May 28, 2022 - Bannon's War Room
48:56
| 
| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
|
unidentified
|
War Room. | |
| Pandemic. | ||
| With Stephen K. Bannon. | ||
| The epidemic is a demon and we cannot let this demon hide. | ||
| War Room. | ||
| Pandemic. | ||
| Here's your host, Stephen K. Bannon. | ||
| Okay, it's Saturday, 28 May, Year of the Lord 2022. | ||
| This kicks off our coverage of Memorial Day on Monday. | ||
| We're going to have a special, as we always do, I have the combat historian Patrick K. O'Donnell, of course my daughter, Captain Bannon. | ||
| We're going to be discussing Arlington National Cemetery, the Tomb of the Unknown. | ||
| How the first unknown soldier came over, the whole thing. | ||
| How he was selected with General Pershing, all of that. | ||
| We're also going to talk about the American Battlefield Commissions, which manage the overseas cemeteries of our sacred dead, and also here in the United States, the veterans we're going to talk about. | ||
| Many of those are two hours to honor the war dead of America that will play in its entirety starting at four o'clock in the afternoon of Real America's Voice for the entire two hours. | ||
| We're going to play it twice on Saturday. | ||
| I want to thank Real America's Voice and everybody that's helped us partner with us to do this. | ||
| I think it's the eighth or ninth year we've done this. | ||
| I want to thank everybody. | ||
| Today, normally we kick off and I try to say, hey, it's not about barbecues or anything like that. | ||
| We try to lead into that. | ||
| We're doing something a little different this year and the reason is We want to make sure we don't have more war dead, right? | ||
| And we are looking at not some sideshow in Ukraine. | ||
| We're looking at the main event. | ||
| As Captain Fennell says, the main thing is the main thing. | ||
| And we're going to get to Captain Fennell, who kind of shocked everybody a couple of months ago by saying, no, the historic 7th Fleet is probably not up to the task, as they were in the Pacific in World War II. | ||
| I want to finish with Jeff Nyquist. | ||
| I got one question for Jeff and then I want you to jump in. | ||
| Jeff, you said in the previous segment that you might be a little skeptical about some of the moves here into Taiwan or to the South China Sea. | ||
| Because the rest of us think we've seen a tectonic plate shift. | ||
| Not just from May 2019 with the people's war and breaking off of Western technology and doubling down on One Belt, One Road and all the other aspects that she said, right? | ||
| The whole thing with walking away from the Trump deal with Li He and Lighthizer, right? | ||
| The deal that really integrated them into the Western economy. | ||
| And now they've come up. | ||
| We had this horrible speech by Blinken the other day, very mush mouth. | ||
| And really, those guys come out right afterwards and say they see a new geostrategic order themselves in Russia that protects the sovereignty of other nations at the same time that they're cutting deals in Micronesia and Polynesia and the Pacific Islands, which I know a lot of people in the United States may be not familiar with, but we think we're encircling them where they're encircling us. | ||
| Are you still skeptical that you think we may be over our skis here, relying on the South China Sea and Taiwan? | ||
| Well, you know, in a war you don't necessarily have to assault, directly assault, the strong position. | ||
| You can encircle it, and you can attack other targets. | ||
| The fact that the Chinese like indirection, look at the game of Go that originated in China. | ||
| It's, you know, in chess you directly capture pieces, in Go you surround them to capture them. | ||
| It's part of the nature of their thinking, it's indirect. | ||
| You look at Taoism, you look at all their traditional thought, and then you look at communism. | ||
| It has the same concepts of how to attack. | ||
| You go into the enemy rear, you undermine him, you subvert him, you work on him from behind. | ||
| So a direct assault on Taiwan, I am skeptical. | ||
| Mobilization for war, it appears they're doing it. | ||
| I mean, immobilization is war. | ||
| So that's very alarming. | ||
| And when you look at Chi-Hao Chen's speech, that I cited before where he said, look, our target is not Taiwan, it's America. | ||
| If we take America, Taiwan falls automatically. So how do you defeat America? That's the question. | ||
| And when he was talking about using biological weapons, a biological attack to devastate the United States, so it's something we have to think about. | ||
| It's the word they use generally. | ||
| Depopulate, yeah. | ||
| So that it could be colonized. | ||
| So it could be colonized, yeah. | ||
| He talked about moving, making a second China in the United States. | ||
| Now, what really disturbed me about the speech, and at first I dismissed it, but then I had done work with Colonel Stanislav Lunev. | ||
| He was a defector from the Main Intelligence Directorate of the Russian General Staff. | ||
| And he spoke Mandarin. | ||
| He'd worked in China. | ||
| And he said, look, the last time he was in Russia, he defected after the fall of the Soviet Union. | ||
| The general staff said, look, we're on board with China on a future war against the U.S. | ||
| We're going to invade Alaska and parts of Canada. | ||
| They're going to take the lower 48 states. | ||
| And I said to Ludovic, I said, that's crazy. | ||
| Do you think they could do that? | ||
| And he said, well, with China's manpower and Russia's missile power, yes, they could. | ||
| And it's biological warfare. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, and it's very disturbing because, see, what people don't understand is the mode of war of Russians, this is why they're not doing so well in Ukraine, although they probably will prevail in the end, is the decisive weapon is the nuclear missile weapon, and they taught the Chinese. | ||
| You go back to Sokolovsky's Soviet military strategy, they still believe that stuff. | ||
| Look, why are you worried about tanks and other little things when it's strategic nuclear warheads that are going to give you the battle Once you get ascendancy in that one category of weapons, and look at what China and Russia have done. | ||
