Cage Fight with Bruce Thornton

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Hello, and welcome to the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

Victor is an author, scholar, columnist, essayist, political and cultural critic, and as we like to say here at the podcast, an unwitting provocateur of the left.

So today we have a special show.

We have with us Bruce Thornton.

He is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution and he has a new book out.

I was going to put the in front of it.

And we had a long discussion of the word the in a recent podcast, but it's called Cage Fight: Civilian and Democratic Pressures on Military Conflicts and Foreign Policy.

Bruce is also the author of,

I counted about six books.

I hope I don't know.

No, no, I'm interjecting.

He has 10.

10 books.

Oh, I missed some of them.

The Hoover site is being

not generous to you.

then, Bruce.

You need to have those.

I know Sammy, but you could have asked me.

I was his colleague for 22 years.

I've known him for 40 years.

I would have politely told you with a little bit of research.

All right.

So he has a book out called Greek Ways: How the Greeks Created Western Civilization, Searching for Joaquin.

It's about Joaquin Marietta, Decline and Fall in Europe's Slow Motion Suicide.

And he wrote very, very early on in his career, he wrote an especially good book that Victor often mentions all the time.

It's called Eros,

The Myth of Ancient Greek Sexuality.

So hopefully today, sometime they'll be discussing that.

But those are Bruce's works.

And Victor, of course, is the Martin and Nealey Anderson Senior Fellow in Military History and Classics at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marsha Busky Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

So we are going to take a break and then come right back and talk to Bruce for the 45 minutes or so here.

We'll be right back.

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Welcome back.

So, Bruce, Bruce, welcome to you.

We're glad to have you with us.

Very excited about this new book.

Victor, I think I'll let you take it from here.

Okay, I'd like to remind everybody that Bruce works at the Hoover Institution.

He's been there for over a decade, and he was a colleague of mine at Cal State Fresno.

We met, I think, almost 39 years ago.

Yeah.

40 years ago.

And we were both part-time exploited lecturers.

He was in the English department.

I was in the department of what became modern and classical languages, but then it was called the Department of Foreign Languages.

And I lived on a farm and I was from rural Salma, and he thought that that was less prestigious.

His family had grown up in a cattle ranch

next to Easton, Easton, California.

And I reminded him that when we wrestled Easton,

we came out of the gym and all of the tires on our bus were.

So Salma was a cut above Easton.

Oh, three cuts above.

Yeah.

So, anyway,

and then

as a colleague,

we created this classical languages program, which

I left in 2004 and Bruce continued it.

He's been the chairman of the Foreign Language Department, Modern and Classical Languages.

And

I think everybody reads him often because He writes for front page,

a weekly column or two, but it appears it's picked up a lot of places.

And you probably have seen it on Real Curve Politics or sometimes people at Power Line cross-list it.

So look out for that.

And I think

Sammy was right.

He's written a lot of books.

One of them, I mean, think of the diversity there.

One was on Joaquin Marietta, the bandito, if I could use that term without disparagement, in the 19th century.

The myth of Joaquin, searching for Joaquin, ancient Greek sexuality.

He wrote, well before Douglas Murray did, he wrote a book called The Slow Motion Suicide of Europe, which was an analysis of why the EU would eventually lead to economic and demographic stagnation.

It was a very good book.

He wrote a book on a handbook on the humanities.

He's written on a whole range of topics, as well as being a contemporary

commentator in his columns and op-eds.

And then he's a member of the Military History Working Group at

the Hoover Institution, where he's the he and David Berkey and I run the program.

But

we're having him here because

The whole controversy over January 6th was looked at in isolation.

And so what he did is he took a group of our finest scholars at the military history working group and i think all of you remember ralph peters he was he was a commentator on bill o'reilly a lot very bright guy and he looked and the the the title is called cage fl

cage fight but i don't think it does justice myself i know you don't take it badly bruce but i i think your original title was superior but nevertheless

He looks at civil dissension in the Civil War.

And then Paul Ray, I think everybody knows that monumental work work he wrote on Republic's Ancient and Modern.

My God, it's 400,000 words.

And he looked at the civil-military relations and the tensions in ancient Athens, especially over the execution of the generals after the Argonusai, so-called affair.

And then we have former Colonel Peter Monsour, who was the chief of staff for David Petraeus in Iraq, and he's got a question on military dissent

from the military side, you know, for things like the MacArthur problem in peacetime.

And then the world's expert on the Luftwaffe, I think everybody by mutual acclamation knows it's Williamson Murray or Wick Murray, as he's known by.

And he writes about the Cold War, American isolation, and the Korean War.

And then Bruce Scott, Bing West, and I know you've, you know, the strongest tribe, he wrote a series of books based on his firsthand experience on the ground, both in Iraq and Afghanistan.

And of course, he was a decorated combat veteran in the Vietnam War.

And he looked at American objectives and the war and dissent.

And then I wrote an epilogue about the civil, civilian-military relations

in the news.

