All Episodes
Previous Next
Plain Text
Feb. 14, 2023 - The Charlie Kirk Show
34:37
The Decline (and Resiliency) of the American Military with Fmr Acting Def Sec Chris Miller
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
|

Time Text
Homeland Under Attack 00:14:41
Hey, everybody, today on the Charlie Kirk Show.
Is our homeland under attack?
Is it aliens?
Is it the Chinese?
Something's not right.
Or is it a false flag operation from our government?
We entertain all of these theories and more.
Support our program directly at charliekirk.com/slash support.
Get involved with Turning Point USA today at tpusa.com.
That is tpusa.com.
Email me your thoughts as always, freedom at charliekirk.com.
Buckle up, everybody, here.
We go.
Charlie, what you've done is incredible here.
Maybe Charlie Kirk is on the college campuses.
I want you to know we are lucky to have Charlie Kirk.
Charlie Kirk's running the White House, folks.
I want to thank Charlie.
He's an incredible guy.
His spirit, his love of this country.
He's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created.
Turning point USA.
We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
That's why we are here.
Brought to you by Andrew and Todd at Sierra Pacific Mortgage.
For personalized loan services, you can count on.
Go to andrewandtodd.com, the wonderfulandrewandtodd.com.
Joining us to help explain, from the best of his knowledge and experience, what is going on with these unidentified flying objects and balloons and Ukraine is former acting Secretary of Defense and Green Beret Colonel Christopher C. Miller.
He is also the author of a new book, Soldier Secretary: Warnings from the Battlefield and the Pentagon about America's most dangerous enemies.
And Chris joins us now.
Welcome to the program.
Charlie, holy cow, I'm honored to be here.
It's good to be with a fellow Midwesterner.
You know, I'm from Iowa City, Iowa.
Dude, I'm in Denver right now because in my book, well, I'm not independently wealthy.
So in my book, I talk about how we need to transform the defense industry.
So I put my money where my mouth is and I'm out here.
I'm not going to do shameless promoting.
I'm not going to say the name, but it's this incredible tech startup that does counter-drone work.
I'm just sitting off the shop floor.
We got technologists out there.
We got people bending metal.
It's just the greatest thing in the world.
So my backdrop, it's all industrial, my friend.
So thanks for having me on.
Most importantly, hey, you're in the arena, and I really respect that.
Well, if you're from Iowa City, Iowa, then you know all about why college campuses need to be turned to love America.
So I know that town very well.
So, Chris, tell us about your book, and then I have a ton of questions to ask you.
But first, introduce our audience to your biography and also your book.
Yeah, left government on 1201 on the 20th of January 2021 with no work, no opportunity.
I enlisted in the Army in 1983 in Iowa City, Iowa.
I'd served until 2014 as a Green Beret, an Army Special Forces guy.
Then I worked at the Pentagon a bunch more and met President Trump.
I really got really focused on defeating Al-Qaeda.
And President Trump had the same idea.
And I worked with a guy named Kash Patel who was also with me on that journey.
And we just got really, really obsessed with killing off the rest of Al-Qaeda and defeating them and ending that war.
And when I left government, didn't have a lot of opportunities.
I was fortunately given the chance to write this book.
And what I wanted to do with the book was make it really accessible.
I didn't, you get these people like the DC people, and you know them, Charlie, that they write those big phone book-looking things where nobody reads them, you know.
They just name, you just name-check yourself, right?
You're like, hey, then I always name-check myself, and it's always some snide remark about, you know, this unqualified guy, which nothing could be further from the truth.
So I decided I needed to, well, I got the opportunity to put my thoughts down.
So I tell a lot of war stories from my time in the service in Afghanistan in 2001, Iraq, 2003, and then, you know, basically was part of that war for the remainder of the time.
And then talk about my time in working for President Trump.
Key takeaways on this thing is I wanted to make it accessible.
You know, 7% of our population are veterans, 93% aren't.
I want to try to close that gap between, you know, those that serve and those they serve because I saw a lot of confusion.
That's not a criticism.
It's a great problem to have, right, Charlie?
We're not an armed society anymore.
