America Nearly Made a Catastrophic Mistake With China | Command Post

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to change hi i'm ben parker from the bulwark welcome to another emergency episode of command post we keep doing these on the bulwark takes feed thanks for tuning in i am joined as always by our very own lieutenant general mark hurtling general how are you this morning i'm well but ben you know what i'm thinking if we should change the the name from command post to bub which is what command post normally have do you know what that means no what does it mean it bub is a battle update brief oh yeah we're just having a bub almost every day now because the battle continues to uh to to to rage on we have a few breaking stories and then a little a little trip down general hurtling memory lane uh in the second half of the show so stay tuned for that we have props it's gonna be great but first we have to start with the breaking news i don't know which story to start with first let's go with this one apparently a few months ago the united states military was preparing to board a chinese vessel in the strait of hormuz because an intelligence report according to cnn said that that chinese vessel was carrying components for a nuclear program they said well chinese components for nuclear program sailing by iran can't let that happen and there were planes in the air and there were people ready to board the ship when they took another look at the intelligence report and they said oh wait a minute this report was written by ai and not only was the report written by ai but the initial analysis connecting all the dots that said that the ship was carrying nuclear weapons material or nuclear program material was also done by ai and um did anyone check that they called off the mission and it turns out no there were not nuclear uh components on the ship and uh i guess we kind of dodged a bullet there generally you've been the recipient of a lot of finnish intelligence in your career uh that's got to be a pretty scary concept it is ben and what i will tell you is there was actually one situation that i experienced in iraq working with special operators and truthfully i think i've said this on the show before the special operations forces have been using ai since about 2006 so it is normal for them to do analysis of a lot of uh data which is one of the values of ai it can it can search through a lot of data data at one time and then give you an out out outcome but as this has become more ubiquitous uh you're getting more sources for that data and i think in this case what we're going to likely find that the special operations were just asking for universal data as opposed to keeping it under the classified realm that's the early indicators and when you do that you go into the open source intelligence reporting and sometimes open source intelligence comes from conspiracy theorists so there was likely some kind of just bizarre factor that played a part in this ai search but again and anybody that uses ai and both of both you and i do uh you know that you have to really check the prompts and make sure that what is being spit out in terms of any kind of answers for an ai inquiry has sort of factual and and logical and maybe a little bit of pressure on the emotional part of it and say well wait a minute this this thing that the the ai is spitting out just doesn't make sense from my experience that's where the human in the loop comes in and i think we're going to see that was exactly the case with this one and potentially other ones that we've seen in this war and in one case uh when when i was last commanding in iraq in 2008 we had an incident of a mistaken identity and we had an incident of a uh for a terrorist cell we were going after and we actually killed the wrong people and that's really gets unfortunate i'm glad that didn't happen in this case uh this is just breaking now another story we absolutely have to talk about the washington frost reporting uh that according to five sources they spoke to uh the number of american service members who have died in the middle east during the iran war is higher than the pentagon has admitted the official pentagon database has 18 military fatalities more than six million people have died in the middle east six u.s officials familiar with the defense department's internal uh accounting there have been 22 military fatalities four more than what's in the public database a sixth official the washington post reports who like the others spoke on condition of anonymity said that 23 service members have died since february 28th uh not all of the undisclosed deaths are directly tied to the conflict but have involved u.s personnel who are in the middle east additionally the official said three u.s contractors based in the region have died since combat operations began this is a story we've talked about a lot depending on trying to shift the numbers hide the numbers play games with the numbers of fatalities uh the president is clearly very proud that compared to say vietnam which is always his comparison there have been relatively few fatalities in this war but it looks yet again like the pentagon is trying to hide the true cost of the war yeah well we don't know what uh if there were deaths as being reported it didn't look like there were deaths as being reported we don't know what those deaths were caused by uh you know when you're talking about civilian contractors there have been cases where a civilian contractor was a little bit older a little bit overweight and had a heart attack in theater or there was a truck roller and and that's something called a death by non-battle injury or dnbd uh so you know are these literally enemy attacks that have taken lives or are these something ancillary to soldiers being deployed and as you and i have talked about on a previous episode we've talked about the death by non-battle injury and we've talked about it on a previous episode that happens but the calculation and the reporting of it should be pretty uh you know it shouldn't be opaque it