International Man: During the recent Iran–Israel war, the US used up to 20% of its global stockpile of Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) ballistic missile interceptors, each costing over $18 million. THAAD isn’t effective against hypersonic missiles, which both Iran and even Yemen’s Houthis now possess.
What do you make of this?
Doug Casey: War, in the long run, is a matter of economics. If you can’t afford to fight a war, you’ll lose the war. Missiles are now the preferred weapon for taking out enemy targets, and the only effective counter is anti-missile missiles. The problem is that both are brutally expensive. Can the costs be kept down, so war is more… affordable?
Generals, politicians, and “defense” contractors, however, love expensive high-tech toys. But if you’re going to afford a war, the most cost-effective weapon is an ignorant teenage boy—something the Third World, especially the Muslim world, is awash in. They’re cheap and stealthy delivery systems, far more effective than multi-million-dollar missiles. There’s an endless supply of them, and they can be employed in a myriad of ways. From an economic point of view, it makes no sense for technologically advanced countries (like the US) to use ultra-expensive weapons to attack primitive countries, as we’ve done for the last 75 years.
Regardless of the weapons used, the thing to remember is that war amounts to setting wealth on fire. Missiles are about taking real goods, manufactured at great expense, and using them to blow up other real wealth; there can be a perverse logic to it. However, despite their rhetoric to the contrary, I’m not sure governments are too concerned about lots of young men dying. A surplus of unemployed young males is destabilizing, especially in poor countries.
Even a large country like the US will eventually collapse under the weight of war. That’s much more true of the Ukraine. And vastly truer of Israel. Israel will further bankrupt itself shooting down missiles with ultra-expensive anti-missiles. With a gigantic debt load, enormous war expenditures and losses, living on welfare from the US, and no prospect of things getting better, the prognosis isn’t good. About a million (it’s said) of Israel’s seven million Jewish citizens have recently made the chicken run, and those who remain aren’t allowed to leave. I think Israel has a near-insoluble problem. Giving them more money and missiles won’t help.
International Man: President Trump recently unveiled a plan to build a “Golden Dome” missile defense shield over the US, modeled loosely on Israel’s Iron Dome. Critics question its feasibility, effectiveness, and cost. Independent analysts estimate the long-term price tag could reach $800 billion.
What’s your take?
Doug Casey: Almost every major weapons system ends up fighting the last war, and that will be true of the so-called Golden Dome. It strikes me as a criminally stupid idea, further ensuring the bankruptcy of the US government and the US itself, while serving no real useful purpose. If you want to attack the US, you don’t want to use missiles.
First, we don’t have a major military threat. The US is insulated from hostile powers by two very large oceans. Should someone launch a nuclear missile attack—which is what the Golden Dome is supposed to defend against—we would know exactly where those missiles came from. The enemy could expect massive retaliation from the American nuclear triad, which makes the attack pointless. That alone makes the Golden Dome redundant and unnecessary. Apart from that, if an enemy wanted to launch a nuclear attack, it would be more effective with pre-positioned nukes, or nukes delivered surreptitiously with cargo ships and planes.
Nuclear war via missiles scared everybody 70 years ago. But today it’s not a practical threat. The likely threats, I think, are from more subtle areas—cyber war, bio war, or a new type of guerrilla war.
WW3 will have a huge cyber element. Everything runs on computers: the banking system, the monetary system, the electrical grid, the communications grid, the transportation grid, and utilities. A successful cyber-attack would turn almost everything we use or need into a brick overnight. It would be cheap and effective, cause widespread chaos and mass casualties, without kinetically destroying very much.
If the enemy is really serious, though, they’ll use bioweapons. Viruses and bacteria can zero in on, or exclude, certain populations. Why have a nuclear war when you can neatly kill the people who are the real problem? And both cyber and biowar offer a great deal of plausible deniability.
The third option was demonstrated on September 11, 2001. The attack with commercial airliners was ultra cheap, super effective, and hard to counter. I suspect we’ll see numerous mutations of that theme. It’s a new type of guerrilla war. Millions of military-age males—cheap teenagers—have infiltrated the US over the last decade or so. For all we know, many may be organized as informal guerrilla armies to be activated whenever. They could surreptitiously wreak havoc.