So that was kind of the idea and try to try to communicate in a way that was accessible and lighthearted in some ways, but serious in others and try to talk to each other and help bridge this gap between our society right now.
Well, I encourage everyone to check out the book.
And boy, there are a lot of questions about our military right now.
Not all of them are good.
It's Soldier Secretary by Christopher C. Miller.
Okay, so I want to ask you, let's just start with the urgent and pressing news.
I want you to tell me the rational explanation as to what are all of these unidentified flying objects coming into American airspace.
Is this normal in your experience as the head of the Department of Defense?
Is this something you saw?
No.
So, Charlie, thanks for bringing that up.
We found out, I guess it was a week ago, a week ago Sunday night, there were these claims that the Trump administration knew all about these Chinese spy balloons.
Do you recall that?
Yeah, I mean, I remember the story, but I certainly don't remember anyone telling me that.
I mean, look, this is the most preposterous thing.
The number one reason I knew this was a fake story was that if Donald J. Trump knew that there were Chinese spy balloons in the air, he would make sport out of shooting it down.
And by 7 a.m., he would call into Fox and Friends after tweeting about it, bragging about how quickly he was able to shoot it.
And then he would double the tariffs on China just for sport by lunch.
It's nice to be with the home team because that's exactly what would happen.
And so we had not, I didn't have a clue.
And I subsequently learned from other people I served with in the administration at high levels.
None of us had any idea that this was going on, which leads to the question of, well, who knew?
I think what we're going to find out, you just mark my words, Charlie.
If Congress finally starts to do their job and does some oversight on these things and asks the right questions, you know, the Department of Defense will do a study.
They'll do an investigation.
It'll last about what?
What do you think?
18 months, two years?
You know how?
Yes.
No, we should take, we should, we should have all our viewers.
Yeah, we should have a pool on this.
I say about 22 months.
It'll have to be tied with a slow news cycle.
And then it will be revealed that someone in the Department of Defense and in the intelligence community actually knew about these overflights for a long time.
But I suspect, I don't know this for a fact, but I suspect it'll be in the UFO files.
They call them something else now, anonymous.
I can't even pronounce the word.
But I think we'll find out that these things got bucketed in this kind of UFO file and wasn't brought to the attention of senior military officials or civilian officials that oversee the Department of Defense.
That's my bet that this has been going on for a long time, but it just didn't get reported out.
And that's, you know, I don't want to talk about Deep State and all that stuff, but that's kind of, you know, this is, I bet you this is going to be emblematic, right?
Yeah.
So then I suppose why now are we learning about it?
Is it just that some great citizen in Montana saw it?
That's what's strange to me.
Yeah, I think I've heard, I thought I heard a rumor that somebody was flying on a commercial aircraft and looked out the window and said, hey, there's a balloon out there.
Perhaps that's that does that does show the amazing beauty of flyover country.
Sorry, continue.
No, that's where we're from.
I know you're from Chicago.
I'm from Iowa City, which is also a fairly urban area in Iowa.
Well, 50,000 people, but yeah, that is flyover country.
But well, let's go there.
Common sense of the American people.
Yeah, seriously.
You know, it's like, so hey, why is there a balloon?
Shut up.
It's okay.
It's fine.
Just take the vaccine.
It's fine.
Just a side effect.
It's fine.
Right.
So, you know, I don't know the answer.
What I suspect we're going to find that this has been going on for a while.
I want to, you know, there's this, there's this adage in the military: don't question the guy on the ground.
Like, don't money money quarterback while they're in the fight.
But ultimately, you have to go back and do lessons learned, right?
And that's really what we have to do: how long has this been going on?
Why was it going on?
And clearly, now we've got our act together and we're not letting them violate our airspace.
But why did we let them fly all the way across the doggone continental United States before doing something last week?
So, you know, this is going to get this is going to get really, really interesting.
I think the administration just wants to go away, right?
Yeah.
They're like, oh man, can we just have the Super Bowl every night so we don't have to talk about stuff?
That's right.
Yeah.
So just a minute remaining in the segment, though.
But then now, this last weekend, the one over Lake Huron, they said it's an octagon.
