Bannon's War Room - WarRoom Special： Sea Power And Freedom Prelude

00:00:00.000 Turn, O Father, strong to save rules on the ground of the restless flame.

00:00:15.660 Who bids the mighty ocean deep his own, a point and a limit hee.

00:00:33.660 Oh, hear us when we cry to Thee for those in peril on the sea.

00:00:51.660 Eternal Father, grant me great to all maurits both night and day.

00:01:09.660 The courage, honor, strength, and skill, then as to serve thy love, O fill.

00:01:27.660 Be Thou the shield forevermore from every burial to the cold.

00:01:47.660 Amen.

00:02:09.660 For 250 years, America's Navy has guarded freedom, projected strength, and carried the fight across the sea.

00:02:17.660 Now, from Norfolk, Virginia, history meets destiny.

00:02:22.660 They fight, fight, fight, and they win, win, win.

00:02:28.660 President Donald J. Trump joins America's warriors aboard a mighty aircraft carrier

00:02:34.660 as we celebrate two and a half centuries of sea power, explosive demonstrations, military might, unstoppable strength,

00:02:43.660 Navy to 50, sea power, and freedom.

00:02:48.660 With your host, Steve Bannon, with live reporting from Jack Posobiec and Steve Gruber, starts right now.

00:02:55.660 This is the primal scream of a dying regime.

00:03:08.660 Pray for our enemies.

00:03:10.660 Because we're going medieval on these people.

00:03:13.660 Here's another time I got a free shot at all these networks lying about the people.

00:03:18.660 The people have had a belly full of it.

00:03:20.660 I know you don't like hearing that.

00:03:21.660 I know you try to do everything in the world to stop that, but you're not going to stop it.

00:03:24.660 It's going to happen.

00:03:25.660 And where do people like that go to share the big line?

00:03:29.660 MAGA Media.

00:03:30.660 I wish in my soul, I wish that any of these people had a conscience.

00:03:35.660 Ask yourself, what is my task and what is my purpose?

00:03:39.660 If that answer is to save my country, this country will be saved.

00:03:46.660 War Room.

00:03:47.660 Here's your host, Stephen K. Bannon.

00:03:56.660 Sunday, 5 October in the year of our Lord, 2025.

00:03:59.660 Welcome for our all-day coverage of the commemoration of the 250th anniversary of the birth of the United States Navy.

00:04:07.660 President Trump was able to carve this out of the schedule.

00:04:09.660 We're going to have quite a show today, an actual live-fire naval exercise that the President of the United States,

00:04:17.660 the Commander-in-Chief, will actually witness live in a carrier strike group.

00:04:24.660 Our own Jack Posobiec, a naval intelligence officer, will be with the President.

00:04:29.660 He'll be leaving Andrews Air Force Base in the next couple of hours to go to Norfolk, Virginia.

00:04:35.660 And, of course, Steve Gruber, the great Steve Gruber, will actually be out on one of the combatants during the day.

00:04:40.660 And we're going to have a host of analysts, strategists, people that know the United States Navy backwards and forwards.

00:04:48.660 We're going to try to frame today the United States Navy, just not the history of it or the glorious history of it,

00:04:54.660 but also where we are today and kind of quo vadis, whether thou goest on the greatest Navy in mankind's history.

00:05:02.660 I want to thank Real America's Voice, Parker, and Rob Sieg.

00:05:06.660 The logistics of this have been pretty daunting.

00:05:09.660 I also want to thank the White House.

00:05:11.660 I think we're going to get some, since we're doing this all day as we did with Charlie Kirk,

00:05:16.660 on the great memorial for Charlie Kirk, and we did it at the Kennedy Center for the prayer vigil,

00:05:21.660 and we've done over and over again.

00:05:23.660 We're going to get some, I think, special insights and maybe even a little access to special footage.

00:05:28.660 So stick around.

00:05:29.660 It's going to be an incredible, incredible day.

00:05:32.660 Six months, Lexington and Concord was, what, April of 1775,

00:05:37.660 and then Bunker Hill followed shortly thereafter, mid-June, what, 17 June of 1775.

00:05:44.660 The founding fathers were pretty smart.

00:05:47.660 They knew they were at war right then.

00:05:49.660 It didn't take the Declaration of Independence or kind of the war proclamation that would come later.

00:05:54.660 It's a traditional birthday of the American, of the American Republic.

00:05:59.660 They knew war was coming.

00:06:00.660 They knew they were already in a fight, and so they established the United States Army,

00:06:05.660 and on 13 October of 1775, the Continental Congress, who didn't have a lot of ability to raise revenue,

00:06:13.660 knew they needed something to stand up to the Royal Navy.

00:06:17.660 My two co-hosts throughout the day, Captain Jim Fennell and Cleo Pascal,

00:06:23.660 they're going to be joining me, and I'm also going to have many, many other people during the day.

00:06:28.660 Cleo, I want to start with you.

00:06:30.660 You're a senior columnist over at the Sunday Guardian.

00:06:34.660 You spent so much time for us explaining really naval strategy and the importance of the Pacific in that strategy.

00:06:43.660 Give us your sense of how important today is, and I think President Trump in highlighting to the American people,

00:06:49.660 the importance of the power and might of the United States Navy.

00:06:56.660 It's incredibly important. It's an exciting day.

00:07:00.660 I'm so glad you're covering it, and with Captain Fennell on top of it.

00:07:04.660 It's worth remembering that during the 19th century, it was Britain who ruled the waves,

00:07:12.660 but after World War II, it was definitely America.

00:07:15.660 And if you look at that whole series of presidents between 1961 and 1981,

00:07:21.660 they all served in the Navy in one capacity or another.

00:07:24.660 Then you had Reagan, who through no fault of his own served in the Army, and then you're back to Navy.

00:07:29.660 So the whole making of modern America was made under naval presidents,

00:07:36.660 and they understood the value of the Navy, of that hard power, not just speaking softly,

00:07:42.660 and how the Pacific was really central to American security and prosperity.

00:07:47.660 So the fact that this is being done and celebrated in the way it is,

00:07:52.660 is truly showing what the heart of American economic, political, and I'd have to say moral leadership has been,

00:08:01.660 because although it conquered most of the Pacific after World War II, it didn't stay.

00:08:06.660 It moved back. The U.S. came back to itself.

00:08:09.660 It created relationships, key relationships with allies and partners in the region,

00:08:13.660 but it wasn't a colonizing power.

00:08:15.660 So this is a new kind of Navy, not the British Navy of the 19th century.

00:08:20.660 This is a Navy that really wants peace and growth through strength,

00:08:25.660 without the sort of dominance and control that you had previously seen.

00:08:30.660 Yeah, we're going to have a lot of conversation about today, shipbuilding, the cost of it, all of that,

00:08:35.660 as President Trump highlights the striking power of the United States Navy.

00:08:41.660 I think the live-fire exercise off the Virginia capes today will be pretty awe-inspiring for people.

00:08:47.660 But it comes at a cost, and you have to have trade-offs.

00:08:50.660 We're going to be talking about hemispheric defense.

00:08:52.660 Also, throughout the day, to add to the drama of this,

00:08:56.660 President Trump is negotiating peace in the Middle East, and so he's still got his deadline,

00:09:00.660 although he has negotiators over in Egypt right now at the Red Sea, over at the resort at the Red Sea.

00:09:07.660 Negotiators, I think he's still, the 6 o'clock deadline's still there,

00:09:10.660 so we're going to have updates throughout the day.

00:09:13.660 Captain Fennell, I might add, Captain Fennell is a legendary figure,

00:09:17.660 a revered figure among all naval officers for his insights and his truth-telling.

00:09:24.660 Captain Fennell, I know you just had a great piece up.

00:09:27.660 I think it was an American greatness on sea power, current sea power.

00:09:32.660 But put in perspective, the importance of the United States Navy in the arc of American history.

00:09:38.660 The founding fathers, who were in the revolutionary generation, pretty smart.

00:09:42.660 They realized they were in a gunfight already in 1775.

00:09:45.660 Yes, the Declaration of Independence came, and people all celebrate that as the beginning of the country.

00:09:50.660 But I always argue the country really started at Lexington Common and at Concord Bridge.

00:09:58.660 And after Bunker Hill, they knew they were in a gunfight.