And i.e.,

it touches on things like generals one to three, four-star commenting in violation of Article 88 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice that were criticizing their commander-in-chief in a way that I think fits a definition of disparagement and things like Mark Milley calling his PL.

So, the whole topic of what is the tension between generals and admirals and civilian control in a democracy is what Bruce explored.

And then Bruce wrote the introduction and edited it all.

And so, with that introduction,

What did you find out?

What did you find out, or Bruce,

what is similar, different,

or irrelevant about the present status of this tension we're seeing, especially during the Trump administration, vis-à-vis what has happened in past Western consensual societies?

Well, thank you for having me on the show.

And since you brought up the subject of my race yesterday,

I would hope I'm forgiven for mentioning a couple other books, The Wages of Appeasement

and Democracy's Dangers and Discontents, which overlap a lot of

what we're talking about.

What I wanted to do in the introduction

is to

give a larger context for

this issue

because it arises out of what Churchill and the Gathering Storm called the structures of democracy.

Now, you know, we're all democracy, yay, democracy is great, you know, but that's

two things.

One, that's a misunderstanding of the kind of political system we actually have.

And also,

all the way up through the founding period and even beyond, democracy was not something you wanted to

emulate.

In fact, the founders

Part of the divided government and the separation of powers was also to acknowledge democracy, which we get in the House of Representatives, and then what we might call an aristocracy or an elite that was the Senate, and then

quotation Marx King, which we have in the

president.

But there's

all these dimensions of it that, and it's a paradox,

that guarantee or make sure we are free from tyranny.

But in times of war, then there's a stressful relationship between those structures and the military.

So, if we think about what are the defining characteristics

of our system,

you start with

regularly scheduled elections.

which is meant to keep circulating and shifting those who

are part of the government and rule,

and also to hold them accountable

for what they've done.

They have to go face in our system every two years.

You got to go face the people in an election.

The

other

factor is the First Amendment.

The right of the people to communicate, excuse me, communicate publicly

their displeasure

um

with

the decisions being made including the decisions being made by the military and the government controlling the military when you talk about the first amendment if i can interject yeah

and that doesn't quite apply equally to members of the uniformed military who are right to the chain of command.

And I think since 1950, we have this uniform code of military justice that kind of codified everything.

But that's a tension.

That's a source of tension.

Exactly.

To what degree can somebody criticize the civilian overmaster?

Sort of like, remember the Burt Lancaster, Kirk Douglas, seven days in May.

Seven days in May.

Yeah.

Yeah, that's exactly right.

And I was going to say.

That also

has

a sort of tension because,

like you said,

our service members, our officers, our brass, they're all American citizens too, yet they have a kind of hierarchical structure, the chain of command

that is

alien to the spirit of representative government, and particularly in the United States, where we are a people

who don't like being told what to do by other people who think they're better than we are.

And historically,

this came in the American Revolution with the Patriot Army, the Continental Army, which is modeled more on a typical

structured

army,

and the militias of the colonies.

There was this tension between the two because the militiamen, they elected their own officers

because in that spirit of localism, of, you know, I'm not bossed around by somebody I didn't choose.

So that's an that shows that.

I asked you a question at this point.

So

when you edited this, and we start with references to the Revolution, we go through the Civil War and then through the modern period.

We have all of these.

The people you selected to participate all have different political views.

It's a very diverse group.

They, you know, there's

no.

and some of them,

the majority of them, I should say, were in the military: a Wick Murray, a Bing West, a Ralph Peterson.

But when you look at all of this and you superimpose that paradigm on, and I try to do it a little bit in the epilogue, but when you look at all this controversy, I don't remember any time other than the

MacArthur-Truman Wars of 1950-51 that we had this tension between

a Mark Milley and a Donald Trump, or the chairman, the whole Joint Chiefs, or a Barry McCaffrey, or a Jim Mattis, or

it was just something like I'd never seen before.

And was this unusual, or

from what these scholars said,

was this able to be handled by the existing framework?

I mean, it didn't seem that anybody that was vocal was subject to the application of the Uniform Code of Military Justice.

And then we yeah, and

probably a lot of that could be a reflection of, you know, a mass communication more intrusive

than it was.

It creates incentives.

for careerists and opportunists who

want attention or political approval from one party rather than the other.

I think a lot of it recently was just the Trump phenomenon.

I was going to ask you.

I have to go back to Andrew Jackson to

find that sort of just

irrational

hatred of a candidate that overrode what perhaps some of these people would have known is,

you know, what would have happened outside the bounds of their position?

What would have happened, let's say, in the dark days of the writing of that summer of 2020, when in succession, I'll just give you some examples.

When the former director of the CIA, Michael Hayden, tweeted out a picture of a cage and then said that essentially in the tweet, that Trump was adopting the protocols of Auschwitz.

He was a four-star retired Air Force officer, as I remember.

And then we had someone like Admiral McCraven, who I've met.

He's a very distinguished guy, but he wrote an op-ed

and basically said that Donald Trump should be gone, even though there was a regular scheduled election.

The sooner, the better.

