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June 2, 2024 - The Ben Shapiro Show
01:05:33
How The Military Went Woke | Pete Hegseth
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So I signed up 20 years ago to fight extremists, put my life on the line, and now I'm deemed one because of what I believe, because of my Christian faith, or because I work for Fox News, or because I support Donald Trump.
Any one of those is a wrong answer.
Like, I've worn this uniform for the better part of 20 years for this country, and you're calling me an extremist.
If they'll do that to me, They'll do it to anybody, and they did.
Pete Hegseth is a prominent American television personality, author, and military combat veteran.
Hailing from Minnesota, he served as an infantry officer in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Guantanamo Bay.
Hegseth's dedication and leadership earned him numerous commendations, including two Bronze Star medals and a Combat Infantryman badge.
Following his military service, Hegseth transitioned into the realm of media and political commentary.
He became a familiar face on television as a contributor, and his insightful analysis and passionate advocacy for conservative values quickly garnered him a loyal following.
As a co-host of Fox & Friends Weekend and a frequent commentator on Fox News, he brings a unique blend of first-hand experience and keen analysis to the discussion of national security, veterans affairs, and American values.
In addition to his work in media, Pete is a passionate advocate for veterans and military families.
He's served as the CEO of Concerned Veterans for America, where he has championed policies to reform the Department of Veterans Affairs and improve the lives of those who have served our country.
His commitment to these issues is also evident in his writing, having penned several books on topics ranging from military history to contemporary politics.
In our conversation today, we'll explore Pete's journey from the battlefield to the newsroom, discuss his views on the current state of American politics and the shocking state of the military, We'll also touch on his personal experiences, the lessons he's learned through his service, and his vision for a stronger, more united America.
This is the Sunday Special, and today, we're proud to welcome Pete Hegseth.
♪ Well, Pete, it's wonderful to see your dad.
Thanks so much for joining us.
Really appreciate it.
Great to be here.
So let's talk about your book, The War on Warriors.
For those who don't know, it has become also a series on Fox, a special on Fox.
I want to play a little bit of it so people understand how awesome it is.
People definitely need to tune over at Fox News and check it out.
Here's a little bit of your series.
There's new concepts like patriot extremism, which is a part of how they review the profile of people serving.
So there are real insidious aspects of what's happening inside the Pentagon.
A lot of ideological people with too much time staring down at a meritocracy that they don't control.
And you know the left.
They don't like things they can't control.
And they look at the DOD and they say, this is something we need to bring to heel.
And something like CRT is perfect because it's Marxist in origins and it gets people turning on each other.
I mean, this is really important stuff, and obviously your book is filled with important stuff.
I want to start from the very beginning here.
The most trusted institution in the United States by all polling data remains the military.
But we have this weird situation where fewer Americans than probably any time in American history actually know somebody who is serving or has served in the military.
How do you see that emerging in American life, that ignorance of the military?
Well, no doubt.
It's in some ways become a family business, the all-volunteer military.
My grandfather served.
My father served.
I'm going to serve.
I would encourage my kids to serve.
And if you have a break in that chain, then you see the kind of recruiting pitfalls we're seeing right now.
But as much as I believe in, and I do think we should continue the all-volunteer force, it comes with that pitfall.
Inherently, our warriors are detached from the Americans that they defend.
And then, even more so, our wars are fought far-flung.
So no part of the conflict comes home to anybody who's actually serving.
So if you've got 1% serving, and a smaller fraction maybe has served at some point, A small percentage of Americans might know someone serving, but the idea that they would know someone in combat or someone that's been wounded or lost their life is almost minuscule.
So it's easy to be pro-war or anti-war or pro-defense or just sort of rah-rah America without having a real sense of what the warriors are doing, which means that certainly is true for our political class.
So in a second I want to get to the political class and talk about also sort of the public view of the military and war itself.
Let's start from where the military has gone wrong in terms of the brass.
So the everyday soldier on the line is as amazing as he ever was or she ever was.
But when it comes to the brass, that has obviously changed.
There's been something that the right has been increasingly noticing, obviously, and they've gotten a lot of criticism.
People like you have gotten tons of criticism for noticing it, that if you notice the quote-unquote wokeness in the military, that this means you're somehow undermining the military.
But obviously, it's the other way around.
It's people who are injecting foreign values into the military who are undermining the military.
Correct.
You can't blame me for pointing out what you're doing to an institution that's beloved to me and my fellow warrior class.
The book is not about how the military went woke.
The book is about how the military allowed itself to go woke.
Because this is an institution more focused than any other in our government, in our society, on meritocracy, on lethality, on readiness.
I mean, every aspect of it is, how good are you at your job, and how quickly can you execute it?
And that's what it's supposed to be.
And if you're a general officer inside the military, you raise your right hand to defend the Constitution, that's what you're defending.
You're not gonna let anything inside the ranks of your forces that tear that down.
We have a whole warrior general class that has done just that, starting a little bit under Clinton.
This is not a 100 year story.
This is a recent story.
So that's why it's different than education.
The last book I wrote about the last 100 year takeover.
This is a two decade, two and a half decade.
Started with Clinton, but it was mostly the fundamental transformation under Obama, who said, I will not tolerate What this institution is, and so I'm going to take my political appointees who will put pressure on the brass.
The brass that comes to heel gets promoted.
The rest of them slowly get filtered out.
And over the course of eight years, we have a very complicit officer class inside the Pentagon.
Now, here's the crazy part, though, because you mentioned the Warriors are just as good as they've always been.
I agree, kind of.
The challenge is, because it's a top-down organization, you start pushing things like DEI.
Now you're young lieutenants.
And your young privates going through Basic or going through ROTC or West Point are getting that woke ideology as part of their training as gatekeepers.
So you almost have a donut hole in the military right now where you've got the general class that's complicit because they have to to get promoted on the gender stuff, on the climate stuff, on the DEI stuff, on the extremism stuff.
They have to go along to get along.
And then you have the younger officers who have been baptized in this, either through left-wing universities of ROTC or West Point or Annapolis.
And now they're enforcing it because maybe they don't believe it, but they have to if they want to advance their careers.
It's the middle group that's going, wait, This isn't the military I signed up for.
And if I want to be a colonel or a general, I have to give into this stuff I don't want to be a part of.
And so they're leaving or they're being quiet or they didn't take the vaccine.
So you've got a couple of different militaries right now, which means the next commander in chief is going to have a lot of work to do about how you actually change it.
I guess the real question is, why didn't it happen sooner?
Considering that Bill Clinton was the president, Barack Obama obviously was much more activist in terms of his feelings about social transformation than any of his predecessors.
And you can see there's always been this gap in the military, and people have talked about this in literature and film since time immemorial.
There's sort of the political generals, and then there's the everyday guy who's fighting on the line, and there's a big gap between those.
If you want to rise to the top level, you do have to mirror back at the political leadership exactly what they want to hear.
