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Jan. 31, 2022 - Doug Collins Podcast
51:33
A Green Beret Comes to Congress
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I don't know about you, but if I've been concerned and seeing inflation grow like it has, I mean, it's growing at 7%.
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You want to listen to a podcast?
By who?
Georgia GOP Congressman Doug Collins.
How is it?
The greatest thing I have ever heard in my whole life.
I could not believe my ears.
In this house, wherever the rules are disregarded, chaos and mob rule.
It has been said today, where is bravery?
I'll tell you where bravery is found and courage is found.
It's found in this minority who has lived through the last year of nothing but rules being broken, people being put down, questions not being answered, and this majority say, be damned with anything else.
We're going to impeach and do whatever we want to do.
Why?
Because we won an election.
I guarantee you, one day you'll be back in the minority and it ain't gonna be that fun.
Folks, it's good to have Mike Walsh here, the Florida 6th Congressional District.
He is on some of the most, what I consider some of the best coasts in Florida.
I've enjoyed the area that he represents down there a great deal.
But he's got a long story to tell, a great story to tell on service not only to our country in the United States Congress, but also in the military as well.
Mike, glad to have you.
We've been talking here for a few minutes.
Tell me a little bit about your district first, because there's going to be a lot of people who will recognize the district before they would ever recognize you or me.
Tell me about the district you get to represent.
Well, I had the honor of taking Ron DeSantis' district when he left Congress to go be our great governor of the Peninsula of Freedom of Florida.
It runs from the Jacksonville suburbs, which is the very northeastern corner of the state, down the coast.
I live in St. Augustine on an island.
I love it.
Blocked from the beach.
Oldest city in America.
Just really a fun little town there.
Daytona is the main city.
It's got NASCAR beaches and bike week.
I don't know what else more you need in life.
Is there anything else better in life than Bike Week, Daytona, and the world?
Yeah, that's it.
We touched the northern boundary of Cape Canaveral, so we have a lot of space and aerospace interest there, and then I run west down the I-4 corridor almost to the I think?
That's right.
Have New Samaritan.
I'm fighting hard to keep it with redistricting because I think it's one of the real gems of Florida and probably one of the few places you can get some quasi-affordable real estate these days.
We've talked about it, but New Smyrna holds a real special place in my heart.
There's a little condominium down there called Ebtides, and it's sort of like the last 15 years of our life.
Big events have sort of rolled around us going and staying at Ebtides right before I went to law school, right before I went to Iraq to deploy graduations.
It's been fun.
So your district is right, but you also, and I think this is something I'm glad you mentioned that, Because everybody just thinks of Florida as the coast and Disney and they don't realize that agriculture is huge and you're as apt to see ball caps and F-250s and you are as anything else.
You mentioned citrus.
I read a disturbing report the other day that citrus was having some trouble this year.
What's going on with that?
It's having trouble over the last many years, actually.
It's kind of the confluence of three things.
One, just development that's buying up a lot of the groves.
Number two, hurricanes that have really devastated some of the groves in the South and just some of these poor farmers that are land rich and cash poor.
They just can't afford to rebuild.
And then it's kind of a niche thing, but it's really devastating the agriculture in certain parts.
It's a disease.
It's called greening.
And it's a tropical disease we've thrown.
I don't even know how much money at trying to figure this thing out.
But it's eaten up some of the groves from the inside.
So the combination of those three and then, frankly, competition from...
From Mexico, from Brazil, from South America, where they can just dump these goods.
It's one of the great things, one of the great accomplishments of the Trump presidency was reforming NAFTA, getting a new NAFTA. I remember when people literally laughed at him when he said he was going to renegotiate that thing because it was a bad deal.
And you know what?
He got it done.
And I think the new USMCA will help.
We didn't get everything we wanted for Florida agriculture, but it'll It'll help with a lot of that, you know, basically price dumping that we get from Central South America.
Well, and that's something that a lot of people don't realize about, you know, especially, you know, Northeast Florida, you know, Central Florida, up to, you know, even Southern Georgia, we have a lot of fruit, vegetables, a lot that come out of there, and especially strawberries, blueberries, things like that, that really, you know, we're Paying a price on this overseas dumping into the market because they have a longer growing season.
They would just dump on top of our markets when they were coming to bay.
But I can remember going to Florida when I was young and going to Orlando, going to Disney 40 years ago.
And you come in off 75 and you take the Orange Parkway and there was nothing but orange grows everywhere you look.
And I went down there a few years ago and I went down there and there's none of them.
They're just all gone.
Yeah, there's now suburbs as far as you can see.
