The Military Myth Is Cracking
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Okay, I’m breaking out my Iran slash war slash military industrial complex secret decoder ring. Because people, I I I’m working my buttocks off trying to stay on top of all of the call it information, misinformation, what’s being thrown out there and the various different angles.
What I’ve have learned over the years, and like I said, I’ve been doing this podcast, well, radios then podcast, radio and podcast for twenty six years, been involved with the mainstream media for almost thirty. you don’t trust anything that they’re putting out. Okay, we’ve we’ve gone over that time and time again. I gotta back up a little bit over the the course of the weekend.
Again, you watch Donald Trump big interview over the weekend, interviewed by his daughter-in-law. His daughter-in-law. And some of the statements that were made, I I again, complete contradictions here, there, and everywhere. And we’re gonna be told that this is some sort of 3D chess. This is by design. he said a couple things. He said we left the Iranian military alone.
Meanwhile, we were told the opposite that Iranian the Iran’s military was completely destroyed. It was was wrecked. It was no longer. It was zero. Navy’s at the bottom of the ocean or the you know, the sea. And again, I explained to you that their navy was nothing of any any great traits again. We prov we gave them the their navy as a matter of fact.
Is the ships going back to the 1960s? But yeah, again, trying to understand, made this statement as well, saying that again, when all the Qatar, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Kuwait, Bahrain, they all got hit, he said he was surprised, but he said he viewed it as a positive because then all of those people came immediately to our side. I going out, American media.
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you know, basically saying you’re happy that your allies got hit. I I don’t get it, quite frankly. you know, but again, the the spinmeisters over at Fox will come up with something at some point in time. So yesterday, Iran stops negotiations with US, vows to completely block the Strait of Hormuz. That came out. Now we’re being told that there’s diplomacy that is happening under the table. Who knows?
and now we have the whole dust up. dust up between the United States and Israel or the the so-called dust up. I I I don’t gonna be honest with you, I I don’t necessarily believe what’s being put out there. again, you you can tell what the administration wants to have out based upon this. Is this is one thing you can, it doesn’t mean it’s true.
But it’s the information they want to get out. You just listen to Jesse Waters or some of these programs late in the day. You know, the first news that came out, you know, Trump blasting Netanyahu and, you know, F and this and F and that, all that stuff. I was like, I don’t know, is it real? again, I still don’t know if it’s if it actually happened, if it’s real, but they want us to think that. I mean, if it goes out there on Fox, then you know that this is again, the the the administration wants this information.
Ow. supposedly we Trump told Israel to stop bombing Lebanon. Told them to stop bombing Lebanon. the reality is Netanyahu came out later on and basically said no.
No. we were told that the president yesterday was in direct negotiations with Hezbollah and he secured a ceasefire proposal. Hezbolla no, we’ve completely rejected that. We we we nothing to do with that at all. as it stands right now.
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Iran has successfully managed to excavate multiple key sites tied to its missile program that were previously hit during the first five weeks of Epic Fury. more missile tunnels have been dug out than previously thought. 69 targeted tunnels, 18 missile production sites. yeah, this is the the information that’s been.
Coming out, various different releases. what does this all mean? well, a couple things. I’m bouncing things back and forth right now. kind of interesting the story that came out. you you almost got confirmation on it from Mark Levin of all person.
people he came out, my God, whoever put this out, national security can’t do that. Terrible, all this stuff.
You’re watching this, and this is kind of an interesting take. The journalist in this story, his name is Barak Ravid. he’s based in Washington, and he covers the Netanyahu U.S. relationship for Axios. He basically wrote a very similar story. This was brought to my attention about Biden. And remember how.
We he was putting out stories about Biden was very upset with Netanyahu based upon what was going on in Gaza at the time. basically the the opinion of of this individual and I’ve looked at it, it’s it’s pretty solid and I but again do I know? No, I don’t, is that nothing is really changing as far as Israel and their position.