Is that sort of the story here, is that you had a bunch of people who wanted to rise up in the esteem of Barack Obama and his administration, and so they started mirroring back all the social engineering Big time.
In addition to that, the military took on the ethos that it wants all of its senior officers going to elite universities.
Almost a couple of gap years at some point.
Going to Harvard, going to Columbia, going to Berkeley.
The idea being, hey, the more the civilians at high levels interact with the military, the more understanding they'll have.
You tighten the civil-military divide.
What actually happened instead was these officers got cozy with types that will be the political class or the media class or the bureaucracy, the class of bureaucracy.
And as a result, started to reflect more so the ethos of those institutions than the military.
It's a lot easier to be liked by the media than to stand up for this warrior code that everyone says is hyper toxic and masculine.
And so the formations, the leadership started to look a lot more like that.
Add that to, really, Eisenhower was right.
The military-industrial complex is a real thing.
You've got generals who, if they get along to go along, from one star to two star to three star, have a handsome future corporate board on a military organization afterwards, contractor.
And if you speak up, or if you cut against the grain, or if you don't get promoted, that job doesn't await you.
That's a real problem in politics.
It's a real problem in business.
Military is another thing.
If the incentive is to go along with systems that don't work, or grease the skids with money, or go along with social programs, that's how you get the corporate board or the next job.
Then you never get the disruption you're supposed to have amongst men and women whose job has been the profession of arms.
My job is making sure my unit is ready to fight, that the equipment we have is top-notch, that there's no division entering the ranks of our troops, so that when the Commander-in-Chief and the American people say, you're headed to war, I'm ready.
Except Especially under Obama, the focus became, no, no, no, no, what about these gender issues?
What about these trans issues?
What about these women in combat issues?
What about climate change?
And certainly under Biden, it's been, what about extremism?
And the sort of the myth of white supremacy inside the military, which is something that the book talks about.
The shame is, in each example, the generals know what they're peddling isn't true.
But they peddle it quietly because it's what they have to do.
So let's talk about each of those issues. You mentioned the extremism problem,
the supposed extremism promise been pushed by the Biden administration. This idea that there is this
wellspring of white supremacy living inside the American military. It's a true threat that needs
to be extirpated inside the American military. Where is that coming from? And why is it being
promulgated? It's being promulgated because our general class, our Secretary of Defense,
were interested in being liked by the chattering class of the woke moment of 2020.
I mean, there was more DEI and things like that were bubbling under the surface.
But when George Floyd happened and that moment happened, the military
Those with political orientations inside the leadership of the Defense Department said, this is our moment to address this systemic problem.
Because everyone will see systemic problems everywhere.
There must be a systemic problem inside the DoD, even though racial integration inside the Defense Department, way ahead of the curve of everywhere else.
The book talks about how it led the curve on things like that.
I served, and racial issues were not an issue.
I had black soldiers, white soldiers, Hispanics.
We were so far beyond that that anybody you talked to pre-2020 would say, yeah, that's not an issue.
And by the way, it's already illegal to be racist inside your units.
And if you show racial preference, you can.
But then you got Mark Milley at Testimony saying he wants to understand white rage.
You have the military saying we need an extremism stand down.
Because we think we have systemic racism.
Here's the thing.
They could never name an instance.
This is how the left often works.
It's this ubiquitous threat that can't be defeated, but it's ever-present, and it doesn't have a name, right?
But it gives you every justification to crack down everywhere.
So the extremism stand-down happened.
We had to suddenly rename all of our bases, all these confederates.
Here's one example.
Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs.
Mark Milley was the commander of Fort Hood for many years.
Why wasn't he clamoring about the Confederate general named after Fort Hood when he was the commander of the base?
Didn't seem to be a problem then, or when he was commandering all the other divisions as he was a younger officer.
Where, if white extremism is everywhere, what were you doing, Mark Milley?
Why weren't you sounding the alarm?
Pounding the table?
We gotta purge the rest.
Because it was never about that.
This was what the military class had to do to satisfy their political leaders at a certain moment.
And Trump pushed a lot of it out, but it wasn't all gone by the time he, I mean, there were plenty of people underneath still peddling DEI, so that by the time 2020 happened, and then once January 6th happened, And they saw Trump in the rearview mirror.
They were able to fast forward everything that they wanted to do.
Of course, then the military gets through with doing its actual study on white supremacy in the military.
And it turns out the military is far less racist than the general population.
It's like 0.005.
They found 100 extremists amongst 2.1 million service members.
They found 100 extremists amongst 2.1 million service members.
That's 0.005.
That's 0.005, when the general population is like 7%, if you believe the statistics.
So the military's done a phenomenal job forging a multi-ethnic force over the years.
But the left knows by pushing DEI, well, now they've got black soldiers looking
at white soldiers and white soldiers looking at black soldiers, wondering who really deserved what
or why they're in a position, which is really toxic for an organization primed on unity,
which is why the biggest piece of garbage, the military pedals, you hear these generals say it
all the time.
Our diversity is our strength.
What a load of crap.
It's the exact opposite in every way.
In uniform, our unity is our strength.
That's it.
I get a bad haircut because my hair doesn't look different.
I shave because we all look the same.
I wear the same camo because we all look... I don't know how much money you make.
You don't know what I make.
All you know is our rank and our name tape.
That's the only thing that makes us different.
That's how you forge a fighting team.
Any general, Mark Milley would have known that.
Lloyd Austin would have known that.
Until they got to the political phase of their careers, gave in to politicians.
By the way, the military is run by, ultimately you have civilian control of the military.
I recognize that.
No one has thrown their stars on the table.
No one has stood up and said, I won't be complicit in a Marxist infiltration of our military.
People get all, ooh, it's so radical.
Look at where CRT comes from.
Look at where these ideas come from.
Look at who pedals them.
And these military officers should know better.
But instead, you have Milley saying, well, I read Mao, and I read, you know, he almost said Hitler, but he didn't.
I read all these guys, and that doesn't make me a Marxist.
So why wouldn't I want to read about and understand white rage?
Said everything.
And then January 6th, that's where it got personal for me in the story of purging patriots and extremists.
January 6th happened and they had every excuse to fast forward the ideologies that gave them an opportunity to push out certain people they didn't like.
We'll get to more on this in just one moment.
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So let's talk about that.
So January 6th happens, and again, there is this broad media push that suggests
that undergirding January 6th is some sort of quasi-military conspiracy, or that there are
an outsized number of military members who are members of the January 6th rioters
or trespassers or the protesters.
What is that?
What do you make of that?
Yeah, that was not true, by the way.
There were a few reservists and others that were involved, some veterans that were involved.
Shocker veterans, you know, care about their country.
But they created a massive characterization of that this constituted a potential militaristic threat led by people who'd been extremists in the military.
And therefore, as veterans later, they were following through on it.
And I was caught right in the crosshairs.
So I'm a major.
I was a major in the D.C.
