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Dec. 17, 2023 - The Ben Shapiro Show
55:21
The Call of Duty | Tim Kennedy
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I have a journal here that every time I traveled overseas, I would write what was happening and what I felt.
I said, I find this sad, pathetic, but ironic.
Not only a few nights ago, did we track down and kill a man as he ran home trying to avoid us, maybe to survive, maybe just to live another day.
And there his wife and his children saw him die.
Are our actions justified?
How many more terrorists have I just created?
I killed their dad.
I just made a family of terrorists, didn't I?
I don't know.
How is this going to turn out?
Did I just make the wagon wheel roll just one more time?
On our very first mission, we shot this man running back into his home.
I don't know what to do.
I don't know if this is right.
I don't know where morality is in war.
Today we delve into the depths of military valor, the harsh realities of conflict, and the challenges faced on our own borders.
Our guest is none other than Tim Kennedy, a name synonymous with courage and resilience.
Tim Kennedy's life story is a tapestry of achievement.
Both a distinguished Green Beret sniper and a UFC headliner, Tim's journey is a testament to the power of resilience, discipline, and versatility.
When war breaks out, Tim runs toward danger to help.
As a former special forces operator, he's been in the thick of the action, serving with distinction in Afghanistan.
His firsthand experiences in this tumultuous region, particularly during the critical moments of the U.S.
pullout, offer a unique and sobering perspective on the complexities of modern warfare and the consequences of foreign policy decisions.
As the co-founder of Save Our Allies, Tim evacuated thousands of people from war-torn Afghanistan, Ukraine, and most recently, aided in the safe exit of American citizens from Israel under Hamas attack.
Tim's an entrepreneur and a passionate advocate for individual liberty, but Tim's service to our nation doesn't end overseas.
His work at the U.S.-Mexico border has exposed him to a different kind of conflict, where the struggles of migration, border security, and human tragedy unfold daily.
Tim has witnessed atrocities that challenge the conscience, and his stories that shed light on the human cost of these crises.
In today's conversation, we not only honor Tim's military achievements, but also confront the hard truths he's encountered in war zones and at our border.
We'll discuss the lessons learned from Afghanistan, the bravery, the sacrifices, and the painful realities of a war that has shaped a generation of soldiers.
Join us as we explore the life of a man who's faced adversities most can only imagine,
and how those experiences have shaped his views on leadership,
national security, and the moral obligations of our nation.
Tim Kennedy, welcome to the program.
Thanks, Ben.
Looking good.
So let's talk about, there's so much going on, it's hard to know where to start.
Maybe the conflict in Israel.
You're obviously making the rounds about the conflict in Israel.
You're on Joe Rogan talking about the conflict in Israel.
You're actually on the ground in Israel trying to help get people out in the early days of the conflict.
What was that like?
It was horrific, frankly.
I've been in special operations for nearly 20 years.
You know, from ISIS to Al Qaeda to Taliban, I unfortunately have seen the terrors of what this species can do to each other.
This was something entirely different.
This, you know, going to some of the kibbutzes and talking to the police and hearing the stories of the things that they saw, seeing the videos and seeing the photos, you know, as we're trying to find Americans that were missing.
Indescribable horrors occurred there, and it's something that's not being reported, something that's not being talked about.
It was profoundly evil, the things that they did to those people.
So, you know, since you were actually on the ground there and since you've come back and been in the media talking about this sort of stuff, it is amazing the narratives that have taken place around the conflict, the attempt to establish moral equivalence between what Hamas and, by the way, many civilians in Gaza did.
I mean, civilians were crossing that border and taking part in the massacre and taking part in the atrocities.
The attempt to create moral equivalence between what Hamas did and what Israel is doing
in the Gaza Strip is astonishing.
I can see that as a commentator, but you obviously have the military expertise
and military experience.
You've been in these situations.
What exactly is it that Israel is facing in the Gaza Strip?
Why are they doing what they're doing and how are they pursuing that?
Well, making out an insurgency is historically nearly impossible.
And what we see Israel trying to do right now is identify military targets that are in Gaza,
that are the Hamas terrorist organization, that not just, you know,
we don't want to just leave October 7th as the standalone thing that has happened
because that's intellectually inaccurate and historically wrong.
Hamas has a long history of attacking Israel in Countless occasions.
Not just intifadas, not just big assaults and attacks and the things that we saw on October 7th and terrorist attacks, but it has been a constant execution of this long plan of trying to incite Israel to lose in a propaganda battle.
Israel is trying to do the right thing.
They're just doing it the wrong way.
And this is just my opinion.
They are trying to limit as many civilian casualties in a group with a group that are intentionally hiding in and amongst civilians in a populace that frankly is sympathetic to Hamas.
When Hamas was returning from the attacks into the Palestinians into Gaza, what we saw was rejoicing in the streets.
They were excited about the success of the attack.
They were getting constant updates inside of Gaza.
And you can find the videos.
You don't have to trust my word.
