Tucker Carlson

And so it's a kind of sleight of hand where we seem like we're being generous, but actually we're benefiting.

And there may be some truth in that, by the way.

It's not totally... I mean, you can assess whether that's like the kind of country you want to live in where the only real manufacturing base is weapons.

Probably not.

But that's where we are.

And it's not a crazy argument to make on a practical level.

I mean, there are...

military contractors in every congressional district or always were.

And so it does produce American jobs.

But it also sets up an incentive for those companies and the lawmakers who fund them to maintain the status quo.

And the status quo is, of course, always going to favor larger, more expensive weapons systems because those are the most profitable.

A system like that will never invest meaningfully in, say, drone technology because there's not enough money in it.

But you watch the war in Ukraine and you watch the 40-odd days of the war with Iran and you realize, well, wait a second, maybe we should have invested more in drone technology or taken a big picture look at what the United States would need to project military power across.

beyond its shores, and maybe aircraft carriers and the whole suite of weapons systems, the most expensive in the world, aren't really the way to project military power because it doesn't work.

And they can be defeated or at least constrained at a thousandth the cost by less technologically advanced countries like Iran.

But that would be a very obvious conclusion.

In fact, that was the conclusion of any smart, non-aligned person for the last five years.

Is it really worth having an aircraft carrier if you have to open the Straits of Hormuz?

Maybe not.

Well, apparently not.