| That's what they've been working on for the last decade. | ||
| Remember, remember, Mao would say, hey, if we lost, and this is back when they were 800 million, so if we lost three, 400, no big deal, right? | ||
| We can recreate that pretty quickly. | ||
| I want to go to Captain Finnell. | ||
| Jeff, just hang with us. | ||
| I want to go to Captain Finnell. | ||
| Captain, Jeff brings an interesting point. | ||
| You're an intelligence officer in the Pacific Fleet. | ||
| I was a surface warfare officer. | ||
| We're trained from day one to be like John Paul Jones, to be like, let's go alongside, let's get up tight, unmask the guns, and see who can take it, right? | ||
| Boom. | ||
| That's the Western way of naval warfare. | ||
| And yet we're fighting an enemy that it believes in indirection. | ||
| Can you walk us through their tactics and are we prepared to actually take these guys on? | ||
| And do you still stand by your thing that you don't think the 7th Fleet as currently comprised and manned is up to it? | ||
| What Jeff says, there's a lot of truth to what he says, but that doesn't discount the fact that the Chinese Communist Party's invested in a quite large military conventional force. | ||
| And that'll be backed up by this nuclear breakout as Admiral Richards from the Strategic Command mentioned here in the last month or so. | ||
| So I think that the Chinese Navy, as they're comprised today, and the rocket force and the air forces and their joint operations and this new national mobilization order that we're all looking at, all and the actions of their military all lead me to conclude that they're preparing for a conventional strike To take Taiwan. They'd rather not they'd rather use indirect methods and use economic power. No, those are the things | ||
| Because if they can control Taiwan and they can control the chip industry They can drive us to our knees in a way that we probably Haven't anticipated at least at the national level. I don't think you you You've all probably talked about it, but I don't think we really understand what the implications are of that. | ||
| But at some point, the Chinese have to take what they consider to be their territory. | ||
| And they believe that Taiwan is theirs, and they're going to take it one way or another. | ||
| And that's in addition to whatever plans they have for America. | ||
| Let me go back, and for the audience, Captain Finnell, he's much too self-effacing and modest. | ||
| For people to do this for a living, he's a revered figure for not just the naval intelligence aspect, but understanding the whole picture and keeping the main thing the main thing, as we say. | ||
| Is it your belief now, as you've studied the open source, do you believe now that this actually is, that whatever this happened in Shanghai and this 400 million lockdown, everything else you've seen, do you actually think they are pivoting to a general mobilization, sir? | ||
| Well, you know, I don't have access to classified sources to see what the actual movement is of of troops and force movements. | ||
| But in this report that we're referencing here, they talked about that they, you know, they're going to need about 45 days to achieve some of the mobilization efforts. | ||
| So we should be seeing, given the dates that they mentioned that they started the planning on 18 April, and it had some of it had to be, you know, kind of completed around the 9th of May, we should start seeing some kind of reflections of that. | ||
| But I would say, before we get caught up in watching or predicting there's going to be a war before the 20th Party Congress, I think we need to look at the entire document and understand that this is a people's war. | ||
| It's a total national effort. | ||
| to take Taiwan, and they're energizing. This is just one province, Guangdong. | ||
| There's many other provinces that can come into play here, and they're all probably doing the exact same things, preparing themselves to be able to mobilize their general population to be able to support the war effort. | ||
| And they talk about what the war effort is. | ||
| In general areas, it's being able to prepare, you know, civilian merchant vessels to be prepared for combat operations to lift troops across. | ||
| And they talk about hundreds and hundreds of vessels, almost a thousand vessels in Guangdong. | ||
| They talk about, you know, 100,000 ton roll-on, roll-off ships. | ||
| They also talk about networks and satellites and what they can bring to bear to help bring situational awareness to the military. | ||
| So it's a total package, if you will. | ||
| They also talk about in this document, they talk about that they actually have brigades and military forces that will suppress what they believe will be civilian riots in the Pearl River Delta. | ||
| And so this is a very interesting document that talks about I don't know. | ||
| Aspect of what, you know, the war that would, the mobilization of a nation of 1.4 billion people to take Taiwan. | ||
| That's in addition to what we know about their conventional military forces. | ||
| And so I think, and they do, as you asked the first question, they do have a superior mass of military forces, conventional military forces against the US 7th Fleet and the 5th Air Force out there in the Pacific right now. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| Our guys are good. | ||
| I'm not denigrating them. | ||
| And they're earnest. | ||
| And they want to do the right things. | ||
| But they haven't been given the resources. | ||
| And China continues to build and build and build. | ||
| And you just saw the PLA spokesman yesterday say, there's no such thing as a center line in the Taiwan Strait. | ||
| So they've ratcheted up and increased their capacity to get closer and closer and closer to Taiwan. | ||
| And they control the timing and tempo. | ||
| And we have to disrupt that. | ||
| Could I just ask, Jeff, you spoke on the webinar yesterday about a timeline, and Jim just sort of alluded to it. | ||
| Could you just tease that out a little bit? | ||
| Yeah, it's interesting. | ||
| If you look, they mentioned 588 railcars to bring up equipment, and it's very funny. | ||
| The 45 days for the robo-ships, I did a calculation of, you know, moving, loading, unloading, moving tanks or vehicles or artillery. | ||
