Learn English with Stephen K. Bannon. President Donald J. J. Trump joins America s warriors aboard a mighty aircraft carrier as we celebrate two and a half centuries of sea power, explosive demonstrations, military might, unstoppable strength, Navy to 50, sea power and freedom.
00:13:37.660I've got Jim Berchers who's going to join us here in a moment because we're going to get a lot of geopolitics in here, a lot of strategy, because you're going to have to kind of set the framework.
00:13:45.660Particularly folks, obviously, you follow the war room.
00:13:51.660One of the most fundamental pivots that we're going through under America First, because we're not isolationists.
00:13:58.660There is an isolationist wing. There's no doubt about that in the America First movement.
00:14:09.660He's trying to bring two wars, two bloody wars to an end right now, one in the Middle East and one in the bloodlines in Ukraine.
00:14:16.660Also, at the same time, trying to stare down the Chinese Communist Party in the South China Sea in Taiwan.
00:14:21.660But for the first time since World War II, there is, and I would say actually since a rise to power in the Spanish-American War as a global power, there is now a kind of a pivot back to what would be hemispheric defense.
00:14:37.660And we are trying to, here at the war room, make sure that we're defining hemispheric defense appropriately.
00:14:45.660And this is why Cleo and her work in the Pacific has been so vitally important when we get into that.
00:14:52.660Captain Fanon, I want to go to you about, really, in the history of the Navy.
00:14:56.660You had the Revolutionary War, which were, we're essentially a group of freebooters, I would guess.
00:15:02.660You had John Paul Jones and, you know, Commander Roy Barrett.
00:15:05.660You had, we really weren't an organized Navy.
00:15:08.660In 1812, we played a much bigger, we played a big role in the Revolution, don't get me wrong, but more of a decisive role in 1812.
00:15:15.660Obviously, a very decisive part of the Civil War that's never really been, I don't think, that well documented how important the Navy was in the Civil War.
00:15:25.660And particularly keeping us out of war with Great Britain during the Civil War, which a lot of people in the Confederacy were pushing for.
00:15:32.660But then, really, it's the Spanish-American War.
00:15:35.660And I want to tie this to, you know, President Trump, as much as he relates to Andrew Jackson and other populists, right, and Reagan, he is very fond of McKinley.
00:15:47.660Because of McKinley's global view, and particularly on terrorists, but also McKinley in the Spanish-American War, the late 19th century.
00:15:54.660Those, those young men that had been on the battlefield of the Civil War, when they actually came to actually guide the country.
00:16:02.660And the Spanish-American War, we really became a global power in the beginning of a true naval power globally.
00:16:09.660And for the rest of our time, really, the United States Navy, as much or maybe even more than the Army, has defined American geopolitics.
00:16:17.660And now we find ourselves in the 21st century, at the end of the first quarter of the 21st century, at a fundamental crossroads of the American Empire and the expansion of the American Empire and what's really going to happen, what can we afford, what's right.
00:16:32.220And this is a debate that's going on, and it's centered on the United—a lot of it's centered around the role and place and strategic necessity of the United States Navy.
00:16:42.480And even in that, what that Navy will look like is the 12- or 13-carrier battle group strategy of force projection, something that's from ancient times and with drones and artificial intelligence.
00:16:55.180And we are going to have people on later in the day to talk about drone warfare, to talk about artificial intelligence and how it's changing naval warfare.
00:17:02.640Just your thoughts on the United States Navy is kind of—because Manifest Destiny, I think the brilliance of that generation that was in the late 19th century, Manifest Destiny did not end at the shoreline of the Pacific.
00:17:16.840They viewed us as a continental power, but a continental power that projected all the way to the three island chains in the Pacific and really to open Japan and then China.
00:17:35.760Yeah, Steve, there's no question that the Spanish-American War was kind of the beginning of our global naval operations in a serious way.
00:17:44.860And from that time, it continued, as I mentioned before, the Great White Fleet, but that foray into the Far East and the constant presence that we had there and the ability to project our power and achieve our national objectives of that time, that blossomed under the 20th century in the foundations of what came out of World War II,
00:18:10.560where for the last 80 years, we have been the global naval power.
00:18:24.220You know, we were certainly at the end of World War II, but we sustained that throughout the Cold War.