You can go and look at the Palestinians rejoicing at the death of 1,400 people, taking now 200 captives.
The rape, torture, and murder of children and Holocaust survivors.
It's atrocious, and Israel now has to go block by block, door by door, fighting an embedded insurgency, and they're trying to do it in a way that is acceptable to the world, and that's the problem right there, Ben.
You know, if you read, you know, there's a ton of literature now that the question is the new rules of war.
We're not going to be able to fight the state-on-state thing that we so desperately have been wanting to fight.
You know, the last time America was truly A dominant aggressor in a war was in World War II.
Since then, we have not really decidedly won any wars.
And it's because of what's happening here in Gaza.
It's a perfect example of it.
They're not fighting by the rules that Israel is fighting by.
They're hiding in hospitals.
They're hiding behind women.
They're intentionally taking They're military equipment and positioning at schools.
These are the things that terrorist organizations and insurgencies do.
And these are not the things that proper military would do.
So it's a hard battle.
And every time that you try to take a block, You're of course going to incur civilian casualties because the bad guys are hiding with the civilians intentionally and using them as human shields.
So anytime an Israeli soldier tries to move to try and find an insurgent, of course there's going to be a civilian casualty because that's what Hamas wants and that then continues this revolving door of propaganda.
So it's a real tough situation that Israel's in right now.
We'll get to more with Tim Kennedy in just one second.
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So obviously you fought in counterinsurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan.
What exactly should Israel be doing here?
Because when you look at sort of traditional counterinsurgency tactics or operations against
insurgencies and going back to the Malayan War with the British Army, I mean, the basic
idea was that you kind of take certain areas, you clear them, you hold them, and then you
expand the radius outward of safety.
But what do you do when there are literally no allies in a particular area and yet the
world is clamoring for you to be the only one who's pursuing any sort of humanitarian
end?
There's no clamor for Hamas to pursue anything humanitarian.
There's a baseline assumption that they will not, and not only don't they care about the
civilians, they want the civilians dead.
And yet the human cry from the world is that Israel should care about the Hamas sympathizers
who are in the Gaza Strip.
And obviously no one wants to see children killed.
No one wants to see women killed.
Nobody wants to see any of this stuff except for Hamas.
But that puts Israel in a very difficult situation.
I mean, what's amazing to me is you watch the footage and you see these aerial footage of Israel bombing targets and you see buildings wrecked, you know, for miles around and people are suggesting that this is some sort of attempt to kill as many people as possible.
But the last statistic I saw is that for every bomb that Israel was dropping, it was killing about 0.8 people.
Which is an extraordinarily low ratio.
Israel's telling people to clear out of these areas.
They're essentially hitting infrastructure in a lot of these areas before they send their own guys in on, as you say, a block-to-block basis, attempting to clear these areas and putting them at risk.
I mean, Israel has complete air superiority.
If they wanted to, they could simply bomb Gaza into the Stone Age or forward into the Stone Age, as the case may be morally.
But what exactly would you be doing if you were in charge of counterinsurgency operations in this sort of situation?
You said something incredibly accurate and understated.
You say they have no allies there.
I think we have to unpack that a little bit and expound on what does no allies mean.
So in an insurgency, you have the active fighter, right?
Call them whatever you want.
If you walk down to a pro-Palestine or free Palestine rally, you're going to hear freedom fighters and fighters in Intifada.
Yeah, a bunch of liars.
What you have is terrorists, and then terrorists have a pretty sophisticated network of enablers, supporters, advisors, communication observers, and all of this network supports the warfighter.
So for every insurgent that is carrying a gun and going and doing war, you're going to find anywhere from 10 to 20 support personnel behind that single warfighter.
Now if you look at the dense population that is Gaza and you look at the number of people that are in there and the family relations, so if you started building out a family tree to one freedom fighter and you then build out his support network with people not just aware but complicit in the activities of this terrorist, Use the Amesh network that almost connects every single person there to being a direct supporter of the terrorists.
And you're like, wait a second, Tim.
There's a whole bunch of women and children that live there.
Yeah, man, we're talking about an insurgency.
An insurgency does not wear a uniform.
An insurgency does not say it has to be a military age man.
When you look at the things that they're educating the young children in Palestine, they are radicalizing them just like they do in Africa.
Just like they do in Eastern Europe, they get them as young as they possibly can, preferably illiterate, and they start feeding them these radical ideas of a violent extremist organization.
And by the time these are eight, nine years old, they are actively supporting, in an active support role, the warfighter, the terrorist.
And so being able to use The moral high ground of saying, like, this is an actual terrorist, you know, it's going to be a man between 18 to 45 years old, is just totally false.
It's absolutely wrong and clearly factually inaccurate.
You know, nobody's more dangerous than an 11 year old with an AK.
And they have been training these young men and women how to fight.
So, you know, not only do they have no allies there, In truth, the vast majority of the Palestinians living in Gaza are directly supporting, not just philosophically, but militarily, the terrorist organization that is Hamas.
So what do you do in a situation like that?