| It would be about the same number of days, give or take, which I found was interesting. | ||
| Not that they would be doing it at the same time, but probably they couldn't load the ships they were retrofitting, so there'd be 45 days for retrofitting, another 45 days for then loading the equipment. | ||
| So it looks like a 90-day thing. | ||
| It was kind of interesting. | ||
| That puts us in the middle of August. | ||
| And the point is that you can't sort of put all that in motion and then just have it hanging there. | ||
| Well, that's what, that's what, it's like the guns of August. | ||
| Indeed. | ||
| When the Von Schleifelm, when it goes, when they say the, when they say the mobilization plan goes, it takes on a life of its own. | ||
| I want to get back to that in the next segment, but Jim Finnell, I want to ask you, in the couple of minutes we've got here, Frank and I have talked about it a lot, but I want to hear your perspective so the audience can hear it fresh. | ||
| A declaration of people's war. | ||
| That's not something you just roll out of bed and say, hey, here's what we're going to do. | ||
| Tell us about how meaningful that is and how powerful. | ||
| And what's shocking to me, it's virtually been never mentioned by what are considered the China hands here, the official establishment China hands. | ||
| What is a people's war? | ||
| Why is it so important? | ||
| They declared it in May of 2019. | ||
| Yeah, the People's War is a reference, obviously, to the war that the Chinese Communist Party fought once against the Imperial Japanese forces that were in China during World War II and then against the Kuomintang. | ||
| And it's this idea that you mobilize the entire nation. | ||
| Every person becomes a soldier. | ||
| Every person contributes to the war effort. | ||
| And when you have 1.4 billion people, it really dramatically changes the balance of power. | ||
| I mean, it's already in China's favor in the strictest sense with the conventional military forces. | ||
| But when you add in these massive amounts of civilian corporations and companies and shipyards and repair factories and satellite companies and telecom companies and Everything that you can think of in a nation, that's all gonna be nationalized and brought to bear to put pressure on and achieve their war aim. | ||
| And I don't think we really fully appreciate, it's like an additional sledgehammer. | ||
| They're coming at us with an axe, and then there's a guy right behind them with a 45-pound sledgehammer that's gonna just add weight to that. | ||
| And it just keeps, it's just overwhelming. | ||
| And we haven't, most of our analysts in D.C., up until recently, haven't really considered. | ||
| I mean, there's been some work at the Navy War College and the China Maritime Studies Institute about these roll-on, roll-off ships that was published here in the last year. | ||
| But for the most part, you don't have a lot of deep thinking and analysis about what it means to mobilize billions of people, you know, a billion people to come and fight Taiwan. | ||
| Captain Finnell, Jeff, just hang on. | ||
| Short commercial break. | ||
|
unidentified
|
We'll be back in a moment. | |
| Censors us. | ||
| Deplatforms us. | ||
| Conservatives have been helpless to do anything about it. | ||
| Until now. | ||
| Join Getter, the social media platform that supports free speech and opposes cancel culture. | ||
| On Getter, you can express your political beliefs without fear of Silicon Valley liberals coming after you. | ||
| Getter is led by former Trump advisor and War Room co-host Jason Miller, who saw what big tech did to President Trump and decided to fight back. | ||
| Getter is the fastest growing social media platform in history with millions of users, including prominent conservatives like Mike Pompeo, Steve Cortez, and Steve Bannon. | ||
| Join Getter. | ||
| It's in the App Store, the Google Play Store, and at getter.com. | ||
| Longer posts, longer videos, sharper and clearer pictures. | ||
| And unlike the Silicon Valley oligarchs, Getter will never sell your data. | ||
| Send a message today. | ||
| Join Getter. | ||
| It's time to cancel, cancel culture. | ||
| In the great book, The Guns of August, Barbara Tuchman points out that the assassination of the Archduke down in Serbia was the front page of the Times of London on the day of his assassination, or the day after. | ||
| It did not make, nothing about this conflict made the front page until, I think, August 1st, when the lights went out all over, the lights of peace went all over Europe. | ||
| The mobilization plans, and what she meant, is inexorably drawn to a conflict that nobody could stop. | ||
| That no institution, no politician, no diplomat, they were just drawn into these mobilization plans. | ||
| They've been girding for this for so long. | ||
| Captain, for now, I want to start with you. | ||
| Do we have a situation, you think, that may be here? | ||
| You're probably the guy that could tell us the best. | ||
| When the CCP makes a decision like this, and gets buy-in by senior level cadre, If they have done a mobilization plan, is it the same as a Von Schlieffel plan? | ||
| Is it impossible for them even to call it off? | ||
| The party's been scheduled and the party's on? | ||
| I think the only way we're going to call it off is if we deter them and make them go back and recalculate the plan. | ||
| But I think what you're alluding to is this idea that this kind of thinking isn't just something that's a spur of the moment or something from Xi Jinping. | ||
| You heard Kevin Rudd introduce Blinken's speech yesterday, and he's trying to pin all these woes on Xi as if we get rid of Xi, then there'll be a chance to go back and engage and everything will be happy. | ||
| The reality is this is bigger than Xi. | ||
| This is something that Jiang Zemin, Hu Jintao and Xi have been telling the PLA to prepare to do for two and a half decades or more. | ||
| And so these plans are being refined constantly. | ||
| You can read through this document. | ||
| There's clearly references to observations of the Ukrainian-Russian invasion of Ukraine and how they need to do certain things to improve their war plan. | ||