National Guard when the riots of 2020 happened in the summer of 2020.
I was standing outside the White House with a riot shield and a face mask, staring down Antifa and BLM mobs.
I'd been deployed three times to combat.
And here I remember the surreal moment.
There's like smoke bombs going, everything's going off.
I look back and there's the White House lit up, you know, and there's Jersey barriers on the ground and concertina wire.
I'm like, I feel like I'm in Baghdad, but I'm on in Lafayette Park with a square staring down my fellow Americans.
Who at one moment, I actually remember thinking you could be 20 years ago, you might be on my side, but the government school system has done its work on you.
I mean, there's a whole nother dynamic to all of this.
So I was a part of that, saw that.
You talk about an insurrection that looked like an insurrection to me.
Fast forward to what happened on January 6th.
Remember, Nancy Pelosi had the entire National Guard in the parking garage, sleeping in the parking garage, guarding the Capitol.
So January 6th happens, and the boogeyman is, this might happen again, we have to put a fence around the Capitol, bring in all the National Guard.
So every member of the D.C.
National Guard was there and from satellite states, over 25,000.
So of course, I had orders to defend the inauguration of Joe Biden.
And I've served under Obama.
I've volunteered to deploy to Afghanistan under Barack Obama.
It was never about the politics of the commander-in-chief.
And everyone was going.
So I host the weekend morning show.
So I was going to be in New York for the weekend, be there for the inauguration to guard it, and then go back to my show on Saturday, Sunday.
So shortened orders, but still ordered.
And I'll never forget the day before I was supposed to go down there, I get a call from one of the commanders in my chain of command saying, Pete, you can stand down.
We don't need you.
What do you mean you don't need me?
Like, I mean, everybody's there.
I have orders.
No, no, you're good.
You're good.
And he wouldn't say any more than that.
And I pressed him on it.
He couldn't say any more than that.
I didn't know exactly what it was, but I figured what it was.
And then during the writing of the book, and there's a lot more that goes into that, I decided to resign.
I decided to get out.
Like, that was enough for me.
I called back and spoke to someone that was privy to the decision-making, and they said, the chain of command went through your social media, saw a cross tattoo that you have, the Jerusalem cross, and dubbed it a white extremist tattoo, and that you were a threat and an extremist, and your orders were revoked.
Wait, wait.
So I signed up 20 years ago to fight extremists, put my life on the line, and now I'm deemed one.
Because of what I believe, because of my Christian faith, or because I work for Fox News, or because I support Donald Trump.
Any one of those is a wrong answer.
I've worn this uniform for the better part of 20 years for this country, and you're calling me an extremist.
If they'll do that to me, They'll do it to anybody, and they did.
They found guys, they found guys, guys and gals around the military who had particular points of view, either shamed them in a particular direction, pushed them to get out.
The vaccine, again, did its work to a number of people.
Zero religious exemptions given to anybody.
I wonder who's standing up with a principled stance in those moments.
Things like the Gadsden flag, not allowed on military bases.
I mean, don't tread on me is something that's considered extremist.
So you've got one political ideology and philosophy deemed, meaning conservatives or Trump supporters, or the new word that the Pentagon has used in briefings is patriot extremism.
Is a catalog of the type of people that are a threat to the military.
Last time I checked, it was patriots.
It was normal men from like Tennessee and Kentucky and Florida and all over the country of all backgrounds and all shades who joined our military because they love the country.
Now they're the ones in the crosshairs.
That goes back to our original premise of the conversation.
Why aren't people joining the military?
They look around and they see that, or their parents see that, and they say, Johnny, not the military I signed up for.
And it makes them question it.
I mean, the social engineering of the military obviously takes its most robust form when it comes to the question of, say, transgenderism.
So there's been a wild push, of course, under Barack Obama and then mostly under Joe Biden to basically say that men and women are exactly the same, that you have a right to serve, which is a very weird way of thinking about service, is that it's really about your right to serve as opposed to whether the military needs you to serve or wants you to serve.
I mean, we don't think that way about somebody who has schizophrenia We used to not think that way about somebody who had morbid obesity.
Now we're changing all of the standards to let everybody in because they're desperate.
I mean, they're sweeping the streets for anybody to come in because, as you mentioned, they have a massive recruitment problem.
But that really goes back to something that was happening—I think there were the first inklings of this, even when I was much younger, 20 years ago, when you shifted from the messaging of the military, which was all about group and group cohesion and efficiency in America, To an army of one.
The idea being like it's about the individual who's in the army, which is precisely the opposite.
The army is not an individualistic place.
I mean, you are in the military.
I've seen it way better than I do.
Militaries are not about the individual.
They are about the collective.
They are about the ability to form a team and then go do a thing.
Absolutely right, you're onto it.
At least when it was an army of one, they were tough looking, go get them army.
But you're right, that was the subtle individual, the shifting toward an individual ad campaign.
Now you just have the absurdity of I have two mommies and I'm so proud to show them that I can wear the uniform too.
So it's just like everything else the Marxists and the leftists have done.
At first it was camouflaged nicely and now they're just open about it.
But it did, I mean it started with the Clinton under Don't Ask, Don't Tell, trying to change that policy.
And then when he did, there was a lot of criticism on that.
I spoke to dozens and dozens of guys actively serving of all ranks for this book, and then a lot of people who got out.
One of them was a black gay soldier who had protested outside the White House for the repeal of Don't Ask, Don't Tell.
And I remember him saying, I did it because I thought anybody should be able to serve.
But what became clear to him quickly was that it was never about that for the ideologues.
And so a lot of the original people who pushed for the overhaul of Don't Ask, Don't Tell are no longer public about it and regret it because it was really just a costume for a trans agenda pushed into the military.
Uh, which is full on, by the way, inside the ranks.
You talk to people, you don't have to go very far to find someone that says, well, I've got a trans member of my unit and that means we have a lot more, uh, you know, counseling on pronouns and, and, and, you know, you can't no jokes.
And because the threat is so serious, it permeates the culture of units.
Everyone's, most especially, commanders walking on eggshells.
Because if they make one wrong mistake with this soldier, and
it happens with race and gender too, but it's one of the easiest analogies is asthma or dental exams.
Like, when we would deploy to Iraq and Afghanistan, you always get a dental exam before you go.
And if you were cat 4, meaning you had serious issues, they just pulled your tooth.
Like, no Novocain.
You're going to war!
Because you can't be downrange with a toothache that's debilitating where you don't have a dentist.
Or when you go to basic training, they take away your asthma medication because if you're downrange, you can't rely on that.
The whole thing undermines readiness at every level.
It's the easiest, hard stop, no, which the Trump administration did, by the way, to their credit.
But it's sort of the perfect end state of what the left would like.
You are an individual automaton that we will celebrate Um, just like Harvard does with its aggrieved constituencies, now we're going to do that with Pride Month, with every other, you know, there's, there's now rainbow colored patches for, for the units that you can wear during Pride Month inside your unit.