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Supposedly they’re not, you know, doing going into Beirut, but that’s not true. Their troops are there still there on the ground and they’re still moving forward. So I just maybe this thing is a whole big show for public consumption, much like the Biden is fuming stuff was and Israel did whatever they wanted them to do. Now, again, we shall see. I I have to address something as well. Actually, had a lot of great.
emails and interactions with listeners and i i do app I gotta be honest i i love it when you know i work hard at this thing you know a kudos sometimes actually puts a smile on my face because we do put a lot of work into these podcasts and i do everything and anything i can to make sure everything is exact and right checking rechecking homework all sorts of stuff
One was one email that I got that caught my attention though, one, believe it or not, basically questioning my ideas in regards to our position in the world, our military spending, where we’re at, and basically asking me to go through, and we talked about you know, Pentagon failed, eighth budget in a row. Hey, screw it, keep spending. I have to pick out what items.
to cancel. it would be it’d be a long, long list. And it was also asked you know, what the short and long term impact on these changes.
I’ll be quite honest with you. Okay. I don’t have the ability to gather that information. I I don’t have I don’t work at the Pentagon. what I what I do know, okay, to give another, you know, like I said, the great Bill Parcells, you are what your record says you are.
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And post World War II, how how are we doing? How are we doing as far as our active active conflict military personnel is concerned? just sent over, actually, talking about sent over to me. I mean it’s before drones, before drones, Vietnam,
7,013 Hueys were used in Vietnam, 3,300 were lost, 700 F-4 Phantom 2, 445 were lost. six F-11 Aardvark bombers, sixteen Navy and Marine A6 and Tudor squadrons, eighty-four aircraft lost. It goes right on down the list. We dropped 7.6 million tons of bombs on Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, 352,000 tons of napalm cluster bomb. It goes
All the the the the bombs that we we dropped, all the stuff, how did that
work out. How did that work out? if we were actually taking a look, probably the the most you want to think about the most impressive you want to call it a military force of the past fifty years, you you’d have to, you’d have to give it to the Mujahideen in Afghanistan.
I mean, they beat the Soviets and they beat us.
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They beat the Soviets and they beat us.
Some people seem to think that we are in we’ve got the upper hand in Iran at this point in time. I I’m sorry, we don’t.
We don’t have the upper hand in Iran at this point in time by any stretch of the imagination. Okay. and this just a fact, okay? Our our intelligence said that Iran was nowhere near to getting a bomb. I know they keep repeating that, but again, you can go listen to the testimony in front of freaking Congress for crying out loud. Now,
We have threatened, Trump has threatened to attack Iran how many times over the past several weeks? And we’ve backed down every single time. Why? The exact reasons I’ve given here. They have the leverage. Okay, I know Trump talks about we having the cards. We don’t have the freaking cards. We don’t. And it’s the same way we have softened our position in regards to the nuclear.
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Dust.
Reality, people, again I talk about I the stories I like I talk about here. I don’t like reporting on these things. But one thing I don’t do is I never fool myself. You you have to be honest with your position and where we are. Okay? Reality can suck sometimes. Reality can be, quite frankly, embarrassing. Vietnam, last chopped out, embarrassing. What Biden had what happened in Afghanistan with Biden.
Embarrassing.
But it’s it’s reality. Okay? this was sorry, was they didn’t think this one through.
They didn’t think this one through. I know it can have various different conspiracies. The Israelis pushed us into it. Epstein fought all these various I again, I’m not even playing into any of that. Okay. But again, you are what your record says you are. Our military spends how much?
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A year. What now and again one would think that you could have comp used that money compounded over years, decades.
It shouldn’t even be freaking close. And take a look at what Iran spends on their military.
Are we in a better position now? No. No.
This blockade. Okay? they’re o Iranian oil wells are gonna start exploding. They’re not gonna every every bit of bullshit that they put on TV, guess what hasn’t happened.
Nothing. You you keep going to it and you keep watching it and you keep trusting it. Why?
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When have these people ever been honest with you? Operation Epic Fury. It’s a failure. Just okay. Learn from a mistake. Again, we don’t learn from our past mistakes. Again, we keep making them again, but maybe at some point in time we’re gonna learn. What is the military options here?
We are not going to be putting troops on the ground. I went over the climate issue there. A hundred and twelve degrees, average temperature, ninety percent humidity. How are you gonna run the logistics there?
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Wha what are the options? What is the leverage that we have? We got nothing.
You don’t think that they’re well aware of the situation when it comes to oil? You have the free CO of Exxon and Chevron.
Now it would no, you think about these things of what could possibly happen if you do this and and see the risk that’s involved. You y you following me here? Now I again I I I gotta go into again.
