WarTalk: 9.11, Death of the Army, So Long Dan Driscoll

Jordan Schneider (0:01)

9-11, 25 years ago, we recorded a show last week with Wes Morgan. Probably our best of the year. Is it because I was not present, or because Wes was a great guest? The world may never know. I think we'll do a little bit of more GWOT reflections, and then we've got a sequel to our Death of the Navy, Death of the Army, as well as... One second.

As well as, uh, unmanned boats just happening to wash up on Iran's shores, Russian disinfo and AI in the battlefield, and maybe a little, um, how AI is gonna power the future National Security Council, Justin, Tony, and Bryan. Welcome back to War Talk.

Bryan Clark (1:00)

Awesome.

Jordan Schneider (1:00)

Great to be here.

Justin McIntosh (1:02)

Yeah.

Jordan Schneider (1:03)

Are we gonna do...

Justin McIntosh (1:04)

I'm excited.

Jordan Schneider (1:05)

I proposed 25 9-11 takes, but that seems like far too many. Can we get up to five?

Justin McIntosh (1:12)

I can give one. And it's that today I blame the terrorist for how atrocious LinkedIn is. It is gross. What is going on on that website right now?

Good Lord.

Tony Stark (1:24)

We made it five seconds of song reflection.

Justin McIntosh (1:28)

That's right. Sorry.

What 9-11 taught me about B2B sales, I was seven years old and I knew that the world had changed forever.

Sorry. I have a lot of empathy. Like I said, I wrote about it a couple of weeks ago, the impact that it had on me, the tangential impact it had on me joining the military and stuff. Obviously, I lived in it and it affected my family indirectly. I didn't know anybody that was in the towers or anything, but my father instantly deployed and basically was deployed the rest of my teenage years. I joined the military and deployed through the next 20 years, largely to GWOT campaigns. But the way that people are attempting to monetize this is just, yeah, it's gross. It's gross.

Bryan Clark (2:32)

I got a take. So one take is being a Navy guy that did not affect us nearly as much as it affected the Army and the Marine Corps. But it changed how the Navy and Air Force structured themselves. And so like we came in to 9-11, we were doing this big transformation thing that Rumsfeld wanted to do. So everything had to be pushed through the filter of transformation, had to incorporate new technologies that were way before their time, and we had to do it. What we anticipated was going to be a relatively strong budget environment. So we had money to go do these changes. Well, GWOT comes, consumes all the available resources, and so we're having to transform the military to still meet these edicts coming down from the secretary on a tight budget. So it means you get things like these acquisition disasters, like future combat systems in the Army. And you got the Navy with the forward class carrier, the littoral combat ship, the DDG-1000 Zumwalt, and the CGX, which we didn't even bother to build. So a bunch of failed acquisition programs because we jumped too far on the technology, didn't put nearly enough money into them to solve it, and we were distracted because, of course, we're all trying to support the war that had begun and was probably deserving of more attention than it got, but we were also trying to kind of transform the military at the same time. And the Air Force had its own challenges. I mean, the Pol B-21 that we're getting today is the result of a debacle around the original next-generation bomber they were trying to build, and F-35 got caught up in the middle of this as well, and that part of why it's been such a troubled program is inadequate resources and attention and trying to jump too far on the technology, all driven by this kind of ill-advised idea that we're going to transform the military with 21st century technology in 2000 It just didn't work out.

And we didn't put enough money into it to make it work. It were we to do it that way. So I mean, that was one thing. The other thing I'll note is we did find out also that our reserves were not really as in reserve as we thought they were after 9-11. So we anticipated we're going to activate a bunch of these reservists to go and support CONUS missions while the real military goes and deploys. Well, it turned out half or more of these guys weren't ready to deploy. They were out of shape. They had their medical things all messed up. They weren't even around. We didn't even know where they were in some cases. So it kind of opened up some opportunities to redesign the military to be more effective in the future. So there were a couple of things that came out of that were really ill-advised decisions that we're now still scrambling to dig ourselves out of.