I mean, obviously, that's actually nothing new in the Middle East.
Besides during the Iran-Iraq War, the Iranian government literally giving golden keys or
metal keys to kids and sending them out to the front lines of the Iran-Iraq War to get
killed.
And we're talking about like nine, 10, 11-year-old kids using child soldiers and this sort of
thing.
As you mentioned, it's not uncommon in Africa either.
It's something that boggles the Western mind.
It's something that we can't understand because we would never treat our own children in this
fashion and we don't want to see other people's children treated in this fashion either.
But that, as you say, it puts militaries all over the world in an unwinnable situation.
The American military was in unwinnable situations in Afghanistan and Iraq specifically because
of similar tactics that were being used.
And this is sort of the gap between civilian leadership and military leadership.
Civilian leaders are constantly, you know, kind of projecting their own perceptions about
the world into the world of the military and then assuming that that's reality and it's
And so they're creating rules of engagement for members of the military that are putting members of the military in dire jeopardy, in actual risk, in positions to be killed or wounded very, very seriously.
This goes all the way back to the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.
And long before that, the United States setting out rules of engagement and make it incredibly difficult for our military to operate.
And this is true for Western militaries in general.
So what exactly should a military, when confronted with this sort of situation, do?
Is there anything that can be done other than what Israel is doing,
given the fact that, again, there's two constraints.
In an unconstrained world, the military could do what it would want,
and it would look a lot like the caveman, horrific warfare that we saw
throughout all of human history, up until the post-1945 era,
which would include enormous numbers of civilian casualties, obviously.
And it might end wars more permanently.
It would also be a lot uglier.
I think one of the things that we've done as a society is we've made war more palatable in some sort of weird way by saying, well, it's a humane war.
And so this has simultaneously made it easier for us to get into war and harder to get out of it.
Easier to get in because it's humane.
And hey, not as many people are going to get damaged.
So we're pretty casual about, okay, fine, let's just get involved in a war.
And then two, hard to get out because it turns out it's very difficult to win a war with those constraints.
But the two constraints are sort of, one is the military's moral constraint.
We don't want our men and women in the military having to do this sort of stuff.
And number two, civilian constraints, which is the civilian disconnected from the military situation on the ground.
So under these circumstances, can the West ever win another war?
What does victory even look like?
No, I think in the current political climate and the civilian understanding of the violence that is war, we are not equipped or capable of winning the war.
You know, the definition of a war that Americans see, you know, like you want to see a guy in a gray uniform with like a swastika on his shoulder, right?
And like Estes on his collar and like that's such a visible bad guy.
He was gassing innocents.
And, you know, he's doing these evil, deplorable things.
That's just not the case.
Now we're fighting non-state actors.
We're fighting corporations.
We're fighting groups that are funded by state actors via proxies.
We're fighting in intentional civilian areas.
None of these things we can accept as forms of war.
You know, I just tweeted a couple of minutes ago that we are at war with Iran.
Iran is using proxies.
Iran is using contractors.
Iran They're flying drones and dropping bombs on Americans.
There's no doubt about it.
We know that's happening.
But we, as you can see, if we went down to Congress right now, let's see who's talking about war.
None of them.
Not that I want to be in any more wars.
I'm anti-war.
You know, I'm kind of avoiding your questions like, what do we do?
That's the question that we've been asking for decades now, man, is what do we do?
If it's okay, I have a journal here that every time I traveled overseas, Um, I would write what was happening and what I felt.
Um, there's just two sentences at the, at the end of an entry on 11, July, 2006.
I was in Iraq and, um, we're trying to fight an insurgency and we had gone to a lawmaker's house that night.
And, um, we got in a gunfight and, um, we had killed.
An insurgent.
I said, I find this sad, pathetic, but ironic.
Not only a few nights ago did we track down and kill a man as he ran home trying to avoid us, maybe to survive, maybe just to live another day.
And there his wife and his children saw him die.
Are our actions justified?
How many more terrorists have I just created?
I killed their dad.
I just made a family of terrorists, didn't I?
I don't know.
How is this going to turn out?
Did I just make the wagon wheel roll just one more time?
On our very first mission, we shot this man running back into his home.
I don't know what to do.
I don't know if this is right.
I don't know where morality is in war.
We've been asking this question for a really, really long time.
There is my strategic military brain that says you build out this target list, you identify every single supporter, you identify who is funding them, you identify the enablers, you identify every level of the support echelon that goes to the terror organization, and then you wipe them off the face of the planet.
That would look like pushing Gaza into the sea.
That would turn that place into a parking lot, specifically there.
With Iran, that would be... Iran would have very similar tactics in where they have their military and strategic positions within the country.
It would be unpalatable for Americans to have a war like that.
So the two answers are What we would have to do, Americans and Congress would never accept for us to actually see a legitimate win.
And if we did that, I don't think the world would ever accept America as the leaders of the free world again.
We'll get to more with Tim Kennedy in just one second.
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So there is one possible alternative that I'll suggest.
