June 23, 2007 - Art Bell
02:37:00
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| From the high desert and the great American Southwest, I bid you all good evening, good morning, good afternoon, wherever you may be in the world's time zones, prolific as they are, each and every one covered like a blanket by this program, the very largest of its sort in the world, called Coast to Coast AM. | ||
| I'm Art Bell, and it is my honor and privilege to be escorting you through the weekend. | ||
| Now, we're guest heavy this night, so Matt Seminar is standing by on peak oil. | ||
| So I'll just read you the headlines only. | ||
| It's enough. | ||
| Ohio mom's body found. | ||
| Boyfriend charged. | ||
| Man charged with killing wife and three kids. | ||
| Roadside bombs kill seven U.S. troops in Iraq. | ||
| Iran warns against any nuclear sanctions. | ||
| Talk shows influence immigration debate. | ||
| Larry King lands first Hilton interview, and that's all the bad news, in my opinion. | ||
| The good news, one good news story, Atlanta's crew reunites with families. | ||
| Now you're up to date. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| Matt Savonar. | ||
| And oh, by the way, next hour. | ||
| Oh, man, next hour. | ||
| I'm a big fan, and that's always a problem in trying to do an interview. | ||
| Dale Brown. | ||
| The author of Dale Brown, my God, I am such a fan. | ||
| I have read virtually all of his books. | ||
| So that'll be next hour. | ||
| Coming up in a moment, Matt Seminar. | ||
| Now, Matt is a California licensed attorney. | ||
| He's got a bachelor's degree in political science from the University of California at Davis, law degree from the University of California at Hastings College of the Law. | ||
| He is the author and administrator of LifeAftertheOil Crash.net, which explains global peak oil, its ramifications, and what we can do to address it or can't do. | ||
| So coming up in a moment. | ||
| Yeah, it's all about oil. | ||
| Well, all right, I was going to go on to say it's all about oil, and it is. | ||
| As we bring Matt on, I want to read this email. | ||
| It's short from Don. | ||
| Don says, I knew you could not ignore peak oil much longer. | ||
| This is the biggest issue of our time. | ||
| Everyone is burying their heads in the sand, hoping that some kind of magic bullet of alternative energy comes along to save the day. | ||
| However, without cheap energy, we're in big trouble economically. | ||
| I find it amazing that the stock market is thriving with this backdrop. | ||
| The peak oil story is really very simple. | ||
| The decline rate is going to get us. | ||
| The minimum decline rate for existing fields is at least 3%, and 3% of 73 million, the current daily production of conventional oil, is 2.2 million. | ||
| Thus, we have to find that much new oil just to spin in place. | ||
| Once you do a little homework, you realize that all of this is a lot of new oil to bring online each year. | ||
| By the end of the decade, the decline rate is going to be up around 4% soon. | ||
| It will be impossible to offset this huge decline rate. | ||
| We are literally on the precipice of peak oil because of the decline rate. | ||
| Thanks, Don. | ||
| Matt, welcome to the program. | ||
| Well, thank you, Art, for having me on. | ||
| Actually, it's much worse than what he just made out. | ||
| People who study this topic often think the decline rate may only be 3% or 4%. | ||
| That would be true if we only had to deal with geologic factors. | ||
| The U.S., for example, peaked in 1971 and has declined at a rate of about 3% per year. | ||
| But most of the world's oil is located in extremely dangerous and unstable parts of the world where in addition to the geologic base, the decline from just what's left in the ground, you've got war and terrorism and massive political corruption, all sorts of other things. | ||
| So in reality, the effective decline rate will probably be closer to 10%, which would cut global supply in half in seven years from the time of the peak. | ||
| And what's worse on top of that is here in the U.S., to us, it's not so important when the actual day of the total peak is. | ||
| It's the date of when the exports peak, because we import so much of our oil. | ||
| You have oil coming from places like Nigeria, where, sure, in theory, if Nigeria was as peaceful as Texas, the decline rate would be 4%. | ||
| But when you add up all these other things, it's probably going to be much higher. | ||
| So we're looking at a catastrophe that even the most pessimistic of catastrophists, such as the person who emailed you, it's really almost impossible to get your mind around the size of the catastrophe we're facing. | ||
| Well, Matt, if you and I can sit here and come to these conclusions, then surely the experts who advise the President of the United States and those he listens to, I guess his staff, they must be telling the President all of this. | ||
| Yes? | ||
| Well, I think, well, first of all, we have to be clear that Dick Cheney is, for all intents and purposes, the President. | ||
| And Dick Cheney is fully aware of this. | ||
| He was talking about it in, and it's not to say that Bush isn't, but just to be completely real with everybody, Cheney was talking about this back in the late 90s when he was with Halliburton. | ||
| The biggest piece of evidence, I think, besides the entire war in Iraq, is that the Department of Homeland Security just gave Khaled Brown a root $400 million contract to build massive new detention camps, quote, for an emergency influx of immigrants. | ||
| Now, why are they expecting an emergency influx of immigrants? | ||
| It's because Mexico is a major oil producer. | ||
| Their oil production has dropped by 7 percent in the last year, which is huge. | ||
| Their entire government and security, everything is dependent on revenues from oil. | ||
| So as their oil production crashes, their ability to maintain order is going to fall apart, and there will be an emergency influx of immigrants. | ||
| My God, 7%. | ||
| Now, Mexico has declined 7%? | ||
| I've just got the story. | ||
| It's on my Breakthrough news page today. | ||
| Linked up at the top, Pemex, which is their national oil company, has seen its production drop 6.6% since this time last year. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| If you just do a search for Mexico oil production, tons of stories will come up documenting this. | ||
| I've had lots of stories on my site, but just doing the Google search would probably be the easiest way to bring them up. | ||
| All right, well, listen, this email brought up, I thought, an interesting point, and that is, in the face of this, surely the captains of industry, Matt, understand all of this, as well as the president, whoever you think he is. | ||
| They understand it. | ||
| So why is the market continuing to flourish in the way it is in the face of this? | ||
| Art, have you ever seen, I'm sure you've seen videos of traders on the market where they're yelling at each other? | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Do they look like they're planning more than a couple days in advance? | ||
| No, they're down to hours. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And so our entire, it's very, it's hard for me to get my mind around if people hold it. | ||
| No, no, wait, wait, wait, wait. | ||
| I'm talking about people in the know who are putting big, big money into the market. | ||
| Not just the guys yelling for the trades, but the people investing, Matt. | ||
| I'll tell you, one of, for the most part, they're subject to the same sort of blind spots that the average person is subject to. | ||
| So most people are, even at the highest levels of our society, are in total denial. | ||
| Now, there are some who are not in denial. | ||
| One of Bush's friends, a man by the name of Richard Rainwater, who's worth multi-billions of dollars, a year and a half ago in the year-end investing issue of Fortune magazine, they did an entire special on him. | ||
| And he said he pulled $500 million out of the stock market because he's expecting things to, quote, blow up. | ||
| And there, they came out and they took a picture of me. | ||
| And I've got it up on the site. | ||
| If you click About Us or About Me, and he reads my site every day, and he reads the other peak oil sites. | ||
| So there are some people who have big money who are preparing for this, but I think the majority are in as much. | ||
| It's hard to believe that they are. | ||
| What do you know about the theory of abiotic oil? | ||
| Well, even if it's true, it's not doing us any good because there are 40,000 oil fields across the world. | ||
| Explain the theory. | ||
| It's basically this theory that oil is not a fossil fuel that doesn't come from organic matter that's been compressed over millions and millions of years, which is the traditional theory of oil formation. | ||
| It's a theory that there's just this big center of oil in the center of the earth, and it's just a renewable resource, and there's as much of it as we need. | ||
| Now, even if that's true, it's not doing us any good in the real world. | ||
| let's clear it up though. | ||
| I mean, uh, most reasonable, I haven't talked to one, not one real scientist who believes that. | ||
| Art, if we had a trial today, abiotic oil versus peak oil, I could have a thousand geologists independent from the oil companies testify about peak oil. | ||
| I know. | ||
| I just want to make it clear to the audience so they understand the gravity of what we're talking about. | ||
| There is only one person on this planet who is advocating abiotic oil, and that's Jerome Corsi. | ||
| He may be an expert in other areas in geopolitics or whatever. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| But he has not, to my knowledge, ever had to put food on his family's table by finding and discovering oil. | ||
| And he's the only person I can find who is advocating, only prominent person who is advocating abiotic oil. | ||
| All right, let's leave that one alone. | ||
| I think it's just fantasy. | ||
| But getting beyond that, let's move to another one. | ||
| There's two more things we can talk about. | ||
| One is, how many giant, undiscovered oil fields do you think remain in the world? | ||
| Well, really, oil discovery peaked in 1961. | ||
| So there's virtually, it is now costing the big oil companies more money to go look for oil than what they find from all the, So there really aren't, I mean, we may find an occasional field, but it's pretty slim pickings at this point. | ||
| I'll put it this way, there was the JAC2 find, which everybody got all hyped up about about a year ago. | ||
| And you saw all over the media, people are like, oh, this means PICO is not a problem. | ||
| Well, hold on a minute. | ||
| It was only 15 billion barrels, which would put, we consume 30 billion barrels a year. | ||
| The peak occurs at the halfway point. | ||
| So the 15 billion barrel estimate was the most optimistic estimate. | ||
| That puts the peak off by 7.5 billion barrels, which buys us maybe an extra four months. | ||
| To make matters worse, the oil is five miles below the ocean. | ||
| The companies would not be looking for oil five miles below the ocean if there was oil anywhere else left to be found. | ||
| Well, what you said earlier was more worrisome. | ||
| I mean, if you spend $10 billion looking for oil and you only get $8 billion worth of oil, no company is going to do that very long. | ||
| Yeah, that actually here, I've got the article, the October 2004 New York Times article entitled Top Oil Groups Failed to Recoup Exploration Costs. | ||
| The top 10 oil groups spent $8 billion combined on exploration. | ||
| They only found $4 billion in oil. | ||
| Yikes. | ||
| I'm also hearing that we're cutting back on refining capacity. | ||
| Is that true? | ||
| I believe so. | ||
| I mean, we haven't built a new refinery here in about 25 to 30 years. | ||
| People say, well, that's because the oil companies are manipulating the supply. | ||
| And there may be some truth to that. | ||
| But the real reason that they're not building new refineries is because they know that we're basically more or less, quote-unquote, running out. | ||
| And refineries are billion-dollar endeavors. | ||
| And you're not going to build more refineries if you don't anticipate that there's going to be more oil to actually refine. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Before oil Armageddon, there's going to be a hell of a lot of pain. | ||
| And there's already pain. | ||
| If you go to the gas pump now, there's pain, plenty of pain. | ||
| I don't know what we're up to, 330, 340, whatever it is for premium and over 3 for regular, I think, in most places now. | ||
| So, based on what you know, Matt, where are gas prices going to go, I don't know, look ahead the next five years, say? | ||
| Well, I mean, I can't really give you a specific number, but I mean, it's most likely going to continue to go up unless we get a deflation, massive deflationary depression where the demand for commodities goes down, which in that case, you know, we're in a lot of trouble as well. | ||
| But the problem is in countries like in here, we'll just use the U.S. as an example, we really can't stop driving because we haven't really invested in mass transit. | ||
| We really haven't invested aggressively in any sort of alternatives. | ||
| We built our entire economy around the idea that gas is always going to be 75 cents a gallon. | ||
| And it was incredibly stupid. | ||
| This is the sort of thing that causes societies to collapse. | ||
| If you look over the course of history, these sort of boneheaded on a massive scale type decision. | ||
| I agree. | ||
| So people always want to know, give me a price, and I really can't give you a price. | ||
| I just don't feel comfortable doing that. | ||
| All right, no, that's all right. | ||
| Let's go over that one. | ||
| Let me ask you another question. | ||
| What percentage of electricity in France is generated by nuclear power? | ||
| I think it's something like 80%. | ||
| 80 or 90%. | ||
| Now, we don't use oil to generate electricity. | ||
| Most of our electricity comes from natural gas or coal. | ||
| Yes, I know. | ||
| But if, in fact, we had 80 or 90% of our electricity being generated by nuclear power. | ||
| Well, we'd be able to get a lot of money. | ||
| We could then begin moving toward Google's electric car, and things would begin to change, wouldn't they? | ||
| Well, what would happen if we made a significant switch over to nuclear power at this point, we'd probably run out of uranium as fast as we're running out of oil. | ||
| Uranium is a fossil fuel, just like oil. | ||
| So, you know, I won't say eliminate the nuclear option off the table, but it's really not the panacea that people – You get a 3,000 or 4,000-pound car to move 150-pound person. | ||
| And if we want to solve this, if we want to deal with this in a way that's not going to lead to some sort of energy catastrophe, be it with oil, coal, because the electricity right now is going to come from coal and natural gas, both of which are depleting, or from uranium, which is also rapidly depleting, we're going to have to get away from the car altogether. | ||
| Because it's just a 4,000-pound. | ||
| do what, Matt? | ||
| Well, like the bicycle and mass transit Forget the bicycle. | ||
| People are not going to pick up bicycles. | ||
| It's just not going to happen. | ||
| Some people will. | ||
| But realistically, Matt. | ||
| Well, then realistically, we're screwed. | ||
| We're going to go to West. | ||
| Well, yeah, I mean, that's what this program is about. | ||
| Realistically. | ||
| Let me give you art. | ||
| The Vikings, there was a whole book about this by Jared Diamond called Collapse. | ||
| They had a society based on raising livestock that depleted their topsoil, and their society collapsed into chaos. | ||
| Now, what they could have done, they could have gone over to the Inuit and learned how to fish. | ||
| To you and me, it seems ridiculous. | ||
| Why not just go learn to fish? | ||
| But to them, the idea of fishing was totally, was as ridiculous to them as using a bicycle is to us. | ||
| So they made their bed and they lied in it and they had a 90% die-off of their population. | ||
| We're now in a situation where it's either your car, do you love your children or do you love your car? | ||
| Because if you love your car more than you love your children, your children are either going to have to fight for oil or we can run the cars on ethanol if we stop growing food and just start growing ethanol. | ||
| So it's either get away from the car. | ||
| Yeah, that's it. | ||
| The argument I've heard against ethanol is that you would virtually have to cut back so far on food. | ||
| You'd be starving. | ||
| Is that realistic? | ||
| Yes, that is accurate. | ||