| These are things that are not just haphazard. | ||
| They're all-encompassing. | ||
| They're nationwide. | ||
| There's various elements. | ||
| And, you know, even if this document is not true, I mean, there's some people out there that say it's a false document, it's a plant, and it's subversive or, you know, propaganda. | ||
| But even if that's true, there is an element of truth in this. | ||
| There is an element of structural truth in this that we would be Foolish to ignore. | ||
| And maybe they don't pull the trigger this year. | ||
| But what you read here and what they talk about in order to be able to execute a plan against Taiwan would require this kind of massive national mobilization effort. | ||
| And it certainly looks like That there's people in China that have studied this and have analyzed it and are writing about it. | ||
| And that's the great concern is, how do we take them off of that script? | ||
| And it's going to have to come through a massive counter-conventional force, saying that we're going to defeat it with asymmetric weapons and integrated defense and distributed maritime operations. | ||
| These are all buzz phrases that sound great inside the beltway in Washington, D.C., but they have little, little impact in a real force-on-force operation. | ||
| And as I said, China continues, the PLA continues to circle and enclose that noose around Taiwan. | ||
| The fact that you had the Liaoning aircraft carrier strike group, eight ships operating east of Taiwan here in the last week and a half, And in a space of two or three days, flying 300 combat sorties, fixed-wing fighter aircraft and helicopters, while it may not be exactly the same as the United States, the fact that they're operating like that and will continue to grow at such a rapid pace, we don't have much time. | ||
| And they are on a timeline, a strategic timeline, as we've talked about in this, what I call the decade of concern. | ||
| I want to go back to the argument you said, even if it's not true and it could be a plant, it could be propaganda, you said there's structural elements to it that are a through line. | ||
| What are the one or two things people should focus on, the structural elements that are the through line here? | ||
| Well, they talk about up front the three tasks. | ||
| Form a national defense mobilization command structure for the Guangdong province. | ||
| Implement wartime work institutions and then initiate wartime administrative control preparations. | ||
| They talk about this establishment of a joint command center, a civilian military command center. | ||
| So, there's And then there's a lot more little details that go under these things. | ||
| But for instance, like recruiting. | ||
| They need to recruit civilian people in to supplement all these seaborne forces that they're going to have, and the work teams that are going to have to take some of these civilian craft and make them prepared to have military forces come on board, and other sectors of their economy. | ||
| So they're thinking this through in a very, I would say, disciplined way, and they're outlining all the elements that a civilian sector would have. | ||
| And we're just getting a glimpse of this. | ||
| There's got to be more here. | ||
| You're also seeing these efforts to pull back, as you said at the outset, pull back on investments overseas that might be seized by others and, you know, capitalize on the opportunity to seize assets. | ||
| The notification to the families. | ||
| Captain, for now, and particularly we have a huge audience now because we're on radio, we're live streaming, we're on TV stations, cable, we have a huge audience down in the Tidewater area of where I'm from in Norfolk. | ||
| One of the, I'm not saying it's the arrogance, but the American Navy has always viewed itself as the heir to the Royal Navy, right, of a global force, and able to implement Mahan's geopolitical strategy. | ||
| One of the things we always go back in, in the teachings, and our history, and maybe even the mythology, that as much as the Imperial Japanese Navy, how great it was, and how many years they built, and how focused they were, and they did a sneak attack at Pearl Harbor that maybe people should have picked up, or Intel did, but a higher command, or whatever happened, we didn't defend against it. | ||
| But that shortly thereafter, at midway, when all the chips were in the middle of the table, the American Navy, although on its back foot, with its carrier battle groups, knew how to fight the ship. | ||
| And then when it comes to that deciding moment in these battles, the Japanese just did not know how to fight the ship. | ||
| Isn't that the case here? | ||
| Or maybe we've lulled ourselves to sleep with this huge carrier battle groups they have and all this equipment. | ||
| They have never, ever shown in any war, including Korea, just all manpower, that they've ever done combined arms, they've ever fought the ship, they've ever had the complexity of modern naval warfare. | ||
| Combined with combined arms or other operations. | ||
| And the most difficult operation you could have is amphibious operations against a defended point. | ||
| Isn't it just a fantasy that their military could, in any way, when the balloon goes up, right, and you can smell the cordite, will be able to actually be a lethal weapon of offensive capability, sir? | ||
| I actually disagree with that assessment. | ||
| I think what we see from what I saw in uniform and what I saw of the Chinese military, they actually train joint operations together. | ||
| They're doing it even now. | ||
| This operations east of Taiwan had the PLA Air Force, it had the PLA Strategic Rocket Force, the Joint Logistics Support Force, it had their Strategic Support Force, which provides cyber and EW. | ||
| So, I think we underestimate what they have been doing over the last, especially the last decade, but last two decades, where the Chinese have basically studied us, studied our doctrines, studied our joint operations. | ||
| In 2015, Xi reorganized from seven military regions to five theater commands, which are joint like ours. | ||
| They put joint officers in charge of these things, and we see their forces operating together in joint environments farther and farther away from the PRC mainland. | ||
