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American Prestige listeners, it's Derek, and I am joined, as always, by my friend and

and comrade, Danny Bessner, and we're very grateful to welcome to the program on very short notice.

William Hartung, Bill, is a senior research fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft.

His work focuses on the arms industry and U.S. military budget, two of our favorite topics.

And by the way, Raytheon, when you're ready to talk about ad placement, just let us know.

But Bill, thank you so much for coming on the program.

Yeah, I'm glad to be here.

So we wanted to talk about the big, bold report that was in the Washington Post,

which you have debunked a bit, I think, smartly. But earlier this week,

the Washington Post reported that the Trump administration was ordering the Pentagon to plan

for sweeping budget cuts. That's the headline. The meat of it was that Pete Hegseth,

the defense secretary, had sent a memo, ordering senior officials throughout the U.S. military

to work on plans for cutting 8% from the defense budget in each of the next five years.

Only later did we find out that that money isn't actually going to be saved.

It's going to be put to other uses.

But what did you, let's start there,

when you heard this report,

...