I mean, with a with lateral propulsion abilities and it was hovering at 20,000 feet.
That doesn't sound like a balloon.
That's really going to be interesting because it's pretty advanced.
Everybody wants to laugh about it's just a balloon.
They have very sophisticated abilities to maneuver these things.
And as you know, satellites just go zipping across at whatever, you know, 200,000, what, 17,000 miles an hour, and these things just hover up there so they can really collect some intelligence.
I don't quite understand why China would keep on sending these unidentified flying objects one after the other.
It doesn't seem rational.
And I mean, I guess China is the only one to blame for it, but these are expensive pieces of equipment that after a couple, they would kind of believe that it's going to get shot down.
And so, what exactly do they think they're going to gain from this?
I something here doesn't make sense.
And maybe you can help clarify.
I need to hear somebody convince me of what is the self-interested angle of China to continually send expensive Chinese spy equipment that then gets shot down, which will only provoke more anti-China sentiment in the American homeland.
It doesn't make sense.
Can you just, from your expertise in geopolitics, why would China be doing this?
It does not make any sense.
This is expensive pieces of equipment.
Why would China be doing this?
Charlie, great question.
Here's, you know, these things aren't that expensive.
What do you think these balloons cost at tops?
Maybe 100K, maybe 200K.
What we're doing is we're sending up $100, $150 million jet aircraft, probably more than one, and we're shooting it down with a $400,000 missile.
And that's part of my book: the cost curves are all off.
You know, we got to get this right.
So they're sending something over for $200,000 high-end.
It's taken us $100 million plus to bring it down.
And we can't, Charlie, come on.
We spend a trillion dollars a year on defense and we don't have the capability to bring that thing down to a controlled descent.
There's some not unmanned drone that we can use.
That's the point of my book is that really bothers me that we should be in a better position.
But back to your question.
Sorry, you triggered me there.
I always get upset.
They're doing exactly, we're playing into their hands.
They're sending cheap stuff over and it's just costing us unbelievable amount of money to bring it down.
We should be able to do this relatively easily.
But back to your question, it doesn't take MacArthur, doesn't take Patton, doesn't take a military genius to know what they're doing.
They're probing our defenses.
You always do that.
We do it to everybody else.
They do it to us.
You want to find out where the weaknesses are.
I got a weird one for you.
Can I go there?
Remember how in the lead up to Ukraine last year, the administration presented all this pretty sensitive intelligence that they were gleaning about the Russians and what they were going to do.
Do you recall that?
I do.
And in the business, you know, those are sources of methods, and they decided that they would, you know, burn those sources of methods to try to deter this war, which it didn't work, as we all know.
I think the Chinese saw that and they're realizing, like, let's go ahead and push as much as we can at the U.S. right now to see how much they will reveal about their sensors and their intelligence networks to find.
I think they got the lesson from the Russians going, that's pretty easy.
It doesn't cost anything, or it's relatively inexpensive.
Let's go ahead and probe their defenses as much as we can and see what happens and see what we can what we can deduce about how they're doing their that that's my that's that's kind of my theory right now.
I think it'll be I agree with all that, but again, I'm just a layman here.
When you were head of DOD, are you familiar with any objects that could fly 20,000 feet that are in the shape of an octagon?
I don't know.
I don't, you know, balloons, I'm not an expert.
I don't know.
Yeah, the octagon thing was kind of weird, but probably, well, heck, I'm frequency hopping here.
That's a military term for just going all over the map.
I'm sorry.
You'll never have me on again.
If it's octagonal and it has flat panels, that's probably to keep radar reflections from, scatters radar reflections.
There you go.
That's my crazy piece.
No, I'm just, I'm just a layman here.
I'm not, I don't know military aviation well at all.
I just, you know, when I fly out of Sky Harbor in Phoenix, I don't see, you know, Southwest Airlines, Alaska Airlines, and then here's an octagon, like we're going to Vegas.
And I just doesn't, not something I see very often.
Okay, there's some breaking news I want to play for you here.
This is John Kirby talking about it's definitely not aliens.
Okay.
We could say whatever we want, but it is not the revenge of Neptune.
Play cut 25.
