Mac and Mike Discuss 3 Questions from a person with TDS

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Mike: One of my old military friends—somebody you know I’ve talked about—is always sending me personal texts about things. He’s got severe TDS. I know people don’t like that term, but it’s really true in his case. The questions he’s asking are ones other people want to know, so I’ll read this real quick. He’s addressing me:

“For someone so invested in military matters, you’re being strangely quiet in your public posts about the embarrassments we’re suffering regarding munitions shortages, Trump’s new love affair with World War II-era aircraft carrier tech, and our shift away from South Korea.”

So, is there anything you’d want to discuss about our so-called shortages when it comes to munitions?

Mac: Well, actually, I look at that as being a good thing, Mike. First, there are people out there who say we’re involved in this war with Iran for the wrong reasons. There are many conspiracy theories claiming the only reason America is in this war with Iran is because we’re friends with Israel and we’re attempting to do Israel’s dirty work.

I find that a very difficult concept to wrap my head around. I believe Donald Trump is his own man. Throughout history, from the time he emerged on the U.S. and world stage, he’s been pretty clear that he’s his own man. So to suggest we’re fighting this war for reasons other than the ones he states—that we’re trying to prohibit the theocracy of Iran from getting a nuclear weapon—is hard to accept. They have stated publicly and very frequently that they intend to use any weapons they have to destroy the “Satan” and the “Great Satan,” meaning Israel and the United States.

I look at this war and say Donald Trump is trying to protect the United States of America from a nuclear threat from a theocracy that believes it is their religious duty to attack us. If you choose to believe that Trump is fighting this war to keep Iran from being able to attack us with nuclear weapons—which I think everyone would agree is a bad thing—then my answer to the scarcity of munitions is: I really don’t give a damn. Use every munition you need in order to stop Iran from achieving their goal of having a nuclear weapon, which they have stated again publicly and frequently they intend to use against the United States.

And by the way, people say, “Well, they can’t send an ICBM to the United States. We can protect ourselves against it.” That’s not the way they would do it. They’d put a dirty bomb in a suitcase or a small trunk, ship it to Mexico or Canada, sneak it across the border in a surreptitious way so we wouldn’t know it was there, and take it to one of our most vulnerable targets that would do us the greatest harm. Then they’d explode a dirty nuclear weapon at a location that would cause the greatest damage for the longest period of time. It’s not just the explosion and the devastation from the bomb. It’s the half-life of the radiation that would keep us from using that geography for decades.

So no—when we talk about the “embarrassment” of running short on munitions, guess what? We can make more. There’s no limitation on how many we can make, Mike. You say we’re going to stop Iran from attacking us with a nuclear weapon? I don’t care what it takes.

Mac: You have an opinion on that?

Mike: Well, I have a bunch of thoughts. First, we have to ask if there’s a shortage. Why? And what are we talking about? It’s an internal memo leak that the president and others are denying, but let’s say it’s real because it sounds plausible. No president is going to say, “Yes, we’re short on munitions.”

Why would we be short if we are? Did the last series of presidents give a lot of our munitions away? Yeah. Now we’re selling them, but either way, it’s a drawdown. The other thing is Trump, when he was president, was always asking for more, and it hasn’t been reciprocated by other presidents to build up the military—Congress, to be fair.

But then you have to say, okay, why would they say this? Because we know we have tons more munitions. I’m not 100% sure, but in supply you have your logistics set up for world conflicts. We have a certain amount of munitions designated for maybe China invading Taiwan, a certain amount designated for the homeland, and we say we don’t want to fall below these levels. Then we have the munitions for that theater. So could we theoretically cross-level? Sure. We can pull some of the munitions protecting America to use over there and then replace those stocks. It’s not the crisis everybody thinks.

Of course China is looking at this and saying, “When would be a good time to take Taiwan? Well, if we’re having a little bit of a munitions problem…”

What is the name of the act that Trump could institute about having manufacturing?