People are voting with their feet, which is probably a separate conversation, but they're leaving these badly run, Democrat-run, bankrupted blue states, and they're moving to places like Florida, Georgia, Tennessee, Texas.
We've got 1,000 people a day moving in.
But it also means they've got to have somewhere to go.
And real estate's been on just an insane run over time.
And you're right.
You used to see a sea of orange groves and cattle.
And now you see a sea of suburbs.
You know, look, I mean, everybody's welcome.
We'll figure it out.
Now, Mike, look, I share this a lot, especially with folks who come on who are high profile, like yourself, and we've talked about this with many of my friends who've been in and out of government.
Most people see us on TV, that's when they know us.
They knew us from hearings, and they know us when you go on Fox, you go on Newsmax, wherever you may go, CNN, whatever.
But I like to always give it a chance, because we're going to talk about what's going on in D.C. here during this podcast, but one of the things that always interests me is really how you got here.
So give us a little bit of the history.
I know you went to VMI, you came into the Army, but where does family start?
And bring us a little bit up to date, and then we'll share a little bit about how we got to know each other.
Yeah, sure.
So, you know, grew up in Jacksonville, went off to VMI, got the snot kicked out of me for four years.
It was not exactly the most enjoyable college experience, but kind of like a marathon, you're proud you did it.
I don't know if I'd do it again, right?
And, you know, went off to ranger school and into special forces.
But interestingly, I had this kind of interesting experience that a lot of folks don't realize, both the The Navy SEALs and Army Green Berets have reserve units, which I migrated to as recalled after 9-11 into one of those.
But it meant when I was done with that first tour, I had to have a day job.
And I found myself actually in the policy world under Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld.
In the Pentagon as a civilian and had this kind of really interesting back and forth of there I was at the Pentagon and eventually in the Bush White House as Vice President Cheney's counterterrorism advisor.
But in between, I would mobilize and deploy.
So it was there I was in the White House Situation Room, and then I'd have to be one of the only idiots in Washington that actually had to go do the strategy I just helped write and recommended.
Right?
So it's my butt on the line.
But then the really interesting part, Doug, which you could appreciate, is taking the uniform back off, coming back into the situation room and saying, hey, boss, you know, respectfully, the generals are full of it.
Let me tell you, I was just out on the ground for a year and this is what's actually happening.
They're not doing anything.
What you said to do.
I was in the room when you said to do it.
And so I ended up writing a book about that called A Warrior Diplomat.
Just looking at the world on terror from White House, Pentagon, multiple combat tours out on the ground as a Green Beret.
And one of those tours, I had to lead the search for Bo Bergdahl.
He disappeared just in a district over from mine right after I had taken command.
And here I was coming from the White House.
I was going to be Lawrence of Arabia and solve this whole thing.
And that one private, that one selfish traitor, really upended our entire campaign plan.
And then fast forward a few years later, after Obama declared him a hero in the Rose Garden, I was the first.
My first ever appearance on Fox, actually, was with Brett Baer.
I was the first to go on and say, time out, America.
I had to lead the search for him.
Here's what that son of a gun really did.
He's a traitor and put up your ticker tape parade.
But after I came back having to work for Cheney, I wasn't invited to work for Biden, then Vice President Biden.
I know.
I couldn't believe it.
So I joined some former folks I'd worked with in the Pentagon and we built a business from three of us in an attic up to about 400 employees, took on private equity.
You know, and I say that because I'm incredibly proud of it.
You know, we went months and months without a paycheck.
We, you know, We had to take care of our folks.
We had to figure out how to grow.
Hiring, firing, cash flow, all of those things that business owners struggle with.
And you don't find many people in Congress that can read a balance sheet and fire an M4 at the same time.
And I thought with all of those experiences, when Ron DeSantis announced for governor and his seat was open right on the edge of my hometown, I said, you know, that combat time, that White House policy time, that business time, I thought maybe I could be effective in Congress.
And the other thing, Doug, which you'll appreciate, a statistic kept gnawing in my brain, that in the 1970s, three quarters, 75% of the House and the Senate were veterans.
And today we're sitting around 16%, 1-6.
It's a record low in our nation's history.
And I think it explains a record amount of dysfunction.
I really do, because, you know, if you're willing to get in the foxhole or get in the plane and the ship and die for that flag, you'll be willing to roll up your sleeves and do the tough things necessary to move the country forward.
We don't have really nearly enough of it, so I'm really passionate about helping Get veterans elected and get conservative veterans elected.
Yeah.
Well, I think you bring it up because it is a something.
I don't care what branch you're in.
There's a commonality of going through, whether it be boot camp or officer training, however you go through it.
There's that tempo.
There's that pace of deployment.
There's that pace of having to do your OPRs, having to do your EPRs, having to do the discipline it takes.
And you see it lacking a great deal in Congress.
I think that's why so many people...
Yeah, look, I mean, you know, again, when you're out in combat, and it's the mentality, too, it's the ethos.
Nobody cares about black, white, or brown.
They don't care about Republican or Democrat or whatever.
The only colors you should care about are red, white, and blue, right?
That's on that flag.
And moving out and getting the job done.
And, you know, if you're not accomplishing your objectives in business, you go bankrupt.
You don't accomplish them in combat.
You die.
There's real consequences there.
And in government, it seemed to just kind of float along.
And you can get away with it.
But it's the mentality that we bring.
And so, you know, as you know, I've been really focused on national security issues, on foreign policy and military issues.
Not necessarily just because it's my background, but just as what I call a small government conservative.
I think our state and locals could do pretty much everything else.
The number one job of the federal government is to keep the country safe.
And that means our border, that means our communities, and that means from threats abroad.
Pretty much everything else, I want to get Washington out of the way and let our great state legislatures and our local officials handle it.
I don't want to dive into this yet, but this administration I mean, the number one job to keep us safe, and they're doing anything but.
Exactly, exactly.
Well, let's build up to that a little bit.
You and I got to know each other, and it's contrary to, you know, it really is some of the abnormal, is we got to know each other in small group time every week.
Coming together with a few other congressmen to just talk and share about our lives, and I think that's something that people don't realize that we're real people in doing that.
Coming out of VMI, I want to explore this for a moment because I have a lot of military folks who listen to the podcast, maybe, and also folks who call me all the time saying, hey, I want to go do this or that.
You came through as a ranger, which, by the way, meant that you had to come through my district when I was in Congress.
You had to come through Camp Merrill.
Yeah, that's right.
And was the blueberry pancakes all that you thought they would be?
I cried my way through it, I swear, and was sobbing all over those blueberry pancakes when I was done at the end.
I went through in the dead of winter in January, a good old winter ranger, and I'll never forget my trying to get some water.
We had people going down with heat exhaustion because our canteens were frozen blocks of ice.
Oh, wow.
And literally couldn't drink any water because it was all frozen.
So, yeah, I got to be honest with you, I've never been back.
I probably never will go back.
Well, what I have heard from almost everybody who's went through it, and I got a lot of friends who are rangers who went back through it, they say the blueberry pancakes just don't taste near as good as they did back that first time.
Man, I swear.
It was like manna from there.
I lost 31 pounds in ranger school.
Wow.
It just was no fun.
I understand that.
Now, you went from there to Special Force.
You went to Green Berets.
Compare the training differential from going through the Ranger School then to Green Berets.
Sure.
Yeah, I think probably the quickest way is, you know, I say the Rangers are the Army's elite infantry.
The SEALs are the Navy's.
They're the best in the world at kicking in doors, putting two bullets on a forehead in the middle of the night.
You know, anywhere around the world.
That's what they do.
Green Berets are a bit different.
We tend to be much older.
The average age of the SEALs, for example, is 24. Average age of the Green Berets is 34. We have to go season out and doing other things in Big Army before we have to be a captain before you can even try out as an officer.
And we're the ones, we have to learn multiple languages.
We have to learn local cultures.
We specialize in areas in the world.
And, you know, you'll take six of us and embed us with a tribe or in a village, and we'll train thousands of locals to fight along our side, right?
So that kind of force multiplying effect is really what we have.
I think probably the best modern example is the invasion of Afghanistan or the liberation of I should say of Afghanistan, where you have literally less than 50 Green Berets backed by the United States Air Force with tens of thousands of local warlords on horseback, most of them, that overthrew an entire Taliban army and took out much of Al Qaeda senior leadership, right?
Less than 50 Green Berets.
So that's really kind of our focus and our difference.
And, you know, it's one minute you're building a school and next minute you're blowing up a bridge.
One minute you're hosting a clinic with thousands of villagers and I've never seen a doctor and one of those villagers, because of that goodwill, tells you where the bad guy are and that night you're taking him out.
I call it kind of the PhD of warfare training.
And it's just been my honor to serve in that capacity.
Just hit 25 years.
That's pretty cool.
You're still in, correct, Colonel?
I'm still in.
I'm still a Colonel in the National Guard.
And we have confirmed the only member of Congress still jumping out of airplanes.
There you go.
I'm still finishing.
You hit 25. I'm at 20. I'll be starting a 21st tour here in the next couple months in the Air Force side.
I want to bring back, because we're going to get into a little bit of policy here, but you brought back up something that you worked for Rumsfeld, Donald Rumsfeld.
Yep.
I think as history is written, we'll become more and more a central figure of understanding almost most diplomatic and military issues from the 70s through the Bush administration and even past.
He wrote a little book called Rumsfeld Rules.
What was it like, and I've read through this book, and it's really practical stuff.
I don't care if you're in the military, business, whatever it may be.
What was it like working for somebody who literally, from the history books, will step out as being a giant among history?
Well, a lot of people forget or don't realize it was actually his second time as Secretary of Defense.
Exactly.
And to come back in at that level with that experience was significant.
He was...
You know, he was a tough boss.
I'll say many times he was kind of a jerk.
But he also pressured and pressed the system.
And he truly exercised civilian oversight of the military, of, I think, a general officer corps that in many ways has become politicized.
And of You know, kind of old habits and old traditions, and we're doing it this way because we already have, because we always have, to transform the military post-Cold War.
Now, obviously, 9-11 and then Iraq kind of upended a lot of that.
But, hey, look, at the end of the day, I was kicked out of a couple of meetings.
I take that as a point of pride.
He had these what they called Rumsfeld snowflakes, which were kind of random questions that he would dictate to his assistant with a tracking number on, you know, how to get back to him.
But it would be things like, why have we always done it this way?
Why are people getting out of the Army and the Marine Corps as we became, you know, exhausted and ground down?
What's the Navy and the Air Force?
How are they contributing?
Next thing I know, we saw the Navy getting off of ships and contributing and supporting roles in like supply and logistics and other types of things where they could pitch in.
So he was really disruptive.
And I think you're right.
History is going to take a different view on him over the years.
Yeah.
Well, I think that will be, and I think it'll be interesting to see over time what happens.
But one of the things there, and you just brought this up, and I think it's very important.
I'm seeing this.
I've talked about it some, and you see it in the Biden administration in particular, especially with what happened in Afghanistan.
I'm going to have to say it's unfortunately seen to be more of a trend in recent times over the past 20 years or so.
That civilian oversight, which is so important to our system of government and also our system of military and how it interacts with government.
Rumsfeld And I'm not being blanket here, but was one of those, as you said, took that very seriously.
What's it like, and I'm seeing it, I just want to hear it from you because you worked inside those policy shops.
It seems to me now that we're getting, we're skewing more towards civilians who are oversight of the military.
That are definitely more political, but you're also seeing generals, that general officer corps, more politicized.
And I think my concern is really hurting us, not only in readiness, but also in advice that is given.
Well, look, I think it was a mistake, just to be candid, to put recent general officers like General Mattis, and now General Austin, And as the Secretary of Defense, now, it does require a congressional waiver.
And during the waiver hearing for Austin, I said, look, I just have one question, you know, in the five minutes they get us.
General Austin, why does the Pentagon need another general?
You know, We need true civilian oversight.
And it's not disparaging his service at all.
But, you know, we've got dozens and dozens of generals already in the Pentagon.
We don't need another one with that same set of background and experience sets.
We need someone that brings in civil society or legal experience or industry experience, the defense Industrial base, supply chains, and asks those kind of tough questions because they haven't always been embedded in the system.
And I think we've really been lacking in our last couple of secretaries.
And it's just human nature for them to default to what they know and kind of behave more like a five-star general looking over the shoulder of all the four-star generals rather than someone with a true civilian expertise and in line with the president's agenda.
Whatever side of the aisle that president may be, then asking those tough questions of the military.
And then, of course, Congress has its oversight role as well.
You're right in that I think it's been a real strategic mistake.
For example, one of the things that I've really been pressing on is we just had this massive bipartisan infrastructure deal.
Not a dime went towards shipyards.
We've got four public shipyards that are now 100 years old, about 20 private ones, where the Chinese are on track to have 1,000.
Their Navy is now larger than the United States Navy.
It's also newer.
And here we are spending trillions.
And you would have thought the Secretary of Defense would have raised his hand in those policy deliberations and said, you know, the United States is a maritime nation.
We're a nation of traders.
We have to defend those trading routes.
What gives?
So that kind of strategic thought and whether it's getting to 3D manufacturing, that's getting into AI and how artificial intelligence is going to change the nature of everything, we need people that are asking those disruptive questions rather than more generals overseeing more generals.
Exactly.
Well, I'm going to bring up some.
It's a little sensitive, but we've already touched on it.
We're down at 16% of Congress is actually served in the military.
I had a member who, if I spoke, I'm not going to say the name, but you would know them.
I would.
And we served with them.
And there was an issue coming up about the military, and it was several years ago when I first come in, and I had a real problem with the OCO funding, the Overseas Contingency Funds.
We kept putting it aside for things that should have just been rolled back into the budget.
Instead, we were keeping it out of the budget, and so we just had an issue with it.
And I mentioned to this gentleman, who actually served on the Armed Services Committee, and I told him, I said, you know this isn't right.
And they said, yeah, I understand that, Doug, but I didn't serve.
I can't come out as if I'm against the military.
And I think what you just said about Mattis and about Austin, you know, and I'm not portraying why they were picked or anything else.
Don't get me wrong.
But that understanding of the military, you know, you don't need another general in the Pentagon.
I think that's something missing when you got only 16% even understand what the generals do at the Pentagon, much less everything else.
And are you still sensing that even on the Armed Services Committee itself?
Yeah, I think it's changing.
I think, you know, the I think that the class, the cycle before mine and my class and others, you have a much stronger percentage of veterans.
I'm actively recruiting veterans to run.
We have a pack dedicated to it.
And by the way, for everybody listening, it's not just in Congress.
We need veterans in county commissions and city councils and mayors and our state legislatures.
You know, that doesn't get the headlines, but that's really where the rubber meets the road.
And we saw that with COVID. Federalism matters.
We saw it with the elections, how much it matters.
We need veterans at every level.
But you're right.
I mean, I could come in with a different level, and you can too, of credibility to say, this isn't right.
You know it's wrong.
I know it's wrong.
We all got the same training when we were 18 years old.
Things like CRT being taught at West Point, the fact that they had over 100 cadets attending a seminar that Of how to deal with my whiteness and white rage is just absolutely devastating to unit morale.
When you're teaching that your soldier, your left and your right, is an oppressed and oppressor because of their skin color.
I have to order Green Berets to go charge a machine gun and one's black and one's white.
They have all kinds of questions about why I'm ordering him and not him.
It's terrible.
And with having 25 years of combat experience, you know, I think you can put your foot down in a different way than someone who hasn't served.
Well, it is.
And you have the credibility of being there and done that.
Let's take that and let's start expanding this out into some of the conversations right now on Capitol Hill.
Let's first go back.
I don't think you could...
And people have...
I've been on a lot of TV, a lot of interviews, and I've dealt with this issue.
I believe that Americans are very...
And I say forgiving, that's probably not the best word, but I'll just use that, of domestic issues, even from inflation, economy, you know, different issues.
They're forgiving of an administration up to a certain point, especially if they had a definitive for them to start with.
But what I have found over the years is...
The American public will not tolerate, Democrat, Republican, and especially Independents, will not tolerate what they perceive as weakness on the international stage.
They may not agree with it always, but they don't like to see America in either a no-win or a loss situation.
I say that, that I believe one of the biggest reasons for Joe Biden's I don't even think we know the full ramifications yet, Doug.
But I'll tell you, in terms of Biden's poll numbers, the data shows it.
It was a sharp inflection point.
And from, say, July of last year to September, because it just completely pulled the rug out from the three things that Biden sold himself on, on competence, you know, the adults were going to be back on the room, on credibility and on compassion.
And I've never seen a more heartless and clueless set of policy decisions in my life.
It was devastating from a human rights standpoint.
Not only the Afghan women and girls, but minority groups that are being hunted down and abused.
It was devastating for so many veterans who gave so much to see fellow Americans left behind and their allies.
It's devastating for our credibility.
It's no accident that Putin is now on the march, China's on the march, Iran is on the march.
After they watched us just abandon our ally, the biggest thing for me is it was a real shot in the arm to the global international jihadi terrorist movement that really truly was on its back foot after 20 years of us getting them there and with really a very small American footprint that President Trump had reduced us to.
Now, I had my concerns with the Doha agreement.
That they signed.
There were conditions that the Taliban absolutely were not living up to.
And I don't think if Trump had stayed in office, he would have stuck to that date because I know his senior security officials presented to him In January, all the deals, parts of the deal, the Taliban had broken.
And he said, all right, leave the troops there.
Let's leave Bagram Air Base there.
And we need to keep a lid on this thing.
The thing that has me so pissed off are those 13 Gold Star families that shouldn't have lost their loved one.
That suicide bomber was let out of the prison at Bagram just two weeks prior.
And they shouldn't have been asked to defend an airport Sitting in the smack in the middle of a city of four million people that the Taliban controlled.
And now we have nothing on the ground, no intelligence, no bases, no local allies.
And Biden wants to lie to us and say that can stop the rise of ISIS and Al-Qaeda.
And the intelligence is clear, Doug.
You know how the intelligence community will start coming to Congress to make sure they're covering their rear end.
So they can say we were told Al-Qaeda and ISIS intend to hit us again and they're rebuilding the ability to do so.
Just like we had to go back to Iraq after Obama yanked us out too fast and too soon, led to the rise of the ISIS caliphate.
I think you're going to see the same thing in Afghanistan.
But the difference is in Iraq, as you well know, we had bases in Israel and Jordan and Turkey.
We had the Kurds to work with on the ground.
We still have the government in Baghdad and Afghanistan.
We have none of that.
And that's going to cost future American soldiers' lives.
Well, too, and also the other thing is, I made a comment to one, we were talking about this, and it was the issue.
I said, you know, Afghanistan now is back at 1999-2000 level.
And this veteran quickly said, no, no, no, no, they're better than where they were then because they have more equipment than we left.
They have the infrastructure.
Oh, they were, yes.
Yeah, they have the infrastructure.
They have things that they didn't have before we were there.
I mean, we left almost a billion-dollar embassy with every technological.
And from the understanding that I'm seeing, you, again, being there over the past six months more than I have, we didn't destroy.
I mean, it's one thing to leave it.
It's another thing to leave it functional And how did that happen?
How could we have left Bagram?
I don't understand the military comprehension there and the civilian going along with abandoning Bagram coming to the middle of the city.
Well look, in fairness, I mean to be objective here, Almost all of that equipment and material, we didn't just leave it behind for the Taliban to scoop up.
We left it for the Afghan army to continue the fight.
So I just want to be clear there, but at the same time, anybody who spent a day even reading a military history book, much less serving, would know that in the middle of a fighting season, if you pull out Their air support, their logistics support, their maintenance support, their intelligence support.
You know, you just pull the rug out from under them.
And by the way, psychologically saying, we're out of here.
Excuse me.
It shouldn't surprise you that they that they then collapsed.
And then that's where the Taliban started scooping up so much of this equipment.
But as we saw that happening, why didn't we then start destroying it?
And when we went back in to do the evacuation, we should have gone back into Bagram.
But if you're not going to destroy it, too, because, you know, who's sitting there now?
The Chinese.
And, you know, it's not just about terrorism.
Bagram Air Base was the only base in the world sandwiched between China, Russia, and Iran.
Kind of important.
Just a few hundred miles away from China's new nuclear missile fields.
Also kind of important to have that territory.
And oh, by the way, sitting on top of nearly a trillion dollars worth of critical minerals, world's second largest lithium reserves, third largest copper.
I mean, it's just mind-blowingly stupid.
Well, and you're sitting there with a country now that has regressed, and it's back into that form, and you're seeing it as that superhighway, if you would, of jihadists and others who have gone.
And what just amazes me, and I agree with you about concerns about the Doha Agreement and others, I mean, you're dealing with a Taliban that is not a...
A rational thinking organization.
This is a bunch of thugs.
They're a bunch of rapists, pedophiles.
I mean, that's who these folks are, and they've not changed.
They've just reinvented themselves for this, and it's going to become a concern.
I think coming out of Afghanistan, which is what makes the crisis, and you talk about China coming in, and I think that's a connection that's not talked about enough with the outreach to the Taliban and the Afghan, is We now, sort of six months ahead, not completely, we're now faced with a country, Ukraine, that is sort of an isolated case.
It's not part of the EU, it's not part of NATO, but it's right next door to Russia.
They have a lot of interesting assets and interests there.
And Putin is flexing his military might.
Yeah.
Talk to us.
Let's transition to Ukraine, because that's on the hot list right now.
We've talked about it here on the podcast.
I had a correspondent from England.
We were talking about this and talking about that isolation function.
What concerns you right now with what you're getting and what you're seeing out of the Biden administration?
Yeah, so I just went out to Ukraine about a month ago, a bipartisan congressional delegation.
And the frustration amongst the Ukrainians, amongst our trainers.
We actually have Florida National Guard and some special operations forces there doing some training, small numbers.
And in the embassy itself, the frustration with the Biden administration, the indecision, the inaction.
How slowly they were moving with Ukrainians' requests.
And the whole tone and tenor coming from the White House was, we don't want to do anything to provoke Putin.
We don't want to instigate that Ukrainians were asking for stingers, for surface air missiles, for anti-ship missiles.
And I want to be clear to everybody listening.
The Ukrainians are ready to do the fighting.
Nobody's advocating for divisions of U.S. boots on the ground.
The Ukrainians are ready to do the fighting, but they're asking for help against this monster Russian army coming over the horizon, Adam.
And once again, you've got a concessions-first, America-last kind of policy coming from Don't shake the boat.
And if we're just nice enough to our adversaries, they'll be nice back.
Well, you and I know that's exactly what provokes dictators.
And when they smell that weakness, they smell opportunity.
So it's no surprise that Putin is doing this now.
He got away with it under the Obama administration.
He thinks he can get away with it again.
And why should Americans care?
Well, Putin is marching towards recreating and reimagining the old Soviet Union.
To challenge the United States on the global stage side by side with China.
And we're on a very slippery slope.
He's not going to stop with Ukraine.
And next is going to be Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia, Russian enclaves in Poland and elsewhere.
Those are NATO allies.
And that will mean...
American troops in a shooting match.
So we need to take a much tougher stand now, not after he invades.
Well, and I think that...
Interesting comment.
I'd love to hear your perspective on this, because I was talking about this the other day, and they were talking about if he comes across, and again, the issue of troops and others, which I agree with you, is probably not what we're going to see, but the financial sanctions, the gas sanctions.
Germany is backed up already, doing what...
Germany seems to be doing lightly, and that is sort of an economic interest above everything else.
If there were dramatic effects, the discussion went with these dramatic economic effects, especially in energy and other places, that it would actually have an interesting effect of pushing Putin toward Xi in China And China even growing its dominance because they have to have a place to get rid of their energy.
They have to have a place to get rid of their oil.
And the only country that can do that is the one that's in need.
Is that being explored enough on Capitol Hill?
Yeah, I don't think it's being explored enough.
I mean, actually, Putin is going to have a summit with Xi next week in the opening of the Olympics.
By the way, just as an interesting side note, dictators love the Olympics, and I've called for a full boycott of participating in Beijing, given their atrocities and COVID, their aggressiveness and everything else.
But Putin loves, you know, dictators love the Olympics and that propaganda platform.
He invaded Georgia during the last Beijing Olympics in 2008. He invaded Ukraine after the Sochi Olympics in 2014. And now we have the Beijing Olympics again.
He's on the cusp of another invasion.
But the point I wanted to make about oil and gas is I think they're going to ink a deal called the West Siberian Pipeline that will run from Russia to China through Mongolia and will pull from the same oil and gas field that also flows into Europe.
So that is a real prospect.
But I think the bigger piece is Biden's just disastrous energy policies and how this is feeding into it.
When you shut down our pipelines, when you shut down fracking, when you make it impossible to invest in new oil and gas and you move oil, And if we do clamp down on it,
The administration is now reaching out to Qatar, who shares a gas field with Iran.
Now Iran's going to be getting richer.
So rather than those going to American jobs and American oil and gas companies, which, by the way, are some of the cleanest in the world, we're now going to make our adversaries richer and bolder.
It's just mind-blowing.
It's just insane.
It is.
And it's going to be interesting to see how this Ukraine is in charge.
Oh yeah, but that's what we're seeing right now.
Real quick, on just a funny aside, what I'll call it, when is the Olympic Committee going to go back to putting the Winter Olympics where they actually have snow?
I don't know.
The number one criteria is they're putting the Olympics where they're making money.
The IOC is corrupt and has been influenced and bought off just like the WHO and so many others.
I actually just introduced a bill, bipartisan, got some Democrats on board to strip the IOC of its 501c4 status.
It's a tax-exempt organization as a social welfare organization.
And it shouldn't be.
It's doing anything.
But, by the way, Doug, it's pretty big money.
I mean, the NBC contract alone is $7.5 billion.
The IOC just sent $800 million into Beijing of our tax dollars, or tax dollars that should have been paid to us that are now tax-exempt, $800 million into Beijing's infrastructure.
Enough is enough.
And these woke...
Olympic-sponsor corporations that want to preach to Georgia about social justice, that want to boycott Major League Baseball over voter integrity, but yet want to turn a blind eye to a million Muslims in concentration camps, forced labor, torture, and modern-day slavery.
Again, we're going to call them out.
And I've got another measure to ban them from being able to sell to the United States military if they want to fund China, the Chinese Communist Party who's building up their military.
So, you know, we got to call all of this out and I'm tired of the hypocrisy.
Well, and I think that's what we got to have, you know, is be honest about it.
And it is, again, if you didn't understand the comment about snow, the place in Beijing, outside of Beijing, 67 miles, gets an average of two inches of snow a year.
That's what North Georgia gets, okay?
Let's just be honest here.
You know, go back to Switzerland, Lake Placid, you know, where do we go to these places?
Let's switch gears because we're coming up, you know, closing this discussion out, it won't be the last, but where do you see, you talked about taking and trying to get more military involved in this election cycle.
Most will say that, you know, the House is going to turn Republican.
It looks that way.
We're seeing a lot of that, you know, insight.
We're seeing the polls.
We're seeing that just coming together.
What do you see happening this year?
I mean, now we have a Supreme Court justice, which again will be in the Senate, but they've still got the budget.
You've still got the remnants of Build Back Better, which I think still will come about, but it'll be Build Back Mansion.
What do you see happening this year coming into the election?
Well, as you know, in an election cycle, we really have between now and about June, right, for them to get anything done before everybody's back in their districts really campaigning.
And, you know, it's really a shame we don't have a budget at all.
That Build Back Better has just sucked the oxygen out of the room for any other type of legislative activity, including just the very basic function of funding the government.
I am...
I'm really distraught about it because when that happens, when you hear this term continuing resolution that basically just kicks the can and we just go to last year's budget, that's not necessarily that bad except that for the military in particular – You can't do anything new.
That means no new ships, no new satellites, no new hypersonic.
The Chinese just launched their hypersonic missile we can't defend against, new AI initiatives, nothing.
It's basically just kind of a repeat of what they've done.
And that is really, really putting us behind in this global competition.
And it's a shame.
I mean, the Democrats just can't get their act together to get a very basic budget agreement.
Because they went for, you know, in a split House and a split Senate, they thought they could get grand slams with a massive overreach.
So, you know, we now have Biden said they're going to break Build Back Better up into chunks, so we're calling it the chunky plan.
I don't know which chunk we're going to see first, the Green New Deal chunk or the immigration chunk, but you're going to see a mix of that.
There is this kind of STEM-focused bill that you saw come out of the Senate.
It's a real high priority for Schumer called Endless Frontiers.
They also call it the China Competes Act.
Look, I'm all for this big investment into STEM and getting us back to, you know, a nation that's leading the world technologically and in math and science.
But the Democrats default to just throw massive amounts of money at it, whether those programs actually work or not, something we have to take a hard look at.
And of course, instead of just focusing on STEM, kind of like in our classrooms, you get all this other garbage that they try to tack on.
So I think we'll see those two things, the Build Back Chunky and the STEM Act and maybe, hopefully, a budget.
And I think past there, they're not going to be able to get much more done.
Thank God.
Yeah, that's right.
When they break it up, if they take it out of the reconciliation, you also know it's not going to happen.
So it's just simply messaging pieces at that point as well.
That's right.
They arguably only get one or two more reconciliation pieces.
You know, bites at the apple, so to speak.
I agree.
Well, and I think this is, you know, look, you've shown today as we've been talking about why I think, you know, vast experience is good.
It's not only the military, but it's a business experience.
It's, you know, the things in life that encompasses a whole...
And we're lacking that.
I think we need to have more, as you've talked about, more conversations about what reality needs to look like as we're going forward.
Because if we're simply, you know, basically campaigning every day for two years and then have a campaign, have an election, and then we just start campaigning again, it's the American people that are suffering as we go about this.
But real quickly, how's the newborn?
How's mom and everybody doing?
Oh, thank you.
Yeah, so, you know, we've got...
We've got our 18-year-old who's waiting breathlessly for where she's going to get admitted to college, and we started over with an infant, and somehow I got away with calling him Armie.
Go Army has a new meaning in the Waltz household.
He hit the drop zone heavy at 9.5 pounds.
The doctor said he would have been 12 if he had gone to full term.
He's eating, sleeping, and pooping.
There's somebody that needs definitely a reward on that one.
Folks, you've been listening to Mike Walls.
Mike's a 6th District of Florida, great friend, somebody that I trust dearly and just appreciate greatly.
Green Beret Ranger, has the military background but grew a business.
He's in Congress fighting and bringing up real solutions to real issues and I think that's what we need to have.
Mike, thanks for coming on this time.
We're going to definitely dig back in later.
I'd love to do a more in-depth drag on some of the foreign relations impacts of Afghanistan, Ukraine, and we can come back at that.
But thanks for being on today, and I'm just glad to be able to introduce the world to you even more, because you're one of those stars that are brightly shining, and we need to keep focused on that.
Well, thank you.
Thank you, brother.
I miss our small group sessions and God bless you.
God bless your family.
God bless this great country.
Appreciate it.
Thanks, man.
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