My understanding is that the top officials of the Pentagon, when asked explicitly if they were ruling out any kind of extraterrestrial presence, said they weren't ruling anything out.
And yet at the beginning of today's briefing, albeit with her usual winning smile, Ms. Jean-Pierre seemed to rule out any extraterrestrial activity.
I don't think the American people need to worry about aliens with respect to these craft.
American Meat Subscription 00:03:09
Period.
I don't think there's any more that needs to be said there.
Chris, is this Independence Day?
John Kirby has the toughest job in the world right now, trying to tap dance between the raindrops that are just coming down like a deluge.
I don't know.
Why would we discount anything at this particular juncture?
I think it's terrestrial based.
But, you know, this comes back to the kind of issue about where do all these UFO reports end up.
And one of the big mistakes I made when I was acting Secretary of Defense, I didn't, somebody called me like, hey, did you get the UFO briefing?
And I literally was like, oh, man, I forgot to ask about that.
We were a little busy, right?
So, you know, at the time, but I think that's something, you know, Senator Cruz and others have been really adamant about trying to get to the bottom of a lot of these things.
And I think at the end of the day, there's still some unexplained stuff.
I think the vast majority are our secret weapons or other countries' secret weapons.
But in this case, I'm not thinking it's extraterrestrials.
What do you got?
What do you think?
No, I don't know.
I want to hear Charlie copy.
I'm just asking the question.
I'm asking the question because I don't understand why China would do this.
I'm not saying that it's extraterrestrials, but it's bizarre how the Biden administration is going around saying it's definitely not aliens.
Look, Valentine's Day is now over, but the need to say I love you is never over.
Finding a way to tell someone you care about them on a consistent basis is very hard.
At least it was until Good Ranchers came along.
Look, say I love you with meat this year, but not just any meat.
It has to be Good Ranchers.
100% American hand-trimmed steakhouse quality meat and seafood.
I use Good Ranchers.
I get it sent to my home.
It is amazing.
I'm telling you, it is tasty.
It is succulent.
It is delicious.
Over 85% of grass-fed beef sold in stores is imported from overseas.
That doesn't say I love you.
That says, I think you're as good as this old meat shipped over from Venezuela.
No exaggeration.
Right now, you can get $30 off when you order any box from Good Ranchers and use my promo code Kirk.
Nothing says you care more than prime cuts of beef, pasture-raised chicken, and premium-quality seafood.
You get all of it delivered every four, six, or eight weeks at goodranchers.com.
Ditch the usual gifts that don't just cut it anymore.
Say it with a subscription to American meat instead.
Snag $30 off with promo code Kirk at goodranchers.com.
That is goodranchers.com.
I use Good Ranchers.
You should as well.
It's succulent.
It's great.
It comes right to your home and you have the meat you need to feed your family, the protein, the good fats for you, all there.
February is a month all about love.
So check it out.
Goodranchers.com, promo code Kirk, made in America, meat from America.
Check it out.
Goodranchers.com, promo code Kirk.
Chris Miller is with us, author of the book, Soldier Secretary.
I want to play another piece of tape here.
Breaking Faith with Youth 00:10:30
Seems to be a very warm relationship with China that we've developed.
Let's play cut 24.
At what point do you review a big review of the U.S. relationship with China?
And at what point does the president ask for a call from President Xi?
Again, I don't have a call to talk about today.
The president met with President Xi at Bali at the G20.
The whole purpose of that discussion was to move this relationship forward in a better way.
Most consequential bilateral relationship in the world.
The president knows that.
If he spins any harder, he's going to throw up and be nauseous, Chris.
Charlie, that dude, I told you, man, he's got a tough job.
Wow, that was, I'm getting kind of tired of it, to tell you the truth, but I know it's his job.
Like the fact, I don't know what, well, I'll just tell you what I think.
The Chinese can't figure out what's going on.
I had a great one.
They talk about the madman theory of international relations where, you know, people, President Trump was accused of this, and it's actually a valid means of international relations where you keep them off balance, right?
They don't know what you're going to do.
I'm now calling this kind of the clueless man international affairs strategy, which is not a valid thing because it's confusing.