Like the army birthdays in June, like how about we do that?
No, we're doing, we're doing Pride Month.
So it, it has become an ethos of what commands are expected to do because the DEI, Infrastructure, the bureaucracy grows ever more powerful, just like inside corporations.
You're a leader of a department.
You think you can make decisions?
No.
The DEI officer comes in and says, no, no, you can't.
That same dynamic is coming to play in the military, where it used to be, if you were the company commander or you were the battalion commander of a unit, you were like, Closest thing to God on Earth, to that private.
Anything you said happened, because you are not an individual.
You are collected, to your point.
But now that private says, you can't say that about my beard.
I have a shaving profile.
Or you can't say that about my hairdo.
That's a cultural, you're dissing me culturally for doing that.
Or you can't say anything about my weight.
Look at the standards, they're lower.
And the standards have lowered, by the way.
Because every time, in the military, every time a commander asks a question, It's like bosses, too, but it's not a question.
It's, Lieutenant, why are there only two black females in your unit?
Lieutenant, why aren't there enough women graduating ranger school?
And that captain or that lieutenant says, Roger that, sir.
I'll see you in a year.
And in a year?
The formal or informal quota system is kicked into gear.
And what that means is, formal or informal standards have to be lowered.
Because, you raised the point, men and women are different.
Lung capacity, bone density, you name it, they're fundamentally different down to every single cell.
Yet, I had a Marine Corps officer yesterday, I was speaking to, who proudly said it was one of his biggest accomplishments to integrate basic training.
Male and female.
Who basically pushed aside the idea that men and women soldiers are different.
I mean, it's just sort of, he was a three star.
He's not in anymore.
But they're so baptized with these woke views, they can't confront them.
And that's why this book is going to tick a lot of people off.
They said, no, women and men are different.
Women shouldn't be in combat at all.
Not at all.
They're life givers, not life takers.
I know a lot of wonderful soldiers, female soldiers, who I've served with, who are great.
But they shouldn't be in my infantry battalion.
Not once.
They could be medics or helicopter pilots or whatever, but they create all sorts of variables and complications that have nothing to do with being anti-woman and everything to do with having the most effective military you can.
Underlying all of this is a massive recruitment problem.
You mentioned at the very top that because it's a volunteer military, that usually means that it is a family business and all it takes is one break in that chain to basically destroy the entire downstream recruitment pipeline.
You have kids.
You mentioned that you'd want your kids to serve.
At what point, given how woke the military is going, do you start saying to your kids, maybe something else ought to be on the table because how do you serve your country under these conditions?
Great question, Ben.
I actually, the last chapter of the book is a letter to my five sons because, and I wrote it last because I didn't know what the letter was going to say while I was writing the whole book.
I'm going, okay, I want to dive in as deep as I can into the entirety of this and what ultimately came to bear in that last chapter was the depth of the leftist
takeover is real, but it's not like education where it's deep, it's thin, it's
broad, but it's shallow.
Most people in the military don't buy it, they don't want any part of it. They know it's not
helpful for the units, but they have to kind of go along with it or they say, well, that's over there.
Or they try to join more elite units where it's not as prevalent.
That's where I think some of my different, I was in rank and file regular role units, including National Guard, where some of this stuff percolates a lot faster than some of the more elite units, which is why some people you see on TV are talking about it.
Sometimes they're a little bit more insulated and more hesitant to criticize because it's not, you know, the Navy SEALs aren't seeing a lot of wokeness these days.
Thank goodness.
They'll want to bring that to heel eventually too.
But I balance out my criticism with, this is an institution I revere, I love, we need.
You can change schools, you can get rid of Harvard and do something else.
You only have one 101st Airborne, one 82nd Airborne.
If we lose it, it's gone.
So the question percolating in my mind the entire time was, if not my boys, then who's it gonna be?
I mean, honestly, we're gonna have to have a military to defend our country in the future.
But I did reserve the right in that letter to say, let's see what the world looks like in five years.
This is what I'd say right now.
And what I said to them is, boys, I hope you would choose to serve.
It's my job to help fix it before you get to that age or help get there.
But we can't have an army full of emasculated, racially obsessed wokesters.
We need patriots willing to Sling lead downrange if need be to defend the country.
And the Hegseth boys are as qualified as any other boys.
And I would be proud if you did it.
But the piece of advice I gave them is if you do it, go all in.
I didn't know the difference between the Army and the Marine Corps when I served.
I didn't come from a military family.
I kind of found my way through.
I will say to them, if you're going to do it, then join Special Operations.
Join the Army Rangers.
Join MARSOC.
Join something where a lot of this garbage isn't there and you're going to be used on more vital core national security interests.
And that's the way warfare in many ways is moving anyway.
So that's kind of my hedge for the moment, but I just think we can't say stop joining Full Stop to our boys.
We need those patriots pushing back in the hopes that a commander-in-chief, and the next commander-in-chief, if it's Donald Trump, and I pray it is, needs to clean house.
I mean, clean house of these woke generals.
And bring back guys that you know are rock solid.
Promote guys and gals that you know are rock solid.
Get rid of all the DEI, all of the not transgender nonsense, all of the quotas.
If you want to have different standards, fine, but have different standards for different jobs.
So if you're in the infantry, they're up here for everybody.
If you're a drone operator, then you can beat 300 pounds and as long as your thumbs work, you're good to go.
Whatever, that's different.
But inject that kind of seriousness into it.
No more of, we need X number of this racial background as fighter pilots.
CQ Brown's a great example.
He's the new chairman of the Joint Chiefs.
And he was obsessed with the color and background of Air Force pilots.
Who has ever cared what race their pilot is?
Just how good can you fly and can you shoot while you're flying?
That's all that should matter, and that's not what we're doing right now.
So it's a tough question with kids, and I know a lot of vets would disagree with me on that, and I understand why.
And maybe I will if things continue to go amiss, but right now we need them.
So, let's talk about your own personal experiences in the military as sort of a backdrop to a broader discussion about where the military should be used, how the American people should see the military.
So, what got you into the idea of going into military service in the first place?
You say you weren't from a military family.
Yeah.
So, what made you think of doing that?
Well, you know, we're in and around Memorial Day weekend time frame, which It was always a meaningful moment for me as a kid, because my parents used to take me to the Memorial Day parade down in Wannamingo, Minnesota.
It's a nothing farm town in southern Minnesota of 300 people.
But every Memorial Day, they'd have a huge parade.
And, of course, the vets would—it's like the sheriff's car, the one fire truck, the band, and the vets.
Like, that's the whole parade.
But it was, you know, half a dozen guys in their uniforms walking down Main Street, and everyone's saluting them in this small town.
Of course, it's not about the vets, because it's Memorial Day, so it's about the guys that aren't there.
And we went down to Memorial Park, and they'd have a ceremony.
But you start to think about it, you're like, wow, this is a small town, and that many men gave.
