Aug. 1, 2017 - Steve Pieczenik
04:57
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| Hi, this is Dr. Steve Pachanek, and this is Steve Talks. | |
| Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, this is Dr. Steve. | |
| Steve Pechenek. | |
| This has been quite a turbulent week at the end of July 2017. | |
| We begin with the disastrous performance of our politicians, particularly McCain, McConnell and Ryan, who only had seven years to evaluate Obamacare, make some critiques that were positive, and replace it with a Republican agenda. | |
| None of that occurred, thanks to the fact that they're neither professional nor very effective. | |
| Once again, our Republican politicians have failed America. | |
| In contrast, I must say that the replacement of Reens Priebus, who was the Chief of Staff at the White House, has been replaced by General John Kelly. | |
| I do not know John Kelly, but I do know his former command, which is South Com, or Southern Command. | |
| I used to work in Southern Command with another general who was very talented, just like John Kelly, a man by the name of Mark Cisneros. | |
| Both gentlemen bring a certain professionalism and a certain efficiency that the civilians do not have. | |
| They also have an incredible amount of diplomacy and experience dealing with different personalities and different cultures. | |
| I want to congratulate President Trump for having replaced both Spicer and Priebus, something I had suggested from the very beginning a year ago. | |
| Now let me talk a little bit about Thomas Raymond III, who was head of SOCOM, Special Operations Command. | |
| He gave an interview at Aspen Institute and made a very important statement. | |
| He said, I am not sure whether America understands how to use our special forces or whether they're being abused or overused in Afghanistan. | |
| And I heed his point. | |
| The point is very important. | |
| The special forces were created years ago in order to be the spearhead of our formidable military. | |
| They are not to be used in every conflict that has gone on as the Afghanistan conflict has for over 16 years. | |
| Special Forces represents only 2% of the DOD budget and 2% of the personnel. | |
| We have to use these elite forces in a very special way when we're finding and targeting high-value targets in terrorists and countries that we need to cut through the military where they don't have an efficient military and we need the spearhead of the Special Forces. | |
| So let's not abuse our Special Forces. | |
| Now I would like to talk a little bit about a film that I just saw on Netflix, and I recommend it to everybody. | |
| It's called The Last Days of Vietnam. | |
| It was directed and produced and written by Rory Kennedy, the daughter of Bob Kennedy. | |
| She did a brilliant job of showing how incompetent we, the United States, was. | |
| In the final days of Vietnam, In not being able to be prepared for the evacuation of both civilians and military personnel on the ground. | |
| In contrast as well, she showed the heroism of many Marines, contractors, military officers and a certain individual by the name of Richard Armitage, whom I had worked with in the State Department. | |
| When he was in the Defense Department, Richard defied all orders from above, including the presidential order to cease and desist, and saved the lives of thousands and thousands of South Vietnamese when he brought them into the Philippines. | |
| The moral of the story is that Vietnam has become a metaphor for our military. | |
| We didn't plan well for it. | |
| We were not effective in strategy and we were not effective in tactics. | |
| As McMaster, who now works in the White House, said, we had a major dereliction of duty. | |
| I would like to end this video by a quote from Sun Tzu, which says that if you're going to go to war, make sure you win the war before you shoot a bullet. | |
| What he was talking about is using psychological operations to take down your enemy. | |
| Thank you and good night. | |
| Hi, this is Dr. | |
| Steve Cheney. |
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