The president says one thing.
His secretary of state says something else.
The secretary of defense says something else.
There's no coherence.
Hey, can we go there, Charlie?
Can we go there where this all started?
It started with the debacle leaving Afghanistan.
Correct.
Chinese.
I know you know that.
Sorry.
No, no, I'm encouraging you.
Please continue.
I'm just like, wow.
You know, that the Chinese saw that and we showed our bellies at that point.
That's not the men and women of our armed forces that conducted that evacuation were heroic beyond belief.
That's part of my book, right?
They always make chicken salad out of chicken.
You know what?
That's what they do because they're really great patriots and they care and they get it done.
But that thing was a debacle.
And the Chinese saw that and said, wow, this, we have an opportunity to advance our agenda.
And you know what they started doing?
They started flying fleets of planes against Taiwan and then they would like, they would loop off.
Oops, they would loop off right before they got into their airspace.
And then they started also sending in all those, they did a blockade.
So I think that's where it all started.
You can argue with me.
No, I don't argue.
I think we should have left Afghanistan.
But also, when someone says I need to have an appendix removed, you don't take out a pocket knife and start cutting yourself.
Like there's a process to be able to remove, you know, things that you no longer want to have.
It's just we did the worst possible way of withdrawal of Afghanistan.
Okay, I think this plays into another theme that I would love to explore with you.
And let me be very clear.
For my upbringing, I was the biggest cheerleader and advocate for the American military.
And so it really burdens me when I start to see now the American military become a college campus with missiles, where we now have the worst ideology imaginable of purging patriots, vaccine mandates, and all of this LGBTQ nonsense.
So I want to play a piece of tape here.
I think this is an Army recruiting video or something.
What exactly is this one?
I want to make sure Cut 22 is the Army ad.
Okay, this is an advertisement for the Army.
Now, remember, enrollment for the United States military is at Vietnam level levels.
It is that far down.
The morale is lower than ever before.
We missed our recruitment goal by 25%, 25% in the Army.
Play Cut 22.
Although I had a fairly typical childhood, took ballet, played violin, I also marched for equality.
I like to think I've been defending freedom from an early age.
When I was six years old, one of my moms had an accident that left her paralyzed.
Doctors said she might never walk again.
But she tapped into my family's pride to get back on her feet.
Eventually, standing at the altar to marry my other mom, I needed my own adventures, my own challenge.
And after meeting with an army recruiter, I found it.
A way to prove my inner strength and maybe shatter some stereotypes along the way.
Shattering stereotypes along the way.
And then you have this one, Mark Milley.
Then I'd love to get Chris to riff on this saying, look, I want to learn about white rage.
Play cut 23.
And it is important that we train and we understand.
And I want to understand white rage.
And I'm white and I want to understand it.
So what is it that caused thousands of people to assault this building and try to overturn the Constitution of the United States of America?
What caused that?
I want to find that out.
Chris, how should we think about this?
Well, I got serious there.
I try to be lighthearted and try to be amusing and whatnot, but you really brought up an issue that has to be addressed.
And tell you, Charlie, I joined the Army in 1983.
I left in 2014.
I retired.
And in all those years, I never met a single person that joined the military to fight the culture wars.
They joined the Army or the services.
I dealt with them all because it's ultimate meritocracy.
There are issues involved in the military, but they take it very seriously to correct things that go wrong.
And people, and I went out to the field not too long ago because I thought maybe I was missing something that maybe things had changed because I'm an old guy now, right?
You know, my used to have orange hair, it's white now.
You know, and I went out there to listen.
I didn't talk.
I listened to make sure that I wasn't somehow, you know, missing the big picture.
And military is still the same.
Those people join, they don't want to fight the culture wars.
They want to prepare.
They want to be combat ready to fight real wars.
And our leadership, I think, and you brought up the clips and the ad, that's part of the point of my book is there has to be accountability, but our generals are kind of missing the boat.
And they just need to support those in uniform who don't want to be part of all this.
They just want to do their job.
They want to advance.
And we're getting, it's very troubling.
And let's be honest, it's being exploited by our opponents.
Is there any other explanation as to why enrollment in the military is down 25%?
