Episode 915: The Trillion Dollar War Machine

Summary

Podcast Summary: Newt’s World – Episode 915: The Trillion Dollar War Machine

Date: November 29, 2025
Host: Newt Gingrich
Guests: William Hartung & Ben Freeman
Topic: How runaway U.S. military spending fuels foreign wars, shapes policy, and perpetuates inefficiency and waste.

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Episode Overview

This episode explores the central thesis of Hartung & Freeman’s new book, The Trillion Dollar War Machine: How Runaway Military Spending Drives America into Foreign Wars and Bankrupts Us at Home. Through an in-depth conversation, the hosts examine how the sprawling U.S. “military industrial complex”—from legacy defense contractors to new tech firms—leverages lobbying, bureaucracy, and cultural influence to drive nearly a trillion dollars in defense spending every year, often with little connection to genuine security needs. The episode critiques the inefficiency, vested interests, and lack of strategic clarity in American defense spending, and ponders both the challenges and possibilities for reform.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Exploding Military Budgets and Shrinking Returns

• U.S. military spending is at record highs, yet with reduced capabilities.
  • “New Pentagon spending today, adjusted for inflation, is $100 billion higher than it was at the height of the Cold War. Yet we have half the troops, half the ships, half the aircraft.” — Newt Gingrich (04:39)
• Broken Acquisition System:
  • “The way the DoD buys things is fundamentally broken. And a considerable amount of money is just simply being wasted.” — Ben Freeman (04:58)
• Complex, Overpriced Weapons:
  • “A lot of the weapons are too complex, hard to maintain, and at a certain point, quality can't make up for less of quantity.” — William Hartung (05:39)

2. Origins and Aims of the Book

• Both authors bring extensive experience to the critique.
  • Hartung: Veteran analyst, previously profiled the industry and observed shifts through decades.
  • Freeman: Sparked project after observing that “the military industrial complex of today was just a fundamentally different beast than in Eisenhower's time.” (07:36)
• Military industrial complex’s influence is deeper and more diffuse than ever, extending into tech, academia, Hollywood, and beyond.
  • “Everywhere you turned, we were seeing the military industrial complex's influence and we realized nobody had put all of these pieces together.” — Ben Freeman (08:12)

3. A "Pivotal Moment" for the Defense Industry

• The Old Guard vs. Tech Disruptors:
  • “Transition is explicitly away from the major defense contractors, the primes … towards the defense tech sector.” — Ben Freeman (10:56)
• Rising Tech, Enduring Waste:
  • Both traditional and tech startups are profiting: “A rising Pentagon budget is kind of lifting all boats.” — Ben Freeman (11:39)
• Need for New Strategies and Workforce:
  • “Of course we'll need a different kind of workforce … more involvement of our universities and AI will be suffused throughout society.” — William Hartung (12:17)

4. Lobbying, Influence, and Bureaucratic Entrenchment

• Unprecedented Lobbying Efforts:
  • “These big Pentagon contractors have 945 lobbyists. They spent $148 million in 2024 alone.” — Newt Gingrich (12:35)
• Entrenchment Makes Reform Difficult:
  • Influence is not just about money—lobbyists offer expertise, have deep relationships, and even former government officials serve as insiders to the defense industry. (13:04)
  • “The lobbyists bring expertise to the table. When they're reaching for ideas … they're more present than some other groups.” — William Hartung (13:04)
• Defense Tech Adapts the Playbook:
  • “Anduril, for example … have 42 lobbyists on their payroll right now, and that's just one firm.” — Ben Freeman (13:36)

5. The Revolving Door and Cultural Influence

• Former DoD Officials in Industry:
  • “There are 1700 former senior DoD personnel employed by the major defense contractors.” — Newt Gingrich (18:29)
• Cultural Reinforcement:
  • Hollywood and media reinforce traditional weapon systems as glamorous, making disruptive change less culturally acceptable.
  • “When we see movies like Top Gun … it's not a sex scene in Hollywood to put the drones out there. When the AI or the advanced military technology is put in a movie, it's scary.” — Ben Freeman (34:39)

6. Bureaucratic Inertia—Why Change is So Hard

• “If we reduce the Pentagon to a triangle and put the other two thirds of the building into a museum, we would actually have a better defense system in about two weeks, because so much of what we do now is just nonsensical bureaucracy.” — Newt Gingrich (06:03)
• Both authors stress that institutional interests, career paths, and entrenched job protection make rapid change daunting.