00:18:29.700And what we've seen over the last, you know, four decades, essentially, is a drawdown where we've cut the Navy in half, while at the same time, this pure competitor called the People's Republic of China has now got the largest Navy in terms of numbers of ships, numbers of anti-ship cruise missiles at sea that are vital for victory at sea and war at sea.
00:18:50.160And they're also fielding now these new unmanned vehicles, like extra-large unmanned undersea vehicles that they're testing off of Heinen Island or unmanned surface vehicles that they unveiled this week, a trimaran that's going to be part of what they call their kill web.
00:19:05.760So we're now at this point where we kind of neglected and ignored the Navy component of our national security structure, not in terms of dollars spent and numbers of ships in terms of carriers and things of that nature, but our overall strategy of making sure that we stayed ahead of pure competitors.
00:19:25.660We've kind of let that atrophy for a number of reasons.
00:19:29.200And now the question is, what are we going to do about it, as you suggested just now, is what's the path forward and how are we going to get there?
00:19:36.060And this step today where the president of the United States is going to see onboard an active carrier that I don't think has been done since President Bush went aboard and, you know, declared victory in the Iraq war.
00:19:48.420It's been a long time, and that was an actual shooting war.
00:19:52.820Here we are this time in essentially a war against the Chinese, a cold war, and our president is going to sea, and he's saying this is important.
00:20:02.000And the speech that he gave last week in Quantico, he also talked about victory at sea and the fact that we need to be victorious at sea.
00:20:09.600And that's something that our Navy leadership, you know, they talk about, they fund in certain aspects, but we really haven't been thinking about having victory at sea in the same way that we watched soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan when they were getting blown up by IEDs on their Humvees were being overturned and people were being killed.
00:20:31.280We didn't retreat into our garrisons and say, oh, well, IEDs are killing us.
00:20:37.380No, we figured out a way to up-armor our Humvees, put Kevlar on our people, and we took the fight to the bad guys in the desert arena.
00:20:46.480But in the naval arena, we've been afraid essentially of Chinese missile systems, whether it's a DF-21D or the DF-26 or now these new hypersonic missiles like the DF-17.
00:20:58.340And we had a mentality that says, well, we can't operate inside those weapons envelopes, so we're going to have to continually move to the east.
00:21:06.400And I think what I heard the president say last week was, no, we need to be able to operate inside those weapon envelopes, take the hit, and keep fighting.
00:21:14.880And that's the spirit and attitude that I really like to see, and I hope it infuses – it lights a storm inside the Pentagon.
00:21:22.060I think President Trump looks at this not as Bush's mission accomplished.
00:21:28.240I think he looks at this as his Teddy Roosevelt moment, which he does relate to Teddy Roosevelt.
00:21:33.200Particularly Teddy Roosevelt was welded to American naval power, the Great White Fleet Review.
00:21:39.720I think the Great White Fleet Review under Roosevelt actually took place in Norfolk, if I remember correctly.
00:21:46.120It went all over the world, but I think actually the president went down and reviewed it at – because Norfolk, the Navy base at Norfolk, since the Civil War, has been the principal naval base of the United States Navy.
00:21:58.220And I know the – although Captain Fennell and I are Pacific Fleet sailors, it is the largest and, I think, most complicated naval base in the world.
00:22:07.980You've got the Little Creek Amphibia space right there.
00:22:12.140It is quite a compound there in Virginia Beach and Norfolk.
00:22:15.860Like, real quick, before I go back to Cleo and to bring Jim Rickards to the conversation, you hit on a point I want people to understand.
00:22:25.300We've had this moment kind of before – when I came off sea duty in the late 19 – in 1980, I get back to D.C., as I told people, right, for the inauguration of President Reagan, went to work as a junior officer for the Chief of Naval Operations, Op 090X, which kind of ran the board of directors of the Navy, the flag officers.
00:22:49.420Admiral Stacer Holcomb was my direct boss, and then, of course, the great Hayward, who was a Navy fighter pilot, was the Chief of Naval Operations at that time.
00:23:01.000We came off, Jim, and the first thing that struck us – and we could see this under Carter and was one of the reasons, even as a junior officer in the workup, we had left – we had rotated back right before the strike to get the hostages out.
00:23:16.360But you could tell it was – you know, you didn't have the capacity, the lift capacity.
00:23:21.580I mean, there was a lot of complication, different helicopters, different systems.
00:23:25.440It was – we tried to do the best we could.