You don't want to get your take on it, which is the thing that no one wants to do, which is extremely long term occupations in which you just assume that there's going to be a certain number of casualties.
And that's just going to be the reality from here on in.
And that was true in Afghanistan.
It was true in Iraq.
It's true in the Gaza Strip.
The reality is.
that, you know, America, we don't like to think of ourselves as an empire.
The reality of the world is that the British Empire was what kept any level of world peace
throughout the 18th and 19th centuries.
And it's American empire since 1945 that has kept any level of world peace since then.
People like to throw away the examples of Germany and Japan, but the reality is we still
have air bases in Germany and Japan.
I mean, the fact is that we have military bases literally everywhere all over the planet, and the places where those military bases tend to be are the most secure places in their respective countries.
The kind of bizarre choice that we are faced with is a utopian world in which the United States retreats within our own borders and things don't get worse.
That's not going to happen.
So what's going to happen is the United States reverts to a sort of defensive posture, which we could do because we do have uniquely amazing geography.
We're surrounded on two sides by ocean, on one side by Canadians and on the southern side by Mexicans, which is a pretty good position to be in strategically.
Everything's going to get a lot more expensive.
Everything's going to get a lot more chaotic.
You're going to see a lot more human rights violations.
If you don't like the stuff you see on your TV now, wait until the American influence is gone.
And if you don't like the prices that you're paying right now at the grocery store, wait until those multiply by three, four, five times because all of the supply chains get broken due to the lack of dominance of the American Navy, which is really what guarantees the freedom of the seas.
That's choice number one.
Things are much more expensive and much bloodier outside of our borders, but we have the moral purism to be able to say that we're staying within our own borders and we have nothing to do with any of it.
And then choice number two is a very aggressive American posture.
Doesn't mean we get into wars uselessly or that we don't assess the costs and benefits to begin by getting into wars, but there is a core recognition that once, if you want a place to be stable, that is not going to be a four-year commitment.
That's not going to be a 10-year commitment.
That's going to be maybe a 40 or 50-year commitment.
I remember when John McCain was mocked for saying this with regard to Iraq in 2008.
We were like, that's crazy.
He's saying a hundred year commitment to Iraq.
And he would say, well, yeah, we had a hundred year commitment in Germany and Japan.
And those places are now quiescent.
I mean, the reality is you probably have to occupy those places for longer,
which maybe is an argument for not getting involved in those places in the first place.
I can certainly see that argument, but there are going to be military conflicts
where to even guarantee our own economic and strategic interests,
we are gonna have to be involved there.
And that's gonna require some long-term thinking from politicians that they refuse to do,
especially if they won't do the short thing.
The short thing is the ugly thing, and the long thing is an unpalatable thing to the American people.
So that's the only available alternative.
In Israel, I think, by the way, the long-term alternative is the only alternative available, because they're not going to do the ugly and horrific thing that you're talking about, you know, pave Gaza, push it.
They don't want to do that, and they're not interested in doing that.
Well, the only alternative is going to be what it was before Oslo, which is essentially a long-term occupation, military occupation of these areas.
Hopefully they get some sort of help from the Saudis and the UAE and the Egyptians or whatever.
But they're going to be there for the long haul, and that is not going to be cured anytime soon.
Yeah, no, you're right.
For America to thrive, for us to be able to have commerce, we have to have security and stability in the region that we are trading with.
And it's one of many reasons why we have loved having Israel there since 1948.
They have provided a democracy and stability within the region that just had not existed in a really, really long time.
You know, when you look at Germany and you look into Eastern Europe, you know, obviously we have bases in Poland.
In 1945, when we started setting up our, and we have gigantic bases in Germany, not just strategic, but you know, if you're going to Ramstein or Landstuhl or Baumholder, you know, the largest, most complex hospital in the world is in Germany.
And it's an American hospital and it's staffed by the most brilliant surgeons on the planet, doctors within the American military.
The positions of our military bases in Africa now, also strategic, but also like geographically strategic, but also in positions that try to force stability and security in that region, which is a really difficult thing to do.
What I hate is that our young men and women are the ones that have to go over and Sit there or fight.
Those are the two options.
We have to go sit on ground and hold ground or we have to go and fight foreground to keep back these radicals.
And there's no skin in the game with any of the politicians.
You know, currently in Congress we have the lowest military service records of in the history of both the House and Congress.
People that serve the military that are now serving in a political capacity and they're And they are not on a whim, but they're casually and not flippantly, but I think without fair regard, sending American or girls and boys out to fight these wars.
War is terrible.
I don't want to be in wars, but I do want peace in the world, and I do agree that I don't know another or better way to do it besides us forcing security and stability in a region, and that is us physically being there.
So that takes us to Afghanistan.
So obviously you've fought in Afghanistan.
The collapse of Afghanistan, I think, is the worst foreign policy disaster for the United States, certainly of my lifetime.
It's a it's it was a debacle.
The the the Biden non plan to basically leave the place to destroy all possible
supporting forces ability to even call in airstrikes by the Afghan military.
