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Feb. 1, 2023 - Doug Collins Podcast
25:42
Are we really safe in the World
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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.
All right, folks, as you're seeing here, Mike Walsh, great up-and-coming from Congress, and Congressman from Florida.
Actually got to know him when he first came to D.C. We've had a lot of good time together.
But Mike, you've been there, what, going on six years, I guess, now, right?
I guess you're starting your age?
Yes, going on my third term.
Going on your third term.
I took, I actually ran and won Ron DeSantis' district when he ran for governor.
That's right.
That's right.
Well, coming up, you've had an interesting experience.
I want to talk about this when we get into some military, because your military background, you know, Special Forces, everything is incredible.
But think about this for just a second.
Getting ready to start your third term.
Is there anything about your career?
Because, I mean, you started, you know, the year when I was, you know, ranking member of judiciary.
We're dealing with impeachment.
We're dealing with all this kind of stuff.
Are you sort of hoping for what would be called a normal Congress this year?
Because you've not had it with pandemic, with everything else going on.
Yeah, no.
I mean, look, it's been a hell of a four years.
And I was just saying, when we were in the middle of the week-long speaker-a-thon vote, that...
I've either started with a government shutdown over wall funding, started with a riot, or started with the speaker's vote.
And then in between there, we've had multiple impeachments.
We've had COVID. We just had Nancy Pelosi, period.
So it's been a hell of a run.
It just definitely has not been boring, Doug, that's for sure.
Well, that's for sure.
Well, it will be interesting, though, to see actual members of Congress actually be in Washington, D.C. more than that.
Now, we just talked about the fact we don't see them at all, but there was some, literally, somebody told me, and I know Zoe Lofgren very well, we served on committee for a number of years together, but she was chairman of the House Administration Committee, and she was in Congress like three times in like an eight-month period.
There were about a half a dozen, I think it was Politico did an article on it, there was about a half a dozen Democrats that literally dialed it in through proxy voting, did not come to Washington for two years, except to vote for Nancy Pelosi as Speaker, because you can't do that by proxy.
But the rest of the time, they literally did not come.
I think you saw that in a lot of the lack of production, the partisanship, and how Pelosi really was fine with it, because she would take these trillion-dollar bills into her office, no committee work, no debate, no amendments, and then spring it on us with two hours to read a thousand-page bill with an up-or-down vote.
And so that's a lot.
The Speaker's vote and getting to yes for some people, a lot of it was assurances that those things would change, that we would get back to what we call, as you know, regular order, that things would move through committee, that would move through debate, move through amendments, and get back to really representing the people for all of us, not just a couple of staffers in the Speaker's office, which is how it was under Pelosi.
Oh, very much so.
And, you know, two things I want to get on to that.
One is the partisanship issue.
You know, it's really easy to be angry at somebody you don't know.
Right.
Have you ever thought about that?
It's about like, I had an old pastor friend of mine one time.
He told me, because I was expressing I had frustration for a member of my congregation.
Because, you know, I remember I pastored for 11 years.
And I was saying, oh, I'm having real trouble with this person.
He said, have you prayed for him?
And I did my obligatory.
Yeah, I prayed.
And he said, no, no, no.
Have you actually lifted them up in prayer?
And it struck me, it hit me, and I said, okay, I'll do that.
And when I started lifting them up in prayer, I still was frustrated, but it was harder to be upset.
It's like, you know, and it's the same way with people, you know, members of Congress that you don't know, well, you're bad, you're this.
Look, we can disagree, and we're going to have vehement disagreements, but I think what you just said there, putting them back in the chamber is a pretty good thing.
No, it is.
And you well know, people get really brave and tough on email or on Facebook or on Twitter.
But when you're actually with someone and you're trying to work things out and you get a bit of their perspective, I think that makes all the difference.
And at least understanding where they're coming from.
And as I tell a lot of my constituents who just can't imagine how some people would put forward the things they do, number one, our media now is operating in completely different universes.
I've told some of my base voters, spend a month Watching nothing but MSNBC and CNN and you think you're on a different world and vice versa.
And then, of course, social media, you're getting reinforced only by people who think and look and act like you, your friends.
And so, as a country, we're going down these silos and now...
Now we're actually physically moving with the people coming into Florida, Georgia, Texas, Tennessee, and escaping Illinois and Massachusetts and California.
But I mean, we're physically balkanizing now.
And, you know, I think one of the solutions to that is to get us back to national service.