And then we had,

I think

We had

General McCaffrey said that Trump was a veritable Mussolini.

I think Stanley McChrystal said that he was a liar.

I think General Mattis suggested that he was emulating the ideologies of the people who were on the other side of the beach on D-Day.

And when you, and then if you, if you, in addition to that, 11 days into the Trump administration, Rosa Brooks wrote in Foreign Policy that there would be, that after 11 days, so we didn't know much about what Trump was going to do, that he should be removed.

And one of the options was impeachment, which he thought would be too lengthy.

The second was non-composment

declaration under the 25th Amendment, which he said would be too cumbersome.

And the third was a military coup.

And then we had during that period in 2020,

And I'm going to get your answer on the other side of our break, but in 2020, you remember that we had those two colonels.

one of them was very decorated and said that donald trump should be removed from office by the military and joe biden then said that four former joint chiefs chairs of the joint chiefs would help him get march him out of the white house if he didn't move

And we put all of that together.

And my question in a second is based on what you, your research and all of this contribution that you edited, what would have happened if Donald Trump said, as commander-in-chief, you people have all violated the Uniform Code of Military Justice, and therefore, because you're subject to recall and you're under government pensions, and it's been adjudicated prior that even retired officers have to adhere to the code, that I am dismissing you and court-martialing you?

He wouldn't do that.

I wouldn't do that.

And I'll get your response in a minute.

So

we're with Bruce Thornton.

He He has a PhD in comparative literature as well as an undergraduate degree in classics and Latin.

And

he's branched out a great deal from his work on classical languages, classical history, to things like, I think you should all, I didn't mention it earlier, but you should all look at his book on appeasement, especially what we saw in the 30s, but that had antecedents.

back with Philip of Macedon and the famous exchanges that Demosthenes had warning Athenians about him and their wages of appeasement and then the appeasement of the Islamic world.

Take a break and we'll come right back.

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And we're back again.

And so Bruce, what would have happened if he took the letter of the law literally, Trump did, and tried to apply the code to people who had

by any fair definition, had disparaged their commander-in-chief while they were subject to the code?

Well,

there would be legal challenges to that, obviously.

They go court shopping and

find a friendly judge or a friendly court that would enjoy it.

But haven't the courts been pretty clear that they don't intervene?

Exactly.

Yeah, they don't want him.

They don't want to intervene.

Yeah,

I think it would have been

really interesting to see what what would have happened had he done that.

Did you?

Well, yeah, it would have been.

Let me ask you another question.

When Mark Milley,

it was, I guess, Bob Woodward or somebody leaked that he had called his Chinese counterpart in the People Liberation Army and said,

if Donald Trump issues an order putting this on high nuclear order, I will warn you, i.e., he's not stable.

Right, right.

Alert them.

Yes.

And in addition to that, the second part of that disclosure was even though the joint chiefs by statute are not allowed to interfere in the chain of command, they're not in the chain, they're entirely

advisory officials, but he called in the theater commanders and said, if you get an order, a legal order from the commander-in-chief to the secretary of defense directly to you as...

is has to be that's the law you have to report to me first that seems to me almost insurrectionary.

It's against the law for that to happen.

What would have happened?

Did you think at that point that he had overstepped his military parameters and should have been removed?

Of course.

Yeah.

Why do you think he was not removed?

It was a political

pre-election

decision that Trump made that it would be too controversial.

Right.

Again, I think that's the

two things.

The

somewhat deleterious role of the media, which has expanded with the internet, with social media particularly.

It offers the

ambitious,

you know, a platform that you go back even 50 years and it

couldn't have had the same sort of impact, or it wouldn't have been done, number one.

I think it didn't.

It goes back to the uniqueness of the Trump phenomenon.

And by that, I mean the

hysterical

anger and hatred that it

roused in a lot of people, and particularly the media, and particularly the elites.

I mean,

the top brass, the officer corps.

They're part of the, what I call the bipartisan cognitive elite, the people that run

Leviathan, the big government, the big government agencies.

We have to remember that the military are housed in government agencies, and that means they suffer the deleterious effects of agencies, what

I never remember his name, a French social theorist called professional deformation.

Basically,

rather than the function, they were created to serve, the existence and expansion and power and privilege of the agency becomes their top loyalty.

And that means that

the party in power

is who they look to.

So, for example, the whole introduction of woke nonsense on transsexual and systemic race theory,

which is

harmful for our military preparedness in terms of getting young people to sign up for the military,

that affects our security and national security and national interest.

So they've been absorbed into that.

And whatever the narrative of that group is,

it doesn't matter what the rules are.

It doesn't matter what, you know,

that they've sworn an oath to the Constitution.

That's another thing to remember.

It's also a violation of their oath to the Constitution.

I think that

you take Trump out of the equation.

I would bet that little of that would have happened the way it did.

I think when I read the essay by Williamson-Murray and we revisited the December firing of MacArthur, the subtext of that was, remember that he kept giving a whole series.

