Marshall here, welcome back to the realignment. My guest today are the Quincy Institute's William

D. Hartung and Ben Freeman. They have a new book out this week, Trillion Dollar War Machine,

how runaway military spending drives America into foreign wars and bankrupts us at home.

I really enjoyed the conversation and the book. Given this podcast decently Hockus

POV, though, on paper, there isn't much for Bill Ben and I to agree on. I particularly disagree

with the book's title. I don't think we invaded Iraq, stayed in Afghanistan for 20 years,

or backed and continued to back Israel and Ukraine because of military

spending and the hint of corruption that idea suggests.

I think we've made the decisions we've made in the cases I listed above because of ideas

and our leaders differing conceptions of the threats America faces, how easily we could handle those threats

and the ever-present debates are our country's founding over America's rural in the world.

Suggesting our country's foreign policy disasters are rooted in corruption and failed audits

of Pentagon spending, make this seem like we're just another peace dividend, 1990-style,

or anti-corruption law away from never going into

Iraq again. But this is where history gets really, really interesting. Bush's Secretary of Defense,

Donald Rumsop was a huge proponent of defense reform. The day before 9-11, he gave a big speech

saying the Pentagon needed to change its ways. He canceled, bloated,

Cold War weapon systems that the Pentagon and contractors loved. He transformed the U.S. military

into a hypothetically cheaper, but definitely lighter and faster force. The Pentagon and the

defense industry brass hated him. Yet, he also was the Secretary of Defense that led us into

Iraq, where he found his cheaper, lighter military wasn't ready to occupy a country for almost a

decade. What mattered then, in my understanding of the story and the history, was not the corruption

...