00:23:28.320People wanted to work up to it every day, but you saw where the problems were going to be.
00:23:31.880Also, the Navy, I think, had gotten under, I think, around 200 capital ships, right, actual function.
00:23:37.720I think maybe the overall number is 250, but I think the real number is 200.
00:23:41.600One of Reagan's first things in his – because, remember, Reagan was different than Kissinger or different than Nixon, different in all of them.
00:23:50.420They were coming off the George F. Kennan containment strategy.
00:23:55.200What he wanted was victory against the evil empire.
00:23:58.160One way they knew they could do it was to bury the Soviets under our technology and particularly our naval power, and he committed immediately to build a 600-ship navy immediately.
00:24:08.020It was one of the biggest things in the defense budget.
00:24:09.740That shook up people back then, right?
00:24:18.540Just the building of that was essential.
00:24:20.740It put the Soviets back on their back foot.
00:24:22.640They really never could comprehend how they would compete with really a navy that had 600 warships.
00:24:29.040Give me a minute on that before we go to break, Captain Fennell.
00:24:32.520Yeah, it's a vitally important history, Steve.
00:24:34.520At that time, as you were making that transition to the Pentagon, the Soviet navy was the biggest navy in the world, and they were operating globally in the Mediterranean, in the Pacific.
00:24:46.080They had Yankee ballistic missile submarines operating off of our east and west coast within 200 or 300 miles, putting our capital at risk within minutes from a ballistic missile attack.
00:25:02.320And what President Reagan, as you rightly said, it was a we win, you die kind of mindset for him compared to the containment strategy that had gone on before in the Cold War.
00:25:13.000And he unleashed something that changed the balance of power.
00:25:42.200We're going to take a short commercial break.
00:25:43.840We'll be back in the warm in just a moment.
00:25:59.700We'll be right back with more Navy 250, sea power, and freedom.
00:26:05.260We want to thank our sponsor, Patriot Mobile, for standing with RAF.
00:26:12.200Welcome back to Navy 250, sea power, and freedom.
00:26:20.120We want to thank our sponsor, Birch Gold Group, for standing with RAF.
00:26:24.640Okay, I want to thank my co-host, Captain Jim Fennell, that joins us, one of the most brilliant men I've ever met about the United States Navy, its history and its firepower and the geopolitics as all of it.
00:26:41.940Cleo Pascal, as you know, Cleo has kind of taken the lead on really what is the strategic heartland of this country, the importance of the Pacific and the geopolitics of defense of the homeland or hemispheric defense as we talk about it.
00:26:56.200We're going to get into all that in detail today.
00:26:57.820Jim Rickards joins us, Michael Pack, the great filmmaker.
00:27:15.260But he also directed a brilliant film, Rickover.
00:27:19.440We made the film, the only film about Admiral Rickover.
00:27:21.820I think that's kind of a non-documentary with Tim Blake Nelson playing Admiral Rickover.
00:27:27.460It's absolutely magnificent and a hidden gem.
00:27:30.440Jim Rickards, you're my guy on geopolitics, capital markets.
00:27:34.720We're here at an inflection point in the 21st century.
00:27:38.200I might also add, when you talk about the last time this happened, Bush went after mission accomplished, President Trump is coming out today to a carrier for a carrier strike group or a carrier battle group, as I still call it, to watch a gunfire naval exercise with missiles, guns, jets, helicopters, all of it, submarines, all the assets the Navy brings together.
00:28:01.980I think we've got two, as Monica Crowley speaks today, Ambassador Crowley is going to be one of the early speakers, a couple of Navy SEALs, and we are going to have Eric Prince and Tej Gill, two Navy SEALs, join us.
00:28:15.300In the 12-day war, I think, and I'm not saying this because I'm a Navy guy, but I continue to argue the most destructive capability of the total obliteration at the 12-day war.
00:28:29.600And God bless our air assets coming out of Nebraska and delivered that decisive blow to the Iranian or the Persian nuclear power program.
00:28:39.420But the good old United States Navy and I think fast attack submarines delivered 30 Tomahawk missiles that took down at least 40 percent of the capacity that was out there that the Israeli Air Force was unable to take out.
00:28:51.740These were kind of surface facilities.
00:28:53.840And so I think the Navy still proves that it's got striking power everywhere in the world.
00:29:00.960What are the geopolitics of this, Jim?
00:32:42.720Andy Marshall's one of the most significant individuals behind the scenes in the entire 20th century.