7. Technological Disruption: Drones, AI, and the End of Legacy Systems

• Drones Modernize Warfare:
  • The war in Ukraine and the Israel-Gaza conflict highlight a fundamental shift: cheap, plentiful drones level the playing field even for smaller powers.
  • “Drones are leveling the playing field a bit because not many countries could build a tank or a fighter plane, but they can make relatively cheap drones.” — William Hartung (30:49)
• Legacy Systems Are Vulnerable:
  • “If they're too exquisite and they take too long to maintain, in a war like Ukraine, it would put you at a disadvantage where Russia's cranking out stuff that may not be as technically proficient as ours, but they can do it quickly.” — William Hartung (30:49)
• Autonomous Systems Outpacing Humans:
  • “We're getting to a point where the technology of some of this equipment is exceeding what humans can withstand.” — Ben Freeman (31:51)

8. Strategic Disconnects and the Path to Reform

• Strategy Needed Over Spending:
  • “We have to generate an actual discussion about what our strategy should be. … There's not that many members who are really well informed on this.” — William Hartung (20:21)
• Public Awareness and Top-Down Reform:
  • “We have to provide the information to the public so they understand this idea that more spending equals more security … that's just not how the system works.” — Ben Freeman (21:27)
• Concrete Steps Suggested:
  • Independent testing, safeguarding against price gouging, updating technology assessment in Congress, and recruiting knowledgeable acquisition professionals.

9. Broader Risks and Eisenhower’s Warning

• System Self-Preservation vs. Public Interest:
  • “When you build huge systems that are self serving, that have a huge interest in manipulating everybody else to their advantage. You are inherently both putting your national security and your democracy and your freedom at risk.” — Newt Gingrich (37:09)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Defense Waste:
  “Show me the money. That explains a great deal of the various arguments in Washington, D.C. … under whatever the rationale, the real underlying argument is, show me the money.”
  — Newt Gingrich (19:36)

• On Tech Disruption:
  “We're getting to a point where the technology … is exceeding what humans can withstand.”
  — Ben Freeman (31:51)

• On Hollywood’s Influence:
  “Hollywood likes heroes. An unmanned vehicle is not a hero. Tom Craze, somehow winning a battle that he couldn't win in real life is a hero.”
  — William Hartung (36:42)

• On Eisenhower’s Fears:
  “… the systems that are supposed to serve us in fact have us serving them.”
  — Newt Gingrich (37:09)

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Important Timestamps

• 03:10 – Episode theme introduction by Gingrich
• 04:39 – Discussion of rising budgets and shrinking military force
• 06:03 – Gingrich’s Pentagon-as-museum analogy
• 10:56 – The post-2025 “paradigm shift” in the defense industry
• 12:35 – Outline of defense contractor lobbying power
• 18:29 – The revolving door: former DoD officials in industry
• 20:21 – On building a public discussion about national strategy
• 30:49 – Impact of drones on modern conflict
• 34:39 – Hollywood’s role in sustaining legacy weapons culture
• 37:09 – Eisenhower’s warning on the military industrial complex

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Tone & Takeaways

The episode is analytical but urgent, blending expertise with a touch of humor and cultural critique. Both caution against blind faith in spending or technology as a solution for true national security, urging greater transparency, strategy, and public engagement. The authors invite listeners to rethink what spending “buys,” emphasizing that without reform, America’s war machine may erode both its security and civic foundations.

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For more:

• The Trillion Dollar War Machine by William Hartung and Ben Freeman (2025)
• Podcast: Newt’s World

Transcript

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[Newt Gingrich]

On this episode of Newts World, America spends nearly a trillion dollars a year in its military. This extraordinary spending not only detracts from our ability to address pressing social problems, but compels us into foreign wars to justify our vast arsenal sold to us in the name of security. Our military industrial complex actually makes us far less safe. Top policy experts William Hartung and Ben Freeman follow the profits of militarism. From traditional Pentagon contractors who receive more than half of the Pentagon's budget, to the upstart high tech firms that shamelessly promote unproven and destabilizing technologies, they unmasked the enablers of the war machine. Politicians, lobbyists, the media, Hollywood think tanks, and so many more whose work enriches a wealthy elite at the expense of everybody else, spreading conflict around the world and embroiling America in endless wars. Here to discuss their new book, the Trillion Dollar War Machine, how runaway Military Spending Drives America into Foreign wars and Bankrupts us at home. I'm really pleased to welcome my guests William Hartung and Ben Freeman. Bill and Ben, thank you for joining me on Newt's World.

