollie and I got along quite well. Yeah. Ollie North. But What happened anyway, there you get into antagonisms both of the Democratic Party in the Congress against the Republicans and the concept of freedom in Nicaragua and the whole mess. But also the president. It's interesting how just personalities— Tip O'Neill, the speaker, wonderful man, but his sister was a member of— was a nun, I think, of the Maryknolls. And some punks, murderers in the Salvadoran right murdered several nuns, murdered them. And I think they murdered a cardinal priest as well. And as far as Tip O'Neill was concerned, they were— I mean, you could not move him off Central America and try to explain to him that we need to be helping these people because of communism. As far as he was concerned, They're all a bunch of punks and murderers, and don't you dare bring anything like that into my office.

But they changed their mind when the Soviet Union— well, when the Sandinistas started to ask the Soviet Union for help. That was what changed the Democrats' mind on some of that stuff, wasn't it?

No, they never did. To this day, I don't believe they've ever— I mean, to this day, I don't believe they've ever changed their minds. And that punk who's in charge of Nicaragua is still there. Ortega forever. Yeah. So, no. Well, we haven't touched on Iraq or Afghanistan.

No, we haven't. You want to— you want to tell us about that?

Well, I was on the— I was on the march up to Iraq at the beginning with General Jim Mattis. He and I later wrote a book together called Cause of Chaos that did quite well. Mattis was a terrific general. But it was obvious once we got into town, once we got into Baghdad, Mattis did say, and I was there and I heard him say it. Oh, and the commandant of the Marine Corps as well, Haggy, they both said, get us out of here. We don't want to be here. This isn't our mission. They knew that this thing was going to be a mess. And that the emissary that was there, Jerry Bremer, who was put in by the president—

Yeah.

Jerry believed in Jerry to the extent that he wanted it his way or the highway. And as far as Mattis and the Marines were concerned, we're getting out of here. They, they, they thought it was really messed up. It was messed up. And it took us quite a long while to straighten it out. I was there for the battles of Fallujah and Ramadi. And the big problem there was in the Battle of Fallujah, after several of the contractors were hanged downtown and then burned. And we had— I was with General Mattis and the lead battalion, but they had photographs of the ringleaders. And they had— they had the They had Delta, they had everybody there, and they were going to go in and knock off each one of those guys. But instead, President Bush and Secretary Powell and Secretary Rumsfeld and Emissary Bremer, and it's all on the record, got very angry in Washington. They said they can't do that to us, they can't push us around like that. And they ordered Mattis to take the town. Well, it was 300,000 people. So he began to take the town. But when you tell the Marines to seize the town, they're going to seize the town.

Yeah, for sure. I was with the lead battalion. We were halfway across the town. It was Easter Sunday in 2004. And all of a sudden the battalion commander said to me, he said, hey, Bing, I've been told there's a ceasefire and I have to stop. I said, don't worry, Mattis is not going to let you stop halfway across this city. Oh, yes, he was. And then we were ordered— the Marines were ordered to pull out. I mean, Mattis was so mad, his face was just like stone. And we had to turn the city over to the terrorists led by Zarqawi. And that set us back for a couple of years because the president lost his nerve. The press was indicating the Marines are just running you know, pell-mell. You have to stop it. So he stopped it. And the lesson I took away is, again, commit. You get in a fight, you have to think you're in that fight. None of this stuff about, oh, I'm going to send you out because I'm mad. And then when, when the going gets tough, say, oh, I quit and pull you out is wrong.

One of the other, I think, key things to point out, and you can look at it in Afghanistan, you can look at it in Iraq, you can look at it in Vietnam. is that when the neighboring country provides a safe haven for the bad guys, it becomes impossible to really have a decisive victory.

Period.

Period.

Yeah. Allowing North Vietnam to be a sanctuary, allowing Syria to be a sanctuary, allowing Pakistan to be a sanctuary guaranteed you can never win the war. I mean, it's so elementary. And, and I saw that in spades in Afghanistan because they would walk across. The Afghans are great walkers. The big difference between the Iraq War and the Afghan War, when I was on the ground for years with the different troops, is in Iraq it's flat and everyone rode in Humvees everywhere. Everyone. Foot patrols were much more rare than on the patrols because of the distances, et cetera. In Afghanistan, it was the opposite. With the high mountains, you walked.

Yep.