00:32:47.860I mean the basic strategy of the American empire was really thought through by – and today people, when you say net assessment, they think it's something to do with the internet.
00:57:49.920You have the look of the grace of God that came in and made these things possible for us to win incredible battles against all odds, time and again, for this nation to be standing here 250 years later, Steve.
00:58:02.560And I think that cannot be overstated.
00:58:04.600When you look at the impressive, I mean, it is really jaw-dropping to sit here.
00:58:09.460Like I said, I'm like a kid looking at all this impressive machinery thinking, thank God I'm an American.
00:58:14.780And I really mean that because it's a great place to be.
00:58:33.580And let me do one more thing before I jump back to you.
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00:58:59.360Tell you what, Gruber, you totally nailed it.
00:59:04.620In fact, I've got to go off your comment there, which is so perceptive.
00:59:10.100This is one of the reasons I think the Navy hymn is so powerful for those who have been in the Navy because of the Divine Providence intervention in so many of our naval battles.
00:59:20.060I want to – so I'm going to pivot here.
00:59:22.800I want to go back to – President Trump is a lover of history, particularly military history.
00:59:28.160He has seen the Samuel Elliot Morrison off of his great writing of the naval operations of the Second World War.
00:59:36.320They made the film Victory at Sea, a multi-part documentary that Michael Pakwell has appreciated.
00:59:47.720This is – he's very much like Teddy Roosevelt in that regard of he is looking forward to today, and it's a long time coming.
00:59:54.380I think we should have done it many years ago, but President Trump is doing it today, and it couldn't be more appropriate on the 250th anniversary of the birth of the Navy.
01:00:03.460But, Fennell, you first, and then Rickards on this.
01:00:07.380It's about – I want to make the point about the Chinese Communist Party Navy today.
01:00:11.420Anyway, in World War II, given all the overwhelming power in the buildup of the Imperial Japanese Navy where they actually thought – although the Imperial Japanese Army kind of ran the deal with Tojo and the military dictatorship that essentially ran Japan, their Navy was the striking force against the United States.
01:00:32.100It's the great power in the economic co-prosperity sphere.
01:00:34.940They had to take it out of the United States Navy, and they were going to take it out of Pearl Harbor.
01:00:38.060One thing we found, both at Pearl Harbor and Midway and Leyte Golf and Earth, the ability to fight the ship, the ability to make those naval battles unlike any other battles in the world because they're so lethal, they're so confusing, there's so much happening.
01:00:54.400It's so happening so quickly that their inability, what we call fight the ship, to make fundamentally bad decisions in the deciding moment when it counts,
01:01:03.600and that what we call the unforgiving minute was one of the central reasons besides intelligence and firepower and our courage was our leaders like the Royal Navy, like Nelson and had we been trained, made those correct decisions.
01:01:19.600The Chinese Communist Party, the argument – I still kind of make the argument – they ain't never fought at sea, right, in sea battles and sea warfare.
01:01:26.560And I realize you've got technology, you've got AI, you've got robots, you've got all that, but at the end of the day, it comes down to humans and human calculation and the courage under intense gunfire and death and destruction to make the correct decisions in the unforgiving minute, sir.
01:01:44.140You know, Gruber's enthusiasm in saying he's a 12-year-old being there at Norfolk and seeing all the ships, you know, if I was there, I'd be exactly the same, and I served in uniform for 29 years.
01:01:56.460But let me tell you, just this last week, during their national day in Hong Kong, the Chinese had a number of their warships in Port Hong Kong, and they had thousands of people lining up to go on board their ships and see their naval power.
01:02:11.380And in 22nd of September, the Chinese launched, for the first time ever, a fifth-generation stealth fighter using an electromagnetic aircraft launch system from the deck of their newest carrier, the Fujian.
01:02:23.200Something that the United States Navy has yet to do.
01:02:26.820The USS Gerald R. Ford has yet to be able to launch F-35 Lightning II stealth fighter from the deck of the Ford.
01:02:36.080So they have skipped an entire generation of technology in certain key areas, like steam catapults.
01:02:42.380They went from ski jumps now into electromagnetics.
01:02:45.180So the question that you ask is, do they have the wherewithal and the knowledge and the ability to fight and win a war?
01:02:55.080But I can tell you from my career in naval intelligence and watching them is that they are testing and training like we used to test and train.
01:03:03.380They are not controlled like the Soviets were in terms of their fighters are getting minute-by-minute control.
01:03:18.920They're taking to heart the issues and the abilities to empower their people to connect, to use electromagnetic spectrum, to integrate fires from the land, from the air, from this under the sea, on the sea.
01:03:34.400And this is something that should worry us.
01:03:37.060It doesn't mean that we have to give up.
01:03:38.600But we should not take it lightly or for granted that their lack of being in a naval war is something that makes them inferior to us.
01:03:47.120For many of us, even though we've launched those strikes into Tehran this week and we fought 35 years of carrier operations where we were flying basically unopposed over Afghanistan and Iraq, that's a lot different than a naval war when we're fighting inside that first and second island chain against a force that's concentrated and has been working and practicing together to sink the U.S. Pacific fleet.
01:04:12.620And make no mistake, for a quarter of a century, the Chinese Communist Party has been funding and building a military force across their navy, their space, their air forces, and their undersea forces to sink the U.S. Pacific fleet and the Seventh Fleet.
01:07:31.960You know, he is an undersung hero, just like you said.
01:07:36.720And I also think he's the kind of naval hero that does get neglected.
01:07:40.440I mean, Pete Hegseff and others talk about the war ethos, and that is really important.
01:07:45.040But Admiral Rickover was a great engineer and entrepreneur within the Navy.
01:07:49.700People compare him to Steve Jobs or somebody like that.
01:07:52.660It's hard to—he innovated within the Navy and created, as you say, the nuclear Navy.
01:07:57.440It's a huge achievement, and we would not have won the Cold War without it.
01:08:01.740I think, in a way, the Nautilus going under the pole, under the North Pole, should be celebrated in the same way that Midway is celebrated.
01:08:10.740It's a sent a signal to the Soviets that we controlled the terrain under the sea, as important, really, as the surface of the sea.
01:08:19.700The reason the Cold War didn't become hotter than it was was because of Rickover and the nuclear Navy and our dominance in naval power.
01:08:30.060This is why the Soviets got the joke, right, and started building such a global Navy to try to catch up with us.
01:08:37.000And it's the reason Reagan—the central part of Reagan's take-down the evil empire before he got to Star Wars and all that—was, first, we're going to show them that we're going to be—we're going to go from 200 ships in a deteriorating Navy, right, to back to 600 capital ships and tell them that we're prepared to fight them everywhere in the world.
01:08:56.140If it was not for Rickover, number one, I'm not so sure we would have won the Cold War.
01:09:00.580And number two, it would have been a lot hotter.
01:09:02.500I think it would have gotten a lot hotter than it did in actual gunfire.
01:09:09.100I mean, he's responsible for one-third of the triad, you know, nuclear submarines, to say nothing of aircraft carriers and commercial nuclear power.
01:09:17.960But yeah, without that part of the triad—and I'm a Rickover, a big advocate for nuclear submarines.
01:09:22.940He points us out it's the survivable leg of the triad.
01:09:47.000We don't really celebrate, in fact, the heroes of the Cold War, period.
01:09:50.800But Admiral Rickover is unfairly neglected.
01:09:53.660I hope my movie does help celebrate him.
01:09:57.560I think people should go and understand him.
01:10:00.080I think that kind of—the Rickover approach is really needed today.
01:10:04.500If we're going to really rebuild the Navy, in addition to the warrior ethos and tough fighting men and women, we need to know how to commission submarines, how to deal with contractors, and how to demand the engineering standards that he demanded.
01:10:46.820I'm going to get into more about Rickover and about that, but the one thing we have to get the mentality of Rickover to make America great again, it was his zero tolerance—they had to have zero tolerance for any fault in the nuclear power plant.
01:11:01.340He knew that if it ever had a problem at sea, the whole thing would be scuttled, the whole thing would be shut down.
01:11:09.760Talk about his maniac focus on perfection, on human perfection with machines that, to me, is his lasting legacy, that this guy thought this thing through and understood you couldn't have anything go wrong.
01:11:22.460And I have to have, basically, average sailors, average Americans that I train as enlisted guys, and I've got to take this officer corps and make sure that—because I'm getting maybe above-average people, and maybe they've got certain qualities that are excellent.
01:11:35.940But we have to take the entire operation, like the Royal Navy did.
01:11:39.600You've got to take an organization up to, like—you've got to level up, like, five levels.