We're missing that forcing function.
Whether you were black, white, or brown, Christian, Jewish, you know, in the past, you were all forced together for a greater good to serve the red, white, and blue.
And, you know, if you couldn't get over your differences, you had a drill sergeant's boot up your butt to kind of help you get there.
And just final thing on that, it really came home to me.
There was a World War II veteran.
That I became close with in Jacksonville, Florida.
He since passed.
But he told me, coming from the segregated South, back in his day, he never had a relationship with a person of color or what he called a liberal or anything.
And then, you know, he got on his first ship in the Navy and they were literally sleeping on top of each other.
His first bunkmate was black and they became lifelong friends.
They didn't agree on everything, but they understood each other better.
So I think we're missing that in our society now.
Well, and let's jump off of that a little bit further because I think it works into, and I know an area of the wokeness and some of the things that, look, you and I both are still in.
I'm in the Air Force.
You're in the Army as well.
And this is something that I think is there.
Recruitment, a lot of these issues are down.
I did some of my drill time when I was in D.C. actually at a unit there for reservists in Washington.
We had some three-star general from former personnel folks who came in.
Now, I'm not saying I completely agree with what they're saying, but it was an interesting project when they came in and said, look, we're at a point now to where we really need to consider the draft again.
We really need to consider...
You know, this issue of bringing people in, like you said.
Now, there's an immediate repulsion of that.
You know, oh, we can't do that.
We're getting fined.
Yeah.
But Mike, look long term here.
And one of the first arguments, and it was an interesting argument, I won't name the Republican who actually made the argument, but it said, well, you know, that means that, you know, unit cohesion and morale and everything would go down.
And they said it didn't in World War I, it didn't in World War II, it didn't in Korea, and it didn't in Vietnam.
It explained that.
So it was an interesting argument.
I know we're not there, but is at least there's some conversation saying we got to do something different?
Well, you know, a couple of things.
One, you know, I don't think you have to wear a uniform to serve your country.
You know, you can, there's a FEMA volunteer corps for disaster relief.
There's national parks, there's inner city tutoring, there's rural medicine.
But you learn leadership, discipline, teamwork, followership, and you serve something besides yourself with people who don't look or act or came from the same place that you do.
So I think there's, that's why I call it national service, number one.
And number two, I do think we'd have a hell of a time going back to a draft.
The Israelis do it, but their population is 9 million, ours is approaching 350. But Doug, you know, I mean, you've got Elizabeth Warren talking about just Giving college away and Bernie talking about debt relief.
I think society should get something in exchange for that.
I think that's healthy for the citizen and for the citizenry.
And so, you know, I have a bill called the National Service GI Bill where you graduate high school, you go serve, whether it's in the Forest Service or in the Marine Corps or in inner city tutoring or Teach for America.
And then you get those educational benefits that everybody's talking about after you've given back and you become a better citizen because of it.
So I think there's a lot of ways we could tweak it.
That said, we are facing a recruiting crisis in the military.
It's the worst that we've faced since Vietnam.
The army alone fell 25,000 short Last year, and they're on track to not make it again this year.
Look, at some point, especially with 70% of young people that don't even basically qualify physically or with a criminal or drug background, you know, somehow this has got to come to a head.
I'm going to be chairman of military readiness on the Armed Services Committee, and it's going to be our top priority of getting to the bottom of this recruiting and retention crisis.
Well, okay, and I'm glad you brought that up.
You sort of got it on my train of thought here.
The question I have, though, Mike, in looking at this, because, again, I'm dealing with recruitment in the Chaplain Corps.
We're dealing with recruitment all over.
There's issues here, and we've seen it go with the struggles here, especially with who can get in and age and everything else.
But one of the issues that seems to be coming up is that you mentioned $25,000 short.
That doesn't account for what has happened when we had those that we lost Due to mandates or leaving and things like that.
So you set the $25,000 here.
You are already in a hole in many of these units that are not accounted for in that $25,000.
I would love to hear this because I hear this a lot from folks.
I just want to give your take on it.
A lot of people in the military are glad.
I'm going to be frank.
It's mixed.
You had the mixed opinion of the NDAA where they said, okay, no more vaccine mandate.
And you had 98% of the military said, wait, we've already been forced to take this.
We get it.
But then at the same point, it made no provision at all for those who had been put in IRR or others to our career issues.
What are you hearing now?
You're going to be in charge of readiness.
What are you hearing now as the next steps?