And you add up all these small towns, and you start to get a sense of what was required.
And I didn't put all that together as a kid, but I just remember saying, man, Man, they must have done something special.
Like, if this town reveres them, it's men.
And I use men because it's been mostly men.
I mean, we always say men and women, and I appreciate every woman that serves.
But one of the lines in the book is, all of America's wars have been fought and won mostly by normal men.
Prove me wrong.
It's what it is.
It's what it's always been.
Let's pretend, let's not pretend like it's something else.
So women have made immense contributions, but it's mostly men in those graveyards, and rightfully so.
And so I thought if those men would be willing to do it, I should too.
And that was really it, which is why I'm a huge believer in civic ritual.
I mean, first, religious ritual, but second, civic ritual, if you don't have parades and demonstrate reverence and salute the flag, We are, you know, societies, what you celebrate is a reflection of what you value.
And we don't celebrate those things.
So kids don't think they're worth anything.
And so we find those ceremonies and do those things to show that, that was really it for me.
I didn't, so I got in right before 9-11 in, would have been May of 2001.
I was in ROTC.
I was a sophomore in college.
All I cared about was basketball and I thought I was going to be an NBA player.
And all I did was sit on the bench.
The whole time.
But I did ROTC, got out, I signed a National Guard contract when I signed it and that's what I had.
So I went, first I went to work at Bear Stearns out of college.
May it rest in peace.
And I soon realized I have no business being on Wall Street.
I'm not interested in it.
I just follow the herd like everybody else.
But I deployed to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, as a guard for a year with my National Guard unit first.
Came back.
It was at the height of the lack of popularity of the Iraq War, and I just remember sitting at my desk being like, I'm a qualified infantry lieutenant, and there's a hot war going on right now.
Like, why am I not there?
And the book tells a little bit of this story, but I emailed my company commander from my infantry training.
Which was at Fort Benning, which is no longer Fort Benning.
It's Fort Moore, and Hal Moore's a great guy, but like, there's also a generational link that breaks when you rename Benning and Bragg.
Like, where'd you serve?
Bragg.
Where'd you serve?
Benning.
Where'd you serve now?
Liberty?
Like, it's just, it's garbage.
It's all just, like, just crap all over it.
But he was at Benning at that time, and he needed a platoon leader in the 101st Airborne, and I was able to make some phone calls and maneuver.
It took a long time, and it was a bureaucratic battle, but I joined them on their way to Iraq, and I was a platoon leader in Iraq for six months.
And then I was a civil military operations officer, which means I worked with the Iraqi
people, the tribes, the sheikhs, and the imams on some semblance of civil governance.
But that was, if you remember when the Golden Mosque was bombed, I was in Samarra when that
happened.
And that was the second day of my job trying to work on governance in Samarra.
It was an interesting job.
But we effectively learned to build trust and understand networks and garner intelligence.
And we helped dismantle Al Qaeda cells in that area.
But I came back, you know, really invested in my, in that war.
And when I look back at my advocacy and I fought for the surge and all of those things, like I was just a warrior invested in the legacy of winning the war.
My government sent me to fought and I believed in winning the war.
Like that was it.
I saw my lane.
Let's go for it.
I can easily step back in retrospect now and say, well, what good did the Iraq war give the American people?
Iran more influence?
You know, destabilizing the region?
ISIS?
The most demoralizing moment for me as a vet is when the flag of ISIS and the caliphate flew.
Over Ramadi and Fallujah and Samarra in a way that you're like, wow, we spilled all that blood and now a worse enemy controls that area than we ever did because of our feckless policies.
But you can't deny the limits of foreign adventurism too, like the idea that we're going to remake these societies in our own image.
So this book grapples with a lot of that too, the understanding of I'm proud of the legacy of what I fought for and believed
in and the warfighters I was there with, but you can simultaneously look at the disaster in
Afghanistan and say, what the hell, as well.
So I went out after that. I was an advocate for vets in the military for years.
And then I ended up going to grad school and I went to did one more tour in Afghanistan.
I was a counterinsurgency instructor.
So all the units coming in would kind of get the latest and greatest on what the Taliban was trying to do and al-Qaeda was trying to do, and we'd brief them up on it and send them out in the country.
And that was the moment.
It was right there, 2011-2012, where I realized I'm briefing a strategy that does not work.
I went to Iraq pessimistic in 05, came back optimistic.
I went to Afghanistan in 2011 optimistic and came back pessimistic.
I've just seen enough to say this whole nation building thing that we're trying to do like the Afghans get our weapons for their units and they just sell them on the black market in Pakistan.
Like, we build them a school and then they steal all the air conditioners and sell them on the black market.
This ain't gonna work.
So, two things can be true at the same time.
All of that, you know, some of, many of the things Donald Trump said about the Iraq war originally, like, mortified me.
Stupid war.
Yeah, you can't call us stupid.
Well, maybe we should look at the impact of what we've done in some of these things.
You can believe in American power and American strength without believing that a lot of the things we've done over the last 20 years made us stronger in that context.
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So let's talk about that, because I think one of the things that's happened with American military policy is because it's an all-volunteer military since Vietnam, and because we tend to think of the military largely now as almost a tech-based force.
We think of it as drones, and we think of it as F-35s and F-22s and missiles that are fired from submarines and all this kind of stuff.
Because of that, we tend to think of war as antiseptic, and that Yeah.
actually leads to two false conclusions.
One is that war is easy and clean, so why not get into one since they're easy and clean?
And two is that once we're in it and it takes quote unquote too long or starts to get ugly,
the best move is always to pull out.
And those are both terrible ideas.
I mean, really, from what I, you know, obviously I have a lot of friends who are in the military, and what they have said universally is that what has always been true, war is unbelievably ugly, war is unbelievably terrible, the sacrifices are very large, you should be hesitant to get in, but once you are in, you really need to actually go to win.
And it feels like the American military, whether it's the brass or the political leadership, has spent the last half century, basically, more than that, maybe since World War II, Playing not to lose as opposed to playing to win in all of these places.
Totally right.
I talk a lot in the back part of the book about lawyers and lawfare and the way we fight our wars.
In some really politically incorrect ways I talk about it in the book because I saw exactly what you're talking about.
We fought the Iraq War 20 times, one year at a time.
Every new unit's relearning every single aspect of it.
So there's no investment to fight to finish the way that World War II vets would say, well, I'm not going home until this sucker's done.
And there isn't broad involvement.
You're right.
So Congress can sort of, whether it's the pro-war side or the anti-war side, play their political game without many implications on their own lives.
Uh, so it does become quickly conversation becomes quickly very, very detached, uh, from the American people.
And that's, that's problematic.
I mean, it goes all the way back to, we're not even declaring wars anymore because no one wants their, their, their, their so politically untenable as to what way they'll go.
So no one actually wants to invest in them or is willing to.
