The John Batchelor Show

Sunday 9 March 2014

Air Date: 
March 09, 2014

Photo, above:  Then-Defense Secretary Robt Gates at a lecture in 2009.  "[T]he guy who lectured over the last two days, at the Army and Naval War Colleges didn’t sound much like a peacenik. The Defense Secretary is trying to cut a wide swath of weapons programs, true. But the money from those projects, by and large, will stay in the Pentagon’s coffers under Gates’ plan – for other weapons. Not only is Gates proposing to increase the Pentagon’s budget for 2010 by four per cent more than this year’s total; he doesn’t want to see a major military cut back, even after the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are over.

"After his prepared remarks, Gates was asked what lessons he had drawn from history. His response was less than Gandhi-esque: One of America’s big failures after World War II, Korea, Vietnam, and the Cold War, was 'dismantling both our military and intelligence capabilities,' Gates said. 'Every time we’ve come to the end of a conflict, somehow we have persuaded ourselves that the nature of Mankind, and the nature of the world, have changed on an enduring basis.'

" 'My hope is that as we wind down in Iraq – and whatever the level of commitment in Afghanistan – that we not forget that the basic nature of humankind has not changed,' he added. 'We cannot disarm as we begin to see these conflicts we’re in today wind down.'" 

JOHN BATCHELOR SHOW

Guest host:  Francis Rose, Federal News Radio.

Co-host:  David Hawkings, CQ Roll Call Daily Briefing

Hour One

Sunday 9 March  2014 / Hour 1, Block A: Gordon Chang, Forbes.com, in re: missing Malaysian plane, disappeared for two days.  Suspect data: two or more stolen passports aboard; and the plane may have turned back for a while yet there was no distress call.  Looks as though the plane may suddenly have broken up. Boeing 777s are remarkably reliable, so this is odd.

Sunday 9 March  2014 / Hour 1, Block B: David Hawkings, Roll Call, in re: Congressional shenanigans, budgets, turnovers.

Sunday 9 March  2014 / Hour 1, Block C: Charlie Clark, Government Executive Magazine (govexec.com), in re:  IRS investigation/Lois Lerner pleads the Fifth Amendment, Issa and Cummings verbal battle

Sunday 9 March  2014 / Hour 1, Block D:  LouAnn Hammond, DrivingtheNation.com, in re: Just back from the Geneva auto show where major marques  want Carplay:  iPhone 5 can hook into their 2014 vehicle or later; can synch up and see whatever's on your phone, plus infotainment.  Audi uses Google Maps instead of Apple maps, since the latter don’t actually get you there very well.  If BlackBerry can ever get up off the mat, maybe they’ll try to get into this business, too.

Hour Two

Sunday 9 March  2014 / Hour 2, Block A:  Nina Khrushcheva, New School/Manhattan,  in re: Ukraine.   In 1954, her great-grandfather moved Crimea from the Russian SSR to the Ukrainian SSR.  Not meaningful till 1991, when the Soviet Union ceased.  Now, in 2014, a geopolitical crises. Russia refuses to use the verb "annex," although that's what it's doing.  Khrushchev's first motive probably was economic, since the western part of then-the Ukraine is agricultural and comparatively poor.  Also 300th anniversary of  . . .   and he also wanted to reward the country for al  of its historical suffering, for feeding much of the USSR after WWII.   Need to ask: what happened with Yanukovich, why did he run away on 21 Feb when things seemed to be going well?   Russian hand to destabilize? Also, let's sensibly assume that Crimea is lost to Ukraine; what John Kerry should be doing is finding an excuse for Putin not to move further westward into Ukraine – Russia might cite the Kosovo objection – or break it into two parts.   

Sunday 9 March  2014 / Hour 2, Block B: Maren Leed, CSIS, in re: the Quadrennial Defense Review.  Oh dear!  It's on a four-year time horizon so an Administration submits its first review in its first year; now it's a little whopperjaw and bridges two Administrations.  Original intent was for it to take a long view, perhaps twenty years; currently, apparently no one can imagine twenty years out.

Sunday 9 March  2014 / Hour 2, Block C: Rick Geddes, Cornell University, in re:

USPS dying, will they take cues from Canada Post which has same problems, or other postal services that have privatized? Required to deliver to every address in the US, six days a week; meanwhile, email, phone, FedEx, et al., are cutting in deeply.  Only first-class mail provides a satisfactory profit, and that's what the new technologies cut into.  Using USPS cluster boxes: mail gets delivered to an agglomeration of boxes , where he recipient has to go pick it up, himself – it's the last mile of delivery that's the problem. UK has privatized the Royal Mail. Unfunded USPS liabilities run to about $50 billion? If you give it more pricing flexibility – recall that it has a legally-enforce monopoly, so it'd be dumb to give it excessive latitude.

Sunday 9 March  2014 / Hour 2, Block D: John Vandiver, Stars and Stripes, in re: Military wants to close bases in US, already doing so in Europe, what do our European allies say about that?

Hour Three

Sunday 9 March  2014 / Hour 3, Block A: Robert Gates, former Secretary of Defense, in re: Putin reassembling the old Soviet Union?  consolidating power outside Russian borders?  (1 of 2)

Sunday 9 March  2014 / Hour 3, Block B: Robert Gates, former Secretary of Defense, in re: Putin reassembling the old Soviet Union?  consolidating power outside Russian borders? (2 of 2)

Sunday 9 March  2014 / Hour 3, Block C: Trish Regan, Bloomberg TV, in re: The dark side of Bitcoin.

Sunday 9 March  2014 / Hour 3, Block D: Kavitha Davidson, Bloomberg View, in re: Can soccer save Ukraine?

Hour Four

Sunday 9 March  2014 / Hour 4, Block A: Jim McTague, Barron’s Washington, in re:  The problem with the pivot to Asia

Sunday 9 March  2014 / Hour 4, Block B: Barry Pavel, Atlantic Council, in re: What happens to Ukraine when the current crisis dies down?  What does Ukraine look like in several years?  Georgia?  Or is there a different dynamic coming?

Sunday 9 March  2014 / Hour 4, Block C: James Traub, Foreign Policy, in re: Events may signal the end of the War on Terror, or maybe we will just stop calling it that.

Sunday 9 March  2014 / Hour 4, Block D: Mike McCarthy, Johns Hopkins SAIS, in re: One-year anniversary of Chavez’s death, political turmoil in Venezuela

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