00:10:00.660 That's where they needed an army, and they certainly needed a Navy. Sir? 0.99

00:10:05.660 Well, first of all, Steve, thanks for having me on.

00:10:08.660 It's a privilege and honor to be with you, Cleo, and the War Room Posse.

00:10:13.660 This is a very great day to remember the history of our Navy

00:10:18.660 and the fact that the United States of America isn't just a single land power,

00:10:23.660 but we're also a maritime power.

00:10:25.660 And we're probably the first great power in the history of the world to balance land power

00:10:32.660 and naval power throughout our history.

00:10:35.660 And as you pointed out, when the Revolutionary War started and we started this nation,

00:10:40.660 we had to get rid of, you know, the British Redcoats off of our land. 1.00

00:10:46.660 But our founders understood the importance of sea power, and it grew throughout our 250 years.

00:10:52.660 We can go back and look at Teddy Roosevelt's Great White Fleet at the turn of the 20th century,

00:10:57.660 and then we can certainly look at what happened in World War II with the growth of the Two-Ocean Navy Act

00:11:03.660 that helped us win World War II in the Atlantic and the Pacific.

00:11:07.660 So this is a really tremendous day.

00:11:09.660 It's a day that we should remember that we are a naval power and a ground power,

00:11:14.660 and today we'll focus on the maritime view.

00:11:19.660 We're going to go through it throughout the day.

00:11:21.660 In fact, one of the interesting things of history, the live fire exercise will be on the gunfire range

00:11:28.660 off of the Norfolk Naval Base, which is, I still think, the largest naval base in the world,

00:11:35.660 in the town I was born, right outside of the Norfolk Navy Base in Ocean View, Virginia.

00:11:42.660 Off of the Virginia Capes, we're going to have the live naval exercise is the key naval battle of the Revolutionary War,

00:11:51.660 where the French Navy came to cut off Cornwallis and the expeditionary force of the British Army,

00:11:59.660 and therefore technically, I guess, basically ended the American Revolution.

00:12:04.660 Alex de Grasse is going to join us.

00:12:06.660 His relatives were very directly involved in that.

00:12:09.660 He'll explain everything about the Battle of the Virginia Capes.

00:12:12.660 We're going to have history, strategy, operations, and a couple of hours, I think, I hope, of good old-fashioned Navy power.

00:12:22.660 From the naval air assets, the surface assets, the carrier, submarines, all of it,

00:12:29.660 and the commander-in-chief overseeing it from a carrier strike group.

00:12:34.660 Stick around. You're in the war room.

00:12:37.660 Rail America's voice coverage all day of the 250th Navy 250 and the naval operation that President Trump will oversee.

00:12:46.660 Take a short break. Be back in a moment.

00:12:48.660 We'll be right back with more Navy 250, sea power and freedom. 0.65

00:13:06.660 We want to thank our sponsors, Birch Gold Group, Patriot Mobile, and AMAC for standing with RAV.

00:13:19.660 Welcome back to Navy 250, sea power and freedom.

00:13:23.660 We want to thank our sponsor, AMAC, for standing with RAV.

00:13:35.660 Okay, welcome back.

00:13:37.660 I'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.

00:13:45.660 Particularly folks, obviously, you follow the war room.

00:13:51.660 One of the most fundamental pivots that we're going through under America First, because we're not isolationists.

00:13:58.660 There is an isolationist wing. There's no doubt about that in the America First movement.

00:14:02.660 And we cherish those folks.

00:14:05.660 President Trump's not an isolationist.

00:14:07.660 He's engaged throughout the world.

00:14:09.660 He'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.

00:14:16.660 Also, at the same time, trying to stare down the Chinese Communist Party in the South China Sea in Taiwan.

00:14:21.660 But 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.

00:14:37.660 And we are trying to, here at the war room, make sure that we're defining hemispheric defense appropriately.

00:14:45.660 And this is why Cleo and her work in the Pacific has been so vitally important when we get into that.

00:14:52.660 Captain Fanon, I want to go to you about, really, in the history of the Navy.

00:14:56.660 You had the Revolutionary War, which were, we're essentially a group of freebooters, I would guess.

00:15:02.660 You had John Paul Jones and, you know, Commander Roy Barrett.

00:15:05.660 You had, we really weren't an organized Navy.

00:15:08.660 In 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.

00:15:15.660 Obviously, 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.

00:15:25.660 And particularly keeping us out of war with Great Britain during the Civil War, which a lot of people in the Confederacy were pushing for.

00:15:32.660 But then, really, it's the Spanish-American War.

00:15:35.660 And 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.

00:15:47.660 Because of McKinley's global view, and particularly on terrorists, but also McKinley in the Spanish-American War, the late 19th century.

00:15:54.660 Those, those young men that had been on the battlefield of the Civil War, when they actually came to actually guide the country.

00:16:02.660 And the Spanish-American War, we really became a global power in the beginning of a true naval power globally.

00:16:09.660 And for the rest of our time, really, the United States Navy, as much or maybe even more than the Army, has defined American geopolitics.

00:16:17.660 And 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.

00:16:32.220 And 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.

00:16:42.480 And 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.

00:16:55.180 And 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.

00:17:02.640 Just 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.

00:17:16.840 They 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.

00:17:28.040 They saw us as a global power, right?

00:17:30.760 It's the whole reason that we fought the Spanish-American War.

00:17:33.140 Your thoughts, sir?

00:17:35.760 Yeah, Steve, there's no question that the Spanish-American War was kind of the beginning of our global naval operations in a serious way.

00:17:44.860 And 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,

00:18:10.560 where for the last 80 years, we have been the global naval power.

00:18:14.300 We've been the top Navy.

00:18:15.600 As I—you know, when I entered the Navy in 1986 and got commissioned, we had almost 600 warships.

00:18:21.760 We were by far the largest Navy.

00:18:24.220 You know, we were certainly at the end of World War II, but we sustained that throughout the Cold War.

00:18:29.700 And 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. 0.62

00:18:50.160 And 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.

00:19:05.760 So 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.

00:19:25.660 We've kind of let that atrophy for a number of reasons.

00:19:29.200 And 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?

00:19:36.060 And 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.

00:19:48.420 It's been a long time, and that was an actual shooting war.

00:19:52.820 Here 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.

00:20:02.000 And 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.

00:20:09.600 And 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.

00:20:31.280 We didn't retreat into our garrisons and say, oh, well, IEDs are killing us.

00:20:35.420 Let's not go outside of the base.

00:20:37.380 No, 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.

00:20:46.480 But 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.

00:20:58.340 And 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.

00:21:06.400 And 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.

00:21:14.880 And that's the spirit and attitude that I really like to see, and I hope it infuses – it lights a storm inside the Pentagon.

00:21:22.060 I think President Trump looks at this not as Bush's mission accomplished.

00:21:28.240 I think he looks at this as his Teddy Roosevelt moment, which he does relate to Teddy Roosevelt.

00:21:33.200 Particularly Teddy Roosevelt was welded to American naval power, the Great White Fleet Review.

00:21:39.720 I think the Great White Fleet Review under Roosevelt actually took place in Norfolk, if I remember correctly.

00:21:46.120 It 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.

00:21:58.220 And 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.

00:22:07.980 You've got the Little Creek Amphibia space right there.

00:22:10.420 You've got Oceania Naval Air Station.

00:22:12.140 It is quite a compound there in Virginia Beach and Norfolk.

00:22:15.860 Like, 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.

00:22:25.300 We'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.

00:22:49.420 Admiral 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.

00:23:01.000 We 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.

00:23:16.360 But you could tell it was – you know, you didn't have the capacity, the lift capacity.

00:23:21.580 I mean, there was a lot of complication, different helicopters, different systems.

00:23:25.440 It was – we tried to do the best we could.

00:23:28.320 People wanted to work up to it every day, but you saw where the problems were going to be.

00:23:31.880 Also, the Navy, I think, had gotten under, I think, around 200 capital ships, right, actual function.

00:23:37.720 I think maybe the overall number is 250, but I think the real number is 200.

00:23:41.600 One of Reagan's first things in his – because, remember, Reagan was different than Kissinger or different than Nixon, different in all of them.

00:23:49.040 This wasn't about containment.

00:23:50.420 They were coming off the George F. Kennan containment strategy.

00:23:55.200 What he wanted was victory against the evil empire.