[William Hartung]

Yes, thank you.

[Ben Freeman]

Thanks for having us.

[Newt Gingrich]

New Pentagon spending today, adjusted for inflation, is $100 billion higher than it was at the height of the Cold War. Yet we have half the troops, half the ships, half the aircraft. How did the US End up paying more but getting so much less?

[Ben Freeman]

That stat there, that was one of the stats that really first shocked us when we started writing this book. It revealed a hidden truth behind the US Military of today, that we're spending more and more on security and getting less of it. And what our book attempts to do is explain the story why, why that is happening and how we've gotten to this point. And I think a very direct answer to your question, Newt, is that we have a broken defense acquisition system. The way the DoD buys things is fundamentally broken. And a considerable amount of money is just simply being wasted.

[William Hartung]

And the notion fewer better weapons. But a lot of the weapons are too complex, hard to maintain, and at a certain point, quality can't make up for less of quantity. Norm Augustine, the former head of Lockheed Martin, he sort of joked, at the rate we were going, in 2050, we'd have one fighter plane and the services would have to share it out over the course of the week. We're not there yet. But it was insightful in its own way.

[Newt Gingrich]

He was actually picking up on a comment by President Coolidge, who, when told they needed a certain number of planes for training, said, well, couldn't they just buy one and share it? I tell audiences all the time. I think I'm the longest serving teacher to the senior military. I've been teaching major generals on the art of war since 1983. And I routinely tell groups of military leaders, if we reduce the Pentagon to a triangle and put the other two thirds of the building into a museum, we would actually have a better defense system in about two weeks, because so much of what we do now is just nonsensical bureaucracy. What led you two to write this book?

[William Hartung]

Well, I've been writing about this issue since 1979. I worked with a guy named Gordon Adams, now, Abby Ross, who wrote a book called the Iron Triangle. It was kind of an update of status of the military industrial complex. Interesting. Many of the companies that he profiled have since been absorbed in the merger boom. And at Columbia, I studied with an engineering professor, Seymour Melmond, who had written a book, the Permanent War Economy of the United States. But I blame this all on Ben. You know, when they approach me, I'm like, I've been writing about this forever. The world's on fire. I don't have time for this. Ben wisely convinced me otherwise. And the book is far better because he's a little bit of a clear writer, less of a hothead. I think it'll reach more people. Now, I'll tell you, Newt, to be.

[Ben Freeman]

Perfectly candid, this book began by ruining a perfectly good day on a boat. You see, Bill came down to Florida, where I live on vacation, and he was on this beautiful boat ride. He was boohooing that his old publisher wanted him to write a new book. Unbeknownst to Bill, I already had a book in mind that I wanted Bill to write. And so, with a little lobbying of my own, Bill agreed to it. And the book I wanted Bill to write, which he has ultimately very kindly wrote me into writing with him. The reason I thought this book had to be written was that the military industrial complex of today was just a fundamentally different beast than in Eisenhower's time. And we were documenting A lot of this influence at the Quincy Institute, we were seeing the military industrial complexes overlap with the foreign influence industry. You know, foreign governments, lobbyists working together with defense contractors to push arms sales. And we were seeing the think tank influenced by defense contractors. We were seeing their influence at universities, Hollywood on the D.C. metro, for crying out loud. Just everywhere you turned, we were seeing the military industrial complex's influence and we realized nobody had put all of these pieces together. And so that's where this book really started. We wanted to provide people with this holistic look of the military industrial complex, including the defense tech sector, which Bill had also been covering in great detail too.

[William Hartung]

And I would say that sector, even since we started the book, has mushroomed. I was a little bit out of the mix because I was still stuck talking about the old guard, like Lockheed Martin, which I wrote a book about. There really is a competition, although they may sort of pay off both sides through big projects like Golden Dome, even the new fighter planets, you know, Unmanned Wingman. So that whole drama, I think, is going to be critical. And I think Ben has more of a sense that there's positives in that. You need powerful companies to dislodge powerful companies and to create competition. The question is, what are they offering? How do we know if it's going to work? How does it fit into our strategies? I think we're kind of a pivotal moment, probably more so than we realized when we started the book.