Well, first things first, you know, I mean, we negotiated and I give Kevin McCarthy a lot of credit.
He took it to the president in a very forceful way and said, we're not going to get a defense bill.
We're not going to get any spending bills until we drop the vaccine mandate.
Because on top of the 25,000, we fell short.
The National Guard and reserves were on the verge of discharging another 20,000.
So first, we had to stop the bleeding and save those 20,000 from being discharged.
And we dropped the vaccine mandate in the last defense bill.
Doug, was a mandate for the Pentagon to come back to us in the Armed Services Committee and tell us what it's going to take to make people whole.
And it's not just back pay or drill pay, but it also, I mean, there are service members who didn't get to go to the schools that they needed.
They're required for promotion.
They haven't gone to certain training, so now they've fallen out of certification, whether that's pilots or medics or cyber warriors.
They were expelled from deployments or held back from deployments.
So it is going to be a much more complicated issue.
And the reality I'm hearing from a lot of service members is they're so fed up, they're so frustrated, and they've lost so much trust because they were treated basically like criminals.
You know, over a vaccine that, look, for me, the game changer was once it was evident it didn't stop the spread, whether you took it or not, then it became a personal health decision.
And you're talking about the healthiest population in the country.
So the actual science, the percentages were minuscule of service members that were getting seriously sick.
But getting them back to hold the ones that were adversely affected is what we're going to be focused on in this next defense bill.
Cool.
Two parts to that.
Number one, I was asked this direct question the other day, because we had, you know, from a recruiting standpoint, does a teenager, an 18, 20-year-old, 21-year-old, whatever, going into the Army, any of the branches, because right now there is a mandate, well, it was, okay, but yet it was still left to the commands to implement operationally.
Okay, so a 20-year-old wants to go into the Army right now, Air Force right now.
Will the basic training accept them?
Will they be able to go to basic training without a shot?
My understanding, and I say that very carefully, is yes.
Doug, but you nailed it because he left himself a lot of wiggle room in that operational implementation.
So it's going to be one of our first hearings with, and I'm not sure if it'll be a full Armed Services Committee or my subcommittee, but that's going to be right out the gate is how is this being implemented throughout the force and how is it affecting recruiting and how is it affecting retention?
So TBD, I'll have to come back to you in about a month and let you know how it's actually being implemented.
Well, great.
And I'm glad to hear that going forward because there's just a lot of questions out there.
And for those of us who are still in reserve side like you and I are, which is a different animal, and I'm so glad to see you're going to be in the position you're in because you will bring a perspective that active duty, I don't care how long they've been there or how many may have had reserves, there is a difference in our units.
And they're one force.
But they need to be handled differently.
I can't wait to see you and how you're going to handle that.
I'm so proud of you getting to that position as we go.
Moving forward just a little bit on this as well, because you did mention a lot of this.
Where do we go?
What...
You've seen it as well as I have.
There seems to be more of an interest in our military and the big ship, if you would, than the fighting force.
I'm putting this about as loosely as I can.
What do you see that coming from a readiness perspective or from the armed services perspective?
Well, look, I think the world right now is getting a global lesson on what readiness means or what it doesn't mean.
And that's with the Russian, you know, the massive.
Fantastic failure of the Russian military.
And what we say when we mean readiness, those are things like training, doctrine, leadership, morale, logistics, maintenance, the ability of the country's industrial base to kind of keep the war machine going and fully supplied.
So it's very easy and our intelligence, not very, but our intelligence community is very good at Counting the big planes, tanks, and ships and seeing where they're going and detecting them as they're moving.
But it's not very good and really missed it when it came to its evaluation of the Russian military on all of those other kind of softer things.
And so, look, if you can have the best equipment in the world, but if you don't have the training, the ability, the leadership, the discipline, the doctrine to actually employ those machines, to employ those assets, then you're going to fail.
And so that's what we have oversight of in our committee.
And to tell you where we're going, we've got to get back to focusing our military on winning wars and about standards.
And to me, I don't care if you're black, white, brown, gay, straight, whatever, Christian, Jewish.
If you're the best soldier, the best pilot, you meet the standards, then that's what it's about.
But this administration is obsessed with all of those other things.
And it is a distraction.
It's hurting our recruiting.
It's hurting our readiness.
It's hurting our retention.
Because we're hearing it.
I think the Biden administration thinks Republicans are just making this stuff up about CRT and this over-focus on gender or whatever.
It's coming to us from the soldiers.