00:23:58.160 One 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. 0.93

00:24:08.020 It was one of the biggest things in the defense budget.

00:24:09.740 That shook up people back then, right?

00:24:13.460 They were kind of shocked.

00:24:14.420 How do we afford it?

00:24:15.320 What are we going to do with this navy?

00:24:17.140 But it was absolutely essential.

00:24:18.540 Just the building of that was essential.

00:24:20.740 It put the Soviets back on their back foot.

00:24:22.640 They really never could comprehend how they would compete with really a navy that had 600 warships.

00:24:29.040 Give me a minute on that before we go to break, Captain Fennell.

00:24:32.520 Yeah, it's a vitally important history, Steve.

00:24:34.520 At 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.

00:24:46.080 They 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.

00:24:58.580 They were operating in Cuba.

00:25:00.640 They were everywhere.

00:25:02.320 And 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.

00:25:13.000 And he unleashed something that changed the balance of power.

00:25:17.380 Yeah, hang on.

00:25:18.880 We're going to come right back to that.

00:25:20.680 We got Jim Rickards is joining us for geopolitics.

00:25:24.020 Captain Fennell is with us on all things navy.

00:25:26.660 Cleo Pascal, we're going to be joined by others.

00:25:28.700 I might also add Captain Fennell.

00:25:31.020 They were in the North Arabian Sea and Persian Gulf.

00:25:33.640 They had a fleet.

00:25:35.060 They had a small armada monitoring our every move.

00:25:38.180 The Russian navy was everywhere.

00:25:41.120 President Reagan took it on.

00:25:42.200 We're going to take a short commercial break.

00:25:43.840 We'll be back in the warm in just a moment.

00:25:59.700 We'll be right back with more Navy 250, sea power, and freedom. 0.61

00:26:05.260 We want to thank our sponsor, Patriot Mobile, for standing with RAF.

00:26:12.200 Welcome back to Navy 250, sea power, and freedom.

00:26:20.120 We want to thank our sponsor, Birch Gold Group, for standing with RAF.

00:26:24.640 Okay, 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.

00:26:41.940 Cleo 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.

00:26:56.200 We're going to get into all that in detail today.

00:26:57.820 Jim Rickards joins us, Michael Pack, the great filmmaker.

00:27:01.160 Michael and I have made two films.

00:27:03.340 Michael directed, I executive produced two films about the Navy.

00:27:06.860 Number one was The Last 600 Meters, which I guess was Marine Corps and Army had a part of it.

00:27:13.880 Mo will feel good about that.

00:27:15.260 But he also directed a brilliant film, Rickover.

00:27:19.440 We made the film, the only film about Admiral Rickover.

00:27:21.820 I think that's kind of a non-documentary with Tim Blake Nelson playing Admiral Rickover.

00:27:27.460 It's absolutely magnificent and a hidden gem.

00:27:30.440 Jim Rickards, you're my guy on geopolitics, capital markets.

00:27:34.720 We're here at an inflection point in the 21st century.

00:27:38.200 I 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.

00:28:01.020 Maybe have a demo.

00:28:01.980 I 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.

00:28:15.300 In 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.

00:28:29.600 And God bless our air assets coming out of Nebraska and delivered that decisive blow to the Iranian or the Persian nuclear power program. 0.95

00:28:39.420 But 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.

00:28:51.740 These were kind of surface facilities.

00:28:53.840 And so I think the Navy still proves that it's got striking power everywhere in the world.

00:29:00.960 What are the geopolitics of this, Jim?

00:29:03.060 How big a day is this?

00:29:04.140 How important?

00:29:05.320 And President Trump really coming out.

00:29:07.020 And like he said, hey, I know sailors are not supposed to know how to march.

00:29:10.760 I'm not looking for them to march.

00:29:12.860 Let's go out and let's light things up.

00:29:14.480 Let's have a naval gunfire exercise, sir. 0.98

00:29:16.720 That's right, Steve.

00:29:19.060 By the way, for the benefit of the audience, I'm coming to you from Portsmouth, New Hampshire, which is the home of John Paul Jones.

00:29:26.380 Jones' house is just a few blocks away from where I'm sitting right now.

00:29:30.220 Some of my neighbors have flags up front.

00:29:32.400 You know, don't give up the ship.

00:29:33.380 But in the other direction is Portsmouth Naval Shipyard, the oldest naval shipyard in the country, established in 1800.

00:29:42.000 And there are three nuclear-powered attack submarines sitting there right now, a couple hundred yards from where I'm sitting.

00:29:47.560 My wife once asked me, you know, a couple of years ago in Putin, and they were saber-rattling.

00:29:52.360 She said, you think the Russians will fire nuclear missiles at us?

00:29:55.460 And I said, we are very high on the list.

00:29:57.540 I can assure you of that.

00:29:58.980 But to your point, Steve, what I'd like to do, I'd like to go up to around 61,000 feet.

00:30:05.080 That's my personal best.

00:30:06.660 And talk about two geniuses.

00:30:08.700 One is Alfred Mackinder, and the other one is Alfred Thayer Mahan.

00:30:13.700 They were roughly contemporaries.

00:30:15.540 Mackinder was born in 1861.

00:30:17.520 Mahan was born in 1840.

00:30:19.800 Mackinder was the genius, the father of geopolitics and the genius of land power.

00:30:24.360 Mahan, of course, was the genius of sea power.

00:30:27.200 His major books, The Role of Sea Power in History.

00:30:31.440 Now, Hahn said a lot of things we're quite familiar with, and the Navy carries out.

00:30:34.520 Number one, to be a global power, to be a world power, you need to control the sea lanes.

00:30:39.740 And that begins, obviously, the vessels in the Navy, you know, you start there.

00:30:42.900 But you identify the choke points, and we know what they are.

00:30:45.640 The Straits of Hormuz, the Straits of Malacca, the three island chains off the coast of China

00:30:51.080 and the Western Pacific, you identify the Panama Canal, the Suez Canal, the Straits of Gibraltar.

00:30:56.860 We know what the choke points are.

00:30:58.320 But to do that, you need a series of bases.

00:31:01.080 You can't just send a ship, you know, 8,000 miles and expect it to arrive.

00:31:05.440 First of all, it won't arrive quickly.

00:31:06.820 And secondly, it may not be in very good shape by the time it gets there.

00:31:10.440 The Russian Navy found that out the hard way in the Russian-Japanese War.

00:31:14.480 The Japanese sank the Russian Pacific Fleet, and Zora Nicholas said,

00:31:18.780 no problem, we'll send the Baltic Fleet over to Vladivostok. 0.91

00:31:22.260 Well, by the time they got there, it took months to get there.

00:31:24.220 They were exhausted, low on fuel, low on provisions, and the Japanese sank the Baltic Fleet.

00:31:29.020 So at that point, Russia sued for peace.

00:31:31.260 By the way, the peace treaty of the Russian-Japanese War was settled here in Portsmouth, New Hampshire,

00:31:36.060 under the direction of Teddy Roosevelt, and he won the Nobel Peace Prize for that.

00:31:40.440 But to get back to Mahan and McKinder, so Mahan said, you need the Navy, you need the choke points,

00:31:47.940 you need a series of bases.

00:31:49.740 But in addition to that, you need financial capacity to carry all that out.

00:31:54.080 And I once met with Andy Marshall.

00:31:56.720 He was in his 90s when I met him.

00:31:59.180 Unlike Biden, he actually was sharp as a tack.

00:32:01.120 He had served every president from Nixon to Trump in something called the Office of Net Assessment in the Pentagon.

00:32:07.400 A geeky name, no one's ever heard of it, but they were the futurists.

00:32:12.120 The Office of Net Assessment.

00:32:13.000 But hang on one second.

00:32:17.080 When I was in the Pentagon, this is just like Michael Pack and I made a movie about Rickover.

00:32:23.880 Michael had come up with the idea.

00:32:25.200 He said that I think at the time only 3% of the American population knew Rickover's name or was familiar with it.

00:32:31.840 And this is one of the giants of the 20th century.

00:32:35.500 And our security evolves from the thinking and actions of Admiral Rickover.

00:32:41.060 Andy Marshall's probably at zero.

00:32:42.720 Andy Marshall's one of the most significant individuals behind the scenes in the entire 20th century.

00:32:47.860 I 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.

00:32:58.580 It was basically the net assessment.