And the Afghans are fantastic walkers. They'll walk, they'll walk 15, 20 miles in a day. So they would come back, they would come from Pakistan, attack, and then fold back into Afghanistan, into Pakistan. We all knew it. And we all knew Pakistan was lying to us. They're wonderful liars. But somehow, you know, president after president allowed themselves to be entangled in this, including— you look, look at President Trump. He gets into this mess with, with Iran again, because if you strike a king, strike to kill, because if you don't kill, he's going to kill you. You don't go in and kill the lead— the leaders and then say, oh, it's done with. Baloney. You whack until it's all over. But not President Trump. He just hit them and thought, oh, they're going to fold. Well, they didn't fold. But the problem then becomes that he turned and said, okay, we can negotiate. Guess who the negotiators were? The Pakistanis.

Come on.

The Pakistanis are in league with the Iranians. And, and then he sends out amateurs as, as the diplomats and the whole thing fell apart. Um, but again, I think that President Trump did exhibit what the other presidents exhibited, this Jupiter complex. We're so powerful, we can do anything. And the other side is going to understand that.

Yeah, I think, you know, Trump in particular maybe convinced himself of something because of his success with the Soleimani strike. in his first term, and then the Maduro thing in Venezuela. So there were a series— oh, and the Baghdadi raid during his first term also against ISIS, kind of a series of very quick strategic strikes that were successful.

Well, in my book, I go through all this and I say, look, any president who is going to use use force. In other words, he's going to kill people. Well, let's not fool around about it. You know, if he, if, if he's going to use lethality, if people are going to die, if there's going to be massive destruction, then his national security adviser, when they're all sitting around, has to keep working until the president has 1 to 2 sentences that say, the end state of this war will be by approximately this date. And these are the resources that I'm giving to it to achieve that. And that has to be written down so that everyone can look at it. And in the 4 wars, I never saw that happen.

Yep.

Never. I mean, what would he have written down when he was about to kill them in Iran? The end state is that the end state is that I will kill 20 people and the regime will collapse? If anyone wrote that, they would've said, oh, sir, I don't think that's— I don't think it's gonna work that way. Now, the other thing is the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the military. Okay, what's the military's role? Very interesting. The military's role is like a roller coaster. One example is Colin Powell, whom I like very much, General Colin Powell. But he was, he was an active political policymaker in the war in Iraq, the first war, the '91. He was in there with the Secretary of Defense deciding on the policy, everything, you know. So and then you have General Keane, the current general, And from what I see, General Cain said, I'm going to stay out of the politics and the policy. I'm going to just give my advice as I am asked. Okay, then that means he's not going to be the one saying, Mr. President, I don't understand what your end state is.

Right.

Because the end state is a policy. And he'll— you know, President— the current chairman could probably say, I'm not into telling you what your end state is. I'll just follow orders. You ask me, can I kill those people? Yes, I can kill them. Okay, I've given you, you know, you, and then you decide whether you're going to do it. Right.

So I mean, it's like a bit of a, sounds like the Joint Chiefs will pick and choose what they want their role to be depending on the personalities involved.

Well, no, let me, let me back off that way a little bit.

Sure.

The chairman of the Joint Chiefs is the military adviser to the president.

Yep.

He can influence the defense budget with the other members of the chiefs. Each service chief is responsible for training the troops and for equipping them, but not for using them. That is what they call, of course, as you and I know, the combatant commanders, like in the Central Command or the Pacific Command.

CENTCOM.

Separate from them is the chairman. The chairman really has no command authority whatsoever. He can't command anybody to do anything.

Right.

He can give advice to the president. The president then tells the secretary of defense, who tells the operational commander, like the Pacific commander or the central commander, what to do. And the service chiefs are only supposed to be providing the equipment, the right equipment over the long period and the training and the manpower. Now, you can see there are all kinds of disconnects about how this thing will work in practice. It's, you know, right.

I mean, I was going to ask you, like, is there a problem when the chairman just makes this decision? And I mean, I understand why they make it. They want— why they want to stay out of politics, because that's not a soldier's job to stay out of the policy side. But if you get sucked into just the sort of tactical capability side of it, like, can we do an airstrike at this grid location? Yes, we can do that. Is it possible that they lose sight of the forest through the trees in doing that?

Well, I can't speculate on what the current group is doing. I can just see from outside. But I can understand 2 different positions.