| And when it comes to naval operations, you know, the U.S. | ||
| Navy for the last 30 years since Desert Storm has been focused on projecting power ashore into the Middle East and the CENTCOM region. | ||
| We haven't prepared our Navy for war at sea. When you and I were both young officers and we were serving in the Navy in the 80s, war at sea was everything that we did. | ||
| It was... | ||
| It was our reason for living, was to sink the Soviet fleet. | ||
| But for the last 30 years, the U.S. | ||
| Navy has been otherwise occupied with forward from the sea projection forces ashore. | ||
| But we haven't Really doctrinally and consistently and fleet-wide, Navy-wide, focused on defeating an adversary Navy. | ||
| Only in the last two or three or four years. | ||
| So we have a whole force today that's never really considered what it means to conduct war at sea. | ||
| And we have carrier air wings today that don't have the tanking, the A6s and the kind of long-range reach that our aircraft carriers used to have with organic tanking. | ||
| So we're dependent upon Air Force tanking. | ||
| We don't have the anti-ship cruise missiles that the Chinese Navy has with their YJ-18s that have over 300 kilometer range and are supersonic and high-G maneuvering, whereas we're still predominantly using older Harpoon missiles that have a shorter range. | ||
| We're bringing on some new missiles like the SM-6 and there's some other supersonic missiles that'll come in 26, 27, we're told by OPNAV, but for the most part, we are behind the power curve in terms of being a navy that is dedicated to fighting a war at sea against a peer competitor. | ||
| And the Chinese have been operating at sea as much as we have in many ways. And when you operate at sea, while you may not fire a weapon, operating at sea and being at sea and flying 300 sorties off of your first carrier, which is not a great carrier by any stretch, but the fact that they are operating at sea with all of their naval forces, that gives them a level of confidence and capability. | ||
| We used to laugh at the Soviets when they would leave Russia and go down to the Med or down into the Middle East, they'd go and sit in an anchorage for three months or three weeks or two months. | ||
| And we knew that they had no real military capability because they were sitting where we were operating. | ||
| Well, the Chinese are operating. | ||
| Captain Finnell, just hang on. | ||
| Jim Finnell. | ||
| We've got Jeff Nyquist. | ||
| I'm going to add Stephen Bryan. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| Short commercial break. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Be back in a moment. | |
| Down the T.V. | ||
| They have all I've been... | ||
| War Room. Pandemic. With Stephen K. Bannon. | ||
| The epidemic is a demon and we cannot let this demon hide. | ||
| War Room. Pandemic. Here's your host, Stephen K. Bannon. | ||
| Okay, welcome back. | ||
| This is a pretty hardcore discussion about the path to war and what we can do, hopefully, to avoid it. | ||
| Captain Fennell, I want to ask, short-term and long-term, if you were called into the Oval Office this afternoon and able to sit down with With Joe Biden and Jake Sullivan, Tony Blinken, General Austin, a small group, and they asked you, tell me what we ought to do starting tonight. | ||
| What would be the two or three things that you would say immediately that the United States should do? | ||
| I think we should have a mobilization of our own, a mobilization of our naval and air and marine forces in terms of the reserves. | ||
| They should be called up. | ||
| We should start immediately looking to think how we can pull warships out of mothballs. | ||
| We'll have to have a recruiting drive because we don't have the force structure and people to be able to man those ships. | ||
| And we'd have to go on a kind of an all-hands preparation to say and to make ourselves ready for some kind of conflict at sea. | ||
| And we that would be one of the things I'd do. | ||
| The other thing is, I'd start sending over weapon systems to Taiwan almost immediately. | ||
| Not almost, immediately, I would be sending in theater high area air defense, Patriot batteries, things that can shoot down Chinese ballistic missiles and anti-ship cruise missiles that could help sink an invasion fleet. | ||
| Hang on one second, hang on one second. | ||
| People in the audience that don't know him, Captain Finnell is a revered thinker about the Pacific. | ||
| And I'm going to get back to the mobilization, because that's pretty scary when Jim Finnell says, I think we ought to go to mobilization. | ||
| What you just mentioned right there, if we were to take that, forget the mobilization, but the moves of forward deploying more advanced weapon systems, and really getting dug in there, does that, is that not self-fulfilling in that the Chinese go, that's an act of war, this ain't the Ukraine, you know, you can send all the artillery in there, but this is an act of war, if you start sending those kind of advanced weapon systems into Taiwan right now, or even around Taiwan, | ||
| They're going to say that, but they're already going to take it anyway. | ||
| So I guess the point is, either you're going to try to fight to save Taiwan, or you're just going to give it away through strangulation, as Jeff mentioned, or through an outright invasion in a year or two. | ||
| So I guess my point is, you have to do something. | ||
| And anything that we do will be used by China and their appeasers here in the U.S. | ||
| to say that we're provoking China. | ||
| That's been the mantra for 50 years. | ||
| You must not provoke China. | ||
| And anything that we do is characterized as provoking China. | ||
| At some point, we're going to have to call that bluff, or we're going to have to give Taiwan up. | ||
| It's one or the other. | ||
| But we can't keep going along and saying that we're going to talk to them and things are going to get better, because we've talked to them ad infinitum. You can look at the annual DOD reports and see all the engagements, hundreds and hundreds of engagements by the U.S. Department of Defense with the Chinese military year after year after year for the last 20 years. And it hasn't changed. It hasn't brought peace and stability to the region. | ||