Mac: Defense Production Act or something?

Mike: Yes. I know exactly what you’re talking about. The United States government takes over industry and forces them to make what we need. And we’re not doing that. So if we were truly short… They talked about him threatening it because of Raytheon and I guess Northrop Grumman. We did that during COVID—we took over businesses and made them make ventilators and all sorts of stuff.

Mac: But see, Mike, here’s the other aspect of this. You know what has happened since World War I? Weapons have changed.

Mike: Oh yeah, right.

Mac: So when they say we’re running out of munitions, we’ve also learned that the munitions we have stockpiled are not necessarily the ones we need. Let’s get rid of them. The technology has changed and there are new munitions and new ways of prosecuting a war. Using old munitions is not necessarily a bad thing.

Mike: No, it’s either use them or lose them. Right. Because they’re going to go to waste. They all have a shelf life.

Okay, so what was his next question? Trump’s new love affair with World War II-era style aircraft. What he’s talking about is the catapults that launch the jets being moved from electromagnetics back to steam.

Mac: Well, there’s more than that. Donald Trump announced the new initiative for battleships, for example. Battleships were thought to be obsolete since World War II. The battleship was the way we projected our power to various places throughout the world. And of course, once World War II was fought, we realized that having aircraft all over the place was a better way to enforce our will.

But again, I would argue that the prosecution of war has changed. So when you talk about going back to World War II style, what’s more important—efficiency and the ability to prosecute the war, or what kind of technology we use?

Before we had gasoline-powered cars, we had steam-powered cars. Guess what the gasoline-powered cars did? They eliminated the steam. Right now we have electric-powered cars, but electric isn’t right for every application, so we still have gasoline-powered cars. Does it really matter what technology the military is using as long as it’s not something stupid like solar-powered tanks? You know, really that’s what Biden wanted to do—solar-powered military vehicles.

Mike: Yep. Yep. And look, we had a conversation earlier about war games with Ukraine. The war that Ukraine is fighting with Russia has made Ukraine very adept, and they’ve made a lot of technology improvements in drone warfare. That kind of warfare is, at least right now, looking more like current and future ways of winning than our old ways of tanks and aircraft.

Mac: Oh yeah.

Mike: I think at one point I heard that Ukraine was manufacturing 9,000 drones a month. That’s a lot of power projection, especially in something that costs a couple of thousand dollars.

Here’s a question I would throw out when we’re talking about World War II. We have Patriot missiles. We also have aircraft that shoot warheads from the sky. Aircraft have missiles and various systems—I won’t get into all the numerology and technology—but the point is those missiles we currently use, both ground and air, are very, very expensive. They could be replaced by these much smaller, much less expensive drones that can do basically the same kind of thing. It’s not 100%, but if you shoot down a drone with a $1.2 million missile, are you really winning the battle?

Obviously you want to win regardless of the cost. I’m not trying to put it purely in dollars. But when we look at World War II technology, does it really matter? What is the technology that is the most secure, the most efficient, the most reliable, and the one that gets the job done? I don’t care if it comes from the Civil War.

While I understand the reason they wanted to go back to the steam catapults on the aircraft carrier is because of reliability and repairability—we’re talking supply chain issues again, and time to repair something. I was one of those guys in the military who had to repair some stuff. We got away from a lot of the intricate repairs and just swapped out parts because it was so much easier. Everything became more modularized so you could easily replace things.

But the other side of the argument is the electromagnetic launchers are easier on the aircraft. The steam ones cause a lot of vibration and thrust, and that vibration can cause aircraft failures or maintenance issues—things come loose. People don’t realize how many loose things there are in any aircraft. Anyway, it’s a crapshoot, and I understand why Trump said it. I’m not sure—people were arguing they’re only doing this on the newer ones they’re manufacturing. But I guess on one ship they got so far, and Trump said no, tear that out. It’s going to cost some money. Who am I to say? I don’t know. And I don’t think the person who’s asking this question has the background—the guy was a freaking pilot.

Mac: You used the term reliability, Mike, and that was what I was talking about earlier in my comments. What difference does it make the technology in war? What you really want is certainty that things are going to work. Does it really matter what it cost or what technology? What you really want is assurance that it’s going to work. And the steam launchers have historically just been rock solid. Everything has issues—absolutely they break—but they can be repaired.

Mike: Trade-offs. You and I talking about trade-offs before. Yeah. Always a trade-off.

Mac: Yep. Everything’s a trade-off. That was Thomas Sowell.

Mike: Yeah, he’s pointed that out on economics and it’s true here.

And what about the shift away from South Korea? That’s an easy one. Do you want to take it first?

Mac: No, you go.

Mike: Well, here’s the money. We have 35,000 troops or something at the DMZ between South Korea and North Korea. Why are they there? They’re there as a tripwire, right? Obviously we don’t want North Korea to invade South Korea. The American public is loath to go to war for most any reason. Would we really go to war just to protect South Korea? Maybe, maybe not. You know what? We will go to war for Americans. Dead Americans we will go to war for.

First I think what you must address is: what is our national interest in North or South Korea? That part of the world is dominated influence-wise by China. North Korea clearly is a client of the nation of China. South Korea stands as a beacon of freedom and hope and a capitalist system. All of those are good things. But what are America’s vital interests in South Korea—or Japan for that matter? Do we have vital interests in Japan half a world away? I understand we’re a global world now, global economy, all the interdependencies. But the point I’m trying to get to is this:

Donald Trump received a lot of bad press recently for how he treated NATO. I don’t disagree with Donald Trump’s position. If we have an agreement with any nation-state and we say we will do this if you do this, and that nation-state doesn’t hold up their part of the bargain, should we be suckers and continue to hold up our end of the bargain? In my opinion, no. Just like if you and I make an agreement—you expect certain things from me and I expect certain things from you because you’re a man of your word, because I trust you, I know you’re going to follow through. I think what Donald Trump is saying—and for that matter the Department of War is saying—is: hold up your end of the bargain or maybe we won’t hold up ours.

Mike: Yeah, I remember there was a NATO conference and Donald Trump said, “Look, pay your 2%, or who knows, we may not defend you when the time comes.” And the hue and cry from the NATO European countries was, “You won’t defend us, you won’t protect us.” And Trump said, “Look, you’re paying your 2% or not. Pay your 2% and we’ll hold up our end of the bargain. Don’t pay your 2%—are we under any obligation to do so?” And now of course they’ve ratcheted it up to 5%. And I think that’s fair.

There are so many times in the past when the United States of America has jumped in and very honestly saved our allies from very difficult times. Would Europe be speaking German today if it wasn’t for the United States of America? You know, I’m not trying to be arrogant about the whole thing, but the truth of the matter is that when America entered World War II, not only did we change the tide of the war, not only did we arm all of our allies with the munitions and the weapons of war they needed to help win that war, but in large part, without the American soldiers, the Allies would have lost. I don’t know how you call it different. I don’t know how you parse that and say that wouldn’t have happened.

Yes, America has done some wonderful, great things in the past. And I think that if you are on the South Korean peninsula and need the protection of America to stop not only the North Koreans but also the nation of China from dominating you, then you ought to be a good neighbor to the United States. As long as we have those agreements in place, we should honor them. But it comes back to the thing I said first: What’s America’s national interest in the peninsula of South Korea?

When we entered, by the way, that was not an American war. You understand that was a United Nations operation. So I guess what I’m saying is our reason for fighting the Korean War in the 1950s was to halt the progression of communism. Is that still our stated national interest? We’re letting it go here in America.