It was disgraceful.
We left behind tens of thousands of people who who acted.
actively were eating the United States' efforts in Afghanistan in the first place, turn it
back over to the people who had provided safe harbor to al Qaeda in the first place.
You were attempting to get people out in the middle of all of this.
What was that like?
And then I want to get your overall take on the situation in Afghanistan.
Why it's degraded.
Could it have been stopped?
Oh, man.
You know, when President Biden said that we're going to be leaving Afghanistan, you know,
I had this expectation of, hey, we're going to keep military, whoever controls the outer
perimeter and controls everything that's inside of that perimeter.
And so I thought we would keep our military bases in place and we'd start a slow, intentional downsizing of the military footprint on the ground.
And then when they announced, they literally proclaimed to our enemies that we're just leaving, and here's the date that we're going to leave.
We're going to be abandoning these bases, these very strategically placed bases, with a bunch of equipment that is very useful for war.
And it's going to take years for the Taliban, if the Taliban even wants to, to try and take over that land.
Myself and all of my friends were like, Are they idiots?
Like who's talking to these people?
This is going to happen in weeks.
We were also wrong.
It happened in days.
You know, it was a rapid as fast as a vehicle could drive into Afghanistan from those neighboring countries was as fast as they as Taliban took land.
They barely had to fight.
They barely and in the Afghan Army's defense, even though they had been trained and they had been equipped, they have never fought without us.
We had always advised and, in some instances, accompanied them.
In this instance, we just said, hey, good luck, you know, buenos fuerte.
And the Taliban rapidly took the most strategic portions, took our military bases, repurposed all the military equipment that was there to give them even more momentum to take even more land even faster.
So by the time you get to Kabul in Mid-August of 2021, it's completely surrounded by the Taliban.
The Taliban there, they're using night vision that they took from us, M4 that they took from us, M249s and 240s that they took from us, ammo that they took from us.
And they are the most equipped that they have ever been in the history of the Taliban.
And they now have the last place for us to get the remaining Americans and our allies out of the country.
They have it completely surrounding.
Everybody remembers the videos and photos of people holding on to wheel wells as the landing gear as a plane, a C-17 was taking off and watching people fall to their death.
Honestly, thankfully that they fell because the other option was them to freeze to death or be torn apart by the wind speed of that aircraft.
The human body just can't take it.
So the 90 or 30 second fall was far more humane than what they're about to experience.
Then you have people trying to get out.
You have women taking their babies and just passing them forward on the heads and hands of other people.
They have women taking babies and trying to throw them over the walls, unaware that on the far side of the wall is Constantino wire.
The babies are falling into the Constantino wire and bleeding out.
You know, you see the Taliban executing people.
So after they set up this outside corridor, every route into the HKIA was controlled by the Taliban.
So if A special forces commando, an Afghan soldier that served with the American special forces, if he's trying to come in, they have a list of names.
And if you're trying to hide your passport or all the things that would get you onto the base, those are also the things that will get you killed if you're caught with them by the Taliban.
So the Taliban is executing people on the hoods of their car.
You know, they're doing it in front of Americans to make sure Americans recognize that they're powerless in this instance.
And the initial footprint on the ground was a small contingent of British military.
And that's when the base got overrun.
Then America came back, we launched the 82nd Airborne, and we bumped up the Marines that were on the ground.
We retook the airstrips.
And when I got on the ground, it was the most dissimilar to any airport that you can imagine, right?
There's broken cars, there's burnt out cars, there's dead bodies, there's trash everywhere, and this is where we're about to do the largest evacuation of military personnel since Dunkirk.
You know, like, this is, it was absolutely bonkers, Ben.
I mean, like, you talk about Wild Wild West, that was savage.
We'll get to more with Tim Kennedy in just one second.
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So I want to talk about Afghanistan in a couple of layers.
One is the strategic failure and one is the tactical failure.
So sort of the grand strategy for Afghanistan originally was that there would be an occupation, that this would eventually transition into a democratic Afghanistan.
That was obviously an ideological failure by the Bush administration and then follow on by the Obama and Trump administrations as well.
It's a 20-year war in which the basic idea that this tribal country that had never had a centralized government was somehow going to resolve into a centralized government,
democratically ruled.
That was a bizarre idea at the very outset.
If you were going to pursue something like that, that requires, as we were talking about
earlier, decades of commitment.
It requires you to basically provide the entire force operation in the entire country in order
to ensure safety, which is the prerequisite for any emerging democracy, is that you actually
have to make sure that people aren't getting killed for, quote-unquote, voting the wrong
way.
The reason the Taliban were able to take over the country so quickly is because everybody
knew the Americans were going to leave, the Afghan army was going to dissipate, and if
you were caught supporting the Afghan army, they were going to shoot you and shoot your
And so everybody immediately was welcoming the Taliban in, because what other choice do you have?
So there's that strategic failure that I wanted to get your take on.
And then there's the tactical failure, which is this idea that they could literally say
to the Afghan military, whatever was left of it, that they were going to withdraw close air support.