00:33:01.840 But it was a brilliant kind of internal think tank to the Pentagon.

00:33:06.400 And this guy was a great guy and absolutely a brilliant, brilliant strategist.

00:33:10.440 I think one of the greatest strategists this country has ever had.

00:33:13.300 But continue on, Jim.

00:33:14.180 Yeah, I agree.

00:33:15.760 So I met with Andy and one of his deputies.

00:33:18.700 We're in a vault in the Pentagon, just the three of us.

00:33:21.060 And kind of my expertise is financial warfare and so forth.

00:33:24.680 So we went through a lot of things.

00:33:26.200 And at one point I said to him – he was 90.

00:33:28.800 I called him Mr. Marshall.

00:33:29.760 I thought that was suitable.

00:33:31.240 I said, Mr. Marshall, you're going to wake up one day and find that you have a forward-deployed Navy.

00:33:37.720 You're going to pull into a shipyard and ask for some services.

00:33:40.040 And they're going to ask you to pay in a currency that you don't print.

00:33:44.180 And Andy was a great listener, didn't say a lot.

00:33:48.420 But that got a reaction out of him.

00:33:50.040 He goes, yeah, we need to look at that.

00:33:52.340 In other words, I was talking about the role of the US dollar.

00:33:55.440 And again, you can go back to the pound sterling and before that, the Dutch Gilder, et cetera.

00:34:00.820 Naval power, military power in general, naval power in particular, go hand in hand with a strong currency.

00:34:06.360 I'm not talking about exchange rate valuations.

00:34:08.480 I'm talking about a currency that people have trust in.

00:34:11.660 Now, this naval power shifts from time to time.

00:34:14.940 You go back to the 16th century, it was the Portuguese and the Spanish.

00:34:18.220 The Portuguese went east. 1.00

00:34:19.320 The Spanish went west. 0.99

00:34:21.100 In the 17th century, believe it or not, the Netherlands, the Dutch Navy was very powerful, defeated the Royal Navy in a number of battles.

00:34:27.160 It was 18th century, the French, they helped us out in the American Revolution.

00:34:31.020 19th century, Royal Navy all the way through.

00:34:33.940 20th century, obviously, the US Navy.

00:34:36.520 Although, let's give a shout out to the Japanese.

00:34:38.640 They were the first to adapt to aircraft carriers.

00:34:41.980 The British and the Germans were completely locked into battleships.

00:34:45.960 And the Japanese started basically building very crude aircraft carriers. 0.78

00:34:49.800 And the US Navy was not far behind.

00:34:51.360 And so the question for the 21st century is, what is it?

00:34:54.660 Does the US get another 100 years of naval dominance?

00:34:57.400 Or do the Chinese come along and steal the crown, so to speak? 0.96

00:35:02.200 My view is that the Chinese are not going to be able to do that.

00:35:05.960 If you study them internally, I'm not saying they're not a threat.

00:35:10.200 You never benefit from underestimating your enemy.

00:35:13.840 They have enormous internal social problems, demographic problems, financial problems.

00:35:18.340 And Xi Jinping looks like he's been knocked down a peg and is actually subordinate to the

00:35:22.440 military at this stage.

00:35:23.860 And people talk about the Chinese now have three aircraft carrier battle groups.

00:35:30.380 But they've got this ski ramp technology, which they took from the Russians. 0.87

00:35:34.220 To get the planes airborne, you kind of go up a lift.

00:35:36.980 The bow of the ship is, or the flight deck, rather, is curved up.

00:35:40.460 The problem with that is it's not very efficient.

00:35:42.600 They have to go up with half fuel loads and half loads of armaments in order not to crash

00:35:47.560 into the sea once they take off.

00:35:49.440 The U.S. has mastered the catapult technology.

00:35:51.660 So right there, they have a problem, number two.

00:35:54.520 They're not battle-tested.

00:35:57.720 Well, battle-tested.

00:35:58.780 That's where I'm going to get to.

00:36:00.020 By the way, we've got Gruber's on the scene out, I think, with one of the combatants right

00:36:03.980 now.

00:36:04.460 We're going to go to Steve Gruber in a moment.

00:36:07.700 Posobiec's at Andrew Air Force Base.

00:36:09.760 The president will be leaving from there.

00:36:11.900 And in fact, if he leaves from the lawn, I'm sure he's going to have a gaggle.

00:36:15.340 So we're trying to get to President Trump.

00:36:18.220 Throughout the day, we're going to be juggling between our strategists and geopoliticians

00:36:23.120 and people who know about the details of the Navy's operations and strike power with

00:36:29.160 everything that's going on.

00:36:31.480 First off, well, I want to get to being able to fight the ship in a moment.

00:36:36.920 Do you believe, Rickerts, that to be a global power, you need to have a naval presence that

00:36:45.740 has the ability to strike globally?

00:36:49.200 That's one way to do it.

00:36:50.820 But let's give a little credit to Mackinder.

00:36:53.360 Mackinder came up with this idea.

00:36:55.280 He looked at the Eurasian landmass.

00:36:56.880 He didn't count Europe as a separate continent, maybe a separate civilization, but Europe and

00:37:00.440 Asia.

00:37:01.180 By extension, Africa and the Middle East and the Indian subcontinent.

00:37:04.700 And he called it the World Island.

00:37:07.400 And he identified a place called the Heartland, which is kind of around Xi'an, China.

00:37:11.200 I've been to Xi'an.

00:37:11.960 It was the capital long before Beijing or Nanjing, southern Siberia, and again, Central Asia.

00:37:18.460 And he said, he who controls the Heartland controls the World Island.

00:37:22.060 And he who controls the World Island controls the world.

00:37:25.120 So there is another theory.

00:37:27.240 Now, the last guy to do it was Genghis Khan.

00:37:29.020 And the descendants of Genghis Khan were the mobiles. 0.93

00:37:32.640 But the World War II was a battle for the fight for that Eurasian landmass between the

00:37:41.860 Imperial Japanese Army and the Germans.

00:37:44.040 This is why they hit from two different sides.

00:37:47.040 The naval exercise, Cleo Pascal, just stick there because Cleo Pascal, I would argue, is

00:37:53.640 the Alfred Thayer Mahan of the 21st century.

00:37:56.360 Her theory of the case is, yes, Mackinder is the Heartland.

00:37:59.960 The World Island is what the 20th century wars were about.

00:38:03.040 But the 21st century, and particularly for American hemispheric security, pivots around

00:38:09.960 the vast Pacific, which is, Captain Fennell tells me, approximately 20 times the surface

00:38:18.680 mass of the United States.

00:38:20.900 It is vast.

00:38:23.000 And the argument is, is that the strategic heartland of the United States?

00:38:26.840 Is that the pivot of world history in the 21st century?

00:38:30.520 We're going to get into all that today.

00:38:31.780 Plus, we're going to see some good old-fashioned Navy fighting power.

00:38:35.540 We're going to talk about this concept of combat hardness and fighting the ship, what it's

00:38:40.800 meant historically.

00:38:41.580 Let's take a short commercial break.

00:38:43.320 Real America's Voice in war room.

00:38:45.660 Navy 250 all day today here at Real America's Voice.

00:38:49.400 Back in a moment.

00:38:59.220 We'll be right back with more Navy 250, sea power, and freedom. 0.61

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00:39:45.100 Make sure that there's services and products you spend some time looking at and thinking

00:39:50.420 about.

00:39:50.680 Steve Gruber, always doing yeoman's duty.

00:39:54.260 I tell you, Gruber, here's what I admire about you.

00:39:56.360 I'm tossing you. 0.98

00:39:56.880 I want you to toss where I am, but here's what I admire most about you.

00:39:59.340 You're one of the biggest personalities in this business.

00:40:02.280 You're the Rush Limbaugh of Michigan.

00:40:04.000 Your people listen to you and watch you because of your insights, and yet you go do the hard

00:40:10.420 work every time we have one of these things.

00:40:11.900 You're always on the riser as an old-school reporter.

00:40:14.320 Where are you, sir, and what are you doing today?

00:40:19.960 I'm going to tell you, Steve, I'm right in the heart of it here, main stage right behind

00:40:23.240 me.

00:40:23.460 We'll see the president here later.

00:40:24.640 The USS Truman is right here next to me, an impressive aircraft here, but I have got

00:40:28.820 to weigh in on a couple of things.