It was not unlike the generals who were very vocal in their interviews with the media, but he did something similar, although he was on active duty.

And he said that we cannot win this war.

And partly

he was culpable because he was the one that went up to the Yallo River, you know, that Korea expands as the peninsula gets wider.

It was colder at the end of the year, and he got trapped.

And then he wanted to have flights into Manchuria, bomb the industrial base of China, even spread nuclear waste along the board.

He had all these ideas to win.

There's no substitute for victory.

And then he was removed and the joint chiefs reviewed and Truman asked,

you know, he said, I want the Joint Chiefs to look at this.

They looked at it.

Omar Bradley said they should have fired him a long time ago.

They fired him.

There was a howl.

Truman went out of office, you know, in 52.

Eisenhower really demagogued that, but Eisenhower didn't do anything differently when he went in.

He did the same Truman policy and he didn't go back across the 38 peril.

Even Matthew Ridgway, who saved Korea, didn't.

But my point is,

when MacArthur then went to have his Fifth Avenue parade and all that, Truman went out of office with 22%.

It's the lowest, it was lower than Dick Nixon popularity.

Everybody, even when MacArthur in the Senate hearings,

the joint Senate and House here,

he didn't have any answers when they asked him, how would you win the Korean War and this and that?

And would it start a nuclear war?

He didn't do well.

But nevertheless, he was still much more popular than Harry Truman.

So I guess, and Trump was about as or as not popular as Truman was.

But if Trump had have done that, I guess.

I guess they would have impeached him?

What would they have done?

Or he wouldn't, he thought he wasn't going to win the 2020 election because

he had dismissed.

And there was a whole other civilian military, do you remember that also touched upon this when we had former military officers

like James Clapper, to take one example, who had lied under oath to the U.S.

Senate when he said that he gave the least untruthful answer when asked if the National Security Agency spies on Americans, which they do, and he lied about it, and he was a four-star.

But my point is that during this period, he said that Donald Trump was a quote-Russian asset, basically a traitor.

And at that point, you remember Trump raised the issue of why Brennan and he were enjoying security clearances as retired,

either a CIA or retired military, and they shouldn't have these security clearances.

And he yanked Brennan's.

But it seems to me that

from what

your introduction and what people said, we've gone way

over now with allowing unelected people, be they in the CIA or the FBI or the Pentagon, to enjoy a level of almost, I don't say, insurrectionary,

I don't want to use that word, but

a level of dissent that borders really on an ideological crusade against the commander-in-chief that's in the department.

Yeah, exactly.

That's what, you know,

it created a whole new rationale for what people may have wanted to do in the past and occasionally did.

But the anti-Trump, never-Trump, or I call it Trumpophobia, you know, pandemic or epidemic

gave a specious justification for it.

And,

you know, that it was the higher's duty to remove this,

what they call a buffoon, an amateur, a Vulgarian, vragadocious reality star,

reality television star,

to get rid of it.

And from my perspective, it shows how much just in the last 50 years, it really

began back with Wilson, I mean, the whole progressive reshaping of our constitutional order, how it took a quantum leap in that

the whole notions of accountability, of fealty to the Constitution, of

modesty in

one's behavior as limited by your official

status.

Well,

remember

the motto of the left and the progressive is by

any means necessary.

by any means necessary.

That's how they operate.

And

yeah yeah and they're backed up by the power of the federal government of appointment of uh

you know

who who's responsible for somebody making it to be a general you know

uh i believe the department of defense a cabinet position is involved in that the president's involved

So

you've got malign ideologies.

You've got

actually,

the triumph triumph to a certain extent of the whole progressive idea going back to the 1890s in the early 20th century has dominated and supplanted the Constitution, which is about limiting power.

And progressive say, well, we don't want to limit power because we want the power to do good.

If we have the power,

we'll perform wondrous

transformations,

as a previous president said.

I think everybody, yeah, I think

everybody should buy this book because

it puts all of these questions that we've been upset about the last two years in a historical context.

Exactly.

And one side, it suggests it's not new, but I mean, they had what McClellan was saying about Lincoln and

his backdoor negotiations.

Ralph Peters discusses the riot, the graph riots, but especially the Copperhead movement, McClellan.

That was almost insurrectionary.

But

it puts a lot of historical landscape here to discuss this because I think what we saw between 2020-22, and I was, I had written a lot, I and I got a lot of static actually from some high-ranking military officers.

But I think the Nadir came.

I don't know if you remember that, but there were these two highly decorated colonels and lieutenant colonel, and they had been experts in counterinsurgency.

John Nagel, and I think his name was Yingling, Paul, Colonel Yingling.

And they wrote a letter to Mark Milley, and they said, you have to choose between your constitutional duty and you will be, and Trump is going to stage a coup.

He won't leave office, basically.

And

if you don't remove him from office, then you are participating.

There was no evidence, of course, that Donald Trump has staged the coup and anything.

And they called really for the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and they wrote a public letter.

And they were very influential combat veterans, basically ordering him to the extent that that advice was almost

in the

form of a demand, you must remove it, even though Mark Milley has no statutory authority other than advisory.