And this was magically going to transition into safety.
Like that was totally nuts from the outset.
Yeah.
First, the failure on the Americans' understanding, and we do this so often.
We did it in Vietnam.
We did it, obviously, in Iraq.
We never anticipated having to fight in a way that We had to fight to see success, and we also failed to understand the culture.
Not all cultures are created equal.
An American, using the lens of the Western idea of capitalism and democracy and this beautiful constitutional republic that we live in, and thinking that other people are capable of that, there are some cultures that are not capable of that.
Not all cultures are created equal.
There are cultures that gave human sacrifices of little children or prevented other people from having children or, you know, force people to cover their entire body and then beat them in the street when they don't do what they're supposed to do.
Not all cultures are created equal, but then we think that this culture that we are at war with is going to accept the ideas that we want them to have to see the democracy in this area to provide the security and stability that we want to have there But I still can't understand that they're not capable of it.
It's so sad that we're so ignorant in recognizing, and it's altruistic of us to be like, oh, all humans are equal.
It says so in our beautiful founding documents.
We all are created equal.
We might be created equal, but from that point forward, things can change within a society, within a culture.
And the knowing and seeing the things that These people will do to each other.
They're not going to be able to have the democracy that we so desperately want them to have.
That was the first failure, is us being too dumb and too entitled and too proud and too human, too American, to know that Afghanistan will never be able to handle real democracy and a centralized, organized government, which is not possible.
On the strategic side, Afghanistan has lots of value.
There are minerals there that are now being mined by China.
It's in a position where it's buffering the southern portion of Russia from access into the Middle East, which is useful.
Obviously, it's immediately adjacent to Iran, which is useful from a military perspective.
We knew that it would be very useful for us to have that piece of ground, that area controlled and secure and stable for us to be able to influence positively neighboring countries and to the north and to the west.
Since we have left, as we can see, Iran has just been going Insane with supporting, financing, and pushing every single limit.
And that has really escalated since 21.
Since they knew that now all of our gigantic bases, Bagram, Kandahar, Kabul, those are all gone, right?
Like what do they have to fear to the east?
Nothing.
Before, they were scared in multiple directions, right?
They had Iraq to the west and Afghanistan to the east.
Now Iran's like, Bro, we barely got people in either one of these places now that can affect anything on us.
It's lame.
So, the other hot conflict that we're seeing in the world right now is the conflict in Ukraine.
And there are a wide variety of perspectives on what the United States should be doing in Ukraine.
Obviously, I think that the Ukrainian offensive has, by all accounts, stalled out at this point.
I think that it was a noble mission to prevent Ukraine from falling to Vladimir Putin's invasion.
By the same token, everybody knows what the end of this war looks like, and so the only question is how you get to the end of that war, which is Russia retaining large parts of the Donbass as well as Crimea, Ukraine being given security guarantees by the West to prevent another similar invasion by Russia.
In terms of America's war fighting machine, I mean, the fact is that this has been a fairly
cheap spend.
I know there's been a lot of talk about how much money we're spending in Ukraine, but
the reality is that the American military budget is hundreds of billions of dollars.
And to completely degrade Russia's military capacity in the way that the Ukraine has been
able to degrade that military capacity over the course of a year and a half without any
American casualties, if you could have said, you know, 10 years ago, here's the trade,
$100 billion and Russia's military capacity is wildly degraded and no American casualties,
that seems like a fairly solid trade.
With that said, it's pretty obvious at this point that there's just a World War I line
and that line is not going to move very much in either direction from here on in.
What do you do about Ukraine?
What do you think is the situation there?
I already think we have mission success.
You know, we...
Bye.
I know every Ukrainian is throwing their hands up in the air.
As Americans, how mad would we be if Mexico invaded and took a large portion of Texas, New Mexico, and we're like, all right, we're just going to leave it to them.
Every Texan would be like, hell no, we're not.
We're going to go out and exterminate every single one of them.
When I was in Ukraine, we were all the way into Kharkiv.
We're as far east as you can get in the front lines, and going through French Warfare.
World War I. French Warfare.
Those lines are going to be moving maybe feet over decades.
That land, there's mines there, there's drones.
Now I have permanent fear any time I hear a drone flying through the air.
It just makes my butthole pucker.
You're totally right.
That land is going to cost so many lives and so much money to try and take back another war that's not going to be another type of war, a trench warfare that is not going to be palatable to the West.
It was embarrassing.
It was a huge success for the West to see Putin lose there.
It could have gone either way.
It was really close.
When you go to early 22, they were fighting in the streets of Kyiv.
There were bombs dropping in Lviv on the border of Poland.
This is the frightening concept of a NATO country.
Their neighbor was invaded by an aggressor crossing a sovereign border, and that was a communist army flooding into Ukraine and fighting.
Midway through the country, passing the river into the capital, you know, pushing, attacking military targets all the way in the West.
What should we do is we need to solidify those lines.
I love diplomatic options.