| If we were to corn it takes to put enough ethanol for the average SUV of gasoline, you could feed a person for a year on that amount of corn. | ||
| Well, what about importing ethanol? | ||
| Well, again, you've got, you know, globally, I mean, you basically end up running into the same constraints. | ||
| We could attempt to turn all of Africa, deforest all of Africa, and turn it into a giant biofuel farm, and we could run our fleet of cars on that. | ||
| But then you're talking about massive deforestation, and that would only worsen the climate change problem. | ||
| Not to mention the fact that you've got people in Africa who are already starving, who probably won't be too happy with us trying to move in and convert all of their farmland into fuel. | ||
| And then Central and South America, and they're moving with ethanol, aren't they? | ||
| Well, they are, but when you sit down and look at the numbers, and I don't have them right in front of me, the scale of what we need to do is so huge that, and you basically have to convert the entire world into a giant ethanol farm or a giant biofuel farm. | ||
| These things are great in small doses. | ||
| I'm all for them. | ||
| If you wanted to, we've got 800 million cars on the road right now. | ||
| If you want to say, okay, we're going to use only 100 million of those cars and we're going to run them, have everybody carpool and do mass transit and run that on, you know, ethanol or biofuel, it might be doable. | ||
| But this idea that we're going to keep things running as they are today, we're all driving by ourselves in our 4,000-pound vehicles and just going to do it on ethanol or biofuel imported from wherever, this is ridiculous. | ||
| Do you think, Matt, that our leaders, whoever you think they are, have concluded that we are, as you put it, so screwed and there's no answer that there's no point in even addressing the issue because there is no answer and the collapse is going to happen, period. | ||
| I think my feeling, this is just, I cannot prove this like I can prove our things, is that our leaders have figured that it's either that there's a rapidly diminishing supply of energy and it's either going to be the Christians and the capitalists who get it or it's going to be the Muslims and the communists. | ||
| And they figure it's better the Christians and the capitalists get to the oil than the Muslims and the communists. | ||
| And that's basically what our entire foreign policy and even a lot of our domestic policies is based around. | ||
| Well, of course, India and China are rapidly moving toward eclipsing us in terms of the amount of oil that they're plucking from the spot market anyway, right? | ||
| Well, exactly. | ||
| So even this is another problem, is even if we in the U.S. manage to get our act together, how are you going to convince everybody else to get together? | ||
| Well, you're not. | ||
| The rest of the world sees our Hollywood output, Matt, and they want a couple of cars in the garage. | ||
| They want the kind of life that we have. | ||
| And that means, right now, that means oil. | ||
| There is no other reasonable answer. | ||
| And that's what they're using, oil. | ||
| Yeah, it's a grim situation, to say the least. | ||
| Yeah, grim to say the least. | ||
| All right, Matt Saminar is my guest. | ||
| We're talking about peak oil. | ||
| Peak oil really means when you've begun to use more than you're taking from the ground or can take from the ground. | ||
| And Matt maintains that we've definitely reached that point. | ||
| We are at peak or past peak oil. | ||
| And from here on out, it's only going to get worse. | ||
| I'm RBL. | ||
| There's one thing about being my age, 62 years of age. | ||
| You don't feel any inclination to feed anybody any bulls. | ||
| We'll just discuss it as we see it. | ||
| And right now, the way we see it, I guess, the both of us, Matt and myself, is pretty dim. | ||
| It's not a good future directly ahead of us if we're going to depend on oil. | ||
| Well, Matt used the word, we're screwed. | ||
| We'll be right back. | ||
| We're a pretty bright people. | ||
| I think we'll figure something out. | ||
| But, I mean, the way it's going right now, it really does look like we're screwed. | ||
| I want to bring something up with you, Matt, and that's shale oil. | ||
| Now, Canada has more shale oil than all of the Mideast, according to Michael in East Helena, Montana. | ||
| The Western U.S. has enough to last about 100 years, and production is currently ramping up. | ||
| What about shale oil? | ||
| Okay, he's confusing, this is pretty typical. | ||
| He's confusing the oil sands in Canada with the oil shale in the American West. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Okay, the oil sands, it's not like the oil, you think of oil, you poke a hole in the ground and it comes out. | ||
|
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Yeah. | |
| Okay, the oil sands up in Canada and down in Venezuela, they basically have to be mined. | ||
| And unlike the oil, we are accustomed, we run our economy on light sweet crude for the most part, which has an energy return on energy invested ratio of as high as 100 to 1. | ||
| So you spend one barrel of oil, you get out 100. | ||
| The oil sands up in Canada, depending on whose numbers you believe, are 1.5 to 1 or 3 to 1. | ||
| They require massive amounts of natural gas, which is also running out, and massive amounts of fresh water, which we're also running into problems with. | ||
| If you listen to The Optimist, they say that the oil sands will peak in production of 3 to 5 million barrels a day. | ||
| Global demand is currently 85 to 86 million barrels a day. | ||
| In a business as usual scenario, it's going to grow to 120 million barrels a day. | ||
| We're not going to get to that point. | ||
| So even in the best case scenario, we'll have a few years where you're getting 3 or 4 million barrels a day out of the oil sands at tremendous energetic, financial, and environmental costs. | ||
| And if he goes to my site, I cover all this stuff on the site, and I've got all these articles linked up about how the oil stands projects are all, the price is skyrocketing because all the materials they use to get the oil, to mine the oil stands, they need to bring in heavy-duty oil-powered machinery to mine the oil sands. | ||
| So it's really sort of like the law of receding horizons. | ||
| Look, I just want to cover all the possible points here. | ||
| And shale oil, it actually, it requires, we have a total lack of energy literacy. | ||
| So I don't even know how to explain this in a way that people will grasp. | ||
| It takes more energy to heat stuff up than you get out of it. | ||
| And it doesn't matter the type of technology you use. | ||
| It's like even if you have a machine that is 100% efficient, there's no such machine, but even if you have technology that advanced to cook the stuff up, the amount of energy expended in the cooking process, you get less from that. | ||
| Now, because it offers sort of this false hope and this false illusion, people will throw money at it because we lack energy literacy at every level of our society, from the guy who emailed you as a person on the street, all the way up to the highest people on Wall Street, don't understand this. | ||
| So they hear, oh, there's this massive amount of oil shale, and they hear we're running out of oil. | ||
| So they're going to toss some money there. | ||
| Just to give you an example, they thought about exploding nuclear bombs in the oil shale about 30 years ago to maybe liquefy it. | ||
| It was called Project Bronco. | ||
| You can do a Google search. | ||
| Just to give you, they also thought about there was one proposal to reroute the Mississippi River in order to get enough fresh water to do it. | ||
| So, I mean, these are, it's really, what will happen, people don't want to believe people like me. | ||
| And I understand why. | ||
| It's pretty horrifying what we're talking about. | ||
| Okay, Matt, I want to cover something else with you. | ||
| You know, we have limited time here. | ||
| Another thing that is said, and it's said loudly and frequently, is that the whole thing is bull, that the oil companies are manipulating the availability of oil, the production of oil, in order to manipulate prices, gouge us, make a ton of money. | ||
| There's really plenty of oil. | ||
| If only the oil companies weren't so greedy and raping us the way they are, there'd be plenty of oil and there wouldn't be any of this problem at all. | ||
| You want to deal with that one? | ||
| Yeah, most everybody who's talking about peak oil are independent of the oil companies. | ||
| The oil companies, so people say to me, you're just a show for the oil companies. | ||
| They say all the oil companies, all their CEOs have gone on missions throughout the country to tell everybody that everything's okay and that there's plenty of oil. | ||
| Now, why? | ||
| The people who email you that, they don't understand how publicly traded oil companies work. | ||
| If company A CEO goes out and says, look, we're in serious trouble. | ||
| We're not finding enough to replace our reserve base. | ||
| Our reserves are declining, so on and so forth. | ||
| And then company B, the CEO from company B comes out and says, look, everything's great. | ||
| We've got plenty of oil, blah, blah, blah. | ||
| Where will investors ship their money? | ||
| They ship their money to the company that is creating an atmosphere not of artificial scarcity, but of artificial abundance. | ||
| I suppose so. | ||
| I suppose there's some truth in that. | ||
| I have to give it a little thought, but yeah, I suppose that's right. | ||
| Well, all you have to do is look, like, I've got videos of the CEO of Exxon saying that there's nothing to worry about with peak oil. | ||
| Well, the reason, Matt, that people believe this kind of stuff is that, frankly, in the past, you could name some times when we have seen manipulation of all kinds of things, including power and brownouts and stuff that got blamed on companies. | ||
| It wasn't real. | ||
| It was done for a reason. | ||
| You know what I'm talking about. | ||
| Well, yeah, I don't blame the if there's two things that go in common with oil and energy, it's crime and corruption. | ||
| So I don't blame people for thinking this is all a big conspiracy by the oil companies. | ||
| I think, in fact, they'll continue to believe that. | ||
| It's what's comfortable to believe. | ||
| But I can bring out tons of independent geologists, family-owned, who own small, tiny oil companies who are usually at odds with the big oil companies. | ||
| And they'll tell you exactly what I'm telling you, which is that, yes, reserves actually do decline. | ||
| You wouldn't have companies searching for oil all the way out five miles below the ocean if production hadn't already peaked in the other oil-producing provinces throughout the world. | ||
| Well, unless it proves to be profitable to go look for oil, they're going to stop even doing that. | ||
| Nobody's going to spend, what, $8 billion to make $4 billion very long. | ||
| Well, exactly. | ||
| Now, so I don't, you know, you gave me an instance. | ||
| I don't know if that's universally true. | ||
| Is it? | ||
| Well, that was the top 10 oil company, top 10 oil, like I said, go to New York Times, 2004. | ||
| I can dig up the article for you here again. | ||
| This is all on the site, so people can confirm all this stuff for themselves. | ||
| I don't ask them to take my word or anything. | ||
| Top 10 oil groups spent $8 billion combined with exploration. | ||
| They only led to commercial discoveries with a net value of slightly less than $4 billion. | ||
| No company is going to do that very long. | ||
| And I've got articles linked up on today's newspage that they're not able to replace their reserves. | ||
| So they're not finding enough to replace what they're selling to us. | ||
| All right, Matt. | ||
| How do you see this? | ||
| Look, we're not going to go to bicycles. | ||
| I mean, just accept that as a fact. | ||
| We're not going to bicycles. | ||
| So how do you see this unfolding? | ||
| What kind of timeline do you see? | ||
| And how do you see it all blow up? | ||
| Well, if you look at industrial civilization, we're already collapsing one city at a time. | ||
| Baghdad used to be the Paris of the Middle East. | ||
| Okay, now it's a hellhole. | ||
| New Orleans, which is not because of peak oil, but because of climate change, and in my mind, the two are sort of related. | ||
| New Orleans used to be one of the top cities in the U.S. Now it's a hellhole. | ||
| Detroit, back in the 50s, was economically the strongest city in America. | ||
| Now it's also a hellhole. | ||
| What I talked about at the top of the hour with Mexico's oil production crashing, that's going to, and they're having mass civil unrest there. | ||
| That's going to make Mexico City a hellhole. | ||
| You're going to get an emergency influx of immigrants, just like what they're preparing for. | ||
| That's going to turn Los Angeles into a hellhole. | ||
| So it's already sort of happening one city at a time. | ||
| Now, at what point does stuff get bad for the person listening to me? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| It depends where you live, what sector of the economy you're in, you know, your financial standing, all sorts of stuff. | ||
| But it's not looking good right now. | ||
| Well, but there's going to come a point where it's either too expensive and the economy collapses. | ||
| I suppose that'll happen before the rest of civilization begins to crumble. | ||
| In other words, the price of gas will simply become so expensive that the economy will collapse. | ||
| That'll happen. | ||
| And somebody who looks at the numbers like yourself, you're quoting numbers about where we are with peak oil. | ||
| You ought to be able to project economically when the crunch point comes. | ||
| Yeah, there are certain numbers, like at what point the price of gas, at what point does it take so much money out of the rest of the economy that the rest of the economy can't survive? | ||
| It depends on which experts you talk to, but I've seen numbers anywhere from $5 to $8 a gallon would be the point at which you, for instance, can no longer run the school buses to get kids to school, or the point at which it no longer makes sense for people to actually commute to work because you'd be spending so much money on internet. | ||
| Actually, I suppose the audience can tell us. | ||
| In other words, send me an email. | ||
| At what price point, $5, $6, $7, $8,000? | ||
| $9, $10. | ||
| At what point, folks, would you not be able to continue the life to which you have become accustomed? | ||
| There's a problem with that that people don't think about is that when the price, they just think, well, in my current situation, if the price goes to $6 a gallon, will I be able to afford it? | ||
| What most people don't account for is that the price goes to $5, $6, $7 a gallon, the job that you have, if it's in the discretionary part of the economy, which is where most of us are, you may not have the job to commute to when gas is $5 or $6 a gallon. | ||
| Because that may have taken so much steam out of the economy that if you sell beauty products, well, people might not be buying beauty products when gas is $6 a gallon. | ||
| It's going to hit, let me tell you something, Matt. | ||
| It's going to hit the poorer countries first. | ||
| I spent, I don't know, eight or nine months recently in the Philippines. | ||
| And while most things in the Philippines and services are very inexpensive, the price of gas at the pump is exactly more or less what it is here. | ||
| In other words, they're buying oil on the spot market just the way we are. | ||
| And right now over there, they've got taxi cabs going on strike because the taxis aren't making any money because of the price of gas. | ||
| So the poorer countries are going to begin their collapse before us. | ||
| That's true. | ||
| I think it's already happening if you look throughout the world. | ||
| One of the problems with that, and this doesn't apply to the Philippines so much, but to countries like Nigeria and a lot of the Middle Eastern countries, is that as the population can't afford the oil, there's a lot of social chaos. | ||
| And then if the country is an oil-producing country, that social chaos then impedes the ability to export oil to wealthy countries like us. | ||
| And again, Mexico is a good example of that, too. | ||
| If people can't afford gas and food, you get riots and they're going to get upset at the government and oil companies and so on and so forth. | ||
| So I think sometimes people think, well, I don't care what happens to poor people in other countries. | ||
| And I'm like, well, I kind of understand that. | ||
| I mean, I understand the thinking of America first and whatever. | ||
| But if these poor people in these oil-producing countries can't eat or drive to work, they're going to go crazy, and then that's going to affect us. | ||