And yet they wanted him to go in and remove.

And then Joe Biden picked up on that when he said that the former, remember he got a letter from,

oh, I think it was

four, Colin Powell was one of them,

four or five former chairs of the Joint Chiefs that said that Donald Trump,

he shouldn't do this or do that.

And then that's when Biden boasted that if he had to, they would remove him for him.

But that's about as close as I've ever in my 69 years seen an organized effort by retired military officers to

attack the current serving commander-in-chief to the point where,

whether we look at this letter by Nagel and Yingling, or we look at what Admiral McRaven was saying, when we have scheduled elections, and he said Trump should be removed the sooner the better, i.e.,

if you do it before the scheduled election, it's even better.

I've never seen anything like that.

And yet, when you would write about that, you'd get attacked personally from the left and from the military people.

And it's yeah, of course, of course.

Again, for me, this is what happens when you replace our

constitution of divided powers, of Madison said, ambition counteracts ambition.

Instead,

they formed a ruling elite

that is loyal to the privileges and the perquisites and the opportunities that come from what we now still laughably call public service.

And it's reached a level of shamelessness because in the past, if people were going to do that, they would have kept it secret.

They would have tried to do it sub-rosa because

it was untoward.

It was so.

It was almost virtue signaling.

They wanted public, didn't they?

It was performed.

Exactly.

It was, and it...

it was and nobody nobody i can't think of anybody really who got upset about it because because they hated Trump so much or the media.

Everybody was behind it, and they made them iconic carols almost for doing it.

But it was in clear violation.

It was really scary when you're a military, retired military officer and you're calling on the chairman of the Joint Chiefs to remove a president, or you're a former defense Pentagon legal official, like in the Obama administration, Rosa Brooks, that you're calling on

the military to remove Donald Trump

in a coup.

And

it's redolent of what we call banana republics.

It is.

You know, where the colonels, it's always colonels, isn't it?

You know, in Greece, it's the colonel.

The colonels band together and, you know, get some politicians and then they,

either with or with the threat of force, change the government.

It's funny because one of the things that ideologically, And maybe you can comment on it.

I think

some of us on the traditional conservative side grew up with Ephraim Zimblitz Jr.'s FBI on Saturday nights.

And we kind of defended the CIA.

But when you look at the CIA, the DOJ, the FBI, and the Pentagon brass, what's happened is it's all flipped topsy-turvy.

So the left despised all those people.

Really, the engine of the church committee hearings.

They love the CIA.

They love the FBI.

They love the Pentagon brass.

They love the DOJ because of their ability to skip, I guess, the Sturm and Drang of legislative back and forth and just implement social change by fiat or

go after critics of the left.

And whether it's the IRS after

Lois Lerner or it's James Comey, Christopher Wray, Andrew McCabe, frog marching a person or the Mueller investigation.

They've just loved these people.

I think that's really dangerous because I think a lot of the generals and admirals were reacting to that idea that the left was really pushing them on.

And that's where the book reviews, that's where the corporate largesse comes, that's where the

post-retirement, the incentives, I'm saying, are much more from the left than the right.

And now all the, and what's striking is when you talk to conservatives now, they are terrified of the FBI, the CIA.

Anyway, we're going to discuss this on the other side.

We're going to take another break.

And we're talking with Bruce Thornton.

He's the editor of a new book, Cage Fight, Civilian and Democratic Pressures on Military Conflicts and Foreign Policy.

This is, I think, his 11th book.

This one he's edited, but he has a very good introduction.

And

he chose a really impressive array of scholars Ralph Peters Paul Ray Peter Monseur Williamson Murray and Bing Wes and we'll be right back

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And we're back again with Bruce Thornton

talking about civilian-military relations through history, but especially to the degree that that knowledge of that tenuous or sometimes acrimonious relationship, to the degree it bears on the Trump phenomenon, his problems that he had with the military.

Why do you think, let me ask you another question, Bruce.

Why,

you remember how Trump would always cite Patton and MacArthur as heroes?

And then

he brought Mattis to a rally and introduced him as Mad Dog Mattis.

And then he

said he brought McMaster in.

And then he brought Kelly in, and he tried to have Michael Flynn, who was very treated unfairly.

But my point is,

did he really think that today's general was in the Pat MacArthur conservative mode?

He was very naive, I think, that he thought, well, if they're in the military, they're going to be conservative, can-do, and I'm going to snap my fingers.

I don't think he had any knowledge of the

Pentagon, Virginia, D.C.

Beltway environment and how that affects for

that was one of his

major flaws.

He was entering an ecosystem

that he really wasn't familiar with.

He was being advised by people who were swamp creatures, if you want to use

that metaphor.

I prefer the guild,

you know, the political, bipartisan political guild.

And guilds, one thing they do going back to the Middle Ages, they gatekeep.

They make sure that only the people that suits the guild's culture and narrative.

And when an outsider comes in, then like they're like, you know, a virus and the antibodies come out in the media and they try to destroy it.