| All it has done is allowed China to change the status quo. | ||
| They have changed the status quo. | ||
| They're the ones that have reneged on the one China policy, which said there would be peaceful reunification, peaceful resolution of this dispute. | ||
| They have not followed that dictum. | ||
| They have armed up. | ||
| They are continually threatening Taiwan. | ||
| They say they're going to fly over Taiwan if they want. | ||
| They say there's no center line. | ||
| They're sending bombers and fighters and aircraft carriers surrounding the island. | ||
| They don't let them have any access to any international organizations, World Health Organization, World Health Assembly, or any other diplomatic escape. | ||
| They're circling or crushing the nations that do recognize them, went down from over 25 down to 13 or 14 right now. | ||
| By every metric, China has changed the status quo. | ||
| They are the provocateurs. | ||
| And so if we don't do something, and we have to do it in a smart way where we don't maybe put it on the front page, but we need to do something to get defenses in there to Taiwan that causes the Central Military Commission to reconsider. | ||
| Implicit in what you've just said, Jim, is one other piece of this, which I think we just have to keep in mind. | ||
| And it's been really what we've been talking about to this point in the program. | ||
| As Don Rumsfeld used to say, weakness is provocative. | ||
| And what we are signaling with Blinken's speech and Biden's hash-ups in Asia last week and the condition of our military, you were talking about fighting the ship. | ||
| I mean, running the ship is proving to be a challenge, even at the moment, for the Seventh Fleet. | ||
| All of this is provocative to the Chinese. | ||
| They see a vacuum to be filled, and if we don't take the kinds of actions you're talking about, I want to close the show with a reference to peace through strength, but this is a moment for it, baby. | ||
| If we don't do it, we're going to get the war. | ||
| Let me go back, and we got Steve Byron, Brian, I'm going to bring him in a second. | ||
| I'm going to go back, Jim Finnell. | ||
| To do the mobilization, we have to be able to make the case of the American people. | ||
| And right now, they would look at you, me, and Gaffney as these wild men that are super anti-CCP. | ||
| You know, in the book by Josh Rogin, you know, I'm called the head of the Super Hawks, right? | ||
| These are the craziest guys. | ||
| They've been girding for a fight with the Chinese for a long time, right? | ||
| And this is what they want to do. | ||
| How would you prepare the American people To actually think through that it justifies a mobilization like you're talking about to get naval forces up to speed. | ||
| What would be the two or three things you say would have to do so the American people, the shields drop from their eyes? | ||
| Well, the first thing I'd say is if you think that your fellow American sailors and airmen and Marines and Army personnel in the Indo-Pacific are something worth protecting, then you should ask them, are you willing to see an aircraft carrier sunk and 6,000 people sent to the bottom and dead? | ||
| Because that's what will happen when the Chinese launch an invasion of Taiwan. | ||
| They won't just localize it on Taiwan. | ||
| They're planning, as we've seen in the desert, you know, they've got mock-ups of foreign ports. | ||
| 12, 10 years ago, they had Yakutska in a desert base mock-up. | ||
| They've got other bases in Taiwan, and they're gonna strike the United States and our forces in the Asia Pacific. | ||
| So those people will be dead. | ||
| Taiwan civilians will be dead. | ||
| In this mobilization order, there's a section about the South China Sea and how the Guangdong province is gonna help control maritime rights and sovereignty rights and fishing rights in the South China Sea, which means that the South Sea Fleet's gonna take control of the South China Sea and control all trade that comes in and out. | ||
| And so if Americans like to buy things and have food and have clothes and have all the stuff that they buy from China, that will cease, and they will have nothing. | ||
| And Chinese people will go without, and they'll be under austere conditions, but that's part of the mass mobilization, and they're preparing for the blowback from that. | ||
| But they will take that step in order to get the goal that they want, which is Taiwan. | ||
| And so I would tell American people, if you're sad about and you have, you know, blue and yellow, you know, avatars on your Twitter and all your social media, because of what you're seeing and dead people in the Ukraine, you're going to see much more of that in Taiwan, because the Chinese have gone to school on what Russia's done. | ||
| And they're not going to wait, and they're not going to take their time, and they're going to obliterate large sections to make sure they get what they want and can successfully do this in a quick fashion. | ||
| And the American economy is going to collapse. | ||
| It's Silicon Valley West. | ||
| You have to start thinking about it. | ||
| It's San Jose, what, 8,000 miles from us, that has to be defended. | ||
| I want to go to Stephen Byron, which did this magnificent, Brian did this magnificent book and has led this, Stopping a Taiwan Invasion. | ||
| So, Doctor, tell us how that's going to happen. | ||
| Right now we've got everybody kind of on the edge that this could happen. | ||
| How do we actually stop it, sir? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, I think the first step, first, thank you very much for having me on your program. | |
| I think the first step is coordination. | ||
| In other words, we can't just do it by ourselves. | ||
| We need the support of our allies in the region, and friends, including Taiwan. | ||
| And we have to integrate our command and control so that all our forces can work together. | ||
| I think that the notion that we're following today is that somehow the US will go there in an expeditionary force by itself. | ||
| Let me just kill this off. | ||
| They will go there by itself and do it itself. | ||
| No, no. | ||
| It has to be a coordinated effort. | ||
| There has to be a common command system, which doesn't exist right now. | ||