They're way less expensive, both in blood and cost.
I would love to see, I realize that Negotiating with Russia has historically not proven to be very successful in many instances.
But the other thing is, if you want that land back, you're putting American boots on the ground in Ukraine.
There's no other way that's going to happen.
They don't have the people, they don't have the bodies to take that land back.
We can throw as much money as we want at them, those lines are going to stay the same.
Unless you have American soldiers moving east.
So you talked a little bit earlier about the fact that very few people in the United States have served in the military.
Increasingly, very few people even know someone who has served in the military.
So what made you decide to join up?
That's a sad story.
I was in a real bad moment of my life.
I had every opportunity.
Incredible parents, you know, educated.
I was going to grad school and I had a couple of girls pregnant.
I thought I might have AIDS.
And I was fighting at night in cages, literally for fun.
And I go to work at a dot-com.
In California, and I watched a young woman in a polka dot dress walk out to the edge of a broken window and look down, I don't know, 50 stories and then look inside of a building and try to make the decision if it was better for her to burn alive or jump to her death.
And that woman in the two towers had gone in to work early that day.
She went in work early so she could get off in time to pick up her kids from school so they didn't have to walk home from school by herself.
And her last act of conscious thought was trying to hold her dress down as she jumped to her death so she didn't burn alive.
And I was so angry, Ben.
I get so angry now thinking back to that poor woman trying to one make ends meet in the greatest country in the world.
And then to faced with the decision by Muslim radical terrorists, forcing her to have to make the tough decision of leaving her children as orphans.
And her jumping to her death.
So I went to the recruiter's office that day and tried to enlist.
It took a few months, but ultimately 9-11 was the catalyst that forced me to special operations.
So you and your wife are involved in a lot of charitable projects.
One of the projects you're involved in is Save Our Allies.
Why don't you tell us about what that does and how people can support it.
Not a misnomer.
We named it pretty specific.
It's Save Our Allies.
And, you know, it's not government allies.
It's, I think, people that, you know, you and I would agree need saving.
In Afghanistan, it was Americans.
It was Christians.
They were orphans that were trapped and the Taliban were going to kill.
They were small women, small business owners and entrepreneurs that just would not be allowed to exist.
They were gays in Kabul that were going to be burnt alive or pushed off the rooftops.
We're getting those people out.
You know, in Ukraine, it was providing humanitarian aid to the last mile as far east as we could in the initial invasion.
One of my friends, her colleague, was blown up in, he worked for Fox, Benjamin Hull, and he got blown up in Ukraine and his people and his crew died.
He was dying in Ukraine and Save Our Allies was able to find him and Literally sneak him through an invaded war-torn country, peak conflict, get him across the border into a helicopter and into a military hospital in Germany, full circle here, and saves his life.
You know, then most recently in Israel getting, you know, there's anywhere from 40 to 60,000 tourists that traveled to Israel from America.
And Obviously Christians wanting to go see where Jesus walked and where he was baptized.
Jews coming from all over the United States to go to the Promised Land and see the land that was that has been in their their blood from the beginning of recorded history and uh all those people were trapped you know as American and Delta and United and and every other person and every other carrier canceled their flights um what was left was us trying to find ways to get these people out um because I believe that a war was going to escalate way faster than it did in a way I thought it was going to be
Um, a little bit feistier, a little bit earlier on.
It got kind of stable after the attack.
Israel doing a great job stabilizing the region.
Um, so I was trying to get as many Americans off what I thought was going to be a total battlefield.
The last thing that we want, and this is a difference between us and them, is we want our civilians off the battle space so that we can go and do the thing, which is destroy the enemy, right?
That's what we were trying to do.
We were in Sudan during the coup trying to assist, fortunately, the American military under the leadership of General Donahue created a corridor to get all those refugees out.
We have very Brilliant special operations trained people and kind of expeditionary evacuation, extraction of people.
And the same thing, the same mechanisms that you use to get somebody out are the same things that you use to get resources in.
So Save Our Allies does that.
We try to save the people that need saving in the places that nobody else can save them.
What was it like to enter Special Operations?
Obviously, it's pretty rigorous to get into that program, so take us through that a little bit.
It was wild.
You know, this is the beginning of the war.
We had had a very long, you know, Panama and Grenada and small conflicts, Desert Storm One, you know, which So in the military, in your uniform, you have your unit patch, and then you have your combat patch.
The combat patch is the patch that you get when you deploy with that unit to combat.
You could go to every one of the military bases that had combat arms there, and you would very, very, very rarely see any combat patches on anyone's sleeves.
We just hadn't been to war.
And the very small group that had were in U.S.
Army Special Forces.
Those men that had come back, you know, the horse soldiers, there's a monument for them in New York, that riding to Afghanistan on horseback into battle.
Freaking epic, right?
That's Green Berets right there.
Those were the men that were now training this little small group of men aspiring to go to war, wanting to go make a difference.
And they had just come back to seeing the most cruel form of war that we had seen in a really, really long time.
And it was brutal.
