Editor's note: Bill Bonner has issued a dire warning about the state of our economy.
But his concerns aren't limited to your ability to withdraw cash from your local ATM. As you'll read in today's edition of our weekend Masters Series, Bill also believes outrageous military spending could leave us wildly unprepared for the next World War...
The Military Does Not Want to Win Wars
An interview with Bill Bonner, editor, The Bill Bonner Letter
Porter Stansberry: I wanted to get to a deeper question with you, because one of the things I enjoy with our private conversations is the philosophy that we share about the foolish things people will believe... and the lengths they will go to defend them.
And one in particular, which you've written about in your daily e-letter, Bill Bonner's Diary, is the fallacy of war and the war state... and the whole idea that underpins the idea of conflict, both in modern times and historical times.
How many more senseless wars can we lose before people begin to doubt the wisdom and authority of their elected leaders when it comes to leadership of the Army, Navy, Marines, etc.?
Bill Bonner: This one is, unfortunately, my interest. It's very depressing because I think we can lose lots of wars and, in fact, we intend to lose the wars. These wars are meant to be lost. They're not meant to be won, and winning would be the worst thing that could happen.
I mean, we're set up in a system where the wars are designed to keep the war industry in business. You can't win a war and stay in business, because if you won a real war, then you'd have to send the troops home and stop spending so much money.
But these wars are not intended for that. They're intended to go on forever. The military does not want to win them. The military has no way of winning them, because there's no enemy that could be defeated.
I mean, they're designed just to go on forever. They are an extension and a corruption of the defense industry, really, and so they'll just go on and on.
What will happen, though, is that the defense industry will become corrupted by doing things that really don't involve national defense. And this happened in Argentina, by the way, in the 1970s, when the military was put to service killing people.
You know, they would have these – they call them "disappearances." They would make people disappear – people they thought were a threat. Often, they were journalists, or they were authors... or people who had a message that the government didn't like. And those people would be picked up, their bodies would be dumped in the river, and they would never be seen again.
By the early 1980s... the generals were in trouble, the inflation was running at 10,000% per year, and they decided to invade the Malvinas Islands (otherwise known as the Falklands). And they did that expecting that it would rally the people, which it did.
Even after all this time, even after using the military just to suppress and oppress their own people, people were still behind the military. I think it's almost impossible. People almost never abandon their military, no matter how dumb it is, no matter how bad of a service it gives.
And so what happened was this military, which was so used to killing weaponless people, got sent to the Malvinas. They were certain they were going to just settle this in some long negotiation with Britain. But instead, Britain sent the Army. They sent the fleet. And they went, and they attacked these poor Argentines who were totally unprepared to really fight a war because they had been so used to just killing civilians.
A military that is corrupted in this way becomes a tool... not to defend the nation, but really to divert funds from the nation to itself. This includes its suppliers and military men who have luxury cars and planes.
Well, these people are not prepared to fight a real war, and their defense budgets are all set up to take money from one group of people and give it to them instead. They're not set up to defend the country.
In the U.S., we see these huge, huge expenses for material – war material that is suitable for fighting World War II. And now what's probably going to happen is we're going to keep these wars going for as long as we can.
And then when a real war comes up against a real enemy, like, say... China, that real enemy is developing new weapons that will work against America's clunky old material.
And who knows how that will go. But I think until that happens, the imperial power gets fatter and fatter and bigger and bigger, spending more and more money on the military... Mind you, this is a military which is less and less able to really defend the country. And then you have a real war, and it's defeated.
Now, how long that takes, and whether it'll happen like that, I certainly don't know, but that's kind of the classic story.
Porter Stansberry: Yeah, and the story from World War II that's so ironic is the Billy Mitchell story. Here you had an Air Force guy who warned the Navy to quit building those battleships, because a battleship will sink with just one bomb from one plane.
And he demonstrated that he could do so off the coast of North Carolina around 1922, and he was run out of the military, court marshalled, and he died in poverty in 1936.
But what happened, of course? Well, the Japanese figured out it was easy to sink all of our battleships with airplanes. And I wonder how our aircraft carriers are going to do against China's cruise missiles.
How do you think they'll do, Bill?
Bill Bonner: Well, I have no idea. I'm certainly not a military hardware guy, but I suspect that China is going to think of something. And I suspect it's going to be something that we hadn't thought of. And it's probably going to be a whole lot cheaper and probably a whole lot more effective.
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