And

Trump trusted people he shouldn't have trusted.

He didn't fire as many people coming in as he should have fired.

I still can't figure out why James Comey was around for as long as he was.

I don't know.

Why he picked Christopher Wray to be the

head of the FBI

and didn't fire them,

and get somebody who was

more in tune with what

the country and electing Trump preferred.

Let me ask you another question.

So

the left

always

during the Vietnam War and the increase in the Finnegon budget and the ubiquity of a permanent military, et cetera, et cetera, and the optional wars in the Middle East, they would always quote Eisenhower's farewell address.

I think it was January 1961 when he said that

basically Eisenhower said, until now, we had no permanent armaments industry, and now we've got a huge defense establishment.

The military-industrial complex.

Yes, the military-industrial complex.

And he said, we've got to be careful that they have unwarranted influence and the potential for

the misuse of power.

Have you changed at all in your view?

I mean, conservatives always thought Ike went a little bit, he went a little bit left or centrist.

But in retrospect, when you look at what he was saying, regardless of whether the left liked it or not, it seems that it seems to be more relevant than it ever was.

Oh, absolutely.

And, you know, when I was young and dumb and fancied myself a leftist mainly because it pissed my dad off,

I remember quoting that or half quoting it.

Nobody really looks at the whole passage, just that, you know, snappy phrase.

But now, in fact, just this last year, I quoted substantially from that address and made the point.

This is what we're looking at now,

right?

A firm.

Let's call it like the British call the,

you know,

the royal family, the firm.

And the firm has all these different, you know,

subsections,

and they all are unified

socially,

you know, politically,

and they work to maintain the integrity of their power.

And from the very beginning of progressivism, people thought that, well,

you know, they're against corporations.

That's not true.

They love corporations.

Big government loves big business.

Yeah, they do.

Yeah, they want to call a handful of people.

What I can't figure out is that for years, the Bernie Sanders wing of the Democratic Party was talking about, remember that term they created, the revolving door?

So Lloyd Austin, I won't mention other people because some of them are involved at the Hoover Institution.

We have a protocol that you're not to criticize publicly, so I won't, but I will look at the Secretary of Defense.

So Lloyd Austin came out of Raytheon, right?

Right.

And then he becomes Secretary of Defense, and we know what's going to happen when his tenure is over.

He's going to go back to Raytheon.

And Raytheon, like Lockheed or General Dynamics or Northrop, look at four-star, three-star, two-star officers.

It's just not just those companies, there's hundreds of them.

And I guess

the idea they look at these people and they say, you come and we will give you anywhere from $200 to $1 million stock options, IPO.

I don't know what, but it's pretty loose.

It's not like it used to be 20 years ago, 30, 40, 50,000.

It's much more lucrative.

And they're buying, A, legitimately so, their expertise about, you know, armaments and which armaments would enhance this particular branch of the service or this strategy.

But they're also buying their knowledge of former subordinate officers in procurement, right?

Exactly.

And how procurement works.

So their interest is not necessarily what is in the best interest of the Pentagon, although it can be, it can be tangential.

They can be, you know, very, they're dutiful, wonderful people, and they can say, you know what, my Raytheon system, anti-missile system is the best and I want the country to have it.

But if they find out that a General Dynamics or Northrop platform is better or cheaper, they're not going to say you should buy Northrop.

And so my point is they're using the expertise and the contacts that they gained while they were representing the United States.

And they're monetizing that or leveraging it for a particular corporation whose interests don't always dovetail with what the U.S.

military needs.

And let's not forget, a lot of these people keep their security clearance.

Yes, they do.

So they can go on CNN and they have this alleged authority of

information that they are accessed to, but they can't share with us because it's classified.

And they're monetizing that as well because they're being paid analysts, I guess.

Yeah.

So say MSNBC or CNN is paying a John Brennan for his wink and nod expertise.

Well,

when I was in the CIA, I can't discuss what I knew.

Yeah.

And then that, and he's monetizing that.

And that's why for all of the foibles of Trump, when he shoots from the hip, when he

when he yanked that security clearance and said he shouldn't be on TV editorializing and drawing on and being paid to draw on that extra.

He was right about that.

Yeah.

And

do you think at this point, it would that, believe it or not, I, and

the irony is that you don't hear this from the left anymore.

They've dropped it completely.

But at one point, people like Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders were saying that there should be a cooling off period when you leave the military.

They've mentioned tenures of five or ten years where you cannot work for a defense contractor, i.e., as a lobbyist or on the corporate board.

And now they don't mention it.

I don't know why they don't mention it, but I have a feeling they feel that the military and the industrial complex or forces have left us

change, I guess.

But I think we go back and revisit that, don't you?

Oh, absolutely.

But again,

we're looking at what has happened and the success over a century of the progressive technocratic ideal that a cadre of experts in government agencies, what Wilson called the hundreds who are wise, who can control the thousands who are foolish, that idea has become a reality.

And the assumption that we too readily endorse is that, well, they're experts.