01:11:45.960They had, you know, to go from diesel submarines to nuclear submarines required a level of engineering perfection that not only the Navy, but no company had ever seen.
01:11:57.060And he had lots of ways of doing that.
01:11:59.000I mean, in our interview, Ralph Nader, a big opponent of nuclear power, said that if Admiral Rickover ran commercial nuclear power, he would not oppose it because he knows it would be safe.
01:12:09.760I'm not sure I 100% believed him, but still, everybody knows the nuclear Navy was safe.
01:12:18.440I mean, he had techniques like—he had spies at every one of the contractors, and he forbade them from ever socializing with the contractors.
01:13:48.380I was enjoying the conversation about Admiral Rickover.
01:13:50.520Now, I missed the joy of having the admiral interview me, but I definitely had his successor in 1993, that first interview, that all midshipmen from the Naval Academy had to go through.
01:14:04.300And certainly anyone that was going to go want to become a nuclear submariner had to endure.
01:14:08.280Highly technical and just as pointed as it was, I think, under Rickover.
01:14:13.100But the things like cutting the front part of the chair so that you were always sliding forward and uncomfortable, some of those shenanigans, those were gone by the time I went through.
01:14:23.720There's a commander-in-chief right there, commander-in-chief leaving Marine One, going to Air Force One.
01:16:13.260You had to be the top of your class or close to it.
01:16:15.740You had to know technically he understood that in running a nuclear power plant on a Navy submarine, right, and in charge of ballistic missiles, right, that are part of the triad of the nuclear force, you are going to be put under circumstances that are going to test you as a person, right?
01:16:34.560Just like at Midway, just like at Pearl Harbor, just like at late takeoff, all the great naval battles.
01:19:42.480In a time, the Navy's always been, or at least in the, let's say, the 19th and 20th century, I think the more aristocratic of the services.
01:19:52.480Very hierarchical, very in customs and traditions, a lot of those that came from the Royal Navy, and had certain ways of doing things.
01:20:02.480Talk about, really, Rickover, his toughness, a lot of it, was being a young Jewish midshipman and then a naval officer in what was not particularly accommodating to the Jewish faith or to people that were Jews, sir.
01:20:20.480I mean, you mentioned this on the break.
01:20:22.480You know, he was in the Naval Academy, and in his yearbook, they perforated his page so that if you didn't want that annoying Jew in your yearbook, you could tear it out without actually damaging the yearbook.
01:20:34.480A very Navy persnickety thing, if you don't mind my saying, Steve.
01:20:53.480Another amazing thing about Admiral Rickover is he fled Poland as a young boy, and he remembers seeing Kazakhs coming into his village on a pogrom on horses with sabers slashing Jews.
01:21:07.480And to go from that to creating the most advanced nuclear submarine, nuclear aircraft carrier is an amazing transformation of firepower in his lifetime and that he was instrumental in.
01:21:20.480But he came here speaking only Yiddish and he learned English.
01:21:25.480So, you know, they came to Chicago and he only went to the Naval Academy to get a free education.
01:21:31.480So, yes, he had to deal with a sort of, I would call it more of a gentleman's agreement kind of anti-Semitism that, you know, was in the Navy at that time.
01:21:41.480And as you said, also in the break, he was not everybody's kind of Naval officer, you know, they loved the idea of, you know, of, you know, of Naval officers on the bridge commanding troops, you know, so he was not that kind of a person.
01:22:02.480He was the engineer, the, the, the technical, the, the technology genius.
01:22:09.180We're raised when, when you, when you're in the Navy or the stories you read that it's perspire you like me, it's Lord Nelson, right?
01:22:16.040At Trafalgar, it's, it's John Paul Jones.
01:22:31.620We got to get all the wokeness out Andrews air force base and heading down to, uh, to the Norfolk Naval station with the commander in chief, uh, and Jack Posobiec with him.
01:22:41.380Steve Gruber is going to be deployed out, I think on a combatant here shortly.
01:22:44.500So we're going to, we're going to have amazing coverage, camera coverage of all this, uh, pack.
01:22:49.840He's an extraordinary individual and you're right.
01:22:52.240He's an engineering, basically an engineering duty officer, an engineering officer back in those days when those guys were also considered second and third class citizens.
01:23:00.460It's inside the hierarchy of the Navy, but he hammered his way through and most importantly convinced everybody.