I don't know.
There was a piece that came out, I think, in one of the papers, the major papers the other day, where the Army did a survey and they came up with something that there were people that, you know, it's economics or something.
I really think, though, when we dig into it, there's a problem.
There's a saying, we're seeing our senior leaders do this thing that is, do as I say, not as I do.
And, you know, the testimony you saw there and some of these advertising campaigns and these other initiatives, I think you're seeing like young people going, I just want to serve.
I want to work.
I want to do well.
And I don't want to be part of that.
And then when their leaders get involved in it, they start questioning why they're doing it.
And I also think you brought up vaccinations and other things, or we've talked that certainly come up.
There's a, I'm afraid that we're going to have a break in faith between our leadership and the young people that we really, really need to come in and serve.
And I know I'm talking too much.
That's part of my book is like, we, and I'm glad that you're doing what you're doing because there is nobility in public service.
I mean, there's an just, we need good people to go into it.
And when they, when they're getting confused about their leaders kind of going, blown, or what do they call it, you know, going with whatever way the wind blows, that's not what they want.
The, yeah, thank you for those kind words.
And I will say this, and I've said it before on this show, and it really is disheartening.
I don't think our military is ready to win a war right now.
I don't.
And you might disagree.
I don't see strength.
I don't see competency.
I don't see the ability to pull off sophisticated or difficult military operations, Afghanistan being one of them.
I think the raw potential there is extraordinary.
And at every corner and every turn, Chris, there has to be some social justice wrinkle added to it.
A great example is last yesterday at the Super Bowl.
So there I am sitting far away from the game, about 30 miles away, and I hear, you know, the fighters go abovehead, right?
And then it goes on TV and they had to.
They say, and this was the first ever all-female flyover.
Who cares?
Does that make us more likely to be able to kill the enemy?
I just, you know, I'll disagree a little bit because those people that are down in the trenches that are doing the day-to-day working are just amazing and they will absolutely get the job done.
I'm worried, though, that it's a slippery slide.
And I know that you're looking at it as a much more grand, broad picture.
And we need to do that.
And that's necessary.
But right now, I'm not worried about the utility and the capability of our people down in the trenches that are doing the work.
I'm worried about the leaders that are telling them to behave a certain way and not focus on conversation.
I hope you're right.
I hope you're right.
I really do.
And I don't see a military that is serious about winning wars.
They're very serious about gay public service announcements.
Hey, everybody, Charlie Kirk here.
When Roe versus Wade fell as the law of the land last year, all it did was increase what pro-abortion states are doing to entice and mislead women to abort their children.
Conscientious Objectors Today 00:06:16
States are now advertising to travel just to get an abortion.
It's become abortion trafficking.
So the need to provide the truth as girls and women are contemplating what to do about their pregnancy is greater now than ever before.
Ultrasounds save babies because ultrasounds give the truth at a time everyone else is saying it's not just a baby, it's just a clump of cells.
When you introduce a girl to her baby by providing an ultrasound, you are giving her the truth at the most important time of her life.
And more than 85% of the time, she will choose life.
You don't have to make a lot of noise to make a big difference for life.
Just give an ultrasound at preborn.org to be a hero for life.
That is preborn.org.
$140 gives five mothers a free ultrasound and saves babies.
$200 can save 10 babies.
Go to preborn.org.
I love this organization.
I'm a donor to it.
Check it out: preborn.org.
Hi, my name is Johnny, and I use he, him pronouns.
Hi, and I'm Kanchi, and I use she, her pronouns.
And we're here to talk about pronouns.
What is a pronoun?
A pronoun is how we identify ourselves apart from our name, and it's also how people refer to us in conversations.
Using the right pronouns is a really simple way to affirm someone's identity.
It is a signal of acceptance and respect.
Yeah, so that is an official U.S. military public service announcement.
So, Chris, a lot of topics we could still get into.
I do want your thoughts on Ukraine.
More specifically, do you think the United States bombed the Nord Stream pipeline?
Oh, gosh, I don't think we're that good.
No, I can't do a high take on what you just showed.
Oh, of course you can.
Yes.
Oh, my gosh.
