Jon Stewart meets the US military industrial complex

Part 1 of 3

Last week, Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks was interviewed at a symposium at the University of Chicago’s Harris School of Public Policy by Jon Stewart. The full interview extends for more than an hour. I realize that most people will not watch it in full. That’s too bad. It is a revealing exchange that is deeply worrying.

It was a stunning interview all the way through and extremely unnerving. This was the moment that went viral. It bears mentioning that the US defense budget will exceed $886 billion next year. Let’s watch:

Deputy Secretary Hicks seemed lost in the conversation. She didn’t seem to understand its nature, and thus felt persecuted. She reacted defensively in the way a deeply cloistered individual might to contact outside a very constricted bubble.

The admission by the deputy secretary that “we don’t have an accurate inventory that we can pull up of what we have, where” is an astonishment. Jon Stewart couldn’t be more correct in registering the outcome somewhere along an axis of waste, fraud and abuse. What is most astounding about the interview is the defensiveness, peevishness and effrontery of the deputy secretary towards any question that pierced the NFL halftime presentation of the US military to the American people.

The fact that such questions appeared so shocking and utterly alien to the deputy secretary speaks to the brokenness of the media coverage around the US military. Jon Stewart pointed this out precisely when he referred to the affinity of the media for high-tech weapons and gadgets and idolatry of the institution at the expense of covering its reality, and that of the war fighters and their families. This CNN report aboard a US nuclear submarine in the Pacific is a pristine example: