| Speaker | Time | Text |
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| Essays under the title Fabius, published anonymously in newspapers during the time that the states were deciding on whether to approve the new Constitution. | ||
| John Dickinson of Maryland, Delaware, and Pennsylvania was the only founding figure present and active in every phase of the revolution, from the Stamp Act crisis through the ratification of the Constitution. | ||
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Author Jane Calvert talks about her book, Penmen of the Founding, a biography of John Dickinson. | |
| On this episode of Book Notes Plus with our host, Brian Lamb. | ||
| BookNotes Plus is available on the C-SPAN Now free mobile app or wherever you get your podcasts. | ||
| Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth spoke about diversity programs in the military and border security while addressing Defense Department employees at the Pentagon. | ||
| This is 15 Minutes. | ||
| Ladies and gentlemen, the 29th Secretary of Defense, the Honorable Pete Hegseth. | ||
| Well, good afternoon. | ||
| Thank you very much for your time. | ||
| I want to echo what the chaplain said. | ||
| All glory to God. | ||
| I wake up every morning praying for the wisdom to see what is right and good and true and the courage to do it. | ||
| And I know many of you do the same. | ||
| And it's an absolute honor to stand in front of all of you. | ||
| I'm grateful. | ||
| I'm humbled. | ||
| Just the two weeks that I've been here is a solemn reminder in a couple of instances, but a solemn reminder of the very special nature of what the Department of Defense does. | ||
| And I've seen it in the Office of OSD, I've seen it across so many I've had a chance to interact with and so many more I want to interact with. | ||
| The solemn commitment to the constitutional duty that we all have to protect and defend the Constitution. | ||
| That one administration leaves and another administration comes in and that can mean a lot of changes in the course of that based on elections that happen and new leaders and new executive orders and new directives and lawful orders. | ||
| But what I've been so incredibly impressed by is the professionalism of the men and women throughout the ranks who recognize who we work for, which is the American people and the defense of our nation. | ||
| So I want to thank everybody watching, everybody here, for a part of that being a part of that transition, which I've certainly recognized a great deal. | ||
| I spent a lot of my career in the military, which is not as much as so many of you, trying to run away from the flagpole as quick as possible. | ||
| Now it appears I am the flagpole. | ||
| I recognize and understand that distinction. | ||
| But what I want to bring to this job and to the ethos is a recognition of the men and women who do the dirty work all day long for us here and across the world. | ||
| Every time I speak or every time in my previous profession I was on television and I got the bright lights and spotlight and people are looking to me, I always step back for a second and think about the men and women that I served with. | ||
| The folks that are never going to be introduced, never gonna have a microphone, never gonna be heard from, the men and women that you know that you've served with who are the best of the best in our country. | ||
| That's who we serve. | ||
| I was on the phone late into the night last night talking to families of two soldiers who had a rollover at Fort Stewart. | ||
| I was on the phone with the three the families of the three that were lost in the UH60 outside of the airport here in Washington, D.C. Like the costs and the consequences are very real and you know that. | ||
| One of the things I wasn't prepared for is every couple of weeks we do an orders book at OSD where we literally approve the orders that go out. | ||
| It sounds like a formality. | ||
| But having been on the other end of those orders where those dates really mattered and what the mission was really mattered, I stare at my orders and say, where am I going and what does it mean and how long am I there? | ||
| That struck me like a thud. | ||
| Every one of those signatures affects a human being whose mission needs to be important and vital to the national interest and to our department before I sign that book. | ||
| And that's very much my commitment to you. | ||
| It's also my job to be, as President Trump asked me, to not maintain the status quo. | ||
| We're going to take unconventional approaches. | ||
| We're going to move fast. | ||
| Think outside the box, be disruptive on purpose, to create a sense of urgency that I want to make sure exists inside this department. | ||
| And that's not to impugn anybody who's been here or anybody who's sitting here or anybody who's watching. | ||
| I don't have to tell you all that we live in very dangerous times in a world with ascendant powers who, if they had their way, would love to be on the rise and reject the forces and capabilities and beliefs of the West. | ||
| America is at the forefront of that. | ||
| And wearing the uniform here at the department, it's our job to ensure we create the deterrent effect that maintains American dominance in the world. | ||
| And there's a lot of folks, namely, and I've name-checked it in public as well, the communist Chinese who seek through their ascension a very different view of the world. | ||
| And so we have to be urgent and we have to be ready about what that means. | ||
| And we're going to do that. | ||
| A part of how we're applying that is I've come in with three pillars that I've repeated before, but I want to say again of how we're approaching this from my level. | ||
| Number one is restore the warrior ethos. | ||
| Make sure that we get back to basics. | ||
| Our job is to deter conflict and if necessary, defeat and completely destroy, demoralize, and defeat our enemies. | ||
| That's what we do. | ||
| We do warfighting here at the Department of Defense. | ||
| And we want to restore that through a laser focus on readiness, lethality, and warfighting across the spectrum. | ||
| I was on with the superintendents of West Point Annapolis and the Air Force Academy yesterday. | ||
| Hey, what are we doing there to drive those core principles? | ||
| What are we doing here to drive those core principles? | ||
| From E1 to, I guess is it, 010? | ||
| I don't know if you even said that. | ||
| And I know this room is 06 and below, which I was told was junior. | ||
| Where I come from, an 06 ain't junior. | ||
| So this is a new role for me, too, in that perspective. | ||
| And I went out to Fort Bliss, met with, you know, intentionally said, hey, you know, E7 and above and 03 and above, or 04 and above, you know, move out. | ||
| I want to hear from the folks out here on this border mission. | ||
| How is it impacting you and your family? | ||
| What is your mission? | ||
| Are you being utilized? | ||
| How does it affect, I actually think it adds to readiness because you're doing a real world mission, but how does it affect all those aspects? | ||
| Restoring the warrior ethos is critical. | ||
| And I think we've seen that already in the recruiting numbers. | ||
| I think we've seen an enthusiasm and excitement from young men and women who want to join the military actively because they are interested in being a part of the finest fighting force the world has to offer and not doing a lot of other things that serve oftentimes too often to divide or distract. | ||
| It's about readiness, it's about staying focused. | ||
| And I think you've seen that from a lot of the executive orders the president has issued that we have echoed. | ||
| And there can be confusion about that. | ||
| But from our perspective, why do you get rid of something like DEI? | ||
| Because from our perspective, It served a purpose of dividing the force as opposed to uniting the force. | ||
| And this is something I've said quite publicly, and what I want to be is transparent with this building and everyone who serves here say the same thing in public that we say in private, which I hope you'll find from us. | ||
| I think the single dumbest phrase in military history is our diversity is our strength. | ||
| I think our strength is our unity. | ||
| Our strength is our shared purpose. | ||
| Regardless of our background, regardless of how we grew up, regardless of our gender, regardless of our race, in this department, we will treat everyone equally. | ||
| We will treat everyone with fairness. | ||
| We will treat everyone with respect. | ||
| And we will judge you as an individual by your merit and by your commitment to the team and the mission. | ||
| That's how it has been. | ||
| That's how it will be. | ||
| Any inference otherwise is meant to divide or create complications that otherwise should not and do not exist. | ||
| I've served across my career with amazing men and women from all backgrounds. | ||
| They were at my congressional testimony. | ||
| They've been in my office. | ||
| They work with me and for me now. | ||
| Their contributions are immense to this nation and are appreciated equally as with everybody else, and that's the approach we're going to take. | ||
| So restore the warrior ethos. | ||
| The second one is rebuild our military. | ||
| You know, our defense industrial base, our acquisitions process, how we rapidly field new technologies, how we learn from conflicts around the globe, how we match what we fund to capabilities and effects. | ||
| There's a lot of programs around here that we spend a lot of money on that when you actually wargame it don't have the impact you want them to. | ||
| One of the benefits I have is I don't come from, I don't have any special interests. | ||
| I don't have a background invested in any systems or services. | ||
| I'm agnostic to that. | ||
| I want, it means I'm going to take a lot of arrows and I'm prepared to do so. | ||
| That's fine. | ||
| We need the best systems in the hands of warfighters where they need it to the COCOMs to deter and send the signals that when that fight comes we're ready to win and win decisively. | ||
| That includes a Pentagon audit, which to the Marines out there, y'all got to figure it out. | ||
| And we appreciate that. | ||
| Lean and mean, we are going to focus heavily to ensure that at a bare minimum, by the end of four years, the Pentagon passes a clean audit. | ||
| The American taxpayers deserve that. | ||
| They deserve to know where their $850 billion go, how it's spent, and make sure it's spent wisely. | ||
| It used to be that if you called for an audit, somehow you were undermining the department. | ||
| I believe the exact opposite. | ||
| I believe we are accountable for every dollar we spend, and every dollar of waste we find or redundancy is a dollar we can invest somewhere else, as President Trump has committed directly to rebuilding our nation's military. | ||
| So rebuilding our military is key. | ||
| And then third is reestablishing deterrence. | ||
| Unfortunately, over the last couple of years, we've seen events that have occurred that have created the perception, reality or perception, but I would argue more perception of American weakness, whether it's what happened in Afghanistan, by the way, which we're going to have accountability for, deserve accountability for what occurred in Afghanistan, for what happened on October 7th, the war that was unleashed in Ukraine. | ||