01:23:08.120It just wasn't, it just wasn't making the sales pitch.
01:23:10.040He delivered time and time and time and time again, because he said, we cannot have any mistakes.
01:23:15.760If we have any mistakes, they're going to shut this whole program down.
01:23:19.380Pack, where do people go get the last 600 meters?
01:23:21.600I think we're going to have a special showing of the last 600 meters later in October, which we're going to make a big deal about.
01:23:26.460And, uh, we got to do something on the Rickover film to make sure that everybody sees it and understands why Admiral Hyman Rickover is one of the giants of the 20th century.
01:24:12.060I don't think that, but we know that, but we know that they are, but our film, the last 600 meters will be, um, will be, uh, broadcast by PBS after many years of not wanting to broadcast it November 10th at 10 PM.
01:24:27.020The day before veterans day, the Marine Corps birthday.
01:24:30.140I'm sure you'll have celebration of their birthday too, Steve.
01:24:39.800I think that it does celebrate the, the warrior ethos.
01:24:44.560You know, it's a different kind of warrior in the last 600 meters, not the Admiral Rickover kind.
01:24:49.300And it takes both kinds to make a great military.
01:24:53.080I often think of Admiral Rickover's, uh, uh, long fight back and forth with Curtis LeMay about which part of the nuclear triad counted most.
01:25:02.060But you need, and Curtis LeMay was very much in the tough military, you know, war at all costs kind of guy.
01:25:10.580And it takes both kinds to make a great military.
01:25:13.420America was lucky to have them both, even though they did not like each other.
01:25:16.960Although both, although both, although they hated each other, although both of them understood technical proficiency and understanding.
01:25:24.980It's the, it's the great question that Rickover said, if you don't, if you don't fix your own car and strip your own car down, you're, you're in the wrong line.
01:25:31.500You're in the long, long, wrong line of work here in the nuclear Navy.
01:25:34.980By the way, Pat, you've got great range, as we say in the business, last 600 meters, uh, hour and a half hour, 45 minute gunfight.
01:25:42.880And then you've got Admiral Rickover, which is a brilliant, uh, statement about human, uh, human excellence and pushing the envelope.
01:25:51.140So where's your social media, Michael, where they go to go to your company?
01:25:54.580Well, I see they can go to our websites, which is palladium pictures.com, which is our current films and our older films.
01:26:02.360Like the last, like Admiral Rickover, Rickover is on the manifold productions website, manifoldproductions.com.
01:26:09.500My own social media is Michael Pack underscore.
01:26:13.100Um, and I, I encourage your people to come in.
01:26:17.340And we also have a training program for young conservative filmmakers, which I encourage all your viewers and listeners to, uh, get filmmakers they know to apply to.
01:26:31.320And why Michael Pack is one of my heroes, because for three years, he stood the endurance test of Mitch McConnell, these people torturing him and the media torturing him as he stood as a nominee for president Trump to take over essentially voice of America and the entire global platform.
01:28:11.140Captain Sadler, you wrote a book on a couple of books, one amazing book on naval strategy.
01:28:16.160You've also been a nuclear submarine officer.
01:28:17.740I just want to ask you, we're going to go to break here in a couple of minutes.
01:28:19.920The Navy, I argue, in the 12-day war and the total obliteration part, the expeditionary force that we sent, they had the great, you know, B-2 bombers, the stealth bombers and coming in and blowing up the caves and the things.
01:28:33.360It was a good old United States Navy and submarines and Tomahawk missiles that took down, I don't know, 40% of the apparatus.
01:28:40.820What do you think about that, that it's still the Navy?
01:28:43.700When you want to land a blow, you know the Navy is going to be there, sir.
01:28:49.740And if you want to keep landing those blows at a distance, it's the Navy is really the only one that can do it.
01:28:55.320The Air Force can surge, but again, even coming half a world away, it takes a long time.
01:29:00.860It takes a lot out of the aircraft and the people to do that.
01:29:04.020But a Navy, an aircraft carrier or an SSGN submarine with over 100 cruise missiles ready, that's a kind of firepower that you can sustain for more than just a day.
01:29:13.360We got about a minute before we go to break.
01:29:18.160You wrote a book on naval strategy for the 21st century.
01:29:22.100Do you think that people on Capitol Hill understand the importance of the United States Navy and not just the defense, but the projection of American power?