It's coming to us from the cadets.
Well, I have Air Force cadets' families sending me slides where the Air Force Academy is telling young 18-year-old cadets, don't say mom and dad, don't say boyfriend, girlfriend, say parent or partner.
And when you've got West Point teaching a seminar titled, How to Understand Your Whiteness and White Rage that 120 of our future military leaders attended, That's unacceptable.
And we're going to stop it in our committee.
We're going to put it in law.
And we're going to cut that stuff out.
We're going to get them back to focus on winning wars.
Period.
Yeah.
And I think this is an interesting issue, too.
And again, it's tender for both of us sort of talking about this because we bear the dual hats of being in and out of the military in this kind of sense of looking at it.
So it's a cautionary tale.
But it does seem that this has become a...
A top ring problem, if you would.
By the time the politicization is at the top, it's more of, how do we make ourselves more palatable to Washington than we are, how are we more palatable to fighting a war with China or fighting a war with others?
And those standards, look, we get it in the military.
It is the great equalizer.
We look at each other and say, either you're pulling your weight or you're not pulling your weight, and we're going to fix that.
And chaplains, I mean, we see it, you know, from different perspectives because we hear people come and talk about it.
So, I mean, so I think this is really going to be key to coming out.
If you were talking to parents and they were looking at, I think the Air Force has done some good articles, I mean, good ads recently about, you know, I want to do this.
What would you tell parents now about the military and saying, yes, this is a good place for your son or daughter?
Well, I would tell you, I have yet to come across a veteran that says, I regret serving this great nation.
I regret serving a cause higher than myself with great men and women to the left and right of me, defending our freedoms around the world that we can never take for granted, being a part of American leadership and working with our allies in line with our value.
Getting those basic life skills of leadership, discipline, followership, teamwork, and often technical skills as well.
And the military was a path out of poverty for me, has been for so many others into the middle class of America.
You don't have to do it for 25 years, mom or dad.
You can go and serve and be proud of that and move on to do other things.
But here's what it's not, and I think that's important.
It is not overrun with white supremacy.
In fact, the Pentagon's own study, which we forced them to do because of this narrative, showed that 100 members out of 2.5 million, that's.0004% engaged in some form of extremist behavior.
Minuscule rounding error.
The military is about merit, it's about achievement, and it's about taking care of one another in teamwork.
So it is still absolutely a great place to be.
And I think we have to have, Doug, what we don't have, Right now is the Secretary of the Army, the Secretary of the Air Force out in schools, out in inner cities, out in living rooms, like SEC coaches do, right?
Saying, this is why, you know, we need, you can trust us with your son and daughter and their future.
And instead, you've got them almost kind of bad-mouthing the military, because I think the left To its core, believes this is kind of a bad country.
And it isn't the greatest country on earth.
And we're seeing that reflected with the Democrat leadership in the Pentagon.
Yeah, well, it seems to me like it's almost like, go back to use your recruiting analogy for the SEC, we're recruiting in the wrong areas.
You know, the ones you're making the recruiting pitch to are not joining the military.
And the pitch you're making to them is actually turning off those where they do come into the military.
Yeah, look, I mean, I told the leadership of the Army, you know, whose recruiting base is the Midwest and the South.
I said, these young men and women want to jump out of planes and kick in doors and, you know, do cyber warriors, be pilots, and defend the red, white, and blue.
They're not worried about whether a young lady with two moms, you know, is accepted.
Nobody cares when you're on a mission.
I don't care where your background is.
Can you shoot?
Can you get there?
Can you get there?
That's all I want to know.
Right place, right uniform, right time, and take care of my six.
That's it.
And so they've got to shift their approach because digging out of this hole is going to take many years.
And I tell you what, the Chinese, the North Koreans, the Iranians, the Venezuelans, the Cubans, They're not worried about all that other stuff.
They're worried about killing Americans if they have to.
And that's it.
Well, I know one thing.
Right time, right place, right man.
We've got that right now on the Readiness Committee in the United States Congress.
Mike Waltz is going to be there.
Mike will be back on the show many times.
We've raised a lot of thoughts.
I am excited to have you there.
Genuinely excited to have you in that position with a lot of the readiness and personnel issues that are going on in the military.
Because you provide a great balance between active, reserve.
You also look at it in a forward thinking.
So, Mike, thanks for being a part of the podcast today.
I know y'all got lots of work this week.
Look forward to having you on again soon, okay?
All right.
See you soon.
Thank you.
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