00:40:30.200 First of all, this is kind of old hat to you, Steve.

00:40:32.980 You're a Navy veteran.

00:40:33.900 For me, I get these opportunities on occasion.

00:40:36.640 A few years ago, I was on the USS Michigan.

00:40:39.500 You were talking about those Ohio-class submarines who were involved in that attack on Iran.

00:40:43.540 I was on the USS Michigan.

00:40:45.480 It was not involved in that, but it's one of those Ohio-class submarines that's loaded

00:40:49.340 with ballistic missiles.

00:40:50.960 What an education that was.

00:40:52.600 What an education it is here for me to see an F-18 Hornet parked right here on the deck,

00:40:58.440 not up on the flight deck, but right here for everybody to see.

00:41:01.000 I've got all sorts.

00:41:02.560 I've got an off-street here behind me.

00:41:04.100 Just remarkable for me to see, but I want to weigh in on something else you talk about.

00:41:06.960 I love the conversation about Teddy Roosevelt.

00:41:08.980 Nobody could overstate his job as Undersecretary of the Navy, 1897, 1898.

00:41:15.700 13 months he was in the job, and basically, without authorization, he knew the United States

00:41:20.220 Navy needed to be bolstered.

00:41:21.700 He knew we'd have to be a global power, and he did it without much permission.

00:41:25.500 And he went and did it just before the Spanish-American War.

00:41:28.220 It was a remarkable thing.

00:41:28.920 By the way, Teddy Roosevelt will celebrate his 167th birthday on the 27th of October this year.

00:41:36.180 I know that, Steve, because it's my birthday.

00:41:39.280 So I've had an affinity for Teddy Roosevelt for a long time.

00:41:42.740 I think he did great things for American military.

00:41:45.300 So there you go.

00:41:46.580 Personal story.

00:41:48.300 Hang on, Groover.

00:41:49.980 Hang on.

00:41:50.360 I'm coming right back to you.

00:41:51.340 Captain Fennell, let's talk about that.

00:41:53.540 Teddy Roosevelt was, I think, the first president that saw the Navy as a tool for basically the

00:42:00.620 global expansion of the United States and the power of the United States as Undersecretary

00:42:04.520 of the Navy, as later his cousin, FDR, also, I think, Secretary of the Navy, Undersecretary

00:42:11.800 of the Navy.

00:42:12.240 Talk about Teddy Roosevelt, the Great White Fleet, the importance of the Spanish-American

00:42:16.240 War, and the rise of the power of the United States around the Navy.

00:42:19.900 Well, Steve, you know, we were at that time in the world development.

00:42:25.760 We are in this point where, you know, there's been an industrial revolution in Europe, and

00:42:31.640 there's buying and selling and trading, and nations are expanding, and colonialism is expanding

00:42:38.700 by European nations around Africa and things of that nature, and they're expanding colonialism

00:42:44.660 throughout Asia.

00:42:45.600 And I think what President Roosevelt, then Secretary Roosevelt, saw was this need that

00:42:51.700 the United States was, if we were going to survive and not be, you know, have these European 1.00

00:42:56.820 nations come to look to carve us up, that we needed to be out on the world stage, and we

00:43:01.760 needed to be modern and have a modern fleet that could operate globally to ensure our access

00:43:07.440 to the markets and to be able to buy and sell and trade.

00:43:10.760 And it really hasn't changed in the last 150 years or 125 years since then, which is this

00:43:16.840 faith and belief in free access to markets, the freedom of navigation.

00:43:21.840 As Jim Rickards said, you know, we've got these choke points.

00:43:24.640 The Earth is 70% water.

00:43:26.920 The most of it's in the Pacific, 50% of that.

00:43:29.600 And we need to be able to buy and sell and trade and move goods and services.

00:43:33.880 And at that time, we didn't have the capacity to ensure our ability to do that without being

00:43:40.300 subject to the predations of other European capitals and their larger navies.

00:43:44.920 And so I think that turning point in the Spanish-American War was for us a turning point to say,

00:43:51.500 hey, we are now a global player.

00:43:53.500 We are on this global stage.

00:43:55.060 And it set in motion many, many things.

00:43:58.060 It was the age of going from sailing ships, wooden men and, you know, wooden ships and

00:44:03.900 iron men to iron ships and iron men was kind of the way to phrase it.

00:44:08.260 And so we became the modern Navy in that era.

00:44:11.560 And we kept progressing.

00:44:12.920 And so we incorporated technology, research and development, things of that nature that

00:44:17.900 weren't just into the shipbuilding, weren't just into recruiting, but this idea that we

00:44:22.080 had to have naval armaments and naval gunnery and that we had to have proficiency and science

00:44:26.700 behind those kinds of technologies.

00:44:28.700 It was also during the period of the birth of the undersea, the submarine fleet and the

00:44:33.300 submarine force.

00:44:34.120 So lots of new things were coming into the Navy at the turn of the beginning of the 20th

00:44:39.460 century.

00:44:39.880 And it was all really set in motion because of, as Steve Gruber said, of the one guy who

00:44:44.440 went out on his own and knew what needed to be done and pushed hard for it.

00:44:48.600 And that also set the precedent, as we've talked about, throughout the next 125 years where

00:44:53.900 we saw other periods in our history where people stood up and said, okay, I'm going to

00:44:58.220 lead in this area.

00:44:59.100 We need to get back to leading in maritime and naval power.

00:45:04.560 And as Gruber said, when Teddy Roosevelt was in the Department of Navy, he didn't, he was

00:45:11.380 going to beg forgiveness.

00:45:12.400 He wasn't going to ask permission.

00:45:13.640 He just did it.

00:45:14.880 Cleo, I want to go to you because of those giants and thinking about the Spanish-American

00:45:19.480 War, what they understood is that manifest destiny, the destiny of the United States,

00:45:24.100 did not end at the shoreline of California.

00:45:25.980 It was not simply the settlers and the pioneers and all these heroic giants that we stand on

00:45:31.900 the shoulders of that really went across the Mississippi out west into this really hostile

00:45:36.380 environment to build a civilization.

00:45:38.560 That it projected farther.

00:45:39.940 They're the first ones that understood the importance of the Pacific to the United States

00:45:46.740 and that essentially our destiny would ultimately be tied to being a Pacific power.

00:45:51.780 Walk us through that, ma'am.

00:45:53.560 Yeah, so this goes back to very early on in U.S. history.

00:45:57.560 The Navy actually sent out an exploring expedition in the Pacific from about 1838 to 42.

00:46:03.600 They didn't have the money for the whole thing.

00:46:05.740 The president didn't have the money for the whole thing.

00:46:07.080 So he sent it out hoping that it would be so popular that Congress would find the money

00:46:10.540 to bring it back, which was the case, which proved to be the case.

00:46:13.800 But at that point, the Pacific was very much of a European lake and the U.S. felt threatened by it.

00:46:20.780 Hawaii was sacked by the French in the late 1840s and the U.S. representative there at the time

00:46:27.640 sent a message back then and then again later in the 70s saying,

00:46:31.740 if a hostile power controls Hawaii, we're not going to be safe and we're not going to be able to trade.

00:46:37.180 And that was really what set up the Spanish-American War part in the Pacific,

00:46:42.660 which was President McKinley later said that the reason that they took the Philippines and took Guam

00:46:48.700 was because there was an understanding that if the Dons, as he called the Spanish,

00:46:53.600 controlled the Philippines, then the U.S. mainland wasn't safe.

00:46:58.800 And so that year, 1898, was a very important year for the U.S. saying,

00:47:03.440 we don't want any hostile powers controlling the Pacific because not only did the U.S. take

00:47:08.660 the Philippines and Guam, but that was also when Hawaii joined the U.S.

00:47:15.100 or was annexed to the U.S., giving that central point in the Pacific from which you could then

00:47:21.160 refuel and be able to move forward.

00:47:24.540 Hang on, hang on, hang on, hang on, hang on, hang on, hang on, hang on.

00:47:28.540 I want to make very, people understand this.

00:47:31.900 In 1898, a geostrategic decision was made that no hostile power will ever control the Pacific.

00:47:39.780 No hostile power will ever control the Pacific.

00:47:42.660 We fought the, half of the Second World War, at least a third of the Second World War,

00:47:47.240 was fought to make sure that we drove the Imperial Japanese Navy out of the Pacific.