| Well, I'm talking virtually about every third world country in the world. | ||
| The price of oil is the price of oil, period. | ||
| And you're going to see them begin falling apart economically ahead of the U.S. Maybe not far ahead of the U.S., but definitely ahead of the U.S. Wouldn't you agree? | ||
| Oh, absolutely. | ||
| Yeah, absolutely. | ||
| Yeah, it's the, you know, it's the same thing. | ||
| I mean, it's always going to affect the poor. | ||
| The poor are always going to get screwed first, of course. | ||
| And usually, when this begins happening, this kind of thing begins to happen on a global scale, what you're going to get is war. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| War over oil, war ultimately, over water, war. | ||
| And I wonder how you would see that developing. | ||
| Have you thought about that at all, Matt? | ||
| Well, yeah, our leaders are telling us that we're in a global war that's going to last 40 years, but it's not going to end within our lifetimes. | ||
| So they call it the global war on terror. | ||
| It happens to be where the oil is. | ||
| And it's not a coincidence. | ||
| No, I didn't think it was. | ||
| Every president since I've been alive has said, for example, Matt, that they would use, if they had to, nuclear weapons to make damn sure that the Straits of Hormuz, through which the oil moves, a lot of it, stay open. | ||
| So if anybody tries to close that, we're going to be at war with them. | ||
| That would be an act of war against the U.S. Yeah, Carter stated that explicitly back in the 70s. | ||
| And it's still true. | ||
| And yeah, and I'm sure previous presidents had stated it more or less, too. | ||
| I just didn't fully recall. | ||
| But yeah, there is going to be more war. | ||
| That's what the future that we're looking at. | ||
| And, you know, I don't know what to tell you other than that. | ||
| Yes, there is going to be a lot more war. | ||
| And Iraq. | ||
| We all know the information that took us to war with Iraq was baloney. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So what I haven't heard stated other than Saddam Hussein was a bad guy mistreating his people. | ||
| Other than that, I haven't heard any reason for that war, unless you want to talk about oil. | ||
| Yeah, no, the only way the large oil companies can stay large oil companies is if they grab what's left. | ||
| And most of what's left is in the Middle East. | ||
| The trouble is, it's not working out too well yet. | ||
|
unidentified
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It will. | |
| It depends. | ||
| I don't want to get too conspiratorial. | ||
| In war, if you can't get a certain resource or a certain strategic point, the second goal is to deny it to your enemy. | ||
| And you could argue that we're not getting at the oil, but neither are China or Russia or whoever else. | ||
| That's true. | ||
| A lot of the contracts that Saddam had, they were with the Chinese or French companies, and they're not getting at the oil. | ||
| What about the oil in the old Soviet Union? | ||
| I mean, there's quite a number of fields. | ||
| I don't know how much potential there is there, but I know there... | ||
| I mean, they're still one of the biggest producers right up there with Saudi Arabia. | ||
| And there's Western companies, Anglo-American companies who want to get their hands on it, and Putin wants to keep his hands on it. | ||
| And, of course, there's a whole missile defense situation going on right now where it looks like Dick Cheney wants to put in first, they call them defensive missiles, but they're really not. | ||
| And then Putin is reacting to that. | ||
| And I mean, I don't really have anything to say other than it's a giant mess. | ||
| Matt, if you were in charge and you couldn't force everybody to go to bicycles, what else would you do? | ||
| Oh, I would not volunteer to be in charge at a time like this. | ||
| Because what happens when societies get in a situation like this where they've grown basically too complex, they get so complex and sprawled out that even if you have the best leadership in the world, it becomes impossible to manage the society as it reaches these various breaking points. | ||
| So I would never volunteer to be a leader. | ||
| And if you put me in that position, my first question would be, how do I get out of this position? | ||
| What are your personal plans? | ||
| Well, I just actually came back from a trip scouting a part of the world that I think has a chance of missing the worst. | ||
| Unfortunately, probably best if I don't say where. | ||
| Oh, no, I was just going to force it from you. | ||
| Well, the problem is there's people, you know, my site's quite popular, and there are people out there who think that I'm getting inside information from whoever about how things are going to fall apart and where to move and all that sort of stuff. | ||
|
unidentified
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Are you? | |
| No, I wish that I was. | ||
| All right, all right. | ||
| But nevertheless, you think there's a part of the world where things are not going to go to hell in a handbasket along with the rest of the world? | ||
| Well, no, I think there's parts of the world that will be akin to the seventh level of hell, and there are parts that might that have a shot of being akin to the first or second level of hell. | ||
| And my hope, and it's really just that at this point, is hope that I can get myself situated in a part of the world that's going to be in the first or second level of hell as compared to the seventh level of hell. | ||
| And you don't want to tell us where that is. | ||
| No, because for one thing, what will happen, people assume I'm the expert, and you'll have people moving there, and I could be totally wrong. | ||
| I say, look for rainfall. | ||
| You want fresh water. | ||
| You want to be away from nuclear targets, arable soil, and preferably a low population density of less than 50 per square mile. | ||
| Interesting. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| So, and this is all open. | ||
| I mean, you can, anybody with access to Google can figure this stuff out. | ||
| Yes, I incidentally was trying to figure out where you were talking about. | ||
| And all of that stuff. | ||
| I mean, there are several, there's places in the U.S. that meet those criteria. | ||
| But the problem is, ever since that Fortune magazine article, people assume I'm on the phone with the guy plotting out where to move, and I'm not. | ||
| I've never even talked with him. | ||
| So I don't have any information that the average Joe doesn't have access to. | ||
| I missed it. | ||
| What did Fortune write? | ||
| There's a billionaire friend of Bush who they did a profile on about two years ago in Fortune magazine. | ||
| And they came out and took my picture and put it in there because he checks the site every day. | ||
| I see. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Well, this is all pretty dark and dim, and you don't have any magical solutions, right? | ||
| No, I don't. | ||
| Except the bicycle. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But people don't want to do that. | ||
| No, that's not going to happen. | ||
| I know. | ||
| I'm a realist. | ||
| I just know that's not going to happen. | ||
| I don't think it's going to happen either. | ||
| That's why I'm pretty pessimistic about what the future holds for us. | ||
| Have you done a lot of this is fodder for a future program, but have you done any research into alternative fringe stuff? | ||
| You mean like free energy? | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| I have done research. | ||
| I had about 30 or 40 back issues of Eugene Olov's magazine. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Next program, Matt, you and I are going to talk about that. | ||
| We're out of time right now. | ||
| It's been a spectacular hour. | ||
| I don't know how to thank you except to say, as I just mentioned, we will have you back and we'll have part two or three or whatever it is. | ||
| Matt, thank you for being here. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| I just sent you a free copy of the new documentary I'm in, by the way. | ||
| I appreciate it. | ||
| Have a good night, Matt. | ||
| I'm Mark Bell. | ||
| Every now and then, this happens. | ||
| Somebody comes along like Dale Brown, and I think that I've read almost every book he's written. | ||
| I'm a total Dale Brown freak, so it's going to be tough. | ||
| It's tough to interview somebody that you revere like this. | ||
| Former U.S. Air Force Captain Dale Brown graduated from Penn State University with a degree in Western European history and received an Air Force commission in 1978. | ||
| He was a navigator bombardier in the B-52G Stratofortress Heavy Bomber and the F-111A supersonic medium bomber. | ||
| And it shows and chose in everything he's written. | ||
| Dale is a multi-engine and instrument-rated private pilot and can often be found in the skies all across our great country piloting his own plane. | ||
| He is the recipient of several military decorations, was also one of the nation's first Air Force ROTC candidates to qualify and complete the grueling three-week U.S. Army Airborne Infantry Paratrooper Training Course. | ||
| Dale supports a number of organizations to promote law enforcement, education, and literacy. | ||
| He is the author of 19 action-adventure Techno-Thriller Novels with his latest strike force. | ||
| And at the moment, I'm about seven-eighths of the way through his book, which I'm reading right now, called Edge of Battle. | ||
| Dale Brown, coming up in a moment. | ||
| What an absolute honor. | ||
| Dale Brown, welcome to Coast Coastam. | ||
| Thank you very much. | ||
| It's great to be here again. | ||
| I'm just a monstrous fan, Dale. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Techno-thrillers are my favorite, and you're like the top of the heap. | ||
| Thank you very much. | ||
|
unidentified
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That's a great tribute from you. | |
| Listen, the first book I read was Flight of the Old Dog. | ||
| I believe that was 20 years ago. | ||
| 20 years ago, almost to the day, 20 years ago. | ||
| You flew B-52s, right? | ||
| Yes, I did. | ||
| So I sort of imagined, and of course I knew you did, but I imagined that as you wrote the book, you began to put things into B-52s that you could imagine and sort of smiled as you added them and modified them in your mind. | ||
| Yes? | ||
| This was in a day back in the late 70s, early 80s, when things like stealth technology and electronically scanned radars and GPS technology, satellite navigation technology was just coming out. | ||
| And the B-52 was a very popular testbed aircraft for this. | ||
| You could load a B-52 up with all these gadgets and all this new technology. | ||
| They had B-52s that were reskinned with this weird composite material. | ||
| It wasn't made out of metal. | ||
| It was made out of carbon and it was made out of ceramics. | ||
| And the B-52 was a perfect testbed for this. | ||
| And we heard, to just the line guys out there working on doing the day-to-day flying, we heard little inklings of this stuff, that guys were flying B-52s into Edwards and other bases down in southern Nevada, and they were using them to test these weird new technologies. | ||
| We had no idea exactly what was going on, but we sort of began to project about. | ||
| We saw a few pictures here and there in Aviation Week and Space Technology, what we called Aviation Leak. | ||
| That they would get information about things that we would get classified briefings about one or two weeks later after it actually came out in the press. | ||
| And so it was very easy to fantasize about what the B-52s were being involved with. | ||
| And that's what got me going in the whole subject of us lowly B-52 guys. | ||
| We weren't the F-15 Eagles. | ||
| We weren't the F-4 Phantoms. | ||
| We weren't the hot jets out there. | ||
| But we were the B-52 guys. | ||
| But the B-52s were being used for this top-secret experimental stuff. | ||
| And for a guy who always wanted to be a writer and always wanted to write fiction, it was a perfect breeding ground for stories. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| That's how I got started. | ||
| Okay, let's come forward. | ||
| Strike Force, the latest. | ||
| What's that all about? | ||
| Strike Force is to the one-line story for Strike Force is with all the things going on between the United States and Iran right now, what if there was a military coup inside Iran? | ||
| What if the regular military rose up against the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps? | ||
| There was one general, one true leader inside the regular military who decided to stand up against the Revolutionary Guards Corps and try to take over the government. | ||
| Would the United States support him? | ||
| Exactly, how would he be able to stand up against one of the most well-funded, well-equipped, paramilitary forces in the world? | ||
| And what would the United States do about it if he did try to do it? | ||
| Would the United States support a military coup against the theocratic regime in Iran? | ||
| Well, I guess it would depend on what success would likely bring. | ||
| Well, it's so you have to deal with the guy organizing the coup, and he's an old nemesis that I introduced back about 10 years ago, and I introduced him in a book called Silver Tower, and I introduced him in a book called Shadows of Steel. | ||
| Readers are very familiar with him. | ||
| Oh, yes. | ||
| General Bouzhazi, who actually tried to close off the Persian Gulf and actually tried to take on an American aircraft carrier battle group. | ||
| He's a well-known nemesis to the United States Air Force and to Patrick McClanahan. | ||
| They've tangled several times before. | ||
| Now he wants McClanahan's help that he has no one else to turn to. | ||
| He's a disgraced former Iranian military general, regular military general. | ||
| He's been ousted from the Revolutionary Guards Corps. | ||
| No one believes him. | ||
| No one wants to support him. | ||
| He has no support from his friends in the military, from anywhere else in the world. | ||
| He has no one else to turn to except someone who he knows has the power to help him, and that's Patrick McClanahan. | ||
| So he actually makes a call to the White House where McLanahan is working, and he dares ask McClanahan, who he tried to having him killed, having crossed swords with him several times before, he asks him for help to try to save Iran. | ||
| And the president and the brain trust In the White House, isn't sure whether or not they want to trust him. | ||
| McClanahan certainly doesn't trust him, but this is the future of the Middle East. | ||
| I mean, whether or not they're going to bring down the theocratic regime or if they want to put somebody in there, if they run the risk of putting somebody in charge even worse than the theocratic regime that's there now. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| It's always a gamble. | ||
| In your opinion, Dale, we have always said, I think most U.S. presidents have said, that if somebody tried to close the Straits of Hormuz, cut off the oil supply, that we'd go all the way on that one. | ||
| We'd use, if we had to, nuclear weapons. | ||
| Is that still true today or even more true? | ||
| We would be the second ones in there. | ||
| We would have to deconflict our weapons with those of Israel. | ||
| We would be several hours and maybe even several days behind Israel. | ||
| We have plans going on right now. | ||
| We've been conducting surveillance of Iran for several years now. | ||
| Iran has been successful in shooting down several predator, unmanned aircraft flying over Iran doing reconnaissance missions. | ||
| But that pales in comparison to what Israel has been doing in a pre-strike reconnaissance of Iran. | ||
| Yeah, we usually try to hold Israel down. | ||
| We try to tell Israel, look, stay the hell out of it. | ||
| Let us go do the job. | ||
| Is that how you see this would come down? | ||
| Or do you think Israel would not be able to hold Israel down? | ||
| Israel feels the pressure from Iran. | ||
| Iran has a stated national security posture to take down Israel. | ||
| And they know this. | ||
| They know Iran set up militarily to oppose them. | ||
| They know who the enemy is. | ||
| Iran knows who their main enemy is. | ||
| Israel knows it also. | ||
| So both nations have active, ongoing intelligence and reconnaissance plans for a first strike against each other. | ||
| That's been ongoing for many, many years. | ||
| The United States is playing catch-up. | ||
| Now, we're trying to do it more diplomatically. | ||
| Israel has no diplomatic plans with Iran. | ||
| We've had back-channel negotiations with Iran for several years, easily since 2003, since the invasion of Iraq. | ||