My only point is that we need to evaluate what is in the best interest of the United States of America and most importantly its citizens, its people, because our Constitution is clear. The primary responsibility of the central government, the federal government, is to protect and defend its citizens, defend the homeland. Okay? So I’m not real sure how defending South Korea is in our national interest, but I accept the decisions of our national leaders.

Mike: Yeah. Well, back to NATO, which is sort of kind of related to the same type of back-and-forth between Trump and these countries: the Secretary General of NATO praised Trump because all previous presidents, I guess, pointed out the same thing—“Hey, you’re not ponying up what you’re supposed to.” Yeah. But you know, Trump is such… all the negative things that people like to say about his personality. He’s brash. He’s embarrassing. But really, he embarrassed the hell out of them. Yes, he did. And no other president, with polite rhetoric, could have made the kind of points that he did. Agreed.

Now, when it comes to South Korea, again, Pete Hegseth and others have been asking Congress for more money. So I don’t know this to be the case, but sometimes budgets can be moved. I’m not sure how much Foal Eagle and Team Spirit—the exercises in Korea—cost us. I’m sure it goes into the billions of dollars. At least some of that money can be recouped to establish more money for munitions and things like that, too. And of course South Korea wants to sit there like all the European countries and cry about gas prices, because believe it or not, our gasoline prices were higher in the past than they are now, using 2026 dollars. Everybody forgets about that. So really, you’re not paying any more for gas than in the past. But they want to cry but they don’t want to participate, because we started this without consulting them. Like you could have talked to them and still had it be a surprise. People don’t understand—surprise attacks are surprise attacks for a reason.

Anyway, so I don’t know if that’s going to answer my TDS friend. Again, my friend, I go back to what I said. The nation’s national interest—our national interest—would not be served by sharing that kind of information with any of our allies.

Now, Donald Trump did ask many of our NATO allies for assistance going into the Iranian conflict. Most of those nations declined. They’re even preventing us from using their bases. Not just declining to help, but actually hampering our ability to prosecute the war. Yet who benefits from Iran not successfully having a nuclear weapon? Europe first. Every single one of those countries that are whining and complaining—“You didn’t tell us, you didn’t negotiate, you didn’t consult with us before you did that.” Guess what? America is going to do what is in her best interest, what is in her national interest, regardless of what you say, do, or think. And do you know why? Because when the shit hits the fan, we’re the ones that have to pull your bacon out of the fire. And I don’t mean that in an arrogant way. I mean that as a matter-of-fact way.

So many nations that we are allied with have allowed bad things to happen that are not in their national interest. You look at the nation of Spain. You look at the nation of Portugal. You look at the nation of England. You look at what’s going on in Germany with their unfettered… they don’t call it illegal… inviting people who are not European, with different attitudes and different ideas and different ways of life. Already those nations, many of them, are on a road to destruction. The nation of France doesn’t look like France anymore. The nation of England doesn’t look like England anymore.

America is founded on Judeo-Christian principles. Ronald Reagan used the terminology “the shining city on a hill.” I remember seeing an interview one time with someone who had fled Cuba, the communist island, the communist government of Cuba that was so unfair and so harsh on its people. They interviewed this Cuban and he was talking about America and he said, “I was lucky. There was America that I could flee to.” He said, “If America doesn’t exist, where do we go?”

And I think ultimately that’s what we have to rely on. Whenever I was a wee lad, one of the things my dad taught me—because he expected his boys to be men, I mean manly men—one of the things my father taught me was: you need to take care of yourself first, because if you’re not okay, you can’t help anyone else. And I guess I would apply that simple lesson that a father taught his son to the United States of America. If the United States of America is not okay, if we’re not strong, if we’re not that shining city on the hill, then can we really be in a position to help anyone else? No. And the answer to that is clear.