Our military. And this is again I’ve been doing this for a long time. And one one of the things I’m trying to do right now, because we do so many shows and so many podcasts. I actually have my intern’s working on it this summer. They’re trying to upload all of my material that I have digitally done. I got stacks and stacks of
Shows that are on CD prior to all the digital stuff that eventually have to put that up there. And I want to kind of make it searchable. Where you can go back and you can do a search of when Markowski said this or what I called or what I talked about. I have talked about our military, the military industrial complex, and the disaster that it is for a very long time with people that I know again.
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on the inside that are in that are in it, that are in procurement, all of this stuff, the stories that I have told over the years. and I’m gonna tie this into the same way, same way I think when it comes to when I manage people’s portfolios, when we at Markowski Investments handle people’s money. I don’t know if you’re aware of this, but Polaroid
Excuse again, Polaroid. Excuse me. After Polaroid. After Polaroid, Kodak. What was the you know, Kodak with huge, massive company, blew us to blue chips, Rochester, New York? I don’t know if you’re aware of this, but Kodak invented the digital camera.
Kodak invented the digital camera. Yeah, 70s. And they were told, no. The people that don’t, no, no, no. They’re make we’re making way way. I mean, they had a good thing going, right? They they have a great thing going. Look at look at this. Look at all the film we were sending. Remember all the film we had to buy and taking it to the little photo hut thing at the parking lot at the grocery store.
The Grand Union of the Price Chopper in upstate New York. I remember my dad dropping that stuff off. Well, they didn’t adapt.
Now look at the
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This again we invented drones. We invented drone technology. we spent a lot of time talking about asymmetric warfare here on the program. We have these, you know, impressive looking.
Aircraft carriers, airplane, all of this staff.
I have argued, and I’m not the only one that’s put this out there, you’ve had former joint chiefs of staff actually testify in front of Congress saying our biggest national security concern is our debt.
We cannot that this idea that we can continue to have a blank check for our military is just it’s nonsensical. And not only has it done irreparable harm to other empires of the past, it’s doing it to us at this point in time. We are being asked as a country close to forty trillion dollars in debt, Social Security in a few short years gonna be cut by 27%, to spend an increase of close to 50%.
On our military expenditures. Why would we do that?
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Why? Why? For what? For w what what type of results? What type of results are are we going to see? You know, from the I I I I you know I I don’t get it, people. I I I really don’t. I I don’t think you’re really paying attention, quite frankly, to the realities of war today. Many of you.
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It’s not working. Take a look at bloody what just happened.
What just what was what was accomplished by Ukraine in a very short period of time using drones? What were they, what were they able to do? Lickety split. Again, pushing off the Russians, Ukraine for crying out loud, they changed their procurement. They went towards drones.
Have they figured out how to shoot down these Shaheed drones? And it has worked swimmingly for them. Have they won yet? No, they haven’t won anything yet by any stretch of the imagination. No, but they’re defending themselves.
We’ve got to do better than this, people. And it has to do, and I’ve explained this very thoroughly on the program, it’s about contracts.
It’s not about results.
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I I gone through in the past, and I again I quite frankly I don’t have time to go through very airplane, was it Warthog, various different things that we are still maintaining in the middle of the Arizona desert that not we’re not even using, it’s just there because it’s it’s someone’s frickin’ district. Again, it’s become a jobs program, it’s a contract program. Milton Friedman, I talked about this story, digging with spoons, 1960s. He’s in China.
And he’s looking at this big public works project that is there. And he’s seeing everybody with shovels and ass his Chinese government minder. why why you know why aren’t you using, you know, basically heavy earth material, big tractors and bulldozers and all sorts of stuff? And a guy’s like, Well, you don’t understand this is a public this is a jobs program more than anything else. And he’s like, Well, okay, why why don’t you give him spoons to dig with then? Digging with spoons.
That’s what we have now.
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Ask people that are actually even in the Navy for crying like what the freaking aircraft carrier. What?
With the type of hypersonic missiles that China has that are available today. We can’t get in with a thousand kilometers near Iran with those with those ships. They’re a freaking target. Asymmetric warfare. It makes our military, you understand, fragile. I talk about anti-fragile, same concept. Nicholas Nassim Talbot. It is actually the most talked about, talking about this for years. It’s not it came up, one the most talked about concepts.
Since the turn of the century.
Where you’re supposed to get better by shocks, stronger, not weaker, anti-fragile. Okay? We get a an aircraft carrier taken out. You know what what it the costs are there? It it doesn’t make any sense. I I’m gonna again, I’m gonna go through this, spending some time here today.