You cannot prepare people to go do the worst thing that our species can do to each other without it being very extreme.
You know, Definitely not palatable to most people about what training should look like.
You know, people died in training, people drowned and froze to death, and they got run over by vehicles, and there's no other way that you can prepare people for war without doing hard things.
So, you know, Special Forces has, once you get selected, you know, you'll have, so in my class we had four or five hundred guys that went to selection that went to special operations preparation course and then ultimately went to special course of selection and there was 91 that made it to the end and 88 of them got selected and then that 88 are allowed to go into the Q course which is a one to two year long
qualifying course to train that soldier in what the skills that they need to have to be a Green Beret.
And, you know, from small unit tactics to guerrilla warfare, conventional warfare, learning the language, your target language for that your area of operation you're going to go work in, you know, sheer school, being interrogated, you know, going into concentration camp and, you know, getting the crap beat out of you.
These You know, in the very end, that group of 88 people that were selected, I'm going to guess maybe 60 made it through, you know, so 60 out of 500.
And it's the greatest job in the world.
It's the greatest job to go into a place and to give them the thing that Americans value more than anything else, which is sovereignty and freedom, to be able to go into a poor area and help them dig a well, to go into a broken area that has been scared to death, you know, by By a VEO cell in North Africa, and you come and for the first time in their life, they get to have a peaceful night's sleep because you're on the ground there with them.
America is such a special place.
We really take it for granted how wonderful this country is.
My colleagues have time and time again had to go to places where it was the worst on the spectrum of humanity.
You know, America's way over here and then there's other cultures that are way over here.
So then you get to come back and truly appreciate, you know, your, your wife never looks more beautiful than when you first come back.
Your kids can't be more sweet than the first time that you come back.
And it is, it is the most magical thing to, to come back to this amazing place that we go and fight for.
So how do you deal in the moment with the stresses that you're dealing with on the ground?
How do you deal with coming face-to-face with evil?
Not only the evil of the person you're fighting, but the evil of war itself.
How do you deal with that in the moment, and how do you deal with that later?
Because most of us, I mean, obviously, haven't served in the military, never have to come face-to-face with that sort of stuff, never have to deal with the readjustments or the adjustments in the moment.
Yeah, I think preparation, no surprise here coming out of my mouth, that's hard work and discipline are the two things that, you know, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.
I would rather do all the things to make sure that I'm a healthy, spiritually well, intellectually capable, morally strong, ethically founded human, so that when I have to go and do my job, I'm making the most rational and just decisions I can in the time.
And they're terrible decisions.
Nobody should have to decide if I'm going to engage a machine gun when I know And I know this firsthand.
As I walked up to a door and the door starts getting shredded with machine gun fire, my friend Mike Goble comes to me back and saves my life.
As we pick open the door, we see a PKM machine gun sticking out of a window.
I throw a grenade through the window, right?
That's what you're supposed to do.
There's a machine gun that just tried to kill me and Mike.
And this is who we're fighting.
Surrounding that machine gun were a bunch of women and children.
That's how they fight.
Did I make absolutely the right decision in everything leading up to that, as best that I could with the information that I have?
Could I go and pull that grenade back that I just threw the moment I hear it go off, and the only thing that I hear is the crying and the anguish of babies and women?
Of course, but I can't.
That's war, and that's the people that we're fighting in cultures that are not the same.
Like, would I ever take my own family and barricade them around me with a machine gun as people started assaulting?
Of course not!
But that's who we're fighting.
And so the preparation and hard work and discipline is what enables you to be able to perform in war.
And similarly, after, how do you deal with the things that happen in war?
I think in a really similar way.
Me now, I'm still in, obviously.
I've been to Iraq, Afghanistan, during the evacuation of Afghanistan, into eastern Ukraine.
I've worked on the Mexican border for months and months on end.
Also one of the worst things I've ever seen.
Man, I love my kids.
I go to church.
I get an ice bath.
I exercise.
Right now, unfortunately, I'm in the middle of a three-day water-only fast to try and get a bunch of gross stuff out of my body and make sure I'm healthy so I can live long and be there for my grandkids.
All of these things, like I'm being a faithful husband.
This liquor cabinet behind me, this is for guests.
I've never touched a single drop of any of the things that are in there, but people send them to me, so I take them and I share them when I have friends that come over.
I try to be a good man, and I think being a good man enables me.
Sure, there's pain and I have friends that I can talk to about it, but those are the things that enable me to deal with the stresses that I experience.
And, you know, I can cry with my wife.
I can get on a flight and watch a sad movie and I'm like crying like a baby.
Somebody looks over at this 220 pound burly dude with the square jaw that mostly has killed people his adult life.
He's like, what a softie, right?
But that's being human.
That's being a good man.
And then on the other end of that spectrum, you know, if you're not sleeping and you're drinking and you're smoking or you're doing any substances, you're fighting with your spouse or cheating on your spouse.
Those all add.
Folks, our conversation continues for our Daily Wire Plus members right now.
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