There’s no real defense against these types of attacks.
But the real enemy is not some foreign power, but the fact that the US has turned into a dysfunctional multicultural domestic empire, which is likely to suffer serious financial, economic, social, and political problems over the next years.
Spending a trillion dollars on a useless Golden Dome is an insane distraction. Who comes up with these idiotic ideas?
International Man: The F-35 is the most expensive weapon system in human history, with lifetime costs projected at over $1.7 trillion, according to the US Government Accountability Office (GAO).
Is the F-35 worth the price tag—or is it a military-industrial complex boondoggle?
Doug Casey: The F-35 is a perfect example of fighting the last war, like having cavalry regiments before World War 1 or battleships before World War 2. Aircraft carriers and high-tech fighter planes are their WW3 equivalents.
What is the F-35 built to fight? Other fighter planes? But the next generation of fighter planes will be pilotless, highly sophisticated, and much cheaper. They’ll be drones run by artificial intelligence, which won’t need to drag around a heavy, expensive, and limiting pilot. The F-35 is a dinosaur.
The real enemy here, however, isn’t Russian or Chinese fighters. The real enemy is US military contractors—the so-called defense companies. They’ve learned to fight wars by hiring lobbyists instead of engineers. They take decades to build planes like the F-35, which are already obsolete by the time they’re in production.
It amazes me that during World War 2, the P-51—one of the most effective fighters of the war—went from blank paper to production in six months and was turned out at $50,000 per copy, which is about $600,000 or so in today’s money. The F-35 has taken 30 years to put into production; it got underway in 1995. And it costs—who knows, because the numbers are floating abstractions, buried under mountains of phony accounting and corruption. But somewhere between $100 and $200 million per plane. Enough money that you almost can’t afford to lose one. And that doesn’t count the huge direct and indirect maintenance costs.
International Man: Recently, Israel and Ukraine used relatively cheap drones smuggled into Iran and Russia to bypass advanced air defenses and hit strategic targets with ease.
How are drones changing warfare and its economics?
Doug Casey: Drones are totally changing the entire nature of warfare. The next generation of drones—which are already being manufactured—are the size of bumblebees or even houseflies. They can be produced by the millions and released onto a battlefield or into a city.
Moving up from there, you’ll have quadruped drones like the BigDog, and of course, real, true-to-life Terminators. Tesla anticipates manufacturing AI-powered bipedal robots for as little as $10,000 apiece. Oscar Wilde didn’t know how right he was when he said that life imitates art.
I would not want to be a soldier fighting drones of all descriptions. Human soldiers are dead meat on the battlefield in the next generation of military technology, which is already here.
International Man: It seems the US military-industrial complex is more focused on producing ultra-expensive hardware than on building systems that actually win wars.
What are the investment and geopolitical implications of this trend?
Doug Casey: Everybody’s familiar with Eisenhower’s warning about the military-industrial complex. That was 65 years ago—a lifetime—and it’s mutated and grown like a cancer since then. Today, any movie with a modern military theme is probably propaganda for the government or the companies that manufacture its weapons. Anyway, Congressmen don’t think in terms of the effectiveness of weapons; they think in terms of the number of dollars that will be spent in their home district and the number of people that weapons manufacturers can employ.
Innovations, however, are made by small companies or individual inventors, not by giant companies run by administrators and suits. You don’t want to own the Lockheeds or General Dynamics. You want to own small outfits, run by innovators, not suits.
It’s funny that after World War 2, the War Department changed its name to the Defense Department. It’s odd because the Defense Department has nothing to do with defense. It’s a complete misnomer. The US hasn’t had any wars defending the US, or “freedom”, a word they always throw in there, in living memory. As America transformed into an empire, very much like ancient Athens in many regards, its many wars have been offensive, not defensive. They’ve been wars of words and lies as well as wars of weapons.
In any event, the best defense for the US, or any country, is economic strength and liberty, not a giant military/industrial bureaucracy.
In addition to economic strength, successful countries have a citizenry that shares common values and loves their culture. Those things pretty much disappeared as the US mutated into a welfare-warfare state.
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