| But Israel has no such plans at all. | ||
| They know. | ||
| Yeah, understandably. | ||
| I mean, they're mortal enemies, so they don't even talk to them. | ||
| No, no, absolutely. | ||
| And there's no reason for them to do that. | ||
| They know that war is inevitable with Iran. | ||
| If there isn't any major change in regime, if there is no major redirection of where the military outcome will happen, they know that there will be a fight in the next one to five years in Iran very easily. | ||
| Let me ask you this, Dale. | ||
| Just looking practically at what you know about Iran, how much of a military threat is Iran, whether it's to Israel or the U.S. or anybody else, how much of a threat are they? | ||
| To the United States, very, very small threat. | ||
| It's a short-term economic threat to the United States because if they do lash out, if they do attack oil shipments transiting to the Straits of Hormuz and the Persian Gulf, they could wreak a lot of short-term economic consequences on the West. | ||
| And that's a very serious consideration in the short term. | ||
| They don't have a capability of striking the United States, not like North Korea, not like Russia. | ||
| So they don't threaten us directly. | ||
| They can't change our way of life, unlike Russia, unlike China, other nations. | ||
| So they're not a direct threat to the United States. | ||
| In the short term, they could cause some confusion and some havoc, but just like 9-11, we recovered from that after a relatively short period of time. | ||
| They can do a lot of damage to American interests in the Middle East. | ||
| They could do a lot of damage to American allies, certainly Israel, possibly Turkey, possibly other nations in Western Europe. | ||
| So that's a major consideration for the United States. | ||
| On a regional basis, I'm sorry, Dale, on a regional basis, not threatening us directly, but on a regional basis, how much firepower does Iran possess? | ||
| I mean, we hear stories about submarines developing nuclear potential, chemical, biological, and so forth and so on. | ||
| Regionally, how much of a threat are they? | ||
| They actually have a very limited capability. | ||
| There are several air forces. | ||
| The air force of the United Arab Emirates is larger than the air force of Iran. | ||
| They actually have a very capable ground force. | ||
| To the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps is a very, very highly trained, well-equipped force. | ||
| To the equivalent of the U.S. Marines, about twice the size of the U.S. Marines. | ||
| They're very capable and they're very well trained. | ||
| That's the major threat to the area. | ||
| But in the total overall capabilities, they have a very limited long-term strategic capability. | ||
| But the short term, they could create a lot of havoc. | ||
| And primarily, in the Straits of Hormuz, to the Persian Gulf, and the Arabian Sea area, they could create a lot of havoc. | ||
| And they could really wipe out countries. | ||
| They could wipe Out Bahrain, they could wipe out Qatar, they could wipe out the United Arab Emirates with a massive strike against other nations in the Persian Gulf, and that's a serious consideration for the West. | ||
| It sure is. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| Do you think that we would be able to hold Israel back and we would do the military response? | ||
| Or do you think that Israel would say, that's it, we've had it, and just do what they're going to do? | ||
| I think Israel has a better finger on the pulse of what goes on in Iran and the Persian Gulf and the Middle East than we do. | ||
| So the United States relies on Israel for the lion's share of the intelligence that we gather from that region. | ||
| I think with our occupation of Iraq, that finally may be changing, but we rely on Israel for the bulk of our data that we get from the Middle East. | ||
| And I think they have a firmer idea of what the threat is against them. | ||
| And of course, they're on guard. | ||
| Their nation is under day-to-day threat from nations like Syria, like Iran. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| And they need to keep on top of this stuff. | ||
| If something were to happen, it will initiate with Israel and not with the United States. | ||
| Well, normally we try and keep Israel from doing something like that because, of course, of the fear of igniting all those other nations you mentioned in a full-fledged war against Israel. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| We need to try to control the situation. | ||
| Israel's military intelligence services are all geared towards national survival. | ||
| It's obviously not a factor for the United States. | ||
| The survival of the United States doesn't hinge on what happens in the Middle East. | ||
| Short term, it does. | ||
| Long term, it doesn't. | ||
| We look to nations like Russia towards actually what happens to the United States, not to Iran. | ||
| Israel is different. | ||
| Israel looks at Iran day to day, hour to hour, because that concerns their survivability. | ||
| Sure, I mean, they want Israel as a nation eradicated from the face of the earth. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| And that's their national stated goal is the eradication of the Israeli state. | ||
| That's a powerful statement. | ||
| The United States has never said that, except maybe to Nazi Germany, we will eliminate Nazi Germany. | ||
| We've never said that to the Soviet Union at the height of the Cold War. | ||
| We've never said we want to eradicate the Soviet Union. | ||
| That's a very powerful statement. | ||
| And President Ahmadinejad has not just said it once, he's said it several times. | ||
| We will wipe Israel off the map. | ||
| That's a very powerful statement. | ||
| The entire military and the entire intelligence services of Israel are all geared towards that reality. | ||
| Have you done traveling in that area? | ||
| I have years ago. | ||
| I visited Turkey. | ||
| I visited Israel. | ||
| When you visit Israel, if you haven't been there, when you realize, you realize, I looked at it from the eyes of an ex-Air Force officer, the defense of Israel, when you could be on the upper floor of the Hyatt in Tel Aviv, | ||
| and you can see the enemy, you can see the Mediterranean Sea, and you can see the West Bank from the upper floor of a hotel, you realize how absolutely indefensible that nation is. | ||
| When you stand at the capital and you realize an aircraft with a nuclear bomb on it can fly within radar coverage to your location in five or six seconds, that's just mind-boggling. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| And that's what in the United States. | ||
| And also, when you walk on the streets of just about any Israeli town or city, almost everybody is armed. | ||
| Everybody's carrying submachine guns around. | ||
| It's unbelievable. | ||
| But when you look at what you just said about the stated goal of Iran, it's not so unbelievable. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| It's a nation that is in peril. | ||
| Its very survival, minute-to-minute, is a concern of all the citizens, and you can sure see it when you walk the streets. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Dale Brown is my guest, and we'll be back in a moment. | ||
| This is Coast to Toast A.M. I'm R. Bell. | ||
| If you are a listener to this program, then there's a very good chance you enjoy the kind of books that Dale Brown writes, Techno Thrillers. | ||
| They're just absolutely the best. | ||
| If you have not yet become a Dale Brown fan, actually, I'm shocked if you haven't. | ||
| And just in case you haven't, then you have a wonderful, I don't know, you've got about 19 books out there that you're absolutely going to love. | ||
| He's the man we're interviewing right now, Dale Brown. | ||
| We'll be right back. | ||
| Well, all right, once again, Dale Brown. | ||
| Dale, do you think the United States is on the verge of going to war with Iran? | ||
| Dale, there's no question in my mind that we will, within the next one to five years, we will have a conflict with Iran. | ||
| I think it's inevitable. | ||
| Iran wants to keep on with its nuclear production. | ||
| They're ramping it up. | ||
| They'll have the capability. | ||
| I researched this when I did Shadows of Steel back 10 years ago, that that's when Iran was first recognized as having a nuclear program, and that was 10 years Ago. | ||
| There was no doubt in my mind that Iran wanted to take its place as the leader of the Middle East, as the leader of the Shiite movement in the world, and they wanted their rightful place as the leader of the Islamic world. | ||
| And I think nuclear weapons is the way that they want to achieve that goal. | ||
| And the United States, even in past administrations, the United States wants to stop Iran from having that kind of dominance. | ||
| And I think a confrontation is inevitable. | ||
| They don't want to stop. | ||
| They see their opportunity. | ||
| They see the United States bogged down in Iraq. | ||
| They see the United States on the ropes. | ||
| They see weakness in Israel with the confrontation with Hezbollah in Lebanon. | ||
| And they see this as their opportunity to take their rightful place as the leader of the Middle East. | ||
| So inevitable somewhere between one and five years. | ||
| Yes, yes, within one to five years. | ||
| I believe active planning. | ||
| You know, there was a few news reports back a few months ago saying, well, the United States has an attack plan against Iran. | ||
| Well, when I was in the Air Force, back 20 years ago, we had bags ready with B-52 strike missions against countries like Iran. | ||
| When the hostage crisis erupted in Iran, we had strike missions planned against Tehran. | ||
| There was no doubt about it. | ||
| We have ongoing active reconnaissance and intelligence gathering going on, and I think a confrontation because Iran refuses to back down. | ||
| I see some promise now with the back-channel negotiations now going more overt rather than all back-channel negotiations. | ||
| We actually have State Department-level officials meeting with Iranian officials. | ||
| And I see that as a positive step, but to put the total thrust of the Iranian government and the theocratic regime tells me that they have no desire to change because they see an opportunity to take a leadership position in the Middle East. | ||
| All right, Dane, let me ask you this. | ||
| If we hit Iran, which I agree with you, I think it's inevitable, do you believe that it would be a series of surgical kind of strikes to take and knock their nuclear capability back years and years? | ||
| Or would we be after regime change? | ||
| I don't see that the target. | ||
| I've researched this for years now. | ||
| I don't see that the target complexes actually going after their nuclear research and development facilities. | ||
| I don't see those as the normal targets. | ||
| And I get a real kick out of all these commentators getting on network news and talking about how difficult it would be to bomb these research and development facilities. | ||
| They say, well, it would be useless to attack Iran because they have 32 different facilities, most of them buried underground, and that to the United States would be impossible. | ||
| It would be impossible for the United States to destroy all those facilities. | ||
| Those would not be our targets. | ||
| Our target priority, at least for the Air Force, would be to go after command and control, air defense, and facilities like that. | ||
| We would go after the quote-unquote normal target complexes, which would be airfields, air defense facilities, the relatively short-range strike facilities like the missile facilities, | ||
| the Chinese-based anti-ship missile facilities that we're really worried about that would go against the tankers transiting to the Strait of Hormuz. | ||
| Those would be the targets that the United States Air Force would go after. | ||
| Once we get control of the airspace over Iran, they would hopefully realize that the United States would have free reign to fly over any part of Iran that we chose, and that we could take out the nuclear research and development facilities at our leisure. | ||
| But we wouldn't go after those facilities at first. | ||
| We would go after command and control and air defense facilities. | ||
| We would take those out, and we would establish air superiority over Iran, and then we could dictate terms to them. | ||
| Which, of course, we did with Iraq very quickly. | ||
| And while we're on the subject, we're pretty deeply now into the Iraq war, and I'd love to get your comments on it. | ||
| What are we doing right, and what are we doing wrong? | ||
| Well, I have a lot of criticism against the current war in Iraq. | ||
| I believe that we need to have forces on the ground in Iraq, and I think that's very important for the war against radical Islam. | ||
| The whole notion about the war on terror, I think, is a misnomer. | ||
| And I wish they would recategorize what they describe as the war that we're fighting. | ||
| It's not a war on terrorism. | ||
| It's a war against exactly what struck us on 9-11, and that was radical Islam. | ||
| That's what we're going after. | ||
| That's what we need to control. | ||
| That's what we need to dominate. | ||
| And the Middle East is the heart of that. | ||
| And Iraq is in the heart of the Middle East. | ||
| That's where the United States needs to be. | ||
| And we don't need any interference. | ||
| We don't need other nations telling us we can't operate from their airfields that we built. | ||
| We don't want any nations in that region of the world telling us we can't launch strikes against targets. | ||
| We need to have free reign in that area of the world. | ||
| That's what we're doing in Iraq. | ||
| Now, I don't think that we need to be in Baghdad. | ||
| I disagreed with the whole strategy of bringing 150,000 troops, most of which are in Baghdad, most of which are in the green zone, protecting the green zone. | ||
| We don't need to be doing that. | ||
| I disagree with that strategy. | ||
| I did agree with bringing down Saddam Hussein. | ||
| I think he was stirring up trouble, but he wasn't the worst problem. | ||
| The worst problem were in the neighboring countries of Iraq, not inside Iraq itself. | ||
| If anything, I wouldn't call Iraq an ally of the United States, but they were a counterweight to the real enemies against the United States. | ||
| Well, if you call it a war between the West and radical Islam, you get awfully close to saying it's a war between the West and Islam. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And maybe ultimately that's what it's going to be, Dale. | ||
| Is that your view? | ||
| That's what it is. | ||
| That's exactly what it is. | ||
| It's the same thing that when we were fighting communism during the Cold War, it's the same thing when we're fighting Nazism during World War II. | ||
| It's the very same thing. | ||
| And for some reason, people are afraid to categorize it because we're talking about a religion. | ||
| And the idea that the United States would go to war against a religion is just offensive to a lot of Americans. | ||
| But it's not a religion. | ||
| It's a bastardization of a religion that goes beyond religious tenets. | ||
| How much of Islam, in your opinion, Dale, is radicalized? | ||
| I mean, that's a very, very important question. | ||
| It's the basis of the radicalism. | ||
| It's the basis. | ||
| It exists, and it's there. | ||
| And that's what initially motivates a lot of the fighters. | ||
| But it's what they morphed the religion into that we're really fighting. | ||
| But whatever it is, we have to acknowledge that the evil exists, and we have to have the will, we have to have the national will and the national resolve to go against it. | ||
| And that means putting troops on the ground in harm's way on patrol. | ||
| My youngest brother is out there right now. | ||
| I thought my brother Jim, being a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army, would be free from that. | ||
| I just got a picture of him on the ground in Bakuba on patrol with a rifle in his hand, with all the battle rattle on. | ||
| He's a lieutenant colonel doing a patrol through the streets of Bakuba during the current operation. | ||
| It was amazing to me. | ||
| I thought, I mean, secretly, personally, myself, I thought maybe my youngest brother was safe because he's a light colonel. | ||
| He's an operations officer. | ||
| He should be in the rear. | ||
| He should be in headquarters. | ||
| He's the second in command of the brigade. | ||
| He'll be safe. | ||
| This is his sixth time in the Middle East, his second time in Iraq in the past four years. | ||
| I thought maybe he would be safe from all this stuff. | ||