00:47:52.140 And today, in the 21st century, our central threat as a great power, maybe not the threat

00:48:01.520 here and the threat of the deep state and all these other threats that we're trying to stare

00:48:05.080 down or break apart, but the existential threat as a great power struggle ain't Russia and

00:48:11.120 the Eurasian landmass.

00:48:12.560 It is the challenge of the rise of the Chinese Communist Party in its Navy to basically have

00:48:20.140 a hostile power take over the Pacific.

00:48:22.400 Is that, that's essentially in a nutshell where we stand today, given our history of

00:48:26.380 over, what, 127, 130 years when we made this decision as a country?

00:48:32.100 It's, absolutely.

00:48:33.840 I mean, this is why I think Mackinder was never really relevant for the U.S.

00:48:37.400 The Central Pacific was always the U.S.'s geographical pivot of history.

00:48:41.340 If a hostile foreign power controlled it, the U.S. wasn't safe.

00:48:44.380 At the time that this was clear, it was the Spanish and the British and the French, then

00:48:50.940 it became the Japanese, then it was the Soviets, and now it's the Chinese.

00:48:54.300 The geography doesn't change.

00:48:56.300 And that's why parts of the United States, like the Commonwealth of Northern Mariana Islands

00:49:01.220 and Guam, which are an eight-hour flight west of Hawaii, but only a four-hour flight southeast

00:49:08.720 east of Tokyo, for example, or from Taiwan, are Americans on American soil.

00:49:15.260 That is a strategic lesson encoded in history and given to future Americans to remember,

00:49:23.820 we are a Pacific power.

00:49:25.680 The U.S. is a Pacific power.

00:49:28.080 And that was actually what Teddy Roosevelt said when he sent the Great White Fleet through,

00:49:32.560 was one of the reasons he did it was to remind Americans and everybody else that the U.S.

00:49:37.260 was as much of a Pacific power as an Atlantic power.

00:49:40.260 So this is, and McKinley was also very, very clear about this.

00:49:44.240 This was widely known from early on and it became part of also, for example, the purchase

00:49:49.940 of Alaska in 1867 was an attempt to do a pincher move on British Columbia, what was then a British 0.74

00:49:58.700 colony, to control the entire west coast so that there couldn't be any infiltration onto

00:50:03.960 the continent from other Pacific powers.

00:50:05.820 So don't forget Alaska when you're talking about the Pacific or the ghost of Billy Mitchell

00:50:10.160 will come and haunt you in your sleep.

00:50:13.040 Yeah, we're going to get all that.

00:50:14.660 Billy Mitchell about new technology, court-martialed Billy Mitchell for trying to show naval air

00:50:19.640 power.

00:50:20.820 Alaska, also the Panama Canal.

00:50:22.440 Now, right now, folks, we've allowed the Caribbean to become a lake of the Chinese, of the PLA and 1.00

00:50:28.800 the Chinese Communist Party.

00:50:30.540 That's all going to be swept out.

00:50:31.940 President Trump's hemispheric defense from Greenland in the Arctic all the way to the Panama

00:50:36.600 Canal and then down to Latin America.

00:50:38.720 Of course, we have an amphibious ready group as we speak today with 4,000 fleet Marines and

00:50:45.440 sailors off the coast of Venezuela looking at a potential strike to take over the seaports,

00:50:51.720 the airbases and logistics nodes, potentially, although we're not at war with a nation or won't

00:50:58.220 be a war with a nation.

00:50:58.940 The Trump administration has already told Congress we are already at war, a kinetic war against

00:51:06.720 the drug cartels.

00:51:07.740 Okay, we're going to get into all of it.

00:51:09.660 We've got Cleo Pascal.

00:51:10.860 We've got Captain Fennell.

00:51:11.960 We've got Steve Gruber on the Truman.

00:51:14.500 We're going to go back to Gruber.

00:51:16.040 Jim Rickers is with us for geopolitics.

00:51:18.080 We're going to be joined by the great filmmaker Michael Pack, his amazing film on Admiral Rickover,

00:51:23.600 one of the greatest giants of the 20th century, underappreciated and misunderstood.

00:51:30.800 Short commercial break.

00:51:31.920 We're going to come back, 11 o'clock.

00:51:33.780 Also, I think Jack Bosovic's at Andrews Air Force Base.

00:51:37.100 The president's going to get ready to leave.

00:51:39.080 Ambassador Crowley, I think, is going to take the stage, give a speech with a couple of Navy

00:51:42.120 SEALs.

00:51:42.760 There's a lot going on today.

00:51:44.380 In Navy 250, back in a moment.

00:51:53.600 We'll be right back with more Navy 250, sea power, and freedom. 0.61

00:52:04.920 We want to thank our sponsor, Birch Gold Group, for standing with RAV.

00:52:15.380 This Sunday at 10 a.m. Eastern, history sets sail.

00:52:19.860 I'm going to have all folks from the Navy, national security experts.

00:52:23.380 You do not want to miss this.

00:52:25.440 President Donald J. Trump arrives in Norfolk, Virginia, aboard a mighty U.S. aircraft carrier.

00:52:32.680 Fight, fight, fight, win, win, win.

00:52:37.400 As America celebrates 250 years of Navy power, brace yourself for missile launches, roaring

00:52:44.240 jets, thunderous firepower, and the full force of America's sea strength on display.

00:52:49.860 Hosted by Steve Bannon, with live reporting from Jack Posobiec.

00:52:54.320 And Steve Gruber, Real America's Voice brings you this front row seat to freedom in motion.

00:53:00.300 It's not just coverage, it's a celebration of America's might.

00:53:04.320 RAV presents America 250, sea power, and freedom.

00:53:09.260 Coverage begins this Sunday, 10 a.m. Eastern.

00:53:11.780 See you there.

00:53:15.620 You know, he's well known for being impatient. 0.99

00:53:19.700 You're holding up the whole damn show, Rockwell. 0.97

00:53:22.160 He never took the position, you know, now, son, let's sit down and talk about this. 1.00

00:53:27.160 Don't be an idiot. 1.00

00:53:28.540 Rickover quickly got a reputation that he, and only he, within the Navy, would tell the truth. 1.00

00:53:34.200 And Rickover was a charmer.

00:53:36.920 I'm actually quite moved.

00:53:39.480 The bottom line is Rickover was a genius.

00:53:42.060 I can visualize machines operating right in my mind.

00:53:45.920 And an SOB.

00:53:47.520 Never mind the good news, get to the problem.

00:53:50.200 If he didn't get it right, if they had a safety accident, that would be the end of the program.

00:53:54.160 He was demanding things that our society, even during the Cold War, could not produce it

00:53:59.500 on a Rickover schedule to Rickover's cost the way Rickover wanted it.

00:54:03.920 The fact that the United States has operated hundreds of nuclear reactors in the world's

00:54:10.460 oceans and never had a nuclear accident is the greatest contribution that Admiral Rickover

00:54:16.780 has made to the country.

00:54:18.420 Our job is to anticipate the worst and then fix it.

00:54:23.280 No one in my life influenced me more than Admiral Rickover.

00:54:27.120 Except for my father, Admiral Rickover had the greatest impact on my life of any other man

00:54:32.780 that I've ever met.

00:54:33.920 The question comes up, what would Rickover do?

00:54:38.040 And the answer is, I know exactly what I do.

00:54:40.360 And I'm not willing to do that.

00:54:42.240 But I don't get the things done that he got done.

00:54:45.380 How can you run a Navy if everybody in it acts like you do?

00:54:48.880 If everybody considers themselves...

00:54:50.460 I never told the others how to act.

00:54:52.460 I acted my own way.

00:54:54.160 One of the giants of the 21st Navy.

00:54:59.880 We're going to get to the filmmaker in a second.

00:55:01.540 Michael Paxson will join us momentarily.

00:55:03.260 President of the United States just sent out on True Social.

00:55:06.040 It will be a big day with the Navy leaving now.

00:55:09.220 The United States has the greatest military by far in the world.

00:55:12.320 There will be a show of naval aptitude and strength.

00:55:16.160 Enjoy watching.

00:55:17.680 It will be broadcast everywhere.

00:55:19.120 President Donald J. Trump, D.J.T.

00:55:22.000 Thank you, President Trump.

00:55:23.040 We're doing it all day here.

00:55:24.280 Seven, eight hours.