| And that's something we need to do quickly. | ||
| The US Navy deployments in the Pacific, about 63% of our deployments are in the Pacific in the Navy. | ||
| It was pretty good. | ||
| We have a formidable Navy with a lot more firepower than the Chinese have. | ||
| But Japan has a pretty good Navy, has a very good Air Force. | ||
| Taiwan has an excellent Air Force. | ||
| Korea has both, a good Air Force and a good Navy. | ||
| Including some of the most advanced equipment there, like the F-35 and the F-22, and the B-2 bomber. | ||
| So we have a lot of stuff, but we have to deploy it correctly. | ||
| And we have to have a common framework to operate in where we can't operate at all. | ||
| So the message of the book, if I can start at the top, is two things. | ||
| First of all, we need a one government policy. | ||
| Right now, the policy that we have is a terrible policy because it's ambivalent, it's confused. | ||
| President says one thing, then he says another. | ||
| Secretary of State says one thing, except he said a lot of things which don't make sense. | ||
| So, you know, we're in a state of confusion. | ||
| The Pentagon doesn't know what to do. | ||
| The CIA doesn't know what to do. | ||
| Our allies don't know what to do. | ||
| So we need a one government approach to this problem. | ||
| And secondly, as I said, we need a common command structure to operate in with our friends and allies. | ||
| And we must include Taiwan in that equation. | ||
| So that's the thesis of the book. | ||
| If we did, hang on, the book is fantastic. | ||
| We're going to push it and make sure it gets out. | ||
| If we did, first off, to start from today, to get a common command structure, That would be equivalent. | ||
| And I'm not a big fan of NATO because I don't think it operates particularly efficiently because they don't pay for anything. | ||
| But to get to the equivalent of NATO in that common command structure in the Pacific, if we started today, is that a year? | ||
| Is it two years? | ||
| Three years? | ||
| How soon could that actually be stood up and actually be operational? | ||
|
unidentified
|
A few months. | |
| I think it can be done in a few months if the US provides the leadership. | ||
| The Japanese are ready. | ||
| I'm sure the Taiwanese would be thrilled. | ||
| The Chinese went nuts when Biden blurted out the other day, we're going to defend Taiwan militarily. | ||
| They went crazy on him. | ||
| Of course, they walked it back immediately. | ||
| If you include the time, I mean, the Chinese went nuts when Biden blurted it out the other day, we're going to defend Taiwan militarily. | ||
| They went crazy on him. | ||
| And of course, they walked it back immediately. | ||
| We got about a minute. | ||
| Doctor, if you included Taiwan in a command structure, an operational command structure, are the Chinese going to say, OK, you guys have started, you've taken our province, you've put in, you've got a command structure around to bring in other navies. | ||
| You're basically forcing us into a conventional war, sir. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I would just do it and I wouldn't make an announcement. | |
| I would just organize it and do it. | ||
| How you characterize it for the Chinese is another matter, but I would do it because it's essential. | ||
| You can't fight a war with a blindfold on and your hands tied behind your back. | ||
| It doesn't work. | ||
| Unless you're gonna lose. | ||
| Well, that's the other thing. | ||
| Is there any confidence, you think, is there any confidence over there, we'll get to this when we come back to the break, that they would see the United States as being able to take leadership, given the fiasco in Afghanistan, given the fiasco in Iraq, given, quite frankly, the mixed signals we've been sending in Ukraine, that we would actually be able to have the leadership and to lead an alliance, right? | ||
| And obviously I'm a de-escalation guy in Ukraine, but we'll get to that. | ||
| Okay, short commercial break. | ||
| We got an all-star panel here with Frank Gaffney in the house, got Captain Fresnel, Jeff Nyquist, Dr. Stephen Bryan about the coming war over Taiwan and the South China Sea next in the world. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What defines the American spirit? | |
| Preserving life, liberty, and pursuing happiness. | ||
| Caring for the nation we call home, and its people. | ||
| As patriots, it's our duty to drive the entrepreneurial spirit. | ||
| Pushing hard, reaching for success. | ||
| Sharing patriotism. | ||
| Because the American way of life is for all to live. | ||
| Make sure you also go to MyPillow.com today. | ||
| Promo code WARMTH over the weekend. | ||
| We've got sales, Memorial Day sales all over. | ||
| Also, the Navy Seal Coffee Company, warpath.coffee. | ||
| Get the Mariner's Blend, the Dark Roast, or the Breakfast Blend Black Powder. | ||
| You're going to love it. | ||
| Put in WARM, you get 10% off. | ||
| Also, on Monday at 10 o'clock, we're going to have our Memorial Day Special about Arlington National Cemetery, the Tomb of the Unknown, everything that goes on to honor our sacred dead. | ||
| That'll play from 10 to noon our normal time, and we're going to replay it in its entirety at 4 o'clock to 6 o'clock. | ||
| Then at 6 o'clock, we're going to have a special. | ||
| I've got Transhumanism. | ||
| Joe Allen is here about CRISPR, and he's about the metaverse coming out of Davos. | ||
| Joe Allen and I are going to go through, spend an entire hour. | ||
| That's 6 o'clock. | ||
| Okay, this is only the kickoff to what's going to be a very deep drill down by the War Room over the next days and weeks ahead. | ||
| I don't think there's anything that could be more important than what we're talking about here. | ||
| We want to avoid more sacred war dead. | ||
| Okay, that's the purpose. | ||
| I want to go down with closing remarks and just get just got about a minute guys, but Jeff Nyquist, your closing thoughts on this. | ||
| Okay, fine. | ||
| If it drops, we'll just go here. | ||
| We have Frank. | ||
| Perfect. | ||
| We'll get those guys back another time. | ||
| Frank, in fact, this actually works out well. | ||
| By the way, we had a great, I'm telling you, and this one I'm so proud of. | ||