Both the Ukraine and Iran both were attacked by larger powers. Can we agree on that?
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They’ve stopped both of them. Stopped us, stopped the Russians. basically.
What what did they figure out? What did they figure out? they figured out that you you need actually money matters, okay? Expenses matter. and you know, you understand that there are limited resources. What have we been doing? I I think I talked about this and I talked about you how World War I, machine guns and artillery, no more cavalry charges.
I I cited, you know, Paths of Glory and you know Kubrick film and then the movie Gallipoli. Done. Done. It was another story I was reading about and I can’t exactly is how the English defeated the French and the horses and all this stuff just using arrows.
was cheaper. Okay. W we’re we’re I’m sorry, we’re buying horses. Very expensive horses.
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If you’ve ever seen and again, if you get a chance to see, and you should have seen this years ago, ever see the drone technology? You see some of these shows where the drones are in the air and are flying around and they put on these these shows. China does the unbelievable ones. if you didn’t see that and recognize that that is the future.
But we we didn’t. Well, we we may we probably did. We probably did, but guess what? That’s gonna piss off very expensive weapons programs and pu procurement and contracts with major, again, defense contractors that have operations in almost every single state by design. So these programs are not cut.
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We were the first military to integrate drones. Predator and the reaper. Okay? these vehicles were valuable because basically they could hover. The army could park a predator for hours. And just as basically have, you know, like a feed of information, real-time intelligence, and it was.
cheaper than having a satellite. then we started turning these surveillance drones into weapons platforms. but what is our focus been? Big huge fighter jets.
Fighter jets. So again, nations like Iran, they can’t even afford our dr drones. Predator drones are very expensive. Reaper drones, very expensive. They just shot one out of the sky. what they did, quite frankly, is look to commercial drones. I I remember I remember when those things first came out and I was like, whoa.
I mean kids playing with them. My kid had my kids when they were younger, I don’t know, about 10 years ago, had one of those backyard drones. I I remember one of them flying over my I hated him saying I remember one flying over my backyard. I said, I want to take out a shotgun. I said, Whose drone is this freaking thing? I’m gonna shoot this thing out of the sky. Made me nervous. I being in, you know, on vacation in Greece and Santorini, the cliffs there, people flying drones. I’m like, this is this sucks. Okay. But I also saw the the potential for.
Well, let’s just say mil military procurement. This is what happened in twenty twenty. Armenia and Azerbaijan went to war for the second time in a generation. the first war lasted six years, the second one lasted six weeks. Why? the Azerbaijanis used a combined arms strategy centered around the integration of cheap drones.
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used for both used both for surveillance and as smart munitions. The Armenians, conventional force armor, artillery, infantry were crushed.
You know who’s paying attention? Yeah, they were paying attention in Kev and they were also paying attention. It’s this is Iran’s backyard.
They were watching. They saw.
We weren’t maybe we were, but we were kidding ourselves.
We’re kidding ourselves. you know, again, maybe, maybe that five hundred, five hundred billion dollars they wanna spend the extra they want to spend on the military this year, maybe that’s gonna go all towards drones and and that. But
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I don’t see them canceling the other projects.
Can’t can’t it’s not political. It’s too much money to be made there.
Recent interview. Atlanta Council’s Danny Ctrinowitz and also Isaac Chotner asked. The fundamental question I keep returning to is Did the Iranians not realize how much control they had over the global economy before the US and Israel attacked them? Or had they always known this and were just waiting to wield that power? Hmm. In pre-drone times, Iran would have
Needed to rely on mines, fast boats, and anti-ship missiles. Mines are hit and miss and slow to deploy, plus they’re hard to undeploy. boats and missiles are relatively expensive and can be neutralized by conventional means. They needed another option, which is why they poured resources into their drone industry beginning in 2010.
That’s why Iran has been able to close the strait.
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Okay. and again, this people have failed to understand this sometimes because everyone think that there’s like a bottomless pit. It is a massive economic advantage. Okay. great piece written on this as an economic advance, not a technical advance, an economic advance written by Jonathan Last. guided munitions, smart bombs, rockets.
And shells which can seek out targets after being fired have done what drones do for a long time. What makes the drone different is the cost basis. A guided munition is expensive. Tomahawk missile, two million dollars. These munitions need a dedicated platform which to launch, submarine, ship.