Yeah, maybe not.

Maybe I honestly, I can only understand one position given that everything depends on personalities. I can understand why a chairman of the Joint Chiefs today with the mercurial conceit of the president would say, I'm not going to get involved in that kind of stuff with him because you don't know. He's liable to say you're fired. So he's going to ask me a direct question. I'm going to give him a direct answer. I don't know who can advise this particular president.

Can we turn our attention to Afghanistan for a moment? Um, you know, speaking of not having a mission statement that's written down that every soldier can sort of plug into and understand, I mean, were you surprised that we stayed in Afghanistan as long as we did?

Well, I wrote 3 books about Afghanistan. I spent 5 years there on and off, and I was out with maybe 40 different platoons all over the place for weeks at a time. And my last book was entitled The Wrong War. And I said, look, this is crazy. You— the area is like 2 Wyomings. We do not have the troops— troop to task. There are something somewhere in the neighborhood of 10,000 villages of posthumans who are related to the Taliban. And we have somewhere in the order of less than 1,000 platoons. You can't even do a combined action platoon if you could, and you can't because you cannot enter one Afghan house. You'd be killed. Now, you mentioned at the beginning, what's his name again? I forget.

Jim Gant.

Yeah. Good Special Forces guy.

Yeah, yeah.

Oh yeah, he had big gonads. I mean, I'm surprised he wasn't assassinated. And he wrote a great book. with the reporter from The Washington Post. And we all heard about him. But he was absolutely unique in making a liaison with one sheik in one village. And, you know, he was maybe the exception that proves the rule. We couldn't do it because you couldn't get that many Army and Marine officers who'd be that good, that empathetic.

Yes.

that, you know, so—

Yeah.

It wasn't like Vietnam. Vietnam was much more open. Afghanistan is a very closed religious society. Islam puts huge barriers to any outsider, let alone a nonbeliever, and how they can interact with the people. And we didn't have the forces to do it. And then we allowed the Taliban to have Pakistan as a sanctuary. So I had recommended a long time ago, and I did talk to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs and the commanders several times about it, of going just to a good advisory force and trying to hang on to the internal part, not along the mountains, and to the, and to the cities. And I understand that the, the final general we had there for a couple of years really was good and had that working with practically no, no casualties on our side and keeping the Taliban enough off balance. So they had part of the countryside, but they didn't have the interior. And I think that, that balance could have been held almost indefinitely.

I mean, do you think that, well, the timetable was set during the first Trump administration and then the disastrous evacuation happened during the Biden administration? It sounds like maybe you would be more of an advocate of keeping a small American presence in Afghanistan. I mean, indefinitely, maybe?

Yes, I would have the way that general was doing it because we weren't taking any casualties. It had gone away from the newspapers.

Mm-hmm.

Now, I can understand it wasn't the way one can argue it had gone on too long for that to work. But I don't know. But anyway, you had 2 presidents in a row. President— well, President Obama didn't believe in it. And then President Trump didn't believe in it. And then President Biden didn't believe in it. So who am I to say anything? I mean, 3 presidents in a row said, we're out of here.

Yeah. Yeah. Let's take a moment here to get into— I mean, we touched on it a little bit, but I think you have more to say about the future of the Department of Defense and about your book, Cat 5.

Sure. I'm an old grunt. But now I'm— now I'm 86, and I look back and I wrote this book about all the wars I had been in, all the positions I had held. And I said, as a historian, what am I looking at here? And I came away with 2 things, and that's why I called it Cat 5: The 2033 War. It is inevitable. It's not a matter of my opinion. It's not a matter of anyone's opinion. It is a matter of arithmetic that the next president, probably by 2032, will face a collision with our economy. That's just a fact and it cannot be avoided. The Congress will continue to spend more money than it has. And once you get over 25% of your service for your debt out of your revenues, then the bond market says, I want a premium for having American bonds. That premium will be somewhere in the order of 6 to 10%. Once you're at that level, you have skyrocketing inflation, and you have less productivity because more money is being sucked out by the bonds. At that point, the Congress is going to rebel. The Congress then is going to finger point toward each other, toward the president, and we are going to be in a mess.

