The Pentagon is discussed across two episodes of The Bob Zadek Show as an institution whose spending and overseas posture are shaped by political incentives rather than by strategic assessment. John Glaser, in an episode on forward deployment, describes the scale of U.S. overseas military presence and the stated rationales for it. Jonathan Bidlack, in a later episode on defense spending, describes how Congress funds the Pentagon, how dollars come to substitute for strategy, and how the department has never been audited.
Scale and stated goals of overseas presence
In the October 2017 episode, Bob Zadek frames the subject as forward deployment forces, meaning the maintaining of foreign bases around the world in countries other than the U.S. and its possessions. He asks how large the policy is in numbers of bases, dollars, and humans.
John Glaser answers that at that moment the U.S. has roughly 800 overseas military bases of various sizes, in about 70 countries, amounting to about 260,000 troops and military officials stationed at those bases. He says the dollar amount is difficult to pin down precisely, partly because the Pentagon is notoriously opaque in its accounting and partly because there are multiple contradictory yet legitimate ways of counting, but offers a rough estimate of annual costs from about $60 billion to $120 billion per year. Rethinking Pax Americana with John Glaser (2017)
Asked by Bob what the assumed or stated goal of the expenditure is, Glaser first says what it is not: the goal is not to defend the nation, and that is explicitly not what the overseas bases are for. He narrows the strategic rationales to three things: deterrence, reassurance, and contingency responsiveness. Deterrence is trying to scare an adversary into not doing something, as with bases in South Korea that are supposed to deter North Korea from invading South Korea. Reassurance is meant to reassure friends and allies that the U.S. will come to their defense if attacked, with the presence of bases and troops bolstering the credibility of those promises. Contingency responsiveness is described as a big silly wonk word from the Pentagon meaning getting places quickly, so that if anything should happen anywhere in the world, bases and troops in every nook and cranny of the planet can deploy and intervene quickly. Rethinking Pax Americana with John Glaser (2017)
Spending categories and congressional receptivity
In the March 2018 episode, Jonathan Bidlack describes efforts to break Pentagon spending into different categories or buckets: acquisitions and how to better acquire the military technology needed; VA services and planning for VA retirement; personnel; foreign aid or foreign appropriations; and more fundamental department-wide restructuring. He says categorizing spending does not necessarily solve the problem but helps get a fuller picture of what is being spent. Cheap Hawks; Not Cheap Talk (2018)
On receptivity in Congress, Bidlack says it depends on the member and does not necessarily vary by party. He points to rankings on spendingtracker.org, saying the best of the best tend to be Republicans but the worst of the worst have tended to be Republicans as well, and that scrolling through the rankings shows Republicans and Democrats alternating. He describes a myth that one party wants to spend and one does not, when what really exists, with relatively few exceptions, are two parties that want to spend on different things, with substantial agreement on many big items. He says the incentives members face are not on the side of reducing spending, so reducing spending requires a devotion to principle and deep fortitude, and that the first step toward solving any problem is acknowledging it exists. He cites Milton Friedman’s line about encouraging the wrong people to do the right thing, and says the challenge is to put in place rules and a structure that encourages that, including getting back to the traditional budgeting process and regular order. Cheap Hawks; Not Cheap Talk (2018)
Defense spending as a jobs program
Bob Zadek argues that the defense bill should be put together based on thoughtful consideration of what is needed and what is an effective use of tax dollars—in Jefferson’s words, a wise and frugal government—but that instead the only standard for being patriotic is to give the Defense Department more than it had last year, and that failing to do so makes a member a defense dove putting the country’s safety at risk. He calls this bizarre and irrational, and says money is spent irrespective of the threat, just because members of Congress do not want to be listed in the column of not supporting soldiers. He asks whether the measure of whether enough has been spent for defense is how much more than last year has been spent. Cheap Hawks; Not Cheap Talk (2018)
Bidlack agrees that many people view dollars as a substitute for strategy. He contrasts a business, which asks what it needs to accomplish and then what funds are needed, with Pentagon spending, where much spending is on autopilot because programs have existed and inertia continues them without reassessment. He adds that presidents and then Congress often allocate way more funding for programs than the Pentagon even wants, so that programs the Pentagon says it no longer has a use for are continued because they may be manufactured in a certain district or because particular special interests lobby for them, long after they have ceased to be valuable, if they were ever valuable. Cheap Hawks; Not Cheap Talk (2018)
Bob responds that the Defense Department in effect becomes not a defense bill but a jobs bill, because it creates jobs and benefits local political districts with jobs and with business, done under the political cover of defense spending but not actually defense. Cheap Hawks; Not Cheap Talk (2018)
Strategy versus dollars