| Frank, thank you so much for putting this together. | ||
| Committee on the Present Danger. | ||
| China is really something like the Committee on the Present Danger for us about the Soviet Union. | ||
| And you just had, that is an all-star elite cast. | ||
| I mean, hey, you could be sitting in the tank and not get the level of presentation you had right then. | ||
| We're going to have many more of these guys back up the entire time. | ||
| Committee on the Present Danger. | ||
| Give me your closing thoughts. | ||
| You've been at this work for a long time. | ||
| You know, you and I have been very worried about China and the Chinese Communist Party for many, many decades, but particularly the last ten years, ever since the 2008 financial crash in the Olympics, where they kind of came to me, they kind of came forward and said, hey, we look at, we look at ourselves as a hegemon, we look at ourselves as the middle kingdom between Earth and everybody else is a tributary state. | ||
| Frank Gaffney. | ||
| Steve, thank you for both your leadership in all of this and for creating this unbelievable platform, for educating the American people about this issue and so many others, of course. | ||
| You asked a question, and I want to make sure we touch on it. | ||
| How do we get the American people to think this is a big problem as it is? | ||
| And I think that the answer today is different than it would have been a year ago, or certainly two years ago. | ||
| Every American Every American has had their lives touched by the Chinese Communist Party. | ||
| By COVID. | ||
| By biological warfare that has been waged against us. | ||
| And I'm going to tease a new book we've got coming out shortly from members of the committee about the actual origins and nature and repercussions of the COVID-19 pandemic. | ||
| When is that coming out? | ||
| I think it's about two weeks away now. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Something like that. | ||
| We'll be back to you on that. | ||
| What you heard Steve Bryan talking about is made infinitely more difficult, of course, this one government because of the compromise of our government. | ||
| And some terrific work has been done by members of our committee, notably Sam Faddis and Trevor Loudon, on not just Biden's compromise by the Chinese communists, not just Blinken's compromise by the Chinese communists, but members of Congress, virtually the entire senior ranks of the administration, at least with people who touch in their portfolios on China. | ||
| And that again feeds into the Chinese confidence that they're going to be able to win without fighting perhaps or certainly take us on if they need to violently. | ||
| The question occurs, what do we do about all this? | ||
| And I think the answer of mobilization, which Jim Finnell brought up, putting America on a war footing is an obvious thing we have to do. | ||
| And perhaps the single most important thing of all, I believe, Steve, is we have to take the most The obvious step of all, which is stop underwriting the Chinese Communist Party with the massive amounts of money that Larry Fink and others like him and Wall Street are transferring from the investment accounts of Americans to China. | ||
| And here's a particular kicker, of course, as you know, Steve, we've talked about it off and on for weeks now. | ||
| The people who manage, including Larry Fink, by the way, the federal retirement fund known as the Thrift Savings Plan, are now within a week or so of turning that over to the Chinese Communist Party as well. | ||
| We're going to hammer on that. | ||
| Unbelievable. | ||
| It has to be stopped, and it could be. | ||
| Lastly, let me just say, tying this all together. | ||
| You said we're breaking training by talking about some of these issues in the Memorial Day context. | ||
| I would argue that today, as we approach the actual Memorial Day moment, we're not only doing what that day is all about, which is memorializing our fallen, but it is recognizing that we have a duty to ensure that we don't engage in avoidable wars in the future. | ||
| And that we be able to win them if we actually have to get into those wars. | ||
| What does that come down to? | ||
| That comes down to the essence of Memorial Day, in my humble opinion, which is peace through strength. | ||
| And everything we've talked about today argues for that. | ||
| We have abandoned it under the Biden administration. | ||
| Alas, we must return to it before it's too late. | ||
| When you have guys like Bradley Thayer and Brian Kennedy and Jeff Nyquist and Dr. Stephen Bryan and Jim Finnell, with the gravitas those people have and the reputations they have, when they're sitting here giving you a warning, it's incumbent upon us, and I've got to think this through, with this platform and others. We now, to get to a mobilization, the American people have to understand we need a mobilization and that is the next effort before us. We've got to get it out | ||
| there. Finnell's got a great, I love the thing, the main thing is the main thing and this is the main thing and we've now got to have make sure that everybody can understand why it's the main thing and what we have to do about it. | ||
| When you talk about the seriousness and the level of what they were talking about has to happen, you realize how extraordinary this is. | ||
| We had a technical problem so we lost a group. | ||
| This is the first of many things we're going to do. | ||
| I want to really thank you for your leadership and what you put together here is amazing. | ||
| Remember, the special's on Monday. | ||
| I want everybody to be back here. | ||
| We're going to have this incredible special about honoring our sacred war dead. | ||
| It's going to play twice, 10 to noon in the morning and then again at 4 o'clock to 6 o'clock. | ||
| I want to thank everybody. | ||
| Also, we're going to be live tonight in New York City with Rudy Giuliani. | ||
| A special's going to take place right after the President's Address in Cheyenne, Wyoming. | ||
| We'll be live on Real America's Voice, a special war room tonight, live from New York City. | ||
| We're going to talk about the President's speech and then bring Rudy on a very special occasion and Andrew Julian. |
Export Selection