Trip the Beltway Fantastic With Kelley Vlahos and Friends

Did you know that your hard earned tax dollars were going to a program in which the U.S. military embeds senior officers in private companies to ostensibly learn business practices? Did you know this has been going on for the better part of 30 years and that a disproportionate number of these embeds go to major arms contractors like Boeing and Lockheeed Martin where they return, essentially as free lobbyists, to make their case for the companies’ programs and contact preferences before top brass in the E-Ring?

Brett Heinz is a Security and Foreign Influence research assistant at the Quincy Institute. He and another colleague, Ben Freeman, recently published a report— a very well researched report, entitled, Subsidizing the Military-Industrial Complex: A Review of the Secretary of Defense Executive Fellows (SDEF) Program. A pretty innocuous title, you might say, but what they found is much more compelling, and not in a good way. He joins us to talk about it today.

More from Brett Heinz:

The military is embedding officers in corporate America 

How the DC Metro is a tool for the military industrial complex

How Lockheed's $7.9B stock buyback bonanza is paid for by you

In this episode, my friends Dan Grazier and Julia Gledhill are two ace military analysts who recently shifted their work over to the Stimson Center. The pair have been critical in challenging the status quo in the military industrial complex and the monitoring the goings-on of what we call Beltway Bandits – the major defense contractors in Washington sucking our taxpayer dollars up like a hoover for well, not much true benefit in return. They fund powerful armies of lobbyists and take advantage of the congressional-Pentagon-corporate revolving door to shape beneficial policies, regulation and contracts, that — surprise — aren’t in the best interest of the American people, or even the safety and security of the nation.

Dan is a Marine Corp veteran who served as a tank commander in the Iraq  and Afghanistan Wars, and Julia is a defense budget and policy analyst who likes to dig into the shadowy numbers game in the Pentagon. 

More from them here:

Biden wants to put the US on permanent war footing (Julia)

F-35: The Part-time fighter jet (Dan)

Pentagon can't account for 63% of nearly $4 trillion in assets (Julia)

Navy Shipbuilding struggles highlight need for alternatives (Dan)

My friends Jim Antle and Curt Mills join Trip the Beltway Fantastic this week to shed light on a familiar but mostly misunderstood subject: the schism in the conservative movement over foreign policy. Mainstream media has deliberately (or due to a lack of laziness and ignorance) set the divide up thusly: Traditional hawks vs. Isolationists. We break down the false premise, but more importantly, we flesh out the real differences, and how Trump and other voices on the right have been slowly, systematically, bringing conservative foreign policy back to some clear fundamentals: U.S. interests are not better served by having an activist foreign policy out in search of monsters to destroy, seeking to spread democracy and American values abroad while ignoring liberty, prosperity and security at home.

Antle is the executive editor of the Washington Examiner.

Mills is the executive director of The American Conservative.

More from them:

How Ohio became the center of the Republican world – Mills 

The vast right-wing conspiracy 2.0, Russia edition – Antle 

Republicans could keep the House in 2024 despite dysfunction – Antle

The New Nixonians – Mills

Our guest this week is old friend Scott Horton, who is the longtime host of The Scott Horton Show, editorial director of Antiwar.com, and author of several books, including, “Enough Already: Time to End the War on Terrorism.”

Scott and I have been talking about endless U.S. wars since the mid-2000s, hammering at American policies in Iraq and Afghanistan, then later Libya and Syria. I ask him to identify the threads of Washington War Party failures from before 9/11 all the way to the conflicts in Ukraine and Israel today. 

Turns out this is the darkest daisy chain ever — myopic anti-Russia strategy, coupled with the neoconservative plans hatched under the Project for a New American Century (and even earlier) have run parallel to one another and wreaked global havoc, since the 1990’s. Today’s wars are an apotheosis, but not likely the end.

More from Scott:

Hotter Than the Sun: Time to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (2022)

Enough Already: Time to End the War on Terrorism (2021)

The Great Ron Paul: The Scott Horton Show Interviews 2004–2019 (2019)

Fool's Errand: Time to End the War in Afghanistan (2017)

Our guest for this episode is Michael Vlahos, a writer, a historian of military strategy and history, and author of the book Fighting Identity: Sacred War and World Change. Over several decades, he has taught war and strategy at Johns Hopkins University and the U.S. Naval War College, and has conducted strategic analysis for Johns Hopkins Applied Physic Laboratory. He is a weekly contributor to The John Batchelor Show, and has been publishing articles in major magazines and journals for as long as I’ve known him for 25 years as of this September. He is a non-resident fellow at the Institute for Peace and Diplomacy, and you can read his most recent work in Compact Magazine and Agon. 

Michael joined us this week to talk about proxy wars — why and how are they successful, and when do they fail? He walks us through the history of the most famous successes and failures in modern military history, and why the US is losing it’s current one today in Ukraine.

More from Michael: 

A sitdown with Col. Doug Macgregor: Four episodes

Ukraine Shares Same Fate as the South in the American Civil War

We were made for Civil War

Our guests for this episode are Katrina vanden Heuvel and James Carden, who are joining us to speak on progressives and the anti-war movement in the age of Russia gate and Trump. Vanden Heuvel and Carden experienced first-hand the brutal schism on the left over Russia, beginning with the 2014 overthrow of the pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych all the way through the Trump impeachment and the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Were these progressives ever restrainers or antiwar? How do they square their positioning on Kyiv with the calls for ceasefire in Gaza today?

Katrina is a longtime writer and author and is currently the editorial director and publisher of The Nation. James is also a writer and appears frequently in magazines on both sides of the aisle, including the American Conservative and Responsible Statecraft.

More from Katrina and James:

Where is Joe Biden’s ‘Devil’s Advocate’? (James)

10 Years Later: Maidan’s missing US history 

The Moscow Terror Attack (Katrina)

Now is not the for Ukraine to join NATO

When facts cut through the fog of war

Kelley Vlahos is back behind the mic in this exhilarating new series!