It has nothing to do with my personal opinion. That's the arithmetic. that is there. Now, what I point out is that at the same time that's happening, we cannot forget that Chairman Xi is going to be 80 years old. And yet the clock is ticking. And he has promised that he is going to be in China better than Mao Zedong was. That's his goal. And in order to do that, he said, I am bringing Taiwan back into the fold. And when I bring Taiwan back, we get a huge boost in our economy because they control the computer chips of the world and we control AI. So this is big-time stuff in terms of him looking at us, seeing that we're convulsed by about 2032. with our own economic debt problem that is going to cause us to be at each other's throats and saying, well, look what Iran did. Iran just closed one port and we didn't dare send one destroyer to do anything. So all I'm going to do is simply put pressure on Taiwan. There'll be some fig leaf and I'll say, oh, Taiwan did this, and then I'll cut off trade. And once you cut off trade, then you buckle everything and they'll have to come to our terms.

Then the United States is finished in the Pacific and China emerges. So this is what I'm laying out in my book.

Yeah.

And I don't have the solution, Jack, but somebody has to fly the flag and say, hey guys, watch it. And inside the military, I keep telling my friends, you got to stop this stuff with your legacy because we're not going to have the money for it. Well, it's not that I don't want you to have battleships and carriers and tanks, but we don't have the money. So stop it and start getting into AI autonomous systems. Whether they do or they don't, I think, is an open question in Congress. You know, Congress Every congressman is given money by the large defense contractors, a lot of money. And I think it's obscene, but it's the way our system works. And the large defense contractors want the battleships, they want the carriers, they want the tanks, they want the big stuff, not the small, cheap autonomous stuff. So I don't know what the Congress is going to do. And I do worry that they are so angry at this president that they don't— they're not looking at our own future because they're so selfish.

One of the things I find myself thinking about, Bing, and I think I agree with where you're going, that we're heading for a conflict and we can debate the details of how that's going to come about, what it's going to look like, but we're heading there. And what I think about is Ukraine, Gaza, and Iran, and how these 3 conflicts are becoming intertwined with one another and in some ways merging with one another. And I guess my question to you is, is this the prelude to a Third World War that we're in right now?

Oh boy. Not, I would hope, the answer is you've touched on something that people are not paying attention to, that there's a convergence going on here and we're being squeezed.

Yes.

And we're seeing— and we're seeing that we don't have many partners now. We antagonized a lot of them, you know. And so Great Britain and Germany say, well, you started that. Don't expect me to help you. And then President Trump says, well, maybe I won't do anything about NATO. Whoa. We begin to fracture as the West. And look, our friends in the Middle East, you know, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Qatar, they won't stand up. I mean, they are very flaccid and they're scared of Iran and they keep backing off and saying, well, you do it, you do it, but they won't do it. So you can see all of this is a cauldron that will simmer down, but it indicates We don't have a lot of strong friends. We are scared of taking casualties. That's the big thing now. We don't want to have casualties. Then you add the fact that there's no doubt Russia and China and North Korea and Iran have one thing in common. They want to push out the United States of America as a military force. So if something gets going in the Pacific, would all of them cause some trouble?

Yes, I believe they would. Yes, I believe they would. And would, would we see that our NATO allies stood strong with us? I don't know. They could say, well, you've been giving us the back of the hand. And Japan could say, I'm not sure I want to get involved. involved in this, we could be in a real mess, Jack. We could be in a real mess.

Yeah. I mean, there are some huge fractures between Russia, China, Iran in different ways. But if they were to unify, if anything were to unify them, it would be their opposition to the United States. And then we would be facing a threat that I don't think we've really faced since World War II.

No, but I don't see— I— and a lot of it wouldn't be— would not be military shooting.

Right.

It would be economic. It would be psychological. It would be interfering in the— in psyops. It would be all these different dimensions where they could cause mischief in a lot of different ways. and then see if we had the gonads when the Chinese fleet positioned itself by ourselves to go out and say, I'm willing to take 10,000 or 20,000 American sailors killed for the sake of Taiwan. And we might just blink.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. Um, do you think— I mean, last question before we'll, we'll get in a little bit more into your book and, and wrap up. Do you think we should station troops in Taiwan? Do you think that's the way to kind of head off an invasion?

Well, I've been arguing for years, but not successfully. The answer is that would make a vast difference. There are 2 things that make a vast difference. if gradually, a little bit at a time, we just had tiny little semi-exercises that just get a little bit bigger, a little bit bigger, a little bit bigger, so that it would be very difficult for China to take a move without saying, oh my God, whether I like it or not, the Americans are in it.