Bob Zadek raises the alleged Russian meddling in the recent political campaign, saying Russia spent about $5 or $10 million on messing with Facebook and other ways to influence voters, rather than $600 billion on tanks and missiles, and that if Russia can spend that little and in the eyes of many threaten the country, there is no correlation between the actual threat and the amount of spending. Cheap Hawks; Not Cheap Talk (2018)
Bidlack says the assumption is usually made that more spending equals better outcome, but that oftentimes that is not the case at all. He says generals and members of the military often make the point that sometimes the simplest systems are the most effective on the battlefield because they can be implemented in cases of true danger. He gives missile defense as an example: people think of missile defense as good bullets hitting bad bullets, so if we want to stop bad bullets we need many more good interceptors, but how well different computer systems are integrated has a huge effect, and many systems sit in silos doing their own thing. Congress looks at missile defense and allocates more funding for more interceptors, when changing how those systems link together may be way more cost-effective and even more effective at accomplishing the goals. He says these kinds of things exist all throughout the Pentagon and all throughout government, and that Guide for a Strong America attempts to look at ideas for reducing Pentagon spending or being more cost-effective. He corrects Bob’s figure, saying it is not $600 billion anymore but actually $700 billion now a year, and going up to $716 billion, so the country is allocating way more money than ever in the past without necessarily getting better outcomes, and may ultimately be shooting itself in the foot. Cheap Hawks; Not Cheap Talk (2018)
Auditing and structural reform
Bidlack says the Pentagon is the only government department that has never been audited, and that currently, to the Trump administration’s credit, there is an agreement to audit the Pentagon, but that it will take five or ten years to figure out where all the money is going and where money has been lost. He describes a process of more information, identifying small cuts, and rethinking the bigger picture role of government and of individual departments. Cheap Hawks; Not Cheap Talk (2018)
He offers the example that in 2017 the Navy figured out it could save money by using Xbox controllers on Virginia-class submarines rather than the proprietary controllers previously used, reducing cost from something like $38,000 per panel to $30 per panel. He says that item is not the reason for the Pentagon budget or the national deficit, and that more fundamental structural reforms are needed, but that such items can have a massive impact when added up. He cites former Senator Tom Coburn’s saying that the way to get to what is now a $20 trillion national debt is by adding up all these little items. Cheap Hawks; Not Cheap Talk (2018)
Bob Zadek describes the wasteful spending as sinister because it is structural, not a question of a specific Congress making specific bad choices, and says the problems are almost cancerous and structural, so it does not require one intelligent vote and then it is done. He says an individual member of Congress or of the executive is part of a very large, very sick system that needs repair, and that while voting to spend more on national defense seems like a winner at the voting booth, spending as much as we do is a threat to our national security that in the long run may overcome the benefits of the spending itself. He says spending in the trillions is almost pointless to talk about because a trillion dollars is too big to imagine. Cheap Hawks; Not Cheap Talk (2018)
Bidlack says listeners do not need to take his word for it, noting that many military leaders and people involved in Pentagon policy have sounded the alarm, and that Dan Coats, the Director of National Intelligence, said he thinks federal spending is threatening our ability to properly defend our nation both in the short term and especially in the long term. On getting people to think about the numbers, Bidlack says people often do not realize how much their members of Congress are voting for, and points again to spendingtracker.org, which attempts to track in real time how much every member of Congress is voting for, with the vast majority voting for what he characterizes as insane levels of spending. He says reducing spending is a two-fer issue: it resolves budgetary problems and reduces the incentive to tax people more, and that the Pentagon budget is one big portion of that and should be looked at like every other area of the budget. Cheap Hawks; Not Cheap Talk (2018)
Across episodes
The two episodes touch the Pentagon from different angles rather than developing a single argument: the 2017 episode with John Glaser examines the scale and stated rationales of overseas bases and forward deployment, while the 2018 episode with Jonathan Bidlack examines congressional budgeting, auditing, and cost-effectiveness. The excerpts show no development between the earlier and later treatment, since the guests address different aspects of the department and do not respond to one another.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts do not state the Pentagon’s founding date, its location, its current or historical budget totals beyond the figures the guests give, or the names of specific weapons programs other than missile defense and Virginia-class submarines. They do not describe any completed audit of the department, only an agreement to conduct one and an estimate of how long it would take. They do not give the outcome of any legislative vote on defense spending, nor the name of any defense bill. The Glaser excerpt ends mid-sentence at a section break, so his discussion of the shift to global policeman is not available here.