| And sure enough, just two nights ago, I get an email photograph of him on patrol in the streets of Bakuba during the current operation. | ||
| But as sad as fearful I am of him being out there, him and his brigade, his brigade has lost seven men in the past three months. | ||
| His base has lost 14 in the past three months since their current deployment. | ||
| As fearful as I am of having him out there, I'm glad he's out there because we're fighting a war against radical Islam and the place to fight it is in Iraq because, not because the enemy was in Iraq, | ||
| but because that's a central location where 150,000 troops, 2,000 tanks and armored vehicles can not just reach out and touch Saddam Hussein and the fighters inside Iraq, but they can reach out and they can touch all those radicals in Iran, in Syria, in Lebanon, in Jordan, in Saudi Arabia, in Kuwait. | ||
| I mean, name all those countries. | ||
| That's why the United States needs to be in Iraq. | ||
| We need to establish a presence in Iraq. | ||
| We need to stay there. | ||
| I mean, if it takes 10 years, if it takes 20 years, if it takes 60 years, exactly how long we've been in Germany when we were committed to fight Nazism and then communism, that's what we need to do in Iraq. | ||
| And we've started it. | ||
| It's a tough battle compared to what we've sacrificed in World War II and the Cold War. | ||
| We've really sacrificed nothing. | ||
| I mean, that's very hard to tell to people who have lost friends and family members there. | ||
| But we need to do it. | ||
| We need to have a presence there. | ||
| We need to stay there. | ||
| We need to stay committed. | ||
| And I wish the politicians in Washington would. | ||
| I think they realize I personally think they realize what the mission is. | ||
| They just don't want to admit it in public until they sacrifice their political future to say that. | ||
| Dale, even our president has been very, very careful to delineate between radical Islam and Islam. | ||
| Now, I'm beginning to wonder how successful the radicals have been in posturing all of Islam against the West. | ||
| In other words, how much of Islam is becoming radicalized? | ||
| Yes, I think it's a tightrope. | ||
| It's a public relations and it's a political tightrope that I think that we need to stop walking it. | ||
| We need to stop calling it a war on terror, and we need to call it exactly what it is. | ||
| It's a war on radical Islam. | ||
| It's not a war on Islam. | ||
| It's not a war on peaceful, nonviolent people. | ||
| It's a war on a specific group of people who are very well funded, very well organized. | ||
| Some of their organizers and some of their fund sources are allies or they're beneficiaries of the United States. | ||
| They provide oil to the United States. | ||
| They have a lot of wealth. | ||
| They're very important to the economic success and vitality of the United States. | ||
| But they become enemies because they balance their own political agendas, their own political survivability with the radicals. | ||
| And I think we need to break away from that. | ||
| We need to get away from that agenda. | ||
| And we need 9-11 has completely changed the landscape. | ||
| And we need to realize that everybody in the United States and in the West needs to realize where the new war is. | ||
| And just like it was with Nazism and with communism, we have to realize that we have to generate ourselves into thinking that there's a new enemy out there. | ||
| It's not communism. | ||
| It's not Nazism. | ||
| It's radical Islam. | ||
| And we need to approach it and we need to fight it just like we did with Nazism and with communism. | ||
| We need to have organizations. | ||
| We need to have military units in place just like we created to the Strategic Air Command specifically to counter to the Soviet Union and the rise of the strategic capabilities of the Soviet Union we created to the Strategic Air Command. | ||
| We need to create a unit, we need to create an infrastructure to go against radical Islam. | ||
| And whether or not that's the Special Operations Command, whether or not that's a whole new unit that needs to be created, I bring that up in Strike Force. | ||
| I create a new unit in Strike Force, mostly based in space, that specifically to go and support units like the military coup that takes place in Iran. | ||
| We need to create units and we need to create a whole generation of brain trust to go against to be able to fight that war. | ||
| In real life, Dale, how likely is a coup in Iran? | ||
| I think it's very likely. | ||
| I think the people of Iran are very sophisticated. | ||
| They were created to that way. | ||
| I almost hate to say it, but by the Shah of Iran, he brought Iran into the 20th century. | ||
| He lifted, he used the wealth that Iran accumulated and that Iran earned for itself with its ally with alliance with the United States. | ||
| He brought Iran into the 20th century. | ||
| And I think a lot of Iranians don't like being driven back. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| I believe that most Iranians don't like the direction that the country has taken. | ||
| And I would make it ripe for a coup. | ||
| All right, Dale, hold tight. | ||
| We're at the top of the hour. | ||
| My guest is Dale Brown, and I'm sure that he's written something that you've read. | ||
| And I've read just about every single thing that he's written. | ||
| Quite an author. | ||
| From the high desert and the great American Southwest, I'm Mark Bell. | ||
| One of my favorite authors in all the world. | ||
| Dale Brown is my guest. | ||
| I'm reading now, and I'm about, oh, I guess seven-eighths of the way through The Edge of Battle. | ||
| Now, The Edge of Battle is a very, very interesting, very interesting book. | ||
| In fact, it's so timely right now that, you know, it was written a while ago, and The Edge of Battle is about what's happening right now between the U.S. and Mexico. | ||
| It's all about illegal immigration. | ||
| It's all about border security. | ||
| It's all about some high-tech opposition to border security. | ||
| It's kind of a follow-up on the consortium business for those of you who are Dale Brown fans. | ||
| At any rate, in a moment, I think we'll turn a corner and talk a bit about the edge of battle. | ||
| In fact, just before we get to the edge of battle, which I'm totally fascinated with, Dale, I get little computer messages as we go. | ||
| And Dave in Capistrano Beach, California says, assuming Dale's strategy is valid, meaning radical Islam, how do we pay for this 50-year war? | ||
|
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We're nearly broke already. | |
| We're not broke at all. | ||
| The United States is the most powerful nation in the world, and this is a war that we need to invest in. | ||
| We need to continue on, and we need to be committed to it. | ||
| And I don't think people realize that. | ||
| I don't think people realize who the enemy is, who perpetrated 9-11, what the roots of 9-11 were, and what we need to do to respond to it. | ||
| And I think although I don't agree with every aspect of the war in Iraq, I don't agree with our strategy and what we've done with it. | ||
| I think it's a necessary move that the United States needs to do to combat the enemy that we're facing right now, which is not this ghostly image, this ghostly notion of terrorism. | ||
| It is what it is. | ||
| It's radical Islam is a threat against America, and I think we need to move against it. | ||
| And I think Iraq is the center of the United States strategy against radical Islam. | ||
| It's the best strategy we have right now, and I think we need to proceed with it. | ||
| I completely agree with you. | ||
| Dale, as I just mentioned, I'm just almost finished with The Edge of Battle, and boy, did it strike me that, you know, you wrote this, when did you write Edge of Battle? | ||
| I started writing it two and a half years ago, just when the very notion of actually sending troops to the U.S.-Mexico border started to be talked about. | ||
| And to the whole idea of actually militarizing the border between the U.S. and Mexico, which is one of the sources of pride of the United States, is that we have two borders where we don't have any military troops on there. | ||
| Every other nation in Europe and Asia, they have border forces actually carry guns and they don't cooperate. | ||
| The United States has a very, very serious source of pride with having two borders with Canada and with Mexico where we haven't had weapons. | ||
| We don't have military forces on those borders protecting us from Canada and from Mexico. | ||
| What if we did? | ||
| What if we actually got so serious about not just illegal immigrants, but with terrorists crossing the border from Mexico to the United States that we were forced to put the U.S. National Guard on the border to protect it? | ||
| What would be the political ramifications? | ||
| What would be the military challenges to that? | ||
| And that's what Edge of Battle is about. | ||
| And I wrote this two and a half years ago, one year before President Bush actually decided to put a pitifully small force, 6,000 troops of a National Guard on the border. | ||
| That's ridiculous. | ||
| It's a worse idea. | ||
| I mean, he needs to put 60,000 troops on the border, not 6,000. | ||
| And I was just amazed. | ||
| In the book, you've got to, you know, I don't want to give away the whole book, and I'm not going to. | ||
| I don't do that. | ||
| But you do have a radio talk show host whipping up. | ||
| up anti-Mexican sentiment. | ||
| And there's sure a hell of a lot of that going on right now. | ||
| In fact, news headlines all over the place that talk radio is driving, pretty much, this whole immigration battle, yes? | ||
| To a certain extent, yes. | ||
| But I think it's justified. | ||
| I think they're pointing out, I think they go to a certain extreme, but they're pointing out the reality of the situation that we need to look at, I mean, strip all the politics, strip all the other rhetoric out of the discussion. | ||
| What do we need to do to deal with the problem? | ||
| And if you look at the problem of illegal immigration as a sinking ship, what do you do to save the ship? | ||
| You have to plug the leaks first. | ||
| You have to establish security. | ||
| It's a basic right of any nation to be able to secure its borders. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| If we're going to have a war on radical Islam and we can see millions of illegal immigrants making it across the border without much of a struggle, then obviously if they wanted to get across the border, they could get across the border through Mexico very easily and perhaps Canada as well. | ||
| So we're going to have to secure our borders. | ||
| There's simply no question about it. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| You have to establish security first. | ||
| You can set up all these other programs. | ||
| You can set up legalization. | ||
| You can set up citizenship. | ||
| All that stuff has to come later. | ||
| You have to establish security first. | ||
| And that's not meant to be regressive. | ||
| It's not meant to be mean-spirited. | ||
| It's a national right. | ||
| It's a national responsibility that we have to accept. | ||
| We've been so lax about it before because it's never been a national security problem. | ||
| It's been sort of a social problem. | ||
| It's actually been an economic anti-problem with the United States. | ||
| We're actually welcoming a lot of undocumented workers because that's a benefit for a lot of companies in the United States. | ||
| But what happens if the economic benefit turns out to be a national security problem for the United States? | ||
| How do you change direction? | ||
| Now, who do you turn to? | ||
| Obviously, it's going to be the U.S. military. | ||
| They have the resources, they have the capability, they have the manpower to actually reverse direction. | ||
| If a decision is made that the economic problem turns out to be a national security problem, you turn to the military. | ||
| What will the military do if they're tasked with the problem, with the mission of actually securing the borders? | ||
| I know from doing research for Edge of Battle that the U.S. military can do it. | ||
| Will they receive the political backing? | ||
| Will they receive the national public opinion backing to be able to do the mission? | ||
| I know if you give them the mission, they can do it, but they need the support of Congress. | ||
| They need the support of the White House. | ||
| They need the support of the American people to be able to do it right now, so they don't have it. | ||
| Well, it's getting close. | ||
| You know, they're kicking around the new bill. | ||
| It's not going to be enough. | ||
| Dale, if you were charging the military with securing our borders, what would that mean? | ||
|
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In other words, how would they do it? | |
| If I was in charge, if I was the President of the United States, my first directive would be to bring back all of the National Guard troops that we have deployed overseas to Afghanistan, to Iraq, to Europe, to Asia, bring back all the National Guard forces and bring them back to the United States, redeploy the National Guard to the southern borders and to the northern borders. | ||
| We can't ignore the border with Canada either. | ||
| We need to deal with that problem, but I think the major focus right now should be the U.S.-Mexico border. | ||
| We need to bring back those 250,000 National Guard forces that we have committed, not all deployed, but committed to overseas missions. | ||
| We need to bring those forces back to the U.S. We need to put the emphasis on the National Guard back to what their initial charter was, was to protect the continental United States against insurrection, against attack, against national threats to the United States itself. | ||
| There would have to be some retraining, I suppose, yes, with a border patrol. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| But we've done it on a very limited basis. | ||
| We use National Guard forces to help the Coast Guard, the Customs Service. | ||
| We use them to inspect containers coming in from overseas. | ||
| We do use them, but on a very limited basis, we need to have a national commitment to use the National Guard specifically to secure the borders of the United States. | ||
| With that kind of manpower, we have almost a million troops available. | ||
| If we use to the National Guard, the Air National Guard and the Army National Guard, we have a very large force available to be able to do that. | ||
| Even if they were deployed on a very part-time basis, we would still have Several thousand troops available to secure the borders. | ||
| We could do it. | ||
| We could do the mission if we have the national will to do it. | ||
| I think we're getting close. | ||
| You know, if we found that terrorists were coming across the border, and it's inevitable that they will, they're going to just mix in with the illegals that are coming across, and we need a way to I guess we just need a way to secure the borders, period. | ||
| Some of it, or a lot of it, I imagine, would be technological, or would you be talking about literally a fence all the way across our southern border, for example? | ||
| Well, I don't see that that is actually helping. | ||
| An actual physical fence, and I really hate the term boots on the ground, but I think when you talk about securing the border, that's what you need. | ||
| You need boots on the ground. | ||
| You can have fences, you can have sensors, you can have unmanned aircraft, you can have all the technology, but when the technology actually picks up somebody physically running across the border, you still need somebody on the ground to go out and get them. | ||
| So you can't have an unmanned aerial vehicle capture somebody. | ||
| You can't have them arrest somebody. | ||
| You actually need somebody in a Humvee or in a helicopter to go out and actually intercept them. | ||
| And that's why you need a physical presence. | ||
| And to the border security forces, to the customs service, to the immigration and the naturalization service, they've actually done experiments where they've done surges where they've actually put thousands of people virtually shoulder to shoulder on the border and they've proved that if you have the manpower available, | ||
| you can stop illegal immigration in that sector. | ||
| Now, those programs that have been implemented have been very short-term programs, but in the short term, they've proven time and time again to work. | ||
| And we just need to institute that as a regular ongoing program. | ||
| But that takes funding, that takes political will, that takes a president or that takes a presidential candidate, the presidential candidate that will stand up and say, I am against illegal immigration. | ||