should be open to the public and and what we're seeing seems to not uh summarize that kind of approach to calculating battle deaths and injuries yeah i hope we get more reporting i hope we find out uh more about what happened there uh general in your experience if you have something like a vehicle accident or or a death by non-battle injury that doesn't come in combat does that not count as dying during the war if you're still stationed overseas no it does it's just in a different category and i don't know if you remember ben when we did that episode a long time ago i showed a chart of my time in iraq by month and what we had from killed in action wounded in action uh wounded seriously wounded in action swia and we had dnbd death by non-battle injury uh or you know some type of injury or or or malady that caused a soldier to be shipped out of theater you know if they if they caught measles or if they had malaria or something all that is accounted for when a commander reports their their casualty figures up the chain of the of command we had to report it weekly but we also rolled it up monthly just to have ourselves a good feel for what kind of things that were the metrics we were following related to the kinds of operations we were following we were conducting obviously the lives of the people involved are the most important cost of the war in iran but we also have to talk about the financial costs it is significant we talked a little bit earlier in the week about the congressional budget office which just did their first estimate and they came up with a total expenditure for the war in iran of about 38 billion dollars between late february and august 1st now centcom central command itself has done an accounting this is according to punch bowl they came up with a much higher number 43 point 6 billion dollars uh interestingly they both say that expending precision munitions like missile interceptors cost about 28 billion dollars so they agree there and you pointed out that neither of these estimates includes what would be required to replace or uh repair damaged facilities from iranian drone and missile attacks yeah let's let's break down the congressional budget office figure which you remember was 38 billion dollars to this one conducted by centcom which was 43 billion dollars so whenever you have a combatant commander basically saying no no no i personally spent more than that that's in itself troubling but the other troubling report that we reported on ben in in the article the other day was that the congressional budget officer said this was basically their best guess because the department of defense was not giving them figures well the difference the delta between the cbo report of 38 billion and the central command report of 43 billion had to do with replacing equipment, damaged or destroyed equipment. So you say, okay, well, wait a minute, the Pentagon knows that too, because Central Command is sending that up. What else does the Pentagon know that they're not telling the Congressional Budget Office, which has the authority and responsibility to collect this kind of information for the Congress of the United States? And truthfully, Ben, here's the good news. The Congress of the United States has a regulatory and constitutional requirement under Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution of the United States, which basically says Congress has the authority to build and maintain an army and a navy. So, you know, the fact that the Congress should know these kind of figures and the Department of Defense, a subordinate, should know these kind of figures, and the Department of Organization to the Congress is basically hiding these figures is what's causing all the hubbub right now. Yeah, it is. I hope we get a full accounting, a full and honest accounting with all the numbers at some point, but I am not holding my breath. And speaking of things Congress ought to know, Politico also just reported today that the Hill is investigating what happened to some parts from F-35 stealth fighter jets that mysteriously wound up in Hong Kong, which is controlled by China. Among these parts was the canopy of the jet, which has sensitive stealth technology. It's not easy to get glass not to show up on radar. They don't really quite understand from what this article reports how it happened, but they were supposed to be shipping these parts for repairs from Australia back to Lockheed Martin, the manufacturer of the jet, in the United States. And somehow the parts, which were on a third party transportation system, got diverted to Hong Kong. What is there to say besides yikes? Yeah, I don't know how to address that issue, Ben. I don't know anything about the F-35 and its stealth components, but I do not know about the M1A1E1 tank, the Abrams fighting vehicles that we're talking about when we talk about tank warfare. And the armor of those tanks was classified. So whenever one of those was hit in combat or we were shipping some of the classified hull parts because of the way the armor is manufactured and how we didn't want that to get in the hand of our enemies, it was carefully monitored on where those parts were. So I would suggest probably an F-35 is a whole lot more important than an M1 tank. But yeah, this seems to be a little bit troubling that these parts are getting out of control. But again, as you said, Lockheed Martin, the manufacturer, is the one responsible for the shipping and care of these parts as they go to different places in the world. Yeah, the Chinese have for a long time been trying to copy or steal American stealth technology. There was a, I mean, maybe a decade ago or more, there was a story about how they had managed to, I can't remember if they hacked into the Pentagon computers or into the manufacturer's computers and basically stole all the design data for the F-22, the first stealth fighter jet, first real stealth fighter jet, and then sort of reverse engineered it and made their own. So maybe this was a great Chinese espionage op where they managed to steal a component that they could