[Newt Gingrich]

When you say we're at a pivotal moment, what do you mean?

[William Hartung]

Well, I think, love it or not, we're not as powerful as we once were. There's power in the world is diffuse. The challenges are hard. I mean, Russia, invasion of Ukraine, the situation of Israel, Gaza, how do we address the challenge from China? And now the new focus on Latin America, what they're calling the Don Row Doctrine, Donald Trump and Monroe mash up. And then domestically, there's a lot of division. Our economy is not as strong as it was. It's especially not serving certain parts of the working class who used to have good paying manufacturing jobs. All that's in the mix. And part of that is, all right, what's our strategy? And also how does the Pentagon budget and the military fit into what kind of society, what kind of economy, how do we want to educate and train the next generation? And then, you know, more narrowly, just this new fight between the big contractors which formed in the 90s during the merger boom. I think this is the biggest moment in the defense industrial base since then.

[Ben Freeman]

I really think that last Comment of Bill's is really the key there. And I think that is the reason we're going to look back on 2025 specifically as the year where the defense industry fundamentally changed. There's a paradigm shift that's been under the last nine months under the Trump administration. And that transition is explicitly away from the major defense contractors, the primes who rose up during the 90s defense consolidation that Bill mentioned. And if that was a defense industry consolidation, I think we're in the midst of a defense industry displacement where those old guard firms to some extent or another are actively being pushed around, at least if not completely pushed under by the defense tech sector. And to Bill's point, I was perhaps a little optimistic, a little too optimistic if I'm critical of myself, about the rise of them being able to push out the defense contractors. But what we're seeing is that a rising Pentagon budget is kind of lifting all boats. And so the old guards getting plenty of money and the defense tech startups are getting more and more money. But I think as we transition to the future, we're going the way of a more sophisticated defense industry. And so I think the old guard defense firms are in big trouble.

[William Hartung]

And there's no question we have to integrate new technology. It's just how do we do it? How much hope do we put in it? What's the strategy? And of course we'll need a different kind of workforce. There'll be more involvement of our universities and AI will be suffused throughout society. So how do the military uses relate to the broader uses?

[Newt Gingrich]

One of the things which explains part of this, you all made the case that these big Pentagon contractors have 945 lobbyists. They spent $148 million in 2024 alone. So they have about two lobbyists and $275,000 per member of Congress, which makes reform pretty tricky because you're clearly going uphill against a Praetorian guard protecting the past.

[William Hartung]

Yeah, and as Ben points out, in addition to money, a lot of the Hill is run by 23 to 25 year olds and they have to deal with a whole range of issues. So in addition to money, the lobbyists bring expertise to the table. When they're reaching for ideas, for framing, they're more present than some other groups that don't have as many lobbyists as much money. And there's kind of that interaction. A lot of them came from government. They have expertise. So sometimes they control the discussion internally as well as whatever money they spend.

[Ben Freeman]

I love your Reference to the Praetorian Guard, Newt. I similarly call it the autoimmune response at DoD when it comes to buying stuff where you know, when innovation comes in and automatically they're just swarming to crush that and fight that innovative thing off. That's not part of what they're producing. And it is to your point too. It is the fact that they have that autoimmune response because they have the lobbyist, they have the lobby, they have all this other influence too, think tanks and elsewhere, which we point out. I will say this, the new guard, they know the game and they're starting to play it more and more. Andarill for example, which is a very big player in this new defense tech surge. They have 42 lobbyists on their payroll right now and that's just one firm, one of the defense tech firms. They're leaning into the jobs argument too, creating a big facility in a swing state like Ohio. So you're seeing the defense tech firms create this lobbying and influence campaign of their own. So I think at the very least they're going to to push back on the Praetorian Guard as you put it.

[William Hartung]

And there's a new revolving door, ex military folks, not going directly to the startups, but to the VC firms that fund them. And as a former head of procurement of the Pentagon said, you could cash in big time if one of your investments hits more than making a couple hundred thousand. As a board member, Palantir recruited Mike Gallagher who ran the Congressional China Committee and interestingly he's in his 40s. A lot of times people do it later in their career, but he's sort of staking to centigrade his career and this connection.