00:55:25.540 Wherever it ends, the president gets back to the White House.

00:55:28.420 Of course, he gets back to the White House.

00:55:29.540 I think they're going to the Situation Room.

00:55:30.660 But 6 o'clock, 6 p.m., I still think, unless something otherwise, he's saying,

00:55:35.300 hey, Hamas, you're the in or out. 0.99

00:55:37.980 I've given you a deal.

00:55:39.180 You've got the framework for a deal.

00:55:40.380 I need to see if you're going to accept it or not.

00:55:42.400 Of course, a lot of maneuvering going in the background.

00:55:44.580 We'll get all that in a moment.

00:55:46.180 I still have...

00:55:46.940 Can I go to Steve Gruber for a moment?

00:55:50.320 Steve, you're on the Truman, I guess that's Pearside, at the Norfolk Naval Station.

00:55:55.200 Talk to us, Steve, about what's going to happen later in the day.

00:55:57.660 We've got Monica Crowley, Ambassador Crowley coming up to tee things up, I think, around noon. 0.67

00:56:02.500 Then the president's going to go out to the Naval Gunfire Range off the Virginia Capes

00:56:07.860 for a live fire exercise.

00:56:10.020 I think it'll last an hour or so, probably two, if the president's got anything to say about it.

00:56:14.620 Then what's going to happen?

00:56:15.640 So walk us through the day, sir.

00:56:20.020 You know, it's a remarkable day, and you just laid it out pretty well.

00:56:23.060 Look, this is a celebration of the United States Navy.

00:56:26.020 You look around, you've got thousands of it shipping around me here.

00:56:29.600 You've got the USS Truman.

00:56:31.860 You've got the Cariflage over here, which is an amphibious battle group ship.

00:56:37.400 Just the most impressive stuff.

00:56:38.780 Like I said, Steve, this is stuff that you're familiar with.

00:56:40.980 But for me, I'm excited like a 12-year-old because I see all this impressive stuff.

00:56:45.960 The scale and scope of these things.

00:56:48.040 For people who've never been next to a battleship, they don't understand how big these things are.

00:56:51.340 The USS Truman is 1,100 feet long.

00:56:54.380 It's 11 football fields long on top.

00:56:57.180 It's a remarkable thing to see.

00:56:58.300 But I do want to say something about what you guys were talking about here a minute ago about pivotal naval battles.

00:57:04.560 And no more than in the last month have we seen this revival happening in America.

00:57:09.780 And make no mistake, Providence has played a role in America's success in military battles, especially on the water.

00:57:17.760 You go to Admiral Hazard Perry in Lake Erie, sinking the British fleet when he was completely outnumbered.

00:57:23.420 1814, impossible to do.

00:57:25.380 But I go to June 4, 1942, the Battle of Midway.

00:57:29.380 We were outgunned, outmanned, outhad.

00:57:32.760 And by God, we made it happen between the 4th and 7th of June, 1942, the Battle of Midway.

00:57:37.720 It shifted that entire Pacific domination that you were talking about earlier, pushing the Japanese Empire back. 0.58

00:57:43.500 And then, of course, beating them later in the war.

00:57:46.220 These are important considerations when you look at American history.

00:57:49.480 Providence.

00:57:49.920 You 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.

00:58:02.560 And I think that cannot be overstated.

00:58:04.600 When you look at the impressive, I mean, it is really jaw-dropping to sit here.

00:58:09.460 Like I said, I'm like a kid looking at all this impressive machinery thinking, thank God I'm an American.

00:58:14.780 And I really mean that because it's a great place to be.

00:58:18.640 The weather's perfect.

00:58:19.820 The president's going to arrive.

00:58:20.980 He's going to speak here later.

00:58:22.180 Jack Posobiec is with him.

00:58:23.640 He's going to watch some live fire exercises.

00:58:26.500 We look forward to that.

00:58:27.340 We've got, by the way, cameras everywhere.

00:58:29.320 I think we've got a dozen different camera setups here on Real America's Voice today.

00:58:32.700 So that's pretty exciting.

00:58:33.580 And let me do one more thing before I jump back to you.

00:58:35.820 Let me thank the good sponsors here like Patriot Mobile, America's only Christian conservative wireless network, helping us power this day.

00:58:42.480 If you don't have Patriot Mobile, I don't know why.

00:58:44.440 But Patriot Mobile does the things that you care about, supports the organizations and the things you care about.

00:58:49.820 So you should support Patriot Mobile, PatriotMobile.com slash voice.

00:58:53.700 Your first month is free, I think, today with the promo code voice.

00:58:57.100 There, I got that in.

00:58:58.420 What a lovely day.

00:58:59.360 Tell you what, Gruber, you totally nailed it.

00:59:04.620 In fact, I've got to go off your comment there, which is so perceptive.

00:59:10.100 This 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.

00:59:20.060 I want to – so I'm going to pivot here.

00:59:22.800 I want to go back to – President Trump is a lover of history, particularly military history.

00:59:28.160 He has seen the Samuel Elliot Morrison off of his great writing of the naval operations of the Second World War.

00:59:36.320 They made the film Victory at Sea, a multi-part documentary that Michael Pakwell has appreciated.

00:59:41.660 It's such a great film.

00:59:42.720 President Trump, it moves – President Trump today is the enthusiasm of a young man.

00:59:46.980 I mean, he loves this.

00:59:47.720 This 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.

00:59:54.380 I 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.

01:00:03.460 But, Fennell, you first, and then Rickards on this.

01:00:07.380 It's about – I want to make the point about the Chinese Communist Party Navy today.

01:00:11.420 Anyway, 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.

01:00:32.100 It's the great power in the economic co-prosperity sphere.

01:00:34.940 They had to take it out of the United States Navy, and they were going to take it out of Pearl Harbor.

01:00:38.060 One 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.

01:00:54.400 It'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,

01:01:03.600 and 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.

01:01:17.960 So for now, I'll talk to you first.

01:01:19.600 The 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.

01:01:26.560 And 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.

01:01:42.480 Yes, Steve.

01:01:44.140 You 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.

01:01:54.340 You just can't get enough of it.

01:01:56.460 But 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.

01:02:11.380 And 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.

01:02:23.200 Something that the United States Navy has yet to do.

01:02:26.820 The USS Gerald R. Ford has yet to be able to launch F-35 Lightning II stealth fighter from the deck of the Ford.

01:02:36.080 So they have skipped an entire generation of technology in certain key areas, like steam catapults.

01:02:42.380 They went from ski jumps now into electromagnetics.

01:02:45.180 So the question that you ask is, do they have the wherewithal and the knowledge and the ability to fight and win a war?

01:02:53.360 And that is to be determined.

01:02:55.080 But 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.

01:03:03.380 They are not controlled like the Soviets were in terms of their fighters are getting minute-by-minute control.

01:03:09.640 They have limited fuel.

01:03:11.120 They don't want them to defect and all of those kinds of things that we saw with the Soviets.

01:03:15.700 We don't see that with the Chinese. 0.97

01:03:17.460 In fact, what we see is the opposite.

01:03:18.920 They'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.

01:03:34.400 And this is something that should worry us.

01:03:37.060 It doesn't mean that we have to give up.

01:03:38.600 But 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.

01:03:47.120 For 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.

01:04:12.620 And 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.

01:04:28.920 And we better be prepared for that.

01:04:31.080 Yeah.

01:04:31.200 And I don't know if psychologically the American people are ready to have a carrier battle group go to the bottom off of Taiwan.

01:04:38.240 We'll talk all about that today.

01:04:39.700 We're going to take a short commercial break.

01:04:41.700 We're packed with some of the smartest people about naval warfare and geopolitics.

01:04:46.560 We're going to return to Navy 250 in a moment.

01:04:49.220 We'll be right back with more Navy 250, Seapower, and Freedom.

01:05:05.940 We want to thank our sponsor, Patriot Mobile, for standing with RAF.

01:05:10.120 Welcome back to Navy 250, Seapower, and Freedom.

01:05:20.160 We want to thank our sponsor, AMAC, for standing with RAF.

01:05:31.660 Okay, welcome back.

01:05:33.700 I really want to thank Real America's Voice, everybody, for doing all the logistics today.

01:05:37.160 It's going to be amazing.

01:05:39.080 It's going to be a little complicated.

01:05:40.480 We're going to juggle.