They know stuff.

You know, they're like my mechanic.

I go down there.

I don't know why this thing won't start, but they will.

But if we're talking about issues that in the end are not scientific, they're philosophical.

So they don't have mathematical formulas to get you to the right answer.

And that assumption is what drives a technocratic elite

and its expansion into more and more agencies with more and more reach into civil society, private life, et cetera.

Exactly the opposite of what the Constitution was founded on.

And some of you say, oh, that was 200 some years ago, and, you know, we've made progress.

And

in the end, that's the biggest fallacy of modernity, is that we have nothing to learn from the past because those people were stupid.

They didn't know anything.

They were prejudiced.

They were racist, right?

But we're all more virtuous and we're all more knowledgeable.

And when it comes

anything related to human behavior, there is no science.

There is no technique that people can master.

Right?

Or your best guide is history,

tradition,

common sense, what Aristotle called practical wisdom, everything people have learned over thousands of years, because,

as Thucydides said, human nature

doesn't change.

It doesn't improve.

And so that's why he wrote his history, because what's happening in this Peloponnesian War, down the road, you're going to see the same things as long as human nature remains the same.

It's funny,

this idea that you create a permanent technocracy, it's something beyond the El Escarrell and the Spanish Empire or the Versailles crowd, but a particular class

that is a 19th century

degreed

class and they basically tell the politicians, we're here, you're going to come and go, but we have

a body of expertise you can't possibly master in your brief tenure.

So you have to defer to us.

And I think Sammy wrote, Sammy's not with us anymore, I think, but she wrote a PhD thesis, as I remember, on the French technocracy.

And it started, what I'm getting at, it was sort of the precursors of Gistard de Stang and Macron.

It came out of the French Revolution that they were going to have scientific knowledge and that these people were going to get an exalted position as rationalists that were not, you know, basically at that point, they were not subject to the prejudice of religion.

And this

atheist agnostic enlightenment was going to be based on the French Revolutionary idea.

I think they even had a monument of pure reason, right?

That they were.

Oh, they turned Notre Dame into the temple of reason.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yes.

And that was the birth of this technocracy that these experts then were not subject to the passions of inferior people.

And that way of thinking in Europe, I think we were kind of rejecting it.

But what's really scary now is that

the people in the FBI and the people in the CIA and the people in the DOJ and the people in the IRS and the people in the Pentagon are there as permanent high-paid fixtures.

And their body of expertise is so esoteric that they can assume this mantle of

experts and superior knowledge that we're all supposed to defer to.

And that's what gets us, I think it gets us into a lot of trouble.

Yeah.

That we're losing the civilian control of all of these agencies.

And nobody,

when James Comey went before Congress and he said on 245 occasions, I don't remember,

and he should have been charged.

And when Andrew McCabe, according to Michael Horowitz's inspector general, on four occasions said he lied, he admitted that he lied to a federal, he should have been

robbed of his pension.

He was fired, but he should have been prosecuted for perjury.

And

when Robert Mueller said, I don't know what you're talking about, I don't get into that.

I don't know anything about when he was asked what the Steel dossier and the Houston GPS were, the two pillars, he should have been cited for that.

And we don't do that at all now.

We have no mechanism to control these people whatsoever.

And I don't know.

Trump talked.

I mean, he was very vocal about it.

But when you look at the actual minutiae of the mechanics of bringing those people under control, he didn't understand that.

Yeah.

I guess he thought the left would agree with him or something, but they all, those people, that whole permanent administrative state was brilliant because they understood that if they were vocal, remember Anonymous, the guy in the department, that minor official that the New York Times told us was very important in the Department of Labor.

Right, right.

Chad something,

I forgot.

But that whole thing, when you look at the military bureaucracy, I don't know how you can control it in a civilian fashion.

And

Trump unwittingly brought in a lot of generals into the civilian, the retired generals.

Some of them were very good, some of them not so good.

But

he kind of advanced that idea that

the military is exempt from civilian control.

And he really paid a price in the summer of 2020, following the George Floyd.

Right.

He really did.

I think the founders

understood that militaries are at some level sort of aristocratic

and obedience, you know, you obey orders, it's hierarchical, which of course it has to be in order to be an effective fighting force, but that it poses a danger to power that is,

you know, every citizen

has political freedom.

and political equality in terms of being able to speak, give an opinion, critique, et cetera.

And that obviously doesn't work

in a modern military.

And so they made the president the commander-in-chief.

They put the whole military establishment subordinated

to the civilian

elected by

the people.

Because they feared what happens.

I mean, they remember

the colonists had been part of a global near, for that time, global conflict, which was the Seven Years' War, what we call the

French and Indian War.

And many, George Washington, for example, served alongside them, many of the militias.

And those European mass armies that they had seen in the 17th, 18th century

frightened them because there was no accountability.

There were conscripts, and

they had the idea of the citizen soldier.

And part of this might be because we've gone over to an all-volunteer force,

which

sort of made the

service agencies kind of like businesses, you know, or corporations or corporate offices with employees.

