Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
· Darren Farber, Patrick O'Shaughnessy
In order to win it, look how far they've had to go. I don't know if Netanyahu has the support in the Knesset for the purposes of doing this last leg in the ground war, but it's what's necessary for his condition of winning. You have to have a design on a concept of positive propaganda. Propaganda has a bad connotation to it, but it's just… [00:00:00] S0: Marketing.
· Darren Farber
[00:00:00] S1: It's marketing. It's your political worldview. Israel has just not spent the calories on it. So the question is, should they? I believe the answer is yes. In a finite pie, how much of the pie should they spend on it? It's not immaterial. Their adversaries are spending enormously on it because it's working. The martyrdom culture, because it's hybridized with religion to create a higher form of fanaticism, allows you to run for so long. The design to co-opt American universities can be traced to a single hotel room in Philadelphia by the FBI, listening with laser microphones. Where, after the Oslo Accords, the Palestinian Authority with Arafat is brought in, and Hamas is considered left out in the cold. They go to Hamas. They say, "Guess what? You're not in this deal." This is a political organization with no home. They laid out in this single conversation that the FBI has transcripts of, their plan to co-opt universities and co-opt university teaching and institutions, for the express purposes of changing Western opinion over the course of 20 years. Bezos has attributed the quote that if you have a seven-year plan, you win, because most people give up. These guys had a 20-year plan, and it totally worked. To make it seem like it was this natural formation out of the ether, through moral will, is to dumb down the sophistication of what these people in the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas set out to do. They set out to do this. They were so committed to it, and they saw it through. We're talking about people advocating for a society that brutalizes their own people and denies their rights. You have a series of people advocating for them that would be denied those same rights there. It was done with intent. It was by design. This administration is moving the goalposts in the popular vernacular of what winning means. My view is if you have the strait open and you have a degraded Iranian military capability that can't reconstitute itself very quickly through oil profits, then that will be a win. If it can quickly reconstitute its export network of terror and the strait is closed, then strategically it will be a failure.
· Patrick O'Shaughnessy, Darren Farber
[00:00:00] S0: What do you think will happen in the strait? How would you describe the state of things today and the options that the rest of the world has, or we have, going forward? What do you think will happen? [00:00:00] S1: In practical terms, the rest of the world — we're there, and then we have the Iranians, and there are foreign-flagged and commercial vessels there. But no one else is there in practical terms. It's just us, and the rest of the world is really, to a large extent watching, save for the Gulf Arab states. The amazing thing is the Gulf Arab states have a much stronger will to fight. UAE has left OPEC. That's kind of big. They said they will participate in projecting force with their own forces. That's pretty big too. They are very concerned that we will lose our will to fight by virtue of whatever economic pain in the interim basis it generates. But the concept of overcoming the blockade is going to need more magazine depth, more forces in the region. We're going to need an amphibious force on the shore for sure. That is a major escalation, and that's where Taylor's theory and Eisenhower's theory begin to merge. [00:00:00] S0: Can you describe those two? It's such an interesting history.
· Patrick O'Shaughnessy, Darren Farber
[00:00:00] S0: Can you describe those two? It's such an interesting history. [00:00:00] S1: Maxwell Taylor is a four-star general. He was Kennedy's Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, is a great military leader but also could be blamed for the escalation of the Vietnam War. Eisenhower's warning about the military-industrial complex really came out of this concern of — we now have this new super weapon, so that should really work as the maximal deterrent for any of these things breaking out. Why spend all the calories on building all of these proportional capabilities when through a chain of escalation, it's just ultimately going to lead to the big red button? Those are the competing theories. Eisenhower's theory was maximal deterrence — if you do anything, we're going to use the really special stuff. Taylor's was, we're going to use proportional force, and he viewed it as a deterrence gap, because are we really going to go nuclear for small incursions, small foot faults? To an extent that was right, but all of it leads toward escalation. If you don't embark with this very clear directive internally of what you want to accomplish from a political standpoint, and you're not crisp about it — then you lose political will, and then you lose the ability to do it. You lose Congress, you lose the budget, you ultimately lose the executive. So that becomes more and more important. You have to paint the target of what you want to accomplish, and so all these things are political.
· Patrick O'Shaughnessy, Darren Farber
[00:00:00] S0: So who is more right do you think between Eisenhower and Taylor? Apply those two lenses to today's stance for the US. What is the US doing, not just in the Iranian theater, but in general with its military, with the Department of War? What are they doing? What should they be doing that they're not doing? What are they doing that they shouldn't be doing? [00:00:00] S1: It's fair to say you need both. If you took an exclusive maximalist view of Eisenhower, of having this nuclear deterrent, your only response is nuclear deterrence. Can you imagine the world we'd be living in? Some people would say, "Well, great, that would mean we wouldn't get involved in any of these contingencies. We wouldn't have gotten involved in Vietnam, we wouldn't have gotten involved in Iraq, probably wouldn't have gotten involved in Afghanistan. Because we wouldn't have this flexible projection of force to correspondingly respond, and maybe we wouldn't have the temperament to drop a bomb on someone." Maybe we would, but the binary choice would be so stark. Flexible power has all these gradations of capability that Taylor outlined and that have been modernized for the new concepts of warfare, and that's how we build magazine depth in all of these things. A Tomahawk missile is not a nuclear weapon. HIMARS is not a nuclear weapon. It's the concept of being able to enforce the smaller infringements, if you will. You probably need both. It would be a very scary world if all we had was a nuclear button in order to prevent a full-scale contingency.
· Darren Farber, Patrick O'Shaughnessy
[00:00:00] S1: It's fair to say you need both. If you took an exclusive maximalist view of Eisenhower, of having this nuclear deterrent, your only response is nuclear deterrence. Can you imagine the world we'd be living in? Some people would say, "Well, great, that would mean we wouldn't get involved in any of these contingencies. We wouldn't have gotten involved in Vietnam, we wouldn't have gotten involved in Iraq, probably wouldn't have gotten involved in Afghanistan. Because we wouldn't have this flexible projection of force to correspondingly respond, and maybe we wouldn't have the temperament to drop a bomb on someone." Maybe we would, but the binary choice would be so stark. Flexible power has all these gradations of capability that Taylor outlined and that have been modernized for the new concepts of warfare, and that's how we build magazine depth in all of these things. A Tomahawk missile is not a nuclear weapon. HIMARS is not a nuclear weapon. It's the concept of being able to enforce the smaller infringements, if you will. You probably need both. It would be a very scary world if all we had was a nuclear button in order to prevent a full-scale contingency. [00:00:00] S0: How would you compare the state of our military capability and prowess today to when you were in the Pentagon?