| I will commit to sending the National Guard, putting them on the border to stop illegal immigration, and along with that, have other guest worker programs, have other citizenship programs in place. | ||
| But first, I will commit to putting the National Guard on the border to actually stop illegal immigration, to stop the leaks first. | ||
| After that, other programs can be put in place to deal with the people who have already crossed the border, who have integrated themselves into American life. | ||
| You just can't kick those people out. | ||
| You can't round them up, put them in a bus, and take them across the border again. | ||
| That's not the American way to do it. | ||
| But the first thing you need to do before you deal with those 10 million, 12 million, 15 million people is you need to stop the influx. | ||
| Stop the leaks first, and then deal with the people who are already here. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Let's talk a little bit. | ||
| A lot of what you're talking about tonight, whether it's Iraq, Iran, the Middle East, or our own borders, all of this is going to depend on the United States military. | ||
| I was also Air Force, by the way. | ||
| Yes, you are. | ||
| What do you think the U.S. military is going to look like in the next five or ten years? | ||
| I think that's the most, that's what I'm really focusing on in my next series of novels, that I'm very fascinated with what the military is going to look like in the next few years. | ||
| And I think it's going to be very much smaller than what it is right now. | ||
| It's going to be very much high-tech. | ||
| It's going to be younger. | ||
| It's going to be smarter. | ||
| It's going to be faster. | ||
| And it's going to be unlike anything we've seen in the past 50 years. | ||
| It's not going to, what we have right now, we have a U.S. military and even we have a U.S. Air Force that is a wrecking ball. | ||
| It's a massive, very expensive, relatively slow-moving force. | ||
| It's a wrecking ball. | ||
| It takes space, it takes time, it takes momentum to be able to do its job. | ||
| Once you give it the space, the time, the money, that momentum to do its job, there's nothing in the world right now that can stop it. | ||
| Even Russia, even the largest military in the world, can stop the U.S. military if the U.S. military is given all of the things it needs to be able to do its job. | ||
| And we saw that in the First Persian Gulf War. | ||
| Saddam Hussein made the mistake of letting the United States have the luxury of time to be able to deploy forces, to get them in place, to do what they wanted to do. | ||
| He did nothing to stop it, to disrupt it. | ||
| In fact, he actually encouraged it. | ||
| He actually taunted the United States to try to stop him. | ||
| If the United States military has the time and the space to be able to get into position the way it wants to set up, there's absolutely nothing in the world that can stop it. | ||
| Right, but that's almost a conventional war. | ||
| And as you point out, we have the time to set up a massive sort of conventional war. | ||
| But, you know, the threats we're going to face in the future are not going to allow us that kind of luxury of setup time, are they? | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| So they will not. | ||
| And that's what the U.S. military needs to adapt. | ||
| Everybody criticized Donald Rumsfeld for the whole concept of transformation. | ||
| Donald Rumsfeld was 20 years ahead of his time. | ||
| He was the one who realized that the military, the post-1991 military, can't operate in today's world. | ||
| It's too slow. | ||
| It's too cumbersome. | ||
| It's too expensive. | ||
| It's too lumbering. | ||
| It can't do the job. | ||
| And we saw after 9-11, we saw just an inkling of what a transformed military can do in Afghanistan in 2001 and the early parts of 2002. | ||
| We actually had just 500 special operations forces operating inside Afghanistan that were responsible for the beginning of the end of the Taliban. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| They were fast and they kicked butt. | ||
| I mean, they did whatever was necessary. | ||
| They rode horses into battle. | ||
| There were Air Force units that launched from the United States of America. | ||
| They launched from Missouri. | ||
| Dale, I hate to do this, but we're at a break point. | ||
| I have to break right here. | ||
| Dale Brown is my guest. | ||
| We'll be right back. | ||
| Here I am. | ||
| So, if I was hearing it correctly, and I think I was, Dale Brown is suggesting that the National Guard do exactly what the name implies. | ||
| And you said the National Guard guard the nation, the borders, for example, kind of like the Coast Guard watches our coasts. | ||
| So you tell somebody when they enlist in the National Guard that you're going to be guarding the nation from inside the nation, most probably. | ||
| And that the U.S. military is a foreign expeditionary type force that would only be used internally and under the very worst of circumstances that we can barely even imagine. | ||
| But if you're in the National Guard and you join the National Guard, you'll be protecting the nation, perhaps at our border. | ||
| We'll be back in a moment. | ||
| Dale, I wonder if you think it's possible to fight a politically correct war? | ||
| What a great question. | ||
| I think we do that every day. | ||
| I think every war that we decide to engage in is a conflict between whether or not it is politically correct or not. | ||
| And I think at first, when the fighting starts, when the war begins, when the Twin Towers come down, everybody's a conservative and everybody's a nationalist and everybody is a hawk. | ||
| But I think after that, people start to relax their guard. | ||
| I think people start to back down. | ||
| And I think they start to move back to the center or even back to the left. | ||
| And I think people's wills weaken. | ||
| And I think we need to guard against that. | ||
| That's a real danger for people in the United States. | ||
| People in the United States want things to be normal. | ||
| People want things to be okay. | ||
| We have it great in the United States. | ||
| We have a wonderful life. | ||
| We have a wonderful nation. | ||
| We have wonderful land. | ||
| And people want everything to be fine. | ||
| And people forget that we deal with radicals. | ||
| We deal with people who don't believe in the same things we believe in. | ||
| And that's where the conflict comes in. | ||
| That's where the fight comes in. | ||
| And if you don't want to do the fighting yourself, if you don't want to pick up arms against the enemies of the United States, you rely on the military to do it for you. | ||
| And we have to support the people willing to pick up arms and fly overseas and patrol the streets of a foreign nation. | ||
| The people that we send into Baghdad, into Bakuba, into Fallujah, they are never going to be considered liberators. | ||
| They're never going to be considered allies. | ||
| I mean, no matter what they do, no matter how many good things they do, no matter how many schools they build, how many hospitals they build, the U.S. military in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Japan, no matter where, will always be considered occupiers. | ||
| They will always be considered the enemy. | ||
| It would be the same if Iraqi forces were in the United States, if German forces were in the United States, if Japanese forces were in the United States, they will be considered outsiders. | ||
| They will be considered occupiers. | ||
| They will be considered the enemy just because they're from someplace else. | ||
| They're foreigners. | ||
| They don't belong here. | ||
| We will always be the enemy in Iraq, but we need to be there because there's an enemy out there that we need to fight. | ||
| And we need to come to the realization that no matter what the difficulties are, no matter how many civilians get killed, no matter how many Americans get killed, there's a fight, there's an enemy that needs to be engaged. | ||
| And we need to have the will and the discipline to be able to do it. | ||
| And toward that end, we have to be able to attract and Retain quality recruits in the military. | ||
| And with the news every day and what's going on in Iraq and the daily count of bodies and all the rest of it, that makes recruiting a little difficult, doesn't it? | ||
| Sure, it does. | ||
| But you know, there's always going to be people committed to the idea of defending America. | ||
| There's always going to be people who are going to sign up no matter what happens. | ||
| Even, I mean, 3,3,500, 4,000, 5,000 deaths, there are still going to be recruits, people who are going to sign up. | ||
| There are going to be other people that no matter what you offer them, if you offer them educational benefits, if you offer them money, if you offer them great training, if you offer them fun assignments, there are still people who are going to look at that and say, I'm not going to risk my life. | ||
| Are we going to be able to maintain a volunteer service, in your opinion? | ||
| In my opinion, we need to. | ||
| We absolutely need to. | ||
| We can't institute a draft. | ||
| A draft is the worst thing. | ||
| If the United States itself was threatened, if North America was actually threatened from outside, then I think that's when we need to institute a draft. | ||
| But just to fight, you need troops. | ||
| If you're going to send troops into harm's way in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in South Korea, North Korea, China, where the venue is going to be, Somalia, wherever the new fight is going to be, | ||
| if you're going to send troops into battle in faraway places like that, you need to have troops who are committed to doing what they're ordered to do, troops who are committed to the training and the discipline it takes to be able to do the job. | ||
| Draftees can't do that. | ||
| If you're going to draft somebody, draft them into the National Guard, put them on the border, put them on the U.S.-Mexico border, put them on the U.S.-Canada border, put them, to give them a job inspecting containers. | ||
| You know, everybody complains about we have a million containers per year coming into the United States. | ||
| We don't have the capability of inspecting a million containers. | ||
| Yes, we do. | ||
| If you wanted to draft somebody, draft everybody who graduates from high school before they go into college. | ||
| Make them serve at least one year in the National Guard. | ||
| Give them the training. | ||
| Give them six weeks or eight weeks of training. | ||
| Then one year committed to serving the United States in whatever – Okay, yeah, toward that end, I was going to say, would you say make the National Guard exactly that, and don't send, in other words, guarantee that somebody in the National Guard's not going overseas. | ||
| They're not going to be in Iraq before you know it. | ||
| They're going to be on our border or inspecting containers or whatever. | ||
| Absolutely, Art. | ||
| That's what we need to do. | ||
| We need to change the focus. | ||
| The focus changed after the fall of communism, after the drawdown of the U.S. active duty forces. | ||
| We instituted the total force concept, that the reserves in the National Guard were going to be equal to the active duty forces. | ||
| And that was a good idea back then. | ||
| We were drawing down the active duty forces. | ||
| We didn't need such a big active duty force after the fall of communism, after the end of the Cold War. | ||
| And that was a good idea because we were reducing the size of the standing military, sort of creating a part-time military. | ||
| In case there was an emergency, we had forces that had some training that wouldn't take as long to bring online. | ||
| But we don't need to bring National Guard forces. | ||
| We don't need to send those forces overseas. | ||
| They don't have the training. | ||
| They don't have the equipment. | ||
| And they don't have the same commitment as an active duty force. | ||
| We need to bring those troops home. | ||
| We need to put those guys on the border. | ||
| We need to have them involved in operations like border security, like disaster relief, like civil defense, things like that. | ||
| We need to make them committed to jobs that they were originally designed to do, which was to protect the continental United States. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Kind of a political question, but an obvious one, Dale, and that is a lot of what you're calling for is basically kind of conservative. | ||
| And our country's been, we've had a number of conservative administrations now. | ||
| It looks very much like we're probably going to have a Democrat administration coming along quite soon. | ||
| The president's numbers, approval numbers are quite low. | ||
| It's not going well in Iraq as far as the public is concerned. | ||
| I think we're probably going to have a Democrat in office. | ||
| Can a Democrat and will a Democrat do what needs to be done in terms of border security and the continuation of the prosecution of the war against radical Islam? | ||
| Or what do you think is ahead, in other words? | ||
| Well, I don't necessarily think that the Democrats are against the idea of a strong national security about border security, about national defense. | ||
| I don't discount that. | ||
| I don't disagree with you that there's a possibility That we could have a Democrat as president two years from now. | ||
| But they just have to realize exactly who the enemy is. | ||
| And the enemy is not George Bush, and it's not the neocons, and it's not conservatives, and it's not conservative talk radio. | ||
| It's radical Islam. | ||
| Everybody needs to recognize who the enemy is, and we need to prepare for the fight that is to come. | ||
| And I think that's what we need to recognize. | ||
| Whether you're a Democrat or you're a Republican, Independent, whoever, you need to exactly identify the enemy, and you have to decide exactly how you want to prepare. | ||
| We saw during the 1990s, we saw how the Clinton administration reacted against attacks against the United States. | ||
| After the wars in 1991, after the First Persian Gulf War, after the occupation, after the United States response to the occupation of Afghanistan by Russia when we were supporting the Taliban, | ||
| where we were arming the Taliban, and then after the Soviet Union was ejected from Afghanistan, how we abandoned the Taliban, and that's how they reacted against us. | ||
| We need to recognize exactly what the roots of radical Islam is, and we need to, and who's ever in power, they need to step up. | ||
| Now, I think a Democrat can do that. | ||
| I think a Democrat who realizes who the enemy is and who has the will to do it can do the job. | ||
| I actually agree with you. | ||
| A lot of times, the exact opposite of what you would expect is what can be done. | ||
| In other words, a Democrat can come in and do something that you would expect a conservative to do and get away with it. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| I mean, not just get away with it, but they realize exactly what the threat is and what the response is that's necessary, and they do it. | ||
| And it has nothing to do with your political bend. | ||
| It's actually identifying realistically and honestly what the threat is and then formulating a response to it. | ||
| And that's not liberal, that's not conservative, that's not Democratic, that's not Republican. | ||
| That's a reality. | ||
| And I think Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, any of those guys have the capability of making that realization. | ||
| But I think in the primary process, I think in the political process in the United States, they can't go in that direction. | ||
| If you're going to win the Democratic primary elections, you can't go to the center. | ||
| You can't go to the right. | ||
| You have to appeal to the left. | ||
| And that's the way you get nominated. | ||
| Once you get nominated, I think your whole political needle changes. | ||
| You go to the center because now you've got to appeal to a wider audience now. | ||
| So that's just the reality of the situation. | ||
| Dale, since 9-11, nothing major has happened. | ||
| No bombs, you know, nuclear bombs have gone off. | ||
| Not even a dirty bomb has gone off. | ||
| No massive chemical or biological attacks, thank God, so far. | ||
| Since 9-11, everybody has been kind of waiting for the other shoe to drop. | ||
| Well, it hasn't dropped. | ||
| In your opinion, have we been lucky or have we been good? | ||
| In other words, behind the scenes, a lot's happened that we don't necessarily know about. | ||
| I think a whole lot has gone on behind the lines, behind the scenes that people don't realize. | ||
| I think so. | ||
| And I think if there's any move to stop that, I think that would be disastrous for the United States. | ||