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[Newt Gingrich]

The Japanese used to of this tradition that bureaucrats worked for a limited salary, but then they got absorbed into these very big companies had amazing salaries once they retired. And to some extent we fit that. I mean, one of the points you all make is that I think there are 1700 former senior DoD personnel employed by the major defense contractors, according to a government accountability study. There's a whole process here which I find challenging. There's something wrong if somebody is arguing for an inferior weapon or an inferior system for profit reasons in a way which actually weakens our capacity to defend ourselves.

[William Hartung]

Yeah, and Congress plays a role because sometimes the Pentagon wants to get rid of something and they put it back. So military reform becomes either harder or harder, more expensive. And then internally, for example, of course, Air Force pilots are not thrilled with the move towards unmanned systems. Some of them call the drone operators the chair force.

[Newt Gingrich]

Let's say that I agree with your general concern. It's too bureaucratic, it is too driven by non defense interests. I always tell people that Jerry Maguire, the movie in which the agent, the football player keeps saying to him, I want you to yell, show me the money. That explains a great deal of the various arguments in Washington, D.C. that under whatever the rationale, the real underlying argument is, show me the money. And it's true in healthcare, it's true in defense. It's true, sadly, at NASA where we have been funding a Boeing project that is absurd and amazingly indefensible, but the politicians sustain it. How do you break through that kind of a system?

[William Hartung]

I think part of it is somehow we have to generate an actual discussion about what our strategy should be. I know you were part of the military reform movement which tried to power through a lot of this. We could use that again. There's not that many members who are really well informed on this. And a lot of them spend more time trying to protect many other states or districts than talking strategy or how to do things better. And then in the Pentagon, some people are attached to the existing bureaucracy. There's jobs, there's careers, there's others who would like to innovate. So I think one of it is just a national discussion about strategy, about technology. The alert and knowledgeable citizenry that Eisenhower talked about, obviously that's difficult now. I mean, there's mis and disinformation, there's conspiracy theories, there's division. Everybody reads their own information sources. I think we might need something old school, like meeting people, teach ins, or even podcasts where you can have a longer conversation. So that's a little bit independent of the money. And I think that's a piece of it.

[Ben Freeman]

I think Bill's right. You need that. You need a top down and a bottom up approach here. Like, this is a big wasteful monster we're trying to slay here. And at the end of the day, as we point out in the book, it doesn't make America saf safer. And you know, a lot of cases, it makes America less safe. And so we have to provide the information to the public so they understand this idea that more spending equals more security. It's who we. That's just not how the system works. And then to explain to them how their tax dollars are being wasted. And I think there's an opportunity for that in the near future where you're seeing people worried about their healthcare premiums going up, quadrupling, or even more, in some cases going up. And the inflation putting food on the table is getting harder and harder, yet at the same were willing to spend billions of dollars on what's basically a failed F35 program. I think pointing out those disconnects is key. And getting people mad about it's going to be key. Then top down, I think you really have to have a true Doge at dod. You know, when Doge came around, I think a lot of us in this community that knew there was all this wasteful spending at DOD were just waiting for Elon Musk and his folks to get to dod because, you know, we were just sitting there saying, man, if you want government waste, go to the largest government bureaucracy. It's loaded with waste. Folks in the military will tell you how much wasteful spending there is. Yet when Doge went to DoD, they barely found the change in the couch cushions. They didn't cut hardly anything from dod. I think you need somebody to come in and really do that to get meaningful reform.

[William Hartung]

And I think you need intelligent efficiency. There's all kinds of paperwork which I think the big firms hide behind. You know, they hire former acquisition officials. They make it hard to enter the field. But I think to do it, you couldn't do it in three months. I think you would have had to study what works and what doesn't work in the various bureaucracies. And of course it would be a huge fight to make those changes. And I don't know that many people who would know, well, okay, what does work, what doesn't work? I think you do want independent testing. You want safeguards against price gouging. You want to be able to be flexible, to adapt technology to changing circumstances. If it takes 20 years to develop something, you really can't do that. But I think we need some of those former acquisition officials to tell us what they think would work. I think we need Congress to be more cognizant. They used to have an Office of Technology Assessment given that a lot of the new stuff is tech based. I would like the government to have the expertise to evaluate all that, but it might be controversial because it might cost a little money to keep people with that expertise in government rather than industry. There's a lot to think about, but because it's in flux and there are possibly this clash between the new guard and the old guard. Anduril has a manifesto called Arsenal Democracy 2.0 and its critique of the current system is pretty good. I mean, you know, we could have probably written it. What's the new system and what is going to work and not work and what are the safeguards and the strategy. So there is some hope in that change because we can't really have a military based on 20th century technology.