then reverse engineer. That would be very terrifying. The best possible outcome would be that this is actually an American counterintelligence program and we're feeding them bad parts. But I don't know. I can't imagine that would show up in Politico. Yikes. Whenever you see the looks of Chinese aircraft or tanks or any kind of naval forces, they look surprisingly like the counterpart from America that came out a few years earlier. So they do a pretty good job in terms of stealing intellectual property. That's why there's a concern not just with the defense industry, but any kind of industry that's dealing with China. And they know how to do this very well, as do other countries as well. The best thing that could possibly happen with this story is that we never hear about it again, and it gets quietly cleaned up. But if all of a sudden, a year or two for now, Chinese jets start having much more advanced canopies and smaller radar cross sections, I think we'll know why. All right. Well, that's it for the scary part of the show. Next, we go to. What do you have in your sleeve right now? Next, we go to the fun slash enraging part of the show. And it starts with what Donald Trump said about the weird deal that he was trying to negotiate with Venezuela over giving the United States access to Venezuelan oil fields. We have a clip here of what Donald Trump said about Venezuela. For the record, here we go. And with our new and powerful relationship with Venezuela, we just made the largest oil deal in history. And I think the largest deal in history. We got 65 billion barrels of beautiful 500 years worth of oil, 65 billion. Think of it. Billion barrels of oil. We got it for what? An attack. We got it for an attack. You know, Ben, I got to tell you, I know a little bit about oil. And the reason I do is because I was forced to learn a little bit about oil because my last combat tour in northern Iraq, we had two oil fields in our area of operation, the major Kurdish oil fields in Kurdistan, but also the Bay, oil refinery in Tikrit. So I actually had a young captain in charge of that Bay oil refinery. And I told out of the 101st airborne, I said, he was an infantryman. I said, you learn everything you know about oil and keep an eye on this place. There were terrorists attempting to steal the oil out of there, but they had a pretty good deal in terms of stopping them. Okay. So I had to learn a whole bunch about oil. This captain knew more than I did. And he briefed me up every time I saw him, but it was pretty amazing. Let's talk about the president's comments here. The United States did not, let me repeat that, not get 65 billion barrels of oil from the Venezuela fields. In fact, the White House fact sheet even says that that's not true. It says that North American Blue Energy Partners, NBAP, has a hundred year concession, 100 year concession to further develop the field of oil. And it says that the United States did not, let me repeat that, not get 65 billion barrels of oil from the Venezuela fields in Venezuela. And the U S government has the right to buy 20% of their production of that NBAP corporation at cost. It further says that millions of barrels of Venezuelan output will eventually be processed through U S refineries. So we're talking about potential here. Winning never sounded so good. What would you do if you won big at Crown Coins Casino? 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The White House says the Venezuelan authorities' granted that 100-year concession to those fields, and the U.S. gets 35% equity. If you haven't been confused by the numbers yet, Ben, let me tell you, I got some of these numbers from a professor that I work with at a school of business. The 65 billion barrel oil bonanza that the president says we've got is really a 20% recovery factor from the underfield resources. So this is a 60% recovery factor from the underfield resources. So this is, of the 300 billion barrels of oil that are underground, we might get 65 billion barrels of that over time. At some point over a century. Yeah. So in other words, there's no 65 billion barrels sitting in a bunch of tankers offshore or even in the refineries waiting to be shipped to us. The second thing the president said was we will have from this 65 billion barrels, we're going to have, we're going to have a 500 years worth of oil that we can, you know, use. That's easily fact-checked because this professor friend of mine said that the average U.S. consumer rate is about 20.6 million barrels of petroleum per day, or 7.52 billions per year. At that consumption, the 65 billion that's still underground, but remember, that oil is still underground. For the barrels of oil that are 65 billion barrels to last 500 years like the president said the united states would have to reduce their consumption drastically by about 58 percent or excuse me 58 times the amount in petroleum products oh we'd have to use 160th the amount of oil yeah we actually i actually have a figure we would have to only use 356 000 barrels per day when compared to 20 million yeah so okay you know okay so we got that factor uh all in place but the interesting part is the president said we got all this just for an attack that's not an energy claim it's a claim about the relationship between the u.s military action the u.s industry mbap that's gone into their venezuelan resources over a hundred years so you know uh there i feel like i'm daniel dale sometimes talking about fact checking the president but in this one it's really easy to do because the beiji oil refinery and the kurdish oil fields in iraq we're producing about a million barrels a year and it got up to about 12 million barrels per year so i know these kind of figures from the oil industry and nothing is coming out of the venezuelan oil fields right now and by the way there's one more thing in order for mbap to get that oil from underground to the top of the ground estimates are that it will cost about a hundred billion dollars to basically build the construction and the pipelines and provide the resources it will