Mike: Yeah. Yeah. I think that really answers your friend. Why does America do what it has to do? Typically, one of my favorite quotes from any world leader was Winston Churchill, and he says America will always do the right thing after they’ve tried everything else. And I think sometimes that really does quantify and describe the United States of America. We’re not always right. We don’t always do the right thing, and sometimes we do dumb things and sometimes we do arrogant and imperfect things. But you know what? At the end of the day…

Dan—who was our Secretary of Defense… from Jamaica under President Bush? I can picture him in my head. Name from Jamaica.

Mac: Yeah. Well, he was Jamaican. He wasn’t born in Jamaica—born in New York, but his Jamaican parents. And I can see the man. He was Secretary of Defense when we fought the Gulf War. And you know what he said in the United Nations one time is: America has gone many, many places and fought wars for many different people, and the only thing we’ve asked in return is enough geography, enough dirt to bury our dead. And that’s what’s different about America than any other nation who are what they call colonial powers. Other nations have gone places and claimed them for their own. And what America has done is gone places, won their wars, made their nations better, and then came back home. The only thing we asked in return was enough dirt to bury our heroes—the men and women of the armed forces who paid the ultimate price.

Mike: Yeah, I’ll think of his name as soon as we’re done.

Mac: Yeah, probably. I’ll look it up and try and get it in the chyron or something.

Mike: But yeah, you think about, when I first started going to Europe, I noticed they all had 220 power. Why was the electric different than America? It’s because we rebuilt it or helped them rebuild after the Second World War. And they had high-speed internet before we did.

Mac: Yep. You know, so we sacrificed a lot. Look at Japan. Look at the nation of Japan prior to World War II and then look at the nation of Japan today, starting after World War II when MacArthur instituted many cultural, governmental, political, economic changes in the nation of Japan when they were under military rule. And all of them made the nation of Japan in some ways the mini-me to the United States of America—and I don’t want to insult them that way—but it made them a very different nation. One of which was an economic and influential powerhouse in the world of nations. And that was not by accident. That was because of the changes that we instituted after World War II.

Mike: And it’s so funny you say that in relation to Trump, because if you look back at the old Rona Barrett interviews, he was always talking about Japan instead of China, because that was before… yes, GATT had been around I guess, but we hadn’t started shipping all of our jobs over to China.

Mac: Yeah, we already shipped them over to Japan.

Mike: Yeah. You know, we used to call it scrap back in the old days. I used to call it crap, but same idea. After World War II, they started doing all kinds of manufacturing, parroting and copying the technologies that we had already created, and eventually they became very good at it. And guess what China does today? They steal our intellectual property and they copy our ideas. And it’s the same kind of thing.

But what does our economic system, what does our nation with its great freedoms protected by the Constitution, along with the economic freedom that’s guaranteed by a capitalist economic system—it creates incentive to come up with new ideas. Who was it that coined the phrase “Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door”? We are the place where the better mousetrap is invented. That’s because of our combination of political system, governmental system, freedom—all the freedoms guaranteed by the first 10 amendments to the Constitution, the Bill of Rights—plus our economic system that says, hey, if you do something better, we’ll pay you more money for it. If your future and my future align and we collaborate, we both are successful, we both get more money. And there are very few combinations like that, and that’s what makes us a powerhouse.

You and I have had this conversation before: China will never be able to ultimately defeat America because their political system—that is, communism—doesn’t allow for the freedom of thought that allows the ingenuity and the innovation that our system does. That’s why they’re very good at making things better, but they steal the ideas from us first in a lot of cases. That’s for sure.

Mac: Well, have we beat this up enough? I think we’re over a half hour into it.

Mike: Yeah, I guess we have. Was it a good conversation? I thought so.

Mac: We’ll have to give your buddy—name not to be mentioned, whose name shall not be mentioned—we’ll have to give your buddy a call and say, “Hey, watch this.”

Mike: Oh, he doesn’t want to talk. He won’t come on with us. He doesn’t want to talk on the telephone. I don’t know.

Mac: But tell him we answered his questions. He just has to watch.

Mike: Yeah, that’s what we’ll do.

Mac and Mike: Out.