That was depressing.
That's why I get my, if you want to just know where I come from, that's not a military that's ready to storm a beach or to fight China.
That's official government-sanctioned propaganda there.
Yeah, but they're really good sergeants and non-commissioned officers that are responsible for anywhere from three to 12 Americans that are like, we don't use the pronoun we're going to use here is soldier, sailor, airman.
That gives me hope.
You're giving me hope.
That's why you're rebuilding my confidence because I want that.
Because when I see videos like that, I say, look, you guys should find something else on their line of work.
But, you know, fighting the Chinese or whatever enemy we have to go up against, I really don't care about pronouns.
Yeah, I was always raised where, you know, we had racial issues when I came into the military and the NCOs and the young leaders were like, we all wear green and we all bleed red.
So have a nice day.
You guys have to get along.
When you're out there in really tough situations, it's amazing how people come together.
It's the beauty of the military.
You know, I do a thing in my book about I have one of the, you know, you have to do your 10 policy recommendations at the end, which, Charlie, don't tell my publisher.
I was like, nobody, nobody's going to read that.
They're like, you have to put it in.
I was like, okay.
And I actually really got into it.
One of the things was universal service, right?
Back in the days, and it's just not military service.
Maybe it's something else.
You know, it's working the faith-based organization.
I don't care.
But work in green energy, go overseas, work in a national park.
But that's kind of one of the things I talk about.
And I do these informal surveys with younger people.
And I always get like, I get nine out of 10 say, yeah, I'd be interested in doing universal service, kind of bring, you know, back in the day where you see those World War II movies where the guy from New York City and the southern guy and then somebody from the Midwest, you know, I think that's something that would really help.
And you're focused so much on developing the youth and developing clear thinking and putting in the foundation for ethical and moral behavior.
So that's kind of, you know, and I always get one person that's a hardcore libertarian, and I totally get it.
They say, no, that's counter, that's against the constitution, not part of that.
I said, well, then let's have a waiver process.
There used to be conscientious objectors.
So I kind of, I kind of went off in a tangent there.
And we were supposed to talk about, we're supposed to talk about Ukraine, man.
I mean, the current mood I have towards the government is very sour.
However, the principle and the idea of a national mandated public service work or project, I think, is a great idea if it's done correctly.
Our government would screw it up because they'd end up having you do environmental work or some sort of LGBT thing.
But I mean, I see it.
I go to Israel and the young people there are responsible and they're mature and they love their country and they're fabulous.
Okay, so Chris, really quick, we only have a couple minutes remaining.
Tell us how we should think about Ukraine.
I know there's a schism within our conservative movement and I get that.
I'm kind of the Reagan era.
If there are people that are willing to fight and die for their freedom against tyranny and autocracy, let's go ahead and give them the tools they need.
Absolutely needs to be accountable in terms of what we provide.
In Afghanistan, Iraq, at the height of the war, Charlie, we spent $2 billion a week on training those and equipping those militaries.
Didn't work out so well.
And as soon as things got bad, they collapsed.
That's not going to happen with Ukraine.
And, you know, I think it's a model for Taiwan, too.
If they're willing to fight, if they're willing to die, if they're willing to have their infrastructure destroyed to stand up to tyranny, let's go ahead and give them the tools they need to do that.
Yeah, the question is: what happens when the regime you're supporting is also pretty evil and wrong, which I would consider Zelensky to be there.
But that's a different topic for a different time.
So, Chris, thank you for coming on.
Check out Soldier Secretary.
It's a terrific book.
And I want to thank you for your candor and your honesty and your service.
And I agree to something you said earlier: that public service is noble and it is virtuous.
And boy, I would love to see Donald Trump win another term and put you back as head of the DOD.
We'd be a safer country.
Our enemies would truly fear us and our homeland would not be messed with.
Chris, God bless you.
Thank you so much.
Carly, thanks for being in the arena and having me.
You bet.
Thank you.
Thank you so much for listening, everybody.
Email me your thoughts as always, freedom at charliekirk.com.
Thank you so much for listening and God bless.
For more on many of these stories and news you can trust, go to CharlieKirk.com.
Export Selection