| I think there's been a lot of things going on. | ||
| There's been a lot of activity, a lot of law enforcement action, a lot of intelligence gathering. | ||
| We've only seen the tip of the iceberg. | ||
| I think with the so-called illegal wiretapping, that's the tip of the iceberg. | ||
| I think with a lot of the activities that get a lot of criticism, we've only seen a fraction of what's actually going on, and I think that's what's keeping America safe. | ||
| I couldn't agree more. | ||
| And the problem is that all of it is held secret, and so they don't get credit for it. | ||
| So it doesn't show up in the approval polls or anything else because it just gets done. | ||
| Well, a lot of the stuff you can't publicize. | ||
| You can't tell people that you're conducting wiretaps, that you have secret prisons, that you're interrogating people. | ||
| You can't tell people that because that reverses all of the things, all of the mystique and all the infrastructure that you're trying to set up. | ||
| You don't want to tell people everything that you're doing because that defeats the purpose of what you're doing. | ||
| You can't publicize it. | ||
| But the double-edged sword of this is that if you don't tell people, people think that you're being secretive about it, that you're creating a different anti-American society that people react against. | ||
| People don't like that. | ||
| It's one of the negatives of the system, of the American way of life that we have right now. | ||
| But when I say, when I don't, in the blogs on AirBattleforce.com, on the different websites that I contribute to, when I say that our lives have changed after 9-11, six years after 9-11, people don't relate to that anymore. | ||
| That's almost ancient history. | ||
| Our lives really have changed. | ||
| Our society has changed after 9-11, and I think we don't see what has changed in the background. | ||
| I think that's a good thing. | ||
| And so we need to continue on. | ||
| We need to have leadership in the White House. | ||
| We need to have leadership in Congress that will keep those programs in place to make sure that another 9-11 doesn't happen anymore. | ||
| Well, I guess we have made sure of that, and nothing has happened. | ||
| The only problem, again, Dale, is that unfortunately, they don't get credit for what they can't claim, because, of course, a lot of it would compromise security or the latest of what we have. | ||
| So we can't claim credit for it. | ||
| And so the opinion polls go down. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Dale Brown. | ||
| Dale, hold tight. | ||
| We're at the top of the hour. | ||
| Dale Brown is my guest. | ||
| We will get the phone lines open next hour. | ||
| Just a couple more things to cover. | ||
| He's such a prolific writer that I want to ask him a little bit about writing, and then we'll open the lines. | ||
| From the high desert, I'm Art Bell. | ||
| I've done a little bit of writing. | ||
| Writing is tough. | ||
| We've got one of the best techno, no, maybe the best techno-thriller writer in the world. | ||
| He's Dale Brown. | ||
| He's with us tonight. | ||
| Some of the books I've enjoyed, Flight of the Old Dog, first one, I loved it. | ||
| Air Battle Force, Strike Force, Dreamland. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| He writes a whole lot about Dreamland, actually. | ||
| Armageddon, The Art of War, Edge of Battle, Storming Heaven. | ||
| I could go on about 19 of them, actually. | ||
| So if you have any questions for Dale Brown, anything he said tonight or about writing, and we're going to talk for a few moments in a moment about writing, and then we're going to open the phone lines. | ||
| Any questions at all? | ||
| Those are the portal numbers, so come on in. | ||
| The water is warm. | ||
| We'll be right back. | ||
| Dale, I've been doing radio for well in excess of 20 years. | ||
| I know you've been writing for more than 20 years. | ||
| Are you still having fun? | ||
| It is. | ||
| I'm the luckiest guy in the world to be able to do what I do. | ||
| There's two things that I've always wanted to do in my life is fly and write. | ||
| And I've been lucky enough to do both for a living. | ||
| Now, it's absolutely the greatest thing in the world. | ||
| And one of the best things I love doing is encouraging would-be writers to get published. | ||
| I love doing it. | ||
| It's I love to I love when people who think they can't do it, who believe that it's just too dawning, they walk into a bookstore and they see thousands of books out there and they think that they can't do it because everybody has taken the market. | ||
| People have just exhausted all the avenues for getting published. | ||
| What I really love doing is to convince people who are good writers, who are committed to the craft, to actually sit down and actually finish that manuscript, finish that story that they've got in their heads. | ||
| Well, it is tough. | ||
| I mean, you know, if you're Dale Brown, oh, no problem getting published there. | ||
| They're screaming for you. | ||
| But a first-time author, it is daunting, Dale. | ||
| Well, we're all first-time authors. | ||
| I was a first-time author. | ||
| Yeah, that was a long time ago, but everybody is a first-time author. | ||
| You have to have the personal commitment to be able to, I mean, it is tough in the fact that to write 500 or 600 pages, that's a major commitment of your time, of your mental energy, of your physical energy to actually do it. | ||
| So there's no doubt about that. | ||
| But if you're committed to the craft, if you have a story, if you're committed to the story that's rattling around in your head, you owe it to yourself and you owe it to the, seriously, you owe it to the rest of the world to get that book out there and to get it in writing and to get it into the hands of somebody who can get it published for you. | ||
| Dale, I used to do five-hour radio programs, and then I would sit down for two to three hours every day after a five-hour show and write. | ||
| What is your routine like? | ||
| What kind of discipline do you have? | ||
| Or do you just let it sort of, you know, really crank out one day and then just ignore another day when you don't feel it or what? | ||
| You have to let it flow. | ||
| And I don't mean to be so metaphysical about it, but you have to be aware when you have a story in your head. | ||
| You have to be ready to let the story out, to get it on paper, to get it on the computer, whatever you use. | ||
| You have to be in a position when the story gels in your head, you have to get it down. | ||
| And for me, that means sitting down at the computer, sitting down at the desk with the computer on, with the word processor fired up, and whether or not you actually do any pages or not, that's almost immaterial. | ||
| You have to, I always call it butt glue, you have to be sitting here, You have to be at the desk, you have to be ready to go. | ||
| Whether or not you do one page or you do ten pages or you do 15 pages, that's really immaterial. | ||
| When the story gels in your head, when it's ready to go, when you've resolved the conflicts in your head, you have to be ready to go. | ||
| And there's a commitment, there's a personal commitment, there's a time commitment that you have to be ready to invest in. | ||
| And that's how you become a writer. | ||
| I'm not an English major. | ||
| I don't think I've ever taken any sort of creating writing class. | ||
| I never belonged to any writers' groups. | ||
| I did after I became published. | ||
| I mentor people all the time. | ||
| But I don't belong to any writers' groups. | ||
| You have a story in your head that needs to come out. | ||
| You have to have the discipline and the commitment to yourself and to your readers, to your audience, to actually get that story out. | ||
| And I'm sure you've noticed many days when it just pours out of you, and it's so easy. | ||
| And then other days where it's real serious work to try to get anything meaningful out. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| And that's when, that's when you have to realize, just like anything else in your life, if you're into gardening or if you're into flying or if you're into boating, you know, or golf, you know, I played nine holes tonight before I came on the show. | ||
| I mean, other than writing, I think golf is one of the most frustrating activities you can have. | ||
| You have to be committed to it. | ||
| You have to enjoy the idea of just going out and, you know, up here in Lake Tahoe, we have the most beautiful golf courses in the world. | ||
| You have to be able to see and appreciate the beauty around you. | ||
| That's how you let the enjoyment in life come through. | ||
| If you focus on how lousy your game is, you focus on the last bad shot, you focus on the negative stuff, you're never going to make it. | ||
| You could be in the best situation. | ||
| You can have all the money in the world. | ||
| You can have all the greatest ideas in the world. | ||
| But if you focus on the negative stuff, if you allow the negative stuff to control your life and to regulate what your life and your attitude is, you're going to fail. | ||
| You could be in Los Angeles, Cantran, or New York, but you're in Tahoe. | ||
| What is it about Tahoe you like? | ||
| It's a small town. | ||
| It doesn't seem like a small town during the holidays or during ski season, but for most of the year, it's very quiet. | ||
| We're up in the mountains. | ||
| We're at 6,300 feet. | ||
| We're in the middle of nowhere. | ||
| Relatively speaking, we're four hours driving time from San Francisco, two hours to Sacramento. | ||
| We're really in the middle of nowhere. | ||
| But it's a small town atmosphere. | ||
| It's a great place to raise kids. | ||
| I have a 10-year-old son. | ||
| It's a great place to be. | ||
| It's a quiet place most of the time of the year. | ||
| Do we have a busy season? | ||
| But physically, it's beautiful. | ||
| We have mountains. | ||
| We have the lake. | ||
| We have the deserts. | ||
| It's absolutely gorgeous out here. | ||
| It allows you the opportunity to not deal with external distractions like traffic and population and noise and things like that. | ||
| If you need those things in your life to energize your attitude and to feel like you're plugged into the world, then probably Lake Tahoe is not the place for you. | ||
| But my world, what I get plugged into, is between my ears. | ||
| It's in my head. | ||
| And I could really live anywhere in the world. | ||
| Lake Tahoe right now just is the perfect place for me because it's quiet and allows me to focus on my work and into fostering imagination, which is what I need, which is what my craft desires. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Away we go. | ||
| A lot of people want to talk to you. | ||
| I've got a screen full of people here. | ||
| Bruce in California, you're on the air with Dale Brown. | ||
| Hi. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yes, sir. | |
| Hello. | ||
| Hey, Bruce. | ||
| How you doing? | ||
|
unidentified
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Yes, I'm Bruce from Turlock, Salinas, California. | |
| First, Art, congratulations to you and yours. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
|
unidentified
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Second, you're going to have a little bit of trouble golfing in 30-foot of snow. | |
| Okay. | ||
| Just three weeks ago, we had two inches of snow up here. | ||
|
unidentified
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Crazy. | |
| Border security. | ||
| How come in 72, they were suggesting an inland waterway between San Diego to Corpus Christi. | ||
| This is an extension that exists from Corpus Christi to Jacksonville, Florida. | ||
| How come nobody's considering this? | ||
| I haven't heard of that plan itself. | ||
| I mean, that's a monstrous project, you know, but monstrous projects have been done before. | ||
| I lived back in Western New York. | ||
| We used to take vacations all the time down the Erie Canal, which was a monstrous project back when it was first conceived back then. | ||
| So it's doable, but as far as Board of Security is concerned, you think about the workers that would be necessary to do a project like that, or even a project a tenth of that size. | ||
| I mean, you're not going to find that number of workers in the United States. | ||
| It's an issue that we need to deal with, but I think we can deal with it. | ||
| Well, as you pointed out, Dale, no matter what you've got, if it's a fence or if it's a waterway or whatever, you still need boots on the ground. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| You can have the greatest sensors. | ||
| In an edge of battle, I describe the sensors that we have right now and the sensors that we will have available in the next two to five years or so that are just mind-boggling. | ||
| But you can have the greatest sensors in the world. | ||
| To when those sensors actually pick up somebody, you need to have somebody that will apprehend the people that the sensors have detected. | ||
| And that means boots on the ground. | ||
| The only effective border security method that has been proven over the years is actual physical presence on the border. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Bob in California, west of the Rockies. | ||
| You're on with Dale Brown. | ||
|
unidentified
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Hi. | |
| Mr. Bell, it's a pleasure to speak to you again, sir. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah, this is Bob from Fresno. | |
| Hey, Bob, how's it going? | ||
|
unidentified
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Just fine, Mr. Brown. | |
| Mr. Bell, I have a quick statement to make to Mr. Brown with a small question, if I may. | ||
| But first, if I may, I'd like to say about you, Mr. Bell. | ||
| I've listened to you since the very beginning on radio, talk to you through the years. | ||
| And I want to say this because millions of people would probably like to say the same thing. | ||
| With your ability to articulate, your ability to be what you are, every guest says the same thing, how you hit the nail on the head. | ||
| Your abilities are so incredible. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
|
unidentified
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But I'm saying this because whatever you write in the future, millions of us will read, expressing yourself that long after you retire, how much we're going to enjoy in future generations of all that you write about. | |
| So please consider writing even more. | ||
| Perhaps so. | ||
| But the real writer is right here. | ||
| So go ahead. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yes, Mr. Brown, before I ask you the question and a quick statement first, I want to say run for office. | |
| I'll vote for you. | ||
| Thanks very much. | ||
| I'm not going to run for office. | ||
| You know, I agree with you. | ||
| I would love to advise. | ||
| I would love to give my opinions, but I do that in the pages of my book. | ||
|
unidentified
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Well, my quick statement is that about the border security, I just wanted to see if you want to address this at all, because you mentioned briefly about it earlier. | |
| And that is our friends to the South that want a better life for their families, for their children, they're not just fruit pickers. | ||
| They're engineers. | ||
| They're scientists. | ||
| There are many people just like us up here. | ||
| And there has to be a way to distinguish between these good people and the treatment we show them, the respect we show them versus terrorism. | ||
| Why can't there be discussions and plans for a terrorist unit that's specially trained to work with border officials and looking for terrorism and being able to tell the difference between proper treatment and respect for those wanting a better life versus the terrorists? | ||
| And that was the statement, if you want to address. | ||
| But my question for you about your book, for people that don't have time to always read books, can you give us one good reason why patriots, loyal Americans like myself, need to read the book? | ||
| And thank you very much for this evening's. | ||
| Well, I'm not sure which book. | ||
| He's written 19, I think. | ||
| But Dale? | ||
| Yeah, thanks very much, Bob. | ||
| Yeah, I think that's exactly what Edge of Battle deals with. | ||
| It's not exactly what the present of the border security and illegal immigration problem is. | ||
| It's the future of what the problem is. | ||
| What would we be willing to do if the situation worsened, if the political dynamics were confused, if people didn't know what to do and the military stepped forward and suggested solutions to the problem, | ||