withdraw these things from the venezuelan fields which are currently not in place congratulations you just won the chance to spend a hundred billion dollars well i mean in a company would spend 100 billion dollars if they know they're going to get 500 billion in in response for that but that's not in the picture right now there's still a lot of places to go but the president is shouting these things out to his willful listeners and they're all thinking this is the greatest president of all times and nothing is there right now right uh that is that is remarkable i i do want to focus on that little short sentence he had we got it for an attack i am not an expert on international law but i'm pretty sure you're not allowed to attack country just to take its natural resources correct i don't know that is something now there's oh there's a place i think it's called the geneva conventions oh yeah it's articles four and five that says you can't go into a nation under a military government and you can't go into a country under a military government to take that nation's natural resources also the uh un charter right that's the crime of aggression if you not in self-defense or for any legitimate purpose just decide to make war on another nation that is the crime of aggression and these aren't this isn't you know like this is a long-standing tradition and it's a general these are treaties that the united states signed that the senate ratified where we said this is law this is law in the united states under the constitution the constitution and treaties are the supreme law of the land and it's not just the we signed these treaties and trump is saying yeah we just broke it what's the big deal it's infuriating well i promise we take a trip down memory lane and uh this also has to do with oil because this was 11 years ago back when general you and the the the now president were having this same disagreement over oil so i want to play this clip from 11 years we had somebody causing it between us it was a guy named anderson cooper okay let's play let's play the clip you say sending troops to ring around the oil field general hurtling said they had 30 000 americans 60 000 iraqis guarding the kirk kirk oil field during the war al-qaeda was still able to get in how many i'm a better general than the general you're talking about okay then i'm a better general true or false uh obviously it's true uh because it was interesting during that time in iraq that 15 month i spent in iraq in 2007 and 8 we were desperately trying to get exxon mobil shell and uh bp into our area of operation to help rebuild the beijing oil refinery because it had been pretty much highly damaged by al-qaeda terrorists we also had to rebuild the pipelines going from the kurdish regions down to beijing new york to creep uh they came in they looked around they said yeah this has huge potential but we don't want any part of it because it's going to cost us too much and the security is not good and that's what i told anderson cooper and i said you know we had 30 000 troops in northern iraq guarding those fields and uh even with those the oil companies said yeah we don't want to try and do that so i i don't think this it's quite the same in venezuela right now it's more of a uh it's not as tense of a of a environment but it certainly could be because the venezuelans aren't going to be real happy about americans coming in and basically stealing their oil do you have another tape to play ben i want to bring in lieutenant general hurtling uh general hurtling i'm sorry to get you involved in all of this conversation uh general he's now commanded the first armored division and task force iron in northern iraq from 2007 to 2009 and the u.s army in europe in 2013 currently he's the cnn military analyst so this idea of bombing the hell out of the oil fields in iraq and that there is no iraq and what do you make of that it's delusional anderson i i it's interesting the other day when i commented i tried to be as apolitical as possible and said that we judge leaders in the military through character presence and intellect and i suggested that mr trump did not have a firm grasp of what was really going on not only in iraq but in other parts of the world and i continue to believe that he may be a very good businessman but the art of soldiering is a profession and i'm not sure that he understands the science and the art of soldiering and the connection of military strategy with national security strategy and he doesn't certainly understand the complexity of what's going on in iraq and the rest of the middle east i think the through line here general is that the president seems to think that having control of oil is almost like a legal process like you get title to it and then legally you possess it and for more than a decade now you've been saying no it's much more complicated than what you're saying and i think that's a very good point to actually get the natural resource out of the ground and get it into a form that is economically useful for the state that rightfully owns it. Yeah, to the president, I think it's a business acquisition. And we're talking about independent nations right here. What didn't show in that clip, Ben, I just have to comment because you made issue of it earlier. Right after that, Cooper asked me of what would be the outcome of this? And I said, it's a war crime to steal other nations' natural resources. But I think I have to show you something. This tape is a warning to anybody that puts something on the internet is it always will come back to haunt you. So I was teaching one of my MBA classes a few weeks ago, and one of the students evidently saw this tape. So they had a big joke about making a couple of t-shirts for those in the class and gave me one. And it said, I'm a better general than Hurtley. So I now have this shirt, thanks to a bunch of MBA students. And that tape from Anderson Cooper was during the campaign of 2015. It wasn't even when President Trump was President Trump in his first term. 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