Uh, and so you get these, These forever wars, which is a bad phrase because they're not forever wars, but it's the way it ends up being described because there is no actual end state.
Tell me what the end state is in Ukraine.
I could tell you what the end state is in Israel.
And what's the only thing the American military and the American diplomats are doing right now?
Trying to stop Israel from finishing the fight.
Like there's one thing that Israel could do, kill every last one of those Hamas mother Now, and then the war stops.
And by the way, Israel didn't start it.
Like, that's how wars end.
That's how peace breaks out.
For thousands of years, somebody actually wins the war.
And when they win the war, then there's a new reality, a new geopolitical reality.
We don't fight that way.
We let the lawyers lead.
We let international institutions have too much say.
And it percolates.
I tell stories directly as a platoon leader, down to, can you shoot?
Can you not shoot?
Are guys being criminalized after the fact?
I mean, Donald Trump pardoned a bunch of guys I advocated for in his last couple years in office.
They killed the right guys in the wrong way, according to somebody.
I'm done with that.
We need to fight total war against our enemies when we do.
And yeah, you don't kill civilians on purpose.
But you kill bad guys.
All of them.
You stack bodies.
And when it's over, then you let the dust settle and you figure out who's ahead.
But it turns out we're the ones with the big guns right now.
So if we want to assert our will, we better do it.
And not fight these pussyfoot wars.
Which is what they are.
And then they never end.
The other reality is that when we talk about forever wars, people tend to think of a forever war in the way that Vietnam was a hot war for ten years and then sort of petered out and got out.
But the reality is that technically, Korea is a forever war.
There was an armistice signed in Korea and we still have troops in South Korea.
We don't think of it that way because whatever is the status quo is the status quo.
The status quo right now is not war.
And so what that means is that the reality is, John McCain got all sorts of crap for
this saying in 2008, but what he said when he said, if we want to win Iraq, we might
have to be there for 100 years.
That's more accurate than the opposite, which was happy talk from both parties basically
saying, either we're going to win it immediately or we're going to pull out immediately.
Like, that's actually not how war typically works.
You can make the argument we shouldn't have been there in the first place and therefore we don't want to be there for a hundred years if the interests are not worth it or any of the rest of that sort of thing.
But the reality is that in an era of guerrilla warfare, which, I mean, when's the last time we saw a war?
Ukraine and Russia is actually sort of a throwback war in the sense they actually have armies in a field that are fighting against one another.
As opposed to the news type of war, which is in the Middle East, which is the kind of war you were fighting in Iraq or the kind of war you were fighting in Afghanistan, which is essentially a counterinsurgency war.
And that's a war where basically the only way to win it is to occupy in clear areas for an extraordinarily long period of time with a really, really big footprint.
And if the American people are unwilling to do that, then they shouldn't get into the war in the first place.
That's correct.
So what do you do?
Because I don't think the American people would support that.
Even with a small amount of casualties.
Although, if the casualty count is low enough for long enough, most people get distracted enough that whatever that necessary op tempo is can mostly be sustained if it's keeping an enemy at bay.
I think most people wouldn't mind if we had troops, per se, in Iraq or Syria, keeping ISIS at bay, if those troops weren't threatened.
But now here they are in the middle of Iran staring them down, and drones could swarm those bases and Americans could be killed, and that would have real consequences.
I look at how our government and our Pentagon conducted Iraq and Afghanistan, and I say, if that's the model for clear hold build, if that's the model for counterinsurgency and asymmetric warfare, And we're never going to win.
And we don't have the guts for it.
Because we won't kill enough of the right people.
We can't even hold the detainees at Guantanamo Bay.
You know what I mean?
I mean, the guys responsible for 9-11 or those involved in enemy... We didn't have enough guts to try them in a military tribunal and kill them, hang them.
You don't fight, the cops deal with it every day now in our streets, the catch and release program.
We joked about it in Iraq.
I mean, it's terrible.
You spend all this time finding an insurgent, but then because lawyers are running the show, you hand them over and then ultimately the system spits them out three weeks later.
They're back on the street and everybody that told on them is dead.
You know what I mean?
It's just, it's stupid warfare.
And this is coming just from an infantry captain's perspective, but you have to know these generals are aware that this isn't working.
And there's no sense that the Pentagon is planning all that differently for a future war.
That's the folly of our current system is that this Pentagon is planning to fight the last war, whereas you look at China.
And they're preparing and building a military prepared to defeat the United States of America in 2027 or 2028.
And that's why I just want to go back to where you started this question.
History is not over.
It's just not over.
But we sit in this cozy, comfy moment where America's on top and America's strong and we got this military.
History's not over.
The trajectory of governments and civilizations is not over.
The advances in technology, I mean, China is building an entire hypersonic missile capability that's meant to defeat every single one of our aircraft carriers in the first 30 minutes of any conflict.
When our whole strategy is predicated on power projection on those aircraft carriers, what do we do when they're all gone?
What do we do when drones are swarming all of our remote bases, which have very rudimentary air defense systems, and you've got hundreds of American casualties?
What do you do then?
So I think, tragically, it would take a jarring moment, like a 9-11 or like an October 7th, and I'm not cheering for either of those things, for anybody.
To jar awake the American people to the need for what it would take to actually fight a war.
Even then, I look at our education system, and I look at our culture, and I wonder how much of the left would say, well, you had it coming.
So is national consensus really something that's possible?
So the book ponders our ability to fight and win wars, and I think errs more on the side of Don't fight them if you're going to fight them the way we've been fighting them, pussyfooting around.
If you're going to fight them, then you better unleash these really badass dudes to do stuff in dark places that you don't need to know about that keep you safe.
And it means a lot of people that hate us are going to be dead.
Don't ask questions.
Leave it be.
They're not war criminals.
They're warriors.
And they're going to get it done.
And that's kind of the view that I take.
I mean, I think that's totally right.
And one of the things that has happened in the way that we think about foreign policy is that we refuse to acknowledge the reality, which is that it's always going to be a series of choices between bad and worse.
There's no such thing as an amazing choice where you're unleashing the military.
It's an amazing choice.
Everything's going to be wonderful.
It's always going to be a choice between a more antiseptic, legalistic war that we tire of and then leave and lose, like Afghanistan or Iraq, Or it's going to be what you're talking about, which is something quick and bloody, but we get the job done.
Or it's going to be we delegate the quick and bloody to somebody else and that person gets the job done, but then we have people yelling in our ear about how their human rights violations.
There is no fourth choice where everybody magically just becomes good today.
And if there is something like that fourth choice, what that would be is an extraordinary amount of American intimidation.
So I remember I was sitting with President Trump at a fundraiser that we did with him, and President Trump was talking about how he was intimidating foreign leaders.
He's told the story publicly, so you can tell him.
I think I know.
Yeah, I'm sure you know it.
The one where he was talking about how he met with, how he's on the phone with the leader of the Taliban, and he, Abdul, they call him Abdul, and President Trump says, He says, Your Excellency, Your Excellency, but why are you sending me a picture of my house?