Other guided munitions can be fired from aircraft or land-based batteries, in the case of some extremely short-range weapons like the Javelin anti-tank missile. And every one of these cases, ammunition itself is costly, but the prep price is dwarfed by the long tail costs needed to put those munitions in the field. Two million dollar tomahawk. It can be launched from an Ohio class submarine. Those are about $3 billion each. Requires about $155 crew members.
We got logistical costs, boat running, all sorts of stuff. A Shahid 136 drone costs between twenty and fifty thousand dollars. For the cost of a single American submarine carrying 154 tomahawks.
Iran can make a hundred and fifty thousand drones.
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And a hell of a lot faster.
A hell of a lot faster.
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There’s line that Jonathan Lass wrote that stuck with me. He said, War is politics by other means. It is also economics by other means.
Cost exchange ratio. The economics of breaking stuff, destroying things. when Russia started firing cheap Iranian-designed Shahid drones at Ukraine, the only thing the Ukrainians had on to shoot them down were expensive missile systems designed to take down airplanes, helicopters, and conventional missiles. As a financial and economic matter,
You can’t shoot down twenty thousand dollar drones with multi million dollar missiles over the long term. Even if you could manufacture them fast enough, you bankrupt yourself. So the Ukrainians adapted.
adapted, they became better. Inexpensive ways of downing these cheap drones made by Iran, using drones of their own, electronic warfare that causes the drones to crash. Sitting in the open canopy of a propeller plane and just shooting them with a gun.
If Ukraine can get its average cost to destroy a twenty thousand dollar Russian drone made by Iran to say five thousand dollars, they’re doing all right.
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That that’s that’s the issue.
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War is a competition to kill people in the most economically efficient way possible. So that your resources outlast the other side’s resources. Again, these low-cost drones, they undercut the whole superpower, you know, type model that we have been relying on, and not very well, as far as our outcomes are concerned.
That we’ve been relying upon for again, fifty plus years.
Think about this for a second.
We need a complete rethink. But again, I don’t know.
I don’t know if it’s possible. I really don’t. I mean, Pete Hegseth came in, you know, getting everybody in shape and probably best trained soldiers in the world. There’s no doubt about that. Special force, all of those little things that we could do that okay. Okay, we do that really well.
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But if you couldn’t see the the the problems and again this is under Biden with the Houthis basically causing a com the freaking Houthis causing a ruckus with drones.
At that point in time, you gotta you gotta reevaluate. Or you become a dinosaur. Like Kodak became a dinosaur. They didn’t rethink. They refused to deal with the reality of the terrain, which we are doing.
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No, we sorry, no, we don’t need Trump destroyers. We don’t need new air we don’t need any of this stuff. Submarines fine.
So I’m ready, I I’m all for that. Crank that thing up. Get new London, Connecticut, back at work. I I I don’t care. That again, they can make s sense. Well with the type of technology we have here and and you know, it should we should be able to we should be close.
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This is one thing I don’t seem to understand. Where do you start? What what programs to cut? Where should we start? And we also got to come up with the greatest realization ever. Our best defense, quite frankly, we’re blessed. Pacific Ocean, Atlantic Ocean, Canada, Mexico. I’m sorry, okay. I I quite frankly don’t see the war of eighteen twelve happening again.
We are blessed by where we are.
I think we s really need to get out of the empire business.
That ain’t one of the best things to actually come out. You wanna think about it, one of the best things to come out of this, in my opinion, absolute calamity disaster, is that the realization we we can’t defend Taiwan.
Okay, there’s just take that crap off the ta and I think the president realizes this. Can’t what are we gonna do?
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We’re gonna send aircraft carry over there?
They got hypersonic missiles done.
Done.
What do we do?
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At some point in time, it’s just no different than big yes. People hold on to antiquated ideas for whatever reason it may be. We better adapt the money that we’re spending on a F-35 freaking fighter jet that barely flies, that’s grounded all the time, so many freaking technical issues, and we’re gonna keep dumping money into that shit. We’re dumping money into that. Why? Because people are getting rich off it.
People are getting rich.
We need a complete rethink.
Again, that that could be at some point, maybe I I doubt you’ll see it. Get somebody to actually run on this. Is that we need to completely revamp everything we’re doing. Because it ain’t working.
Prove me wrong. Watchdog on wallstreet.com.