| Chaos happens when the perception of American strength is not complete. | ||
| And so we aim to reestablish that deterrence. | ||
| And it starts with our own southern border. | ||
| It starts with the defense of our homeland. | ||
| I think in some ways this department over time has felt like that's somebody else's mission. | ||
| We've spent a lot of time, decades, my generation and yours, defending other people's borders across the world. | ||
| Yet we've seen an invasion of our own from people all around the world who I'm sure many of them want to seek a better life. | ||
| I understand that. | ||
| But we also don't know who millions of them are, what their intentions are, why they're here. | ||
| That creates a very real national security threat to the country. | ||
| Border security is national security. | ||
| And as the president has told us, we're going to get 100% operational control of our southern border. | ||
| And that needs to be and will be a focus of this department. | ||
| I want to tip my hat to Northcom. | ||
| They've done an amazing job in the first couple of weeks here taking that executive order, which talked about the territorial defense of our country being core to the defense mission and implementing it. | ||
| In some ways, using existing processes that we have, which frankly are not robust enough, but also planning and looking forward to how we transition into a more permanent, effectively defense, repel and seal at our southern border so that we know exactly who's coming in and when they come in they're coming in lawfully. | ||
| And then also around the world, prioritization. | ||
| We have a lot of assets. | ||
| We don't have unlimited assets. | ||
| And so part of prioritizing is empowering our allies and partners. | ||
| We need to lead the world, there's no doubt. | ||
| And President Trump has been clear about that. | ||
| America First means we're taking care of America first, but part of America First is empowering allies and partners to be combat multipliers, to add to the capabilities that we have. | ||
| I mean that's foreign military sales, that's exercises, that's defense partnerships, but it's also reminding certain countries and certain regions of the world that America can't be the guarantor of everything forever in a world where we have to prioritize shifting to larger threats in certain moments. | ||
| So you're going to see that kind of prioritization from us, which we believe will empower, invigorate, incentivize more burden sharing from allies who are beloved to us, who we support, who also need to be prepared to step up. | ||
| President Trump led on that with NATO in his first administration. | ||
| We're going to do it again. | ||
| We're going over to Europe next week for the NATO ministerial to talk to our friends who have been and will continue to be our allies. | ||
| But we also need to encourage them to continue to step up in their defense industrial base, in spending, the kind of things we need to do here at home also. | ||
| So sort of to wrap up, and I've already gone longer than I should have, it really is, from our perspective, a back-to-basics moment. | ||
| When President Trump chose me and he said, Pete, I want you to run the Defense Department, his charge to me was return that department to its war-fighting mission at its core. | ||
| Warfighting, lethality, meritocracy, accountability, and readiness. | ||
| The things we, the bedrock of what we all understand our basic mission to be. | ||
| You know, I was at the Sergeant Major's Academy down at Fort Bliss just a couple days ago talking to 500 future sergeants major. | ||
| They're the standard bearers. | ||
| What are the standards? | ||
| I mean, and it starts with the basic stuff, right? | ||
| It's grooming standards and uniform standards and training standards, fitness standards. | ||
| All of that matters. | ||
| It's almost like the broken windows theory of policing. | ||
| When you ignore the small stuff from criminals, and I'm not saying if you violate grooming standards, you're a criminal. | ||
| The analogy is incomplete. | ||
| But if you violate the small stuff and you allow it to happen, the big stuff, it creates a culture where big stuff you're not held accountable for. | ||
| I think the same thing exists inside our services, making sure at every level there is standards and accountability and that we live it at the highest levels as well. | ||
| Which is why we are going to look back at what happened in Afghanistan and hold people accountable. | ||
| Not to be retrospective, not for retribution, but to understand what went wrong and why there was no accountability for it. | ||
| Those types of things are examples. | ||
| But I just appreciate the service so many of you give. | ||
| I know so many people watching. | ||
| It's the honor of a lifetime to come alongside you. | ||
| No one will work harder. | ||
| No one's going to attempt to be more transparent with the American people and with you. | ||
| We do want to hear your feedback, and we're going to hit the ground running. | ||
| And I'm grateful to President Trump for his leadership. | ||
| We're going to rebuild the military and focus on the troops. | ||
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The final Biden-era jobs report was released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, showing the U.S. economy added 143,000 jobs last month, fewer than economists expected. | |
| And the unemployment rate dipped to 4% from 4.1. | ||
| Economists were projecting the unemployment rate would stay at 4.1% and 170,000 jobs would be added. | ||
| Sunday night, on C-SPAN's Q ⁇ A, ex-convict, award-winning poet, and Yale Law School graduate Reginald Duane Betts is our guest. |