Right. Like North Korea knows.

I think that would help our deterrence. The other thing I believe, Jack, is that AI autonomous is moving so fast and so cheap with drones that if the Taiwanese themselves wanted to protect themselves, they could do it for 4% of their defense GDP in defense. But they have been unwilling to do it themselves. So the big problem they're going to have if they get squeezed is many members of our Congress are going to say, Well, they wouldn't stand up for themselves. Why should we stand up for a country that won't stand up for themselves? And if we've given— my goodness, I'm, I'm embarrassed that we haven't helped Ukraine much more than we have because they had the courage. You know, if Taiwan doesn't show courage, I don't think they stand a chance of having us stand up for them.

Your book, Cat 5, is that out now? Can people go find that?

Oh, yes. Yeah, it's on Amazon. Cat 5: The 2033 War. And I spent a lot of time on it in the battlefields trying to show people what the fighting was all about. So I don't lecture as much as I'm afraid I may have lectured tonight. You know, I try to tell an awful lot of stories about what it's like to be a grunt, what it's like to meet with presidents and try to balance it both and say, we got a big problem coming.

And we'll have some links in the description where people can go and find your books, Bing. You mentioned the memoir you wrote, co-wrote with General Mattis.

Right.

And many others. I mean, it seems like you're still very active. I mean, are you working on any other projects right now?

I am. I have another one for Hoover Stanford on our military, and then another one I just wrote about China. So I always stay on something. You know, it's just—

Yeah, it's what you do.

The commandant has told me that if there's another war, if it's in a fairly civilized place, I can go to my 5th war. Otherwise, I'm excused.

Bing, where can people go to find you? Do you have a website or are you on social media at all? Anywhere people can go look for you?

I am incapable of that sort of stuff, Jack. So I just never got into the 21st century that way. I'm still a grunt at heart.

I don't totally blame you. If I could just sit back and write books instead, I think I would.

Yeah. By the way, the best book I ever wrote was called The Lost Platoon.

That's about Vietnam?

No, no, it was a novel. I've written several novels about Afghanistan, about Afghanistan. And what I did was I took everybody I knew so that everybody in the book is a real person. But I tried to conceal them a little bit. But And I, I set it so that this was the last platoon sent into Helmand Province. It was just supposed to be a short mission. But then I get the involvement of the president, the druggies that are there. The whole thing becomes an absolute show. But I was trying to illustrate in a 7-day window For one platoon by itself, how this all mixed up everything that happened in Afghanistan over 20 years.

I'm actually going to go pick that one. I'm going to pick that one up right now after we finish the show. That's right up my alley.

Well, I noticed yours, The Most Dangerous Man. Who is that?

Yeah, it's a Ranger. Well, yeah, see, this is the difference. I was in Ranger Battalion, so The protagonist of the book is a Ranger.

Oh, and where is he when this happens?

In this book, in West Africa.

Oh, and what years roughly?

Like contemporary.

Have you ever heard of Rudy Enders? Rudy Enders, he was the special operations, the director of the special operations group in the CIA. And he was tremendously famous in the CIA for his escapades. And one of them is when he went into Angola to bring out the last of the British mercenaries that we were paying when we cut off—

Oh, Fenway.

The money to them. And Casey sent him in to rescue them and bring them out. And he had, he had a final confrontation with Was his name Hoare? H-O-A-R?

The—

Mike Hoare?

I don't think Mike Hoare was in Angola. I think you're talking about his Fenlaw with Peter McAleese.

No, but he survived, didn't he?

Yes, he did. Peter did.

Yes. This, this, this was the one they executed.

There's George Washington Bacon, the American.

No, no, this was the Brit. This was the Brit commando leader of the mercenaries who was executed. Anyway, but Rudy pulled that caper off, got the others out, and almost had to kill him. Rudy Enders is a real classic.

That's pretty cool. I'll look that up.

Yeah.

Well, Bengt, thank you for sharing your evening with us and telling us about your life and your stories and your books. It's really great to have you on the show.

Well, I'm honored that you had me on, Jack, because you, you have some real characters on your show.

Yes, we— yes, we do. And now you're one of them.

All right.

And everyone else out there, thanks for joining us tonight. And we'll see you next time.

Thanks, Jack.

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