He says, Because, Abdul, if you kill an American soldier, I'm going to blow up your house.
And that is actually an effective strategy.
And no American soldiers died.
Right.
In that time period.
Exactly, because it turns out that, as he said, even if what I'm saying is a bluff, if it's a 5% shot that it's true, nobody's screwing with you.
But that's something that even the Biden administration doesn't understand.
They don't even understand the ability to flex.
Forget about use the American military.
Even flexing the American military is too much for these guys.
No, they won't.
Everything you said there is true.
The abdication of any responsibility whatsoever to defend our own interests, our own interests first, and then defend our allies and actually stare down our enemies is completely gone.
It's completely gone.
And Israel is a great example.
Now you even have the military trying to... I love when I see stories that the American military is trying to coach or condone the Israeli military about how they're conducting house-to-house operations in Gaza.
Excuse me, have you seen our track record in the last couple of years?
And you think you're going to tell those guys?
And by the way, I mean, you know this stuff better than I, but the traditional ratio of civilian casualties to military is 9 to 1 over history.
It's not around them.
Israel's one-to-one.
Like, they're fighting the most precise urban warfare the world's ever seen.
Military academies will study this, not just for the military, you've got all the political and international limitations, but just on the military side, especially if they're allowed to finish it.
Like, this stuff is really, really hard.
So if you're not clear-eyed about, like, we're the home team, we're the good guys, We have interests and we have natural people to protect.
We're going to do whatever it takes to defend it.
Then you're already off on the wrong foot and everything else is going to go sideways.
And so when you look at like our southern border is a perfect example.
Like we don't even care about our own borders, but we're obsessed with the Donbass.
Like that's why you have people like me who say like, What are we doing?
Defend our border.
So I mean, I'm also a, I've described myself as a neoconservative who was mugged by reality a long time ago and recovering because I went along.
I mean, we all want to believe in the possibility of exporting freedom and giving people opportunity and all of it.
And that was music to the ears of, you know, after 9-11, a better world and turn the corner and American dominance.
And we're going to, and then you look at it and you go, no, no, no, no.
There's evil everywhere, and there's good and there's evil, and the human condition is real.
The garden happened to all of us.
And we have to be realistic about what's possible and fight to defend those we love and the things that we have.
That's what Trump understood.
That's what a commander in chief.
And that's why, you know, even a Clinton, even there was a bipartisan consensus that we were the good guys and that there was no listening to international institutions in the process.
I mean, you saw what the ICC just recently did.
I mean, the ICC is an America and Israel hating organization.
We should do everything we can to bring it to its knees forever.
Like they should have no orientation whatsoever on anything we ever do.
The problem is in Washington, you know this, the entire foreign policy establishment is wedded to the post-World War II ideal of the global order.
That NATO and eventually the EU and the UN and the ICC, all of these things that were created by the West to cement the gains of World War II are permanent.
Except all of those institutions are now being used against the West.
So that's why when Donald Trump talked about NATO, everyone bristled and then everyone realized, well, maybe he's right.
Because I think when I see the stat, I can't remember if it's, if it's, I think it's the French.
They have like, if Russia were to actually invade France, they've got three days worth of ammo.
Like they literally can't defend themselves.
And they can't.
So we're the outsourced defender of the entire world.
You can't defend everybody.
And now, because of our fecklessness, we've pushed Russia and China together in this unholy alliance that seeks just our abdication of the leadership role, which we're happily doing.
And we're doing it culturally, and we're doing it politically, and we're doing it economically, and with debt, and everything else.
So all of that comes around to A new election means a new commander-in-chief, which means new clarity, but it's also going to mean new conflicts on some level.
and how we use that military and whether it's ready is an open question.
You mentioned very briefly there the possibility of October 7th or 9-11 bringing Americans
together and I do wonder if there's enough social fabric left in the United States to
actually bring Americans together around something like a terrorist attack.
I think that if there were a major terrorist attack in the United States under Joe Biden
there actually would be a pretty solid rally around the flag effect because conservatives
Yeah.
to rally around the flag.
Yeah.
But I do wonder if Donald Trump were to be reelected, if there were a major terrorist
attack, would the left jump on board?
Or would the left say it's Donald Trump's fault, this is all because of Donald Trump,
it's all because America is a nefarious force in the world.
There's a reason there are hundreds of thousands of people who are marching in solidarity with
Hamas and they're burning American flags.
I mean, to pretend that the protesters that you're seeing in Europe or on college campuses are predominantly there because of a conflict in a corner of the Middle East that they didn't care about five seconds ago, and they can't define the river or the sea when they say the river or the sea, that those people care deeply about this, other than a small coterie of radical Islamists.
That's not true.
They just don't like America and they don't like the West and they don't like the idea that there is a Western country in this place that is very successful and its enemies are very unsuccessful and quite evil, actually.
And so I wonder, you know, because that idea has been inculcated over the course of generations, and this is your last book about the education system, Is there enough of a remnant left of Americans, enough normies, to stand up to the radicals that if something really, really bad happens, there will be enough people rallying around the flag?
Great question.
I mean, your answer would be as interesting to me as anybody's.
We're in uncharted territory.
We're literally trying to keep a republic while simultaneously training up a generation of young people to, at best, be skeptical of that republic, at worst, hate it.
And so when asked to galvanize in that moment, Do we have even just the foundations to actually muster that defense of our own nation?
I don't know that we do.
Or at least it will quickly become partisan unless it is so devastating.
If it were to happen right now under Joe Biden, I know a lot of conservatives would rally.
But at the same time, you might also look around and say, well, you let 10 million people into the country who we didn't know who they were.
And now there are overwhelming amounts of Middle Easterners and Chinese nationals who China knows where their people are going, and why are they coming across our border, and why aren't you accounting for that?
There is responsibility to be had there, and there will be finger-pointing for something like that.
I don't know, Ben.
I don't know, and I don't mean that to be, to dodge the question.
It would, I hate to say this, it would depend on what happened, depend on who the oppressor was, who the oppressed was, who the victim was, what the circumstance was, what the nationality or background of the perpetrators were, whether or not they did it from stolen land or on our stolen, like it's just so many stupid factors on the calculation of the left that is written off Western civilization, written off Christianity, written off Judaism, written off America and Israel, As the oppressor class permanently.
And if you are the oppressor class permanently, then you can't cheer for the oppressor.
You don't have an American flag in your garage to pull out when that moment exists.
Because you've decided the only flag that matters is the new trans flag.
And that's the one we fly at our embassies under Biden too.
Like it's just not there.
So, and that's civilizationally devastating for any country.
I mean, it means you can't defend your own interests.
Pretty soon you don't have people filling the ranks, which means you look to foreign... I mean, this has happened many times in many civilizations where you become decadent internally.
And that's why there's so much... That's why there's...