I don't know.

I mean,

a lot of it is

just, as I said before, I harp on all the time.

The slow starting with the theorist in the late 19th century, like Woodrow Wilson, a college professor and president, tells you all you need to know.

And

gradually through the Great Society,

not the Great Society,

the

FDRs,

you know, programs and expansion of the government,

then to

Lyndon Johnson.

Obama tried, didn't quite make it, although he got Obamacare.

And here's another point, and now we go back to the Never Trumpers.

So many Republicans, especially establishment Republicans, accept a large part of that paradigm.

They accept it.

It's just business as usual.

And you see,

if the one bipartisan consensus,

right, lately, we're not going to do anything about reforming Social Security or Medicare,

even though we know,

because it's just simply mathematics, they are headed sooner than we think for insolvency.

But

they all agree, you know, they all agree.

No, and Trump did too.

He's not going to do anything about Social Security, right?

Because the voters don't want him to.

So

it's really,

in the end, for me,

it's how our constitutional order, probably the most brilliant political order ever devised by human beings, has been eroded over

100 years and it's going to be very difficult

to try to push back

on that.

Now when it comes to taxes, the Republicans will, you know, but

if you have taxes but you don't have

regulatory reform, for example,

to

which is very expensive for doing business, as we know.

So for me, it's kind of a dismal outlook.

And this one corner of it that we're talking about with the military, I think most of it reflects not just the usual human, you know, passions like ambition and

greed for fame and money and all those all to human motives.

It reflects this transformation.

We're almost out of time, and I want to remind everybody the book is the cage

fight and it's uh a discussion across time and space of civilian military tensions in consensual society we didn't have a chance because we were talking more on the the latter part of the book of the modern questions

but uh there's a wonderful chapters in here on

kind of the episodes of American civilian military tensions, the revolt of the admirals,

whether to spend money on the B-36 or the aircraft carriers, the pushback against Kennedy with the Bay of Pigs, McClellan and Lincoln's tensions.

And we should say that

Bruce Thornton has a wide variety, not just of expertise on different periods in American and world history, but on ideology.

So I wouldn't want to suggest that our skepticism of military

improper behavior in their criticism of the commander-in-chief or their entrance into civilian affairs

is

necessarily emblematic of the whole book because, and I want to end on this, that if you read chapter three on military dissent in peacetime by Peter Mansoor, I think you could make the, or maybe even Ralph Peters article, they would make it from the opposite point of view that,

say, during 2020, that when Donald Trump said said that the governors of particular states were not

protecting the lives and property of their citizens, and therefore, like George H.W.

Bush during the Rodney King riots, he was going to send federal troops.

And he did, was told that if they went into, say, Minnesota or Washington or Oregon, they would not be used by the governors.

But there's a suggestion in some of the essays that maybe the military had a right to push back against that and that Donald Trump had gone on.

So it's an interesting book from all different ideological sides.

And let me, if really quickly, second what you just said about the diversity of approaches,

of political perspectives, chronologically, I think that's one of the great things about,

and also our magazine, our online magazine, Strategica, because you can see that same diversity and expertise

in those essays every month.

We talk about those, the Strategica essays.

And just a reminder that

we have at the Hoover Institution, which is on the Stanford campus, we have this the Role of Military History and Contemporary Conflict Working Group.

That's the formal title.

And

I chair it.

And then Bruce Thornton is a senior editor.

And David...

Berkey is a managing editor of the Strategica online magazine.

And what we do in that magazine is we have about a 2,000-word essay, we call it the backgrounder.

And this issue,

we've had just had a recent issue on nuclear weapons and what's their viability.

We had one on Ukraine.

I think the next one that's in the preparation is on the use of tanks.

Are they still as important as everybody seems to be obsessed with?

So we get an historian or an analyst to write about the issue in historical context.

And then I try to pick a 750 to 800 word op-ed that is going to be antithetical.

So we, in this large group of scholars, analysts, historians

in our group, we have probably 10 or 12 different points of view on every issue.

And so we try to get opposing points of view.

And then during the year, we require essays to join our annual meeting.

Everybody has to write three or four hundred word essays on particular topics.

And then we use, we draw on that corpus and add them in the magazine as enhancements.

And then we have a poll on particular questions.

We have study questions.

So I

it and it's not it's not with a C, it's with a K.

So it's strategica,

K-A.

And you can find it at the Hoover website or you can just Google Strategica and you'll find the issue.

We've never missed an issue.

We're, I think, issue 83.

So I urge you all to do it.

And this book grew out of that group, of which Bruce is a senior editor.

And with that,

we're going to have to wrap up today.

Thank you, Bruce Thornton, for coming in and talking about civilian and military relations in the United States and in general.

Thank you.

And the book is

Cage Fight, Bruce Thornton, Civilian and Democratic Pressures on Military Conflicts and Foreign Policy.

And we'll see you next time.

Thanks for coming in, Bruce.

All right.

And it's Victor Hansen's signing off.