E237 - Inside the American War Machine w/ Ben Freeman and William Hartung

American Prestige

Daniel Bessner & Derek Davison

History, News, Politics

4.8 • 1.2K Ratings

🗓️ 17 February 2026

⏱️ 64 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Subscribe now to skip the ads. Derek and Danny are joined by Bill Hartung and Ben Freeman to discuss the system that drives permanent war for the United States. They talk about the growth of the Pentagon budget and the bipartisan politics of defense spending; the U.S. dominating the global arms trade and the prevalence of U.S. weapons around the world; the rise of defense tech companies and the relationship between Silicon Valley and the Pentagon; the structure of defense lobbying, foreign government lobbying for arms sales, and how contractors benefit; think tank funding, Pentagon involvement in Hollywood and gaming; and public opinion, the national debt, and whether structural change is possible. Read their book The Trillion Dollar War Machine. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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1:05.0	It's Derek, joined as always by my friend and comrade Danny Bessner, and we are very pleased to welcome back to the program to distinguished returning guests. William Hartung, a senior fellow at the Quincy Institute,
1:15.6	Ben Friedman is director of the democratizing foreign policy program at Quincy. They are the co-authors
1:21.9	of the trillion-dollar war machine, how runaway military spending drives America into foreign wars and bankrupts us at home,
1:29.6	which we're here to talk about today. And I guess my first question is now that we have a president
1:36.1	who's openly pining for a $1.5 trillion military, do you guys feel like you sure changed yourselves
1:41.9	with the title of the book? Well, there's this number
1:46.4	of answers. Ben, do you want to go first? You want me to go ahead? Well, we plan for this. We're putting
1:53.1	out a sticker series where when the budget changes, you can plaster it on the front of the book.
1:59.3	It's 39-99 for a year.
2:02.7	And we're optimist.
2:04.7	There's also, like if it goes down to 500 billion,
2:07.6	there's a sticker for that, although only one.
	...

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