01:29:32.440Yeah, I think they do, but it wasn't something that just happened overnight.
01:29:36.000As soon as I cut my lines to the Navy and retired in the summer of 2020, I could actually start talking with my inside voice outside.
01:29:45.360And at my perch up here in Capitol Hill, I started engaging aggressively.
01:29:49.980And I'd have to say, after a few years, it's pretty clear that folks understand that a strong Navy is not a partisan issue.
01:29:57.180They understand that what keeps our economy humming safely and securely and also keeps our interest in American people safe is having that ability to reach out and touch the bad guys wherever and wherever they think they're hiding.
01:30:11.080And the Navy is the best way to do that without having to pull the trigger most times.
01:30:15.180But it took a lot of effort to get to that point.
01:30:17.660Laws and legislations acknowledging that.
01:30:20.420Title 10 changes in the last few years.
01:30:22.400But there's still too much work to be done at this late stage as China's really on the clock to be ready to take us on in 2027.
01:30:46.620One o'clock, we're going to have a naval gunfire exercise.
01:30:49.180We're going to have some speeches before then.
01:30:50.620We'll be right back with more Navy 250, Sea Power, and Freedom.
01:31:04.280We want to thank our sponsor, Birch Gold Group, for standing with RAV.
01:31:08.620President, according to your plan, the Palestinian Authority may control Gaza the day after Hamas.
01:31:34.280Now, can you please explain me what is the purpose by doing this if, according to Israel, they are paying to terrorists, they're paying salaries to terrorists?
01:41:52.840Jason Redman, tell the folks who maybe are hearing your name or seeing you for the first time your story, your personal story, a little bit.
01:41:59.400But I'm super blessed, joined the Navy in 1992, both pre-9-11.
01:42:05.180So I got to experience that, conducted counter-drug operation, Central South America.
01:42:10.100Got a commission right down the street here, become a young SEAL officer, made some mistakes, which is part of my journey.
01:42:15.900Growing up, understanding what it is to lead Iraq or Afghanistan, then Iraq.
01:42:20.420Severely wounded in Iraq, shot eight times by an enemy machine gun, owe my life to my teammates and some of the crew, the Navy doctors and nurses.
01:42:29.420But got another name for myself of resilience and overcoming with a sign I posted on my door.
01:42:38.540I want to make sure our veterans are taken care of.
01:42:40.620I want to make sure our military is taken care of, part of a tech company, TurboVets, revolutionizing the way we take care of our veterans.
01:42:47.660All these things, that's my heart and soul.
01:42:50.240And take care of marriages in the American family.
01:43:22.920We've got activity on the USS Truman, and we're going to have a lot of activity on the USS Bush out of the Naval Gunfire Range off the Virginia Capes.
01:43:31.380We're going to explain it all to you, including the Battle of the Virginia Capes, when we return in the war room.
01:43:38.120We'll be right back with more Navy 250, sea power, and freedom.
01:44:01.660We want to thank our sponsor, Patriot Mobile, for standing with RAF.
01:44:08.120Welcome back to Navy 250, sea power, and freedom.
01:44:16.680We want to thank our sponsor, Birch Gold Group, for standing with RAF.
01:44:21.200It is Sunday, 5 October, in the year of the Lord, 2025, a very special day.
01:44:33.300Navy 250, the Commander-in-Chief is heading to Norfolk Naval Station to commemorate the 250th anniversary of the birth of the United States Navy, which took place by the Continental Congress on 13 October, 1775.
01:45:04.780And then shortly thereafter, they said, we need a Marine Corps, right, like the Royal Marines to help man the ships of the United States Navy.
01:45:12.320First question, Steve Groover, if you can ask Jason, what was his rank?
01:45:16.140And talk to us about understanding he started as enlistment and finished as an officer.
01:45:20.500Jason, Steve wants to know how your progression in rank went, where you got into the Navy, how you ended up being a Navy SEAL, how you ended up in the position you were in.
01:45:33.780Yeah, I started out right here in Virginia Beach.
01:45:37.640I was a young enlisted kid, 1992, headed out to SEAL training on the West Coast, 1995, came back to the East Coast, got my commission.
01:45:46.940I went to Old Dominion University as part of the Seaman to Admiral program, came back as a young SEAL officer after 9-11 had happened, and then started deploying straight into the war.
01:45:56.780And you went to the school out in San Diego, went through the whole deal.