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[Newt Gingrich]

Part of that is the technologies are changing so rapidly. If you look at what's happened with drones in Ukraine on both sides, Russia and Ukraine, that forces profound rethinking of how we set up operations, at least for the moment. These drones have given an enormous advantage to the defense and have made the classic armored warfare that we like up through the Iraqi campaign basically not sustainable because the tanks just get killed. And yet you're both taking on the armored community and you're taking on the piloted aircraft community. If you say, let's really study, what I understand first became obvious in a fight between Azerbaijan and Armenia where the Azerbaijanis had mastered this technology and just massacred the Armenians. And that was the forerunner, which the Russians obviously had not studied, or they would have realized that running down the road towards Kiev, large armored columns was going to be a nightmare and a disaster. But if you look at the American system right now, to go in and suggest that scale of change arouses so much opposition and I am puzzled about the whole program of a next generation fighter and a next generation bomber when I'm looking at the rise of automated systems and you mentioned Anduro earlier, they have this ghost shark automated submarine which when you take out the Human in a submarine, and the amount of space that a human needs, and the amount of support that a human needs, and the dining room and everything else, you suddenly get a radically smaller vehicle that actually carries far more torpedoes. And as I understand it in the unclassified information, the Ghost Shark that they're building for Australia basically can go out about 1800 miles autonomously by itself. If you wanted to really screw up any Chinese communist effort to invade Taiwan, it wouldn't take very many Ghost Sharks to simply make it impossible to cross the 140 miles of the Straits of Taiwan. But we invest huge amounts in exquisite tax submarines that are nuclear powered and have brilliant crews. But you have to ask yourself in the next cycle, is that the right investment? And because all of the senior admirals will have come out of traditional ships, how hard is it going to be to get them to stop and say, you know, maybe we're in a different world now?

[William Hartung]

Yeah, and there's a couple things. One is, I think drones are leveling the playing field a bit because not many countries could build a tank or a fighter plane, but they can make relatively cheap drones. Israel, Turkey, Iran, Ukraine also has a parallel DIY program where they take Chinese drones, put weapons and cameras, and if it's a suicide drone, that does the trick. So some of these legacy systems, they wouldn't fare well in a new approach. They don't give you as much an advantage as maybe they did in the past. And I think there's got to be a range. I mean, if they're too exquisite and they take too long to maintain, in a war like Ukraine, it would put you at a disadvantage where Russia's cranking out stuff that may not be as technically proficient as ours, but they can do it quickly.

[Newt Gingrich]

I was just going to say the sheer number of drones that the Ukrainians are going to make in house this year is a revolution in capability. We never see anything like it.

[William Hartung]

No, these aren't just victory guards. These are weapons of war.

[Ben Freeman]

The Ukraine conflict is fundamentally changing conflict, and not just that conflict. You're seeing this in Israel, Gaza too. And I think to your point, Nu, you know, as much as we might love our friends and family in the US Navy and the US Air Force, for that matter, we're getting to a point where the technology of some of this equipment is exceeding what humans can withstand, I wrote in the book about flying with the Thunderbirds, a special guest with them. And, you know, when you do that, you go through, you know, like a half day training on how to make sure. You don't pass out even in a, you know, a flyover. You know, we were not in combat or, you know, we were going to do a flyover. And you get very serious training on how not to pass out, you know, from the GS. And that's in an F60 that doesn't have the speed of an F22 or an F35, let alone future aircraft. So very quickly getting to a point where the human body just can't withstand the capabilities of the technology that we have. And we have to recognize that, because if we don't recognize it, America's adversaries certainly are, and they're going to be creating these unmanned systems with greater capabilities than our manned systems.

[Newt Gingrich]

It's a little bit like when we went into Iraq. I think in retrospect we should have expected that you would get IEDs and other kinds of low cost but very deadly operations. And at the time, I think it was a shock to us. We were fully prepared to fight a traditional war against a traditional opponent and we would win it. And I remember I happened to be in Australia about five months before we went into Iraq and was at dinner with the head of the Australian military. And I said, if you were faced with the problem of defeating the United States, what would you do? How would you try to do it? And he said, I wouldn't. He said, it's inconceivable in a normal traditional war that I'm going to be able to beat the 96. So I would invest in guerrilla capabilities. I would have lots of equipment that was decentralized. I would assume we're going to lose round one, and then I'd be available to make round two really painful. And I thought that was just so totally outside the way we thought of. And then of course, that's what happened.