| what situations would be created if you actually had a president, if you had a Congress that committed to actually putting military forces on the border to stop terrorists and then to stop illegal immigrants? | ||
| What all the political ramifications would be, all the economic ramifications, what the social economic ramifications would be. | ||
| You can't deal with one aspect of the problem just with the military aspect of it. | ||
| and they have units, and they have systems ready to go to address the problem. | ||
| But then you run into other problems. | ||
| You run into other difficulties that also have to be addressed. | ||
| You can't deal with the military problem and not deal with the social problems, economic problems, historical problems. | ||
| That was one of the main things that I ran into, that the southwest United States is historically considered parts of Mexico. | ||
| That was northwestern Mexico. | ||
| And there are a lot of people in Mexico that still consider Arizona, New Mexico, California as part of Mexico. | ||
| Well, Dale, I hope we don't have to wait until one of our cities blows up until we implement such a plan. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| You have to, that's the problem, that's the immediate concern that the military and the government is faced with. | ||
| Especially after 9-11, all the rules have changed. | ||
| All the dynamics, all the things that the writers were afraid to address that we would never write about years ago, 10 years ago, 15 years ago, we would never consider writing a scene where 3,000 innocent people would be killed in one scene. | ||
| If you're talking about a military force, a military engagement, 3,000 losses is not that great. | ||
| But if you're talking about 3,000 innocent civilians, that's completely different. | ||
| A lot of authors wouldn't, including me, wouldn't touch that with a 10-foot pole. | ||
| After 9-11, we have to consider all that stuff, and we have to address it every day. | ||
| All right, Dale. | ||
| Hold tight. | ||
| Bottom of the hour. | ||
| Already, time is really flying. | ||
| Dale Brown is my guest. | ||
| He is such a prolific and such a very good author. | ||
| When he writes a new book, I grab it right up. | ||
| We'll be right back. | ||
| By the way, for those who have asked, the Kingdom of Nye, that's N-Y-E, is actually Nye County. | ||
| Nye County. | ||
| That's where I am. | ||
| An area just over the hill. | ||
| And I mean, literally, just over the hill from Area 51. | ||
| That's some called Dreamland. | ||
| My guest is Dale Brown, and he'll be right back. | ||
| Dale, other than Strike Force, which I'm not going to allow you to name, what is your favorite book? | ||
| My favorite book, boy, that's a good question. | ||
| I have to tell you that my third book was Day of the Cheetah. | ||
| And when I wrote Day of the Cheetah, that was the third book of a three-book contract, the first three-book contract that included Flight of the Old Dog and Silver Tower. | ||
| Well, I was so convinced, for some reason, and this is the mentality of a first-time author, I was so convinced that nobody would ever buy the third book, even though Flight of the Old Dog did okay as a hardback, did much better as a paperback, Silver Tower did so-so as a hardback also. | ||
| But I wasn't convinced that I would ever make it as an author. | ||
| So when I was doing the third book, I thought, you know, this is the last novel I'm ever going to write. | ||
| So I might as well just pull out all the stops. | ||
| And I was going to write the novel that would shock everybody. | ||
| And that's what I did. | ||
| I wrote a book. | ||
| It was set about eight years after Flight of the Old Dog. | ||
| Everybody had aged a little bit. | ||
| But I wanted to write a novel where I would put up every possible obstacle to success for Patrick McClanahan. | ||
| I was going to write the ultimate conflict story where everything bad that was possible was going to happen to the hero and see him dig himself out of it. | ||
| And I crashed the old dog, killed off most of the crew members, destroyed Dreamland, having FBI investigations and all this, the wrath of the Pentagon, what was coming down and all the heroes in the story. | ||
| And it was the most outrageous book because I knew, or at least I thought, that all my heroes, the old saying was if you're going to elevate your heroes, you have to destroy them. | ||
| You have to be willing to destroy your heroes. | ||
| You have to be able to kill all your darlings. | ||
| You've done a lot of that. | ||
| And that's what I did with Day of the Cheetah. | ||
| And I think pouring your emotions into that story really elevated it. | ||
| And I think that's my ultimate favorite book because I thought that was going to be the last one. | ||
| And I wanted to put all of my energy and all my emotions into that book. | ||
| And yet you picked yourself up and went on. | ||
| Well, halfway through that book, I got another three-book contract, and I knew after that that I was going to make it as a writer. | ||
| So it still turned out to be a very successful book, made it to us to number four on the bestseller list, was on the bestseller list for eight weeks. | ||
| But that's the commitment that authors have to be willing to do. | ||
| You have to have an emotional attachment to the story that you're writing, and you have to be willing to put that emotion, you have to put a piece of yourself into your writing, and those are the guys who are going to make it successful. | ||
| Those are the guys who are going to make it as authors. | ||
| Not just writing a story, not just picking scenes and picking characters and picking plots and technology, but actually putting a piece of yourself into your writing. | ||
| Those are the guys who are going to make it. | ||
| And that's what editors and publishers and agents in New York City are looking for. | ||
| They've seen all the stories. | ||
| I mean, the old saying is that there's only seven original ideas and everything else is a spin-off of the original seven ideas. | ||
| But what editors and publishers and agents are looking for is the personal attachment. | ||
| When you write a story, when you come up with an idea, you have to put a piece of yourself into that writing. | ||
| Yeah, it's the emotional investment, and you know it when you read it. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| Michael in Virginia, you're on the air with Dale Brown. | ||
|
unidentified
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Hi, yes, calling you from Norfolk tonight, Dale, and I appreciate your speaking up for the American military the way you have tonight on this program. | |
| Thank you. | ||
|
unidentified
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And connecting that with your last comment about putting yourself into the picture and connecting emotionally. | |
| You talked about us being in a war against radical Islam. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And the problem that I see with your presentation from the standpoint of the average listener is that it sounded too much like something coming from military brass, coming from somebody in the Pentagon, and not enough of the emotional side of it. | ||
| Even though you did bring your own younger brother in, that part of it I agree with. | ||
| But how we actually go to war against radical Islam cannot be dealt with until we can define the difference between radical Islam and the rest of the Islam. | ||
| Now, the analogy you used was communism and Nazism. | ||
| We don't talk about radical Nazism versus moderate Nazism or radical communism versus moderate communism. | ||
| Now, we have a lot of guests coming on Coast to Ghost who tell us that just by demographics alone, Islam is going to be a problem for us. | ||
| They tell us that France is going to eventually be dominated by Islam. | ||
| Just on the basis of the birth situation there, the regular French aren't producing enough children, and the Islamic people are growing like wildfire. | ||
| So if we're going to go to war with an ideology that has a worldview and a population expansion plan that beats everything that's going out here in Christianity and everything else, how are we going to go about that war? | ||
| We can't just do it by putting troops on the border. | ||
| Well, you make some excellent points, but I think you have to separate some of those issues that you're talking about. | ||
| You're talking about population versus radical Islam, and those are two different scenarios, I think. | ||
| I mean, you can make comparisons to communism versus systems like socialism. | ||
| The next step beyond socialism, I believe, was communism. | ||
| And it's the same with benign Islam versus radical Islam. | ||
| It's a cult of personalities, people who take the idea of Islam and take it to a next level which is more personal, political, social, economic. | ||
| It has nothing to do with the basic religion. | ||
| It has to do with their own station in life, with their own personal situation. | ||
| And I think that's where the bastardization comes from. | ||
| And I think in a military sense, I think that's a completely different direction for the U.S. military. | ||
| But I think that's a mission that I think the U.S. military can accept. | ||
| And I think that they have to be allowed to do that mission. | ||
| And they have to go after those who have taken the idea, to have taken to the religion of Islam and then corrupted it and made it into an enemy force that is completely different than what we faced in the past. | ||
| We're not facing anyone who has a flag, who has a uniform, who has a nation. | ||
| It's a pan-national system that we have to be willing to cross borders, cross social, economic, religious borders to be able to fight. | ||
| And that's a problem for Americans. | ||
| We don't want to be known as a people who go after people, I mean, not just people who would attack us, who would oppose us like 9-11, but who would just oppose an idea or who would oppose religion. | ||
| It's a completely different direction that I think the U.S. military has to undertake. | ||
| And it's going to be a very, very, very difficult one to look at. | ||
| Will in California, you're on the air with Dale Brown. | ||
| Hi. | ||
|
unidentified
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Hello, Mr. Brown. | |
| You said that Iraq is the center of our strategy against radical Islam, but you admit that really radical Islam was not operating there until we invaded. | ||
| And I'd like you to take a look at how truly radical an idea it is for us to go to that nation which was not a threat to us and had not attacked us and turn that nation into a war zone and four years later still be there with no end in sight. | ||
| And our very radical act of waging this war has killed or injured over a million people. | ||
| Now, that is radical. | ||
| That is radical. | ||
| Well, I disagree with the million people, first of all, but first of all, we were in conflict with Iraq. | ||
| Saddam Hussein was a sworn enemy of the United States. | ||
|
unidentified
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Many nations have bad guys as their leaders, including ours. | |
| Yes. | ||
| But after 9-11, after we recognized after 9-11 that the enemy was radical Islam, and we realized that the enemy wasn't necessarily in Iraq, but the enemy that we were facing was a pan-national enemy. | ||
| Let's just focus on that. | ||
| It was being supported. | ||
| It was an enemy being supported by nations that were... | ||
|
unidentified
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But not Iraq. | |
| Right, not Iraq, but Saudi Arabia, countries that... | ||
| Well, I mean, for obvious reasons. | ||
| Because Saudi Arabia is a major supplier of oil for the United States, and we couldn't go after them. | ||
| And that's realistic. | ||
| I mean, everybody has to recognize and realize that we couldn't invade, we couldn't take down the government of Saudi Arabia because we get 40% of our Middle East oil from Saudi Arabia. | ||
| I mean, that's the reality of the situation. | ||
| I mean, we couldn't take down, we couldn't take down Bahrain. | ||
| We couldn't take down the United Arab Emirates, even though they were supporting elements of al-Qaeda. | ||
| I mean, we were enemies with Saddam Hussein. | ||
| Iraq was an enemy of the United States. | ||
| They did support terrorism. | ||
| They may not have been supporters of al-Qaeda, but they were supporters of terrorism. | ||
| And so we had a no-fly zone. | ||
| We had jets flying every day over two-thirds of Iraq. | ||
| I mean, there was a thorn in the side of the United States for over 10 years after the 1991 war. | ||
| And being absolutely honest, we needed a military strategic location like Iraq. | ||
| And we needed bases where we didn't have to rely on political problems to be able to operate. | ||
| Even Saudi Arabia was a problem. | ||
| I mean, as an offshoot of al-Qaeda, of its effect against the Saudi regime, we realized that we couldn't rely on Saudi Arabia to support the United States. | ||
| Even after 9-11, we couldn't rely on allies like Saudi Arabia to support the United States going after al-Qaeda because al-Qaeda was such a threat against the monarchy in Saudi Arabia. | ||
| We have to have bases in the Middle East where we didn't have to worry about political problems like with Saudi Arabia. | ||
| We have to have a presence in the Middle East that we wouldn't have to worry about other external problems like that. | ||
| Iraq was the perfect solution. | ||
| So there's only one reason why we have 2,000 tanks and armored vehicles in Iraq. | ||
| I mean, not just to take Baghdad, not just to bring down Saddam Hussein, but to threaten all the other regimes in the region. | ||
| Somebody right in your hometown, Lake Tahoe, Mark, you're on the air with Dale Brown. | ||
|
unidentified
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Good evening, long, long, long time listener. | |
| Thank you for improving the nighttime. | ||
| You bet. | ||
| Really enjoyed Mr. Brown tonight. | ||
| I'm glad to hear somebody actually state what the facts are. | ||
| I'm going to ask for a slightly sharper point on the pencil, vis-a-vis our immediate enemy being radical Sunnis and their desire to return the caliphate system and whether if that were to occur, we could depend on that force going up against the Shias. | ||
| A quick second question, just the concern of silkworm missiles from Iran as we try to pass ships through the Straits of Hormuz. | ||
| Well, second question first, that's a major consideration, and I'll bet, well, do I know from doing research for Shadows of Steel, my eighth novel, that the United States has specific targets, | ||
| specific packages in mind to take out Abu Dhabusa Island, other areas in Iran that have the Silkworm missiles. | ||
| And I'll bet Israel has probably three times the plans in place to take out. | ||
| That's a major threat for everybody. | ||
| They're Chinese-supplied missiles. | ||
| They're very effective. | ||
| They're not supersonic, but they're very high-powered missiles that could easily take out oil tankers. | ||
| And in the Straits of Hormuz, the relatively narrow waterway, that's a major consideration for everyone. | ||
| If we're going to attack Iran, the major problem is not taking out the nuclear facilities, not taking out their research and development facilities, not taking out the centrifuges, but dealing with those silkworm missile bases, dealing with the air defense bases, things like that. | ||
| As far as the conflict between the Sunnis and the Shiites, it's a long-term problem that I don't think most Americans can deal with. | ||
| As a military problem, you really can't confuse the issue so much. | ||
| Is Iran Shiite, Sunni, can we rely on the Sunnis in the world, in Saudi Arabia, in Jordan, in the United Arab Emirates, to support the United States against the Shiites? | ||
| So we can't be concerned with things like that. | ||
| We have to focus in on military targets, military objectives, and that's what I try to do in Strike Force. | ||
| That's what I'll do in future books. | ||
| All right, Dale, listen, we're out of time. | ||
| Show is over. | ||
| It just flew by. | ||
| It's been a real pleasure talking with you again. | ||
| It really has been a pleasure talking with you. | ||
| Dale, we're going to do it again one day. | ||
| I'd love to. | ||
| There are so much we could do. | ||
| Take care, my friend, and have a great night. | ||
| Thank you very much. | ||
| It was a real pleasure being with you. | ||
| It was a pleasure being with you, too. | ||
| Dale Brown, ladies and gentlemen, one of my favorite authors. | ||
| No question about it. | ||
| If you haven't read Dale Brown, get busy. | ||
| He's got good stuff. | ||
| From the high desert, I'm Art Bell. | ||
| See you tomorrow night. |
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