I mean, every once in a while I look around at our own country and I go, are we the bad guys?
Like, the most important thing we can do is repent.
By far.
And so it's, the problems we have are so much deeper than who's wearing four stars on their shoulder.
And larger, that I don't know if we can muster it, but all I know is when that moment happens, if we don't have a Marine Corps that knows how to shoot straight, full of well-trained people, then we really don't have a chance.
And if we haven't learned from other conflicts around the world, if we don't fix our military-industrial conflicts, which is obsessed with pumping out certain types of boats and certain types of planes because that's what the pipeline is, but what you really need is thousands of cheap drones, you know what I mean?
I mean, if we don't make those changes, then We will be beaten in the most important first moments of that next conflict.
And big empires go down slowly at first, but then quickly.
And you could conceive of our interests being attacked simultaneously around the globe with the wrong commander-in-chief, with some stunning defeats, which makes the world say the era of America is over, and then the rest of it just starts to cascade.
Well, who else is out there?
Where else am I sailing to?
There's nowhere else!
I mean, it's China, the Europeans, it's nobody!
So, we really are freedom's last best hope, and that's why when they come for the camouflage class, which is the first chapter, then they came for the camouflage class, they're coming for the last bastion of what could actually defend us.
Okay, so let's say that President Trump, God willing, is reelected.
Yep.
And you're called to the White House and he says, okay, how do I fix this problem?
Right?
Because what we saw from the first Trump administration, there's a lot of good policy, but the big foible of the first Trump administration is that given the fact he'd never held elected office before, He didn't know which levers to pull.
I mean, the executive branch is enormous.
It has millions of employees.
You've got the military, but that's just a piece of the executive branch.
It's huge.
You have a real deep state, people who are career bureaucrats, who are oriented against the agenda that President Trump will bring to the table.
What do you say to him when he says, how do I fix this problem?
First of all, across the government writ large, I mean, I think you've got to get arbitrary.
If you want to get so big, you've got to get arbitrary.
Something like, if your Social Security number ends in 7, 4, 2, or 6, you're fired.
I don't care who you are.
I don't care what you do.
We can fill your slot.
You're replaceable.
We're at that point where we just need a massive shrinking of the size of the government.
Don't worry about what their nickname was when they were in the military.
You know, what was it?
Mad dog, mad ass.
So as much as I love Donald Trump, that was very much a pitfall of the beginning of his administration.
Who are the people that truly believe in America first, that truly believe in unleashing our war fighters, that reject every aspect of DEI, not just Not the whole like, well, you know, we do diversity, but we're not really, no, no, no, we're out of this whole game.
We only want lethality and meritocracy.
That's it.
And then what's key is not that person.
You'll have a figurehead there at DoD that does that.
It's the series of dozens of underlings who have to be just as committed and understanding everything that's being peddled and pushed.
to help recommend everybody that you fire.
I mean, mass firings at the general officer.
Were you involved in pushing that?
Okay, you're fired.
Were you involved?
And fine, pick five or six symbolic firings of generals.
Well, guess what happens at some level there?
The whole incentive structure changes.
They're politicians wearing camouflage at many levels at that level.
They're going to start to return back, I would think, for many of them, to what they really were supposed to be doing in the first place.
Oh, the incentive is having more ammo and more training, not more diversity trainings?
How about we do that?
I do think it's the type of institution that can turn differently than, say, a Department of Education, which we should just get rid of completely.
Or if you weren't going to get rid of, you couldn't pull the roots out fast enough or hard enough.
Because I think the core of that Pentagon would be with all of those moves.
Most of your 06s and 07s and 05s and E7s and E8s who fought these wars and saw the nonsense, serve with people who were killed will say, yeah, yeah, let's
get back to the real right now.
And they would do it. And then you switch the military academies and you say, we're not teaching
DEI anymore. And then more importantly, I think you go back to standards across the military and
say, whatever the standards were in 1980, 1996, those are the standards. Whatever it took to
pass Ranger School or Airborne School or become a Marine or whatever.
I mean, I just, and that doesn't mean going backwards.
It means returning to colorblind standards, returning to gender-affirming or gender-recognizing standards, to use the wrong phrase.
Men and women are different.
There's a whole chapter on that.
One of the examples I use in the book is the Marine Corps, when Obama wanted to push women in combat, the Marine Corps did a study.
And this study was, let's test 400 male Marines versus 300 male Marines and 100 female Marines together in a grueling exercise of tests.
And shocker, the 400 male Marines crushed the whole thing.
And this was a 300 and 100, not a 200 and 200.
100, not a 200, 200.
I mean, this is, and what did Ray Mavis,
the Secretary of the Navy do?
I'm like, throw the study out, because it's not what the political
folks wanted, even though they were told if you do a study and
it shows differences.
Whoever was involved in any of those types of things, you can see the door and you'll be replaced by a junior officer who can be promoted more quickly.
I mean, I didn't get into it in this book, but there's huge issues with a promotion system that yes, it's a meritocracy, but there's incredible limits on who could move as quickly.
So you've got little Eisenhowers out there who are stuck at captain rank for six years, even though they should be a lieutenant colonel based on what they're capable of doing.
So there's things you can change there too that are long haul, but a lot of firings and then Hire whoever made Maverick, the movie, and say, make me a dozen ads for every branch of the military that show just badass dudes getting to work.
And get ready for an influx of young men under a commander-in-chief they respect to come on it.
And guess what?
Don't bring any of your racist crap.
It's not already an issue.
My point is, that's not an issue, so we don't have to worry about the issues.
The reason I say that is because that's what the left is saying.
The leftists say, oh, it's Donald Trump's shock troops coming in.
You know, Donald Trump's shock troops are the guy you went to synagogue with, or the guy I went to church with, who decided not to join the military, but instead now is working for the power company, or doing construction, but otherwise would have joined.
And they go to church, and they have families, and kids, and they're productive, and they work hard, and they're good, honest people.
Lay out in the book those types of guys I went to school with in high school, some of which probably would have been toxic males if they hadn't been forged through the military.
And then they get wounded in combat, silver stars, like just amazing guys.
Or they were just patriotic and they were kind of wimps.
But they went into the military and then they served 20 years and now they're lieutenant colonels and they're, you know, large and in charge and the military forged them too.
Right now we're not recruiting either of those groups.
So, you recruit those groups with a different ethos of the entire military, you could be back in the game.
Now, we have to build more ships.
I mean, one of the devastating, and I'll stop here, but China's Exponentially larger ability to create naval ships than we do.
We have like four shipyards, and China has a dozen, and each of their shipyards can create more ships than all of ours combined.
I mean, it's staggering what their capabilities are compared to ours.
So we're behind on a lot of levels, but I think that's where you start.
Well, the book is The War on Warriors, and so is the series.
You go check it out over at Fox News and also at Fox Nation.
Pete, thanks so much for your time.
Thanks, brother.
I appreciate everything you do.
I appreciate it.
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