[William Hartung]

And sometimes they measure power by money. The US Spends more than the next ex countries involved. But if you're buying the wrong things, money is not the issue. If there's asymmetric warfare, different levels of morale, I mean, the revolution of military affairs was supposed to be we have superior information, superior networks, superior precision guided munitions. But in Iraq, that didn't get the job done. Or for example, the bombing of the Houthis, the cost exchange was not great. Some of our misses were a few million dollars. Theirs were cheap. So even just economically sustaining some of these wars is a challenge.

[Ben Freeman]

To your point there, Bill, and to your point, Newt, I think part of the system that's in place we talk about a lot in the book is how Hollywood has helped to perpetuate this and help to keep that old guard going. When we see movies like Top Gun And Top Gun 2, these are movies with pilots in seats, with butts in seats. It's not a sex scene in Hollywood to put the drones out there. Very often when the AI or the advanced military technology is put in a movie, it's scary. It's Terminator 2, you know, it's cyberdyne systems trying to end humanity as we know it. And so again, there's this built in autoimmune function in the cultural part of the MIC that is repelling the technological transition.

[William Hartung]

And some of these weapons that don't function well in reality are killing it. In the movies.

[Newt Gingrich]

When I saw a second Top Gun, they were trying to use basically obsolete tactical aircraft to penetrate. And I said at the time, well before what happened, you know, in the real world you'd use B2 bombers and you would have such precision that in fact you would penetrate the target instantaneously with zero risk. And it occurred to me just listening to you guys, and I hope this is not an inappropriate thought, but because these guys are obviously extraordinarily well trained and they practice and they're very, very courageous. But if you actually tried to film the B2 assault on Iran, the number of hours of just flying, you couldn't make a very interesting documentary. Now it had taken the Israeli air force to degrade and destroy the Iranian air defense system, which they did pretty successfully. But the net effect was, you know, we sent seven vehicles a long distance, they refueled a number of times, they got to the right target area, there was no effective anti aircraft capability. They took out the SEIs and then they flew home.

[William Hartung]

Yeah, and even in Iraq and Afghanistan a lot of the casualties were just transporting things. And so the Pentagon became interested in modular solar and so forth, which I think there's still some interest in, even though in some circles alternative energy has a bad name. So there's a lot in that. And of course Hollywood likes heroes. An unmanned vehicle is not a hero. Tom Craze, somehow winning a battle that he couldn't win in real life is a hero.

[Newt Gingrich]

That's right. If every citizen could read your new book the Trillion Dollar War Machines and How Runaway Military Spending Drives America into Foreign wars and Bankrupts Us at Home. I think just in terms of starting the conversation and picking up on what Eisenhower tried to warn us about, that when you build huge systems that are self serving, that have a huge interest in manipulating everybody else to their advantage. You are inherently both putting your national security and your democracy and your freedom at risk. And Eisenhower, who of course had been a career soldier, a West Point graduate, five star general, I think he genuinely had a fear that we had now gotten into a cycle where the systems that are supposed to serve us in fact have us serving them. And I think your book helps make that point. So I encourage everybody to take a look at the trillion dollar war machine. Bill and Ben, I really want to thank you for taking the time to to share with us and I think it's a very important conversation. Thank you both for joining me and I think this was a very, very good conversation.

[Ben Freeman]

Thank you so much.

[William Hartung]

Yes, thank you.

[Newt Gingrich]

Thank you to my guests Bill Hartung and Ben Freeman. Newts World is produced by Gingrich360 and iHeartMedia. Our executive producer is Garnesey Sloan. Our researcher is Rachel Peterson. The artwork for the show was created by Steve Penley. Special thanks to the team at Gingrich 360. If you've been enjoying Newtsworld, I hope you'll go to Apple Podcast and both rate us with five stars and give us a review so others can learn what it's all about. Join me on [e-mail] I'm Newt Gingrich. This is Newt's World.

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[William Hartung]

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[Ben Freeman]

But wait, there's more.

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[Podcast Host]

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