01:05:40.980 We've got so many great folks about naval operations, about strategy, geopolitics, all of it.

01:05:46.800 I want to go to Michael Pack.

01:05:48.640 And, Michael, The Last 600 Meters, which is essentially a film basically about the Marine Corps in fighting in Fallujah.

01:05:58.640 First Fallujah, but then you've got Najaf and then second Fallujah.

01:06:04.800 I want to talk today.

01:06:06.100 The movie's fantastic, and I think we're going to play it actually was in October 30th.

01:06:11.240 You'll give us the details of that.

01:06:13.540 But your film on Admiral Rickover, I think it came off an assessment.

01:06:17.340 You'd either seen polling or I had that they did a poll, and I think only 3% of the American people recognize his name.

01:06:25.080 And he is a giant of the 20th century.

01:06:27.080 He's a giant because he is the father of the nuclear Navy.

01:06:30.400 Walk me through what inspired you to do Rickover's story.

01:06:34.100 How did you convince Tim Blake Nelson to play Admiral Rickover?

01:06:37.660 The film's fabulous, and I don't think it's been seen enough, and we've got to make sure we push it out.

01:06:41.920 Michael Pack.

01:06:43.520 Well, people can see it.

01:06:45.080 It's on Amazon.

01:06:46.280 It's Rickover, the birth of nuclear power.

01:06:49.220 I agree that he's really underappreciated.

01:06:53.020 You know, in all the celebration of the Navy, it's easy to neglect submarines and nuclear submarines.

01:06:57.580 Of course, the aircraft carriers are nuclear-powered too.

01:07:01.040 But, you know, Admiral Rickover is like a hero of the Cold War, and I think that whole war is actually neglected.

01:07:06.600 You know, World War II, far more dramatic midway, as someone just was talking about, a very dramatic battle.

01:07:12.840 Hey, Michael, Michael, hang on for one second.

01:07:15.660 Let's go to Jack Posobiec.

01:07:17.040 We've got some—

01:07:18.120 I just walked away.

01:07:18.980 Never mind.

01:07:19.720 Okay.

01:07:20.800 Okay, fine.

01:07:21.540 By the way, we're going to have to play it by ear.

01:07:23.520 Let's get Posobiec back up.

01:07:25.040 Michael, continue on.

01:07:26.000 We're going to go to Jack Posobiec live when we get him.

01:07:28.000 We thought we had him.

01:07:28.720 We didn't.

01:07:29.220 Just continue on about Rickover.

01:07:31.200 No problem.

01:07:31.960 You know, he is an undersung hero, just like you said.

01:07:36.720 And I also think he's the kind of naval hero that does get neglected.

01:07:40.440 I mean, Pete Hegseff and others talk about the war ethos, and that is really important.

01:07:45.040 But Admiral Rickover was a great engineer and entrepreneur within the Navy.

01:07:49.700 People compare him to Steve Jobs or somebody like that.

01:07:52.660 It's hard to—he innovated within the Navy and created, as you say, the nuclear Navy.

01:07:57.440 It's a huge achievement, and we would not have won the Cold War without it.

01:08:01.740 I 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.

01:08:10.740 It'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. 0.65

01:08:19.700 The 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.

01:08:30.060 This is why the Soviets got the joke, right, and started building such a global Navy to try to catch up with us. 0.94

01:08:37.000 And 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.

01:08:56.140 If it was not for Rickover, number one, I'm not so sure we would have won the Cold War.

01:09:00.580 And number two, it would have been a lot hotter.

01:09:02.500 I think it would have gotten a lot hotter than it did in actual gunfire.

01:09:06.380 Michael Pack, your thoughts?

01:09:08.740 Absolutely.

01:09:09.100 I mean, he's responsible for one-third of the triad, you know, nuclear submarines, to say nothing of aircraft carriers and commercial nuclear power.

01:09:17.960 But yeah, without that part of the triad—and I'm a Rickover, a big advocate for nuclear submarines.

01:09:22.940 He points us out it's the survivable leg of the triad.

01:09:25.920 You could shoot down planes.

01:09:28.240 You could hit ICBM silos, which they all—Sovietes knew where they all were. 1.00

01:09:34.160 It was the survivable element, and we had dominance in that area.

01:09:40.800 And that really—I think you're right.

01:09:42.040 It kept a lid on the Cold War.

01:09:44.940 And he was tireless in that way.

01:09:47.000 We don't really celebrate, in fact, the heroes of the Cold War, period.

01:09:50.800 But Admiral Rickover is unfairly neglected.

01:09:53.660 I hope my movie does help celebrate him.

01:09:57.560 I think people should go and understand him.

01:10:00.080 I think that kind of—the Rickover approach is really needed today.

01:10:04.500 If 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.

01:10:22.920 Yeah.

01:10:23.040 You know, he reformed the Navy at so many levels, and they hated him for it.

01:10:27.080 I mean, he was a complete maverick.

01:10:29.580 I don't know if somebody like that could survive today.

01:10:31.860 You know, he fought every CNO and secretary of the Navy, you know, from the beginning to the end.

01:10:37.600 They didn't even want to give a hot start.

01:10:39.260 I was there when they forced him to retire.

01:10:44.680 He was 80-some years old.

01:10:46.180 No, he's a giant.

01:10:46.820 I'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.

01:11:01.340 He knew that if it ever had a problem at sea, the whole thing would be scuttled, the whole thing would be shut down.

01:11:09.760 Talk 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.

01:11:22.460 And 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.

01:11:35.940 But we have to take the entire operation, like the Royal Navy did.

01:11:39.600 You've got to take an organization up to, like—you've got to level up, like, five levels.

01:11:43.580 Talk to me about that, Michael.

01:11:45.360 Well, that's right.

01:11:45.960 They 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.

01:11:57.060 And he had lots of ways of doing that.

01:11:59.000 I 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.

01:12:09.760 I'm not sure I 100% believed him, but still, everybody knows the nuclear Navy was safe.

01:12:16.820 He was demanding.

01:12:18.440 I mean, he had techniques like—he had spies at every one of the contractors, and he forbade them from ever socializing with the contractors.

01:12:26.620 You can't go out for dinner.

01:12:27.660 You can't become their friends.

01:12:29.200 They were effectively spies, and the contractors hated him.

01:12:32.900 But he knew what was going on, and he knew when there was a problem, and he knew how to fix it.

01:12:37.560 And all along the chain, he set new standards and new techniques.

01:12:44.580 They're new in a way, but I think they could be relearned today.

01:12:48.120 And if we're going to build up the Navy and build up the military, we need to relearn those lessons.

01:12:54.640 And luckily, Rickover's example is there to study.

01:12:59.540 Okay.

01:13:00.180 President Trump, there you see Marine One.

01:13:02.340 President Trump, we're now getting ready to start things.

01:13:05.660 Absolutely incredible.

01:13:08.300 Jack Posobiec with the president to make sure that President Trump arriving at Air Force One at Joint Base.

01:13:14.160 Andrews didn't do a press gaggle, I guess.

01:13:16.480 President Trump taking it seriously today.

01:13:18.780 Michael, hang on for one second.

01:13:20.040 I want to bring in Captain Brent Sadler.

01:13:23.180 Captain Sadler, you were a nuclear submariner.

01:13:26.400 I think you came in—were you interviewed by Rickover, or are you post that generation?

01:13:31.920 I know that Admiral Rickover, I think his last tour was when I was still at Grundoon, a junior officer of the Chief of Naval Operations.

01:13:39.920 Did you come in afterwards?

01:13:41.020 Because Rickover used to interview everybody before he accepted you in there.

01:13:45.360 Captain Sadler.

01:13:47.200 Yeah, thanks for having me on.

01:13:48.380 I was enjoying the conversation about Admiral Rickover.

01:13:50.520 Now, 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.

01:14:04.300 And certainly anyone that was going to go want to become a nuclear submariner had to endure.

01:14:08.280 Highly technical and just as pointed as it was, I think, under Rickover.

01:14:13.100 But 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.

01:14:23.720 There's a commander-in-chief right there, commander-in-chief leaving Marine One, going to Air Force One.

01:14:28.420 The First Lady's with him.

01:14:30.300 Like I said, President Trump couldn't be more enthusiastic about this than you saw his true social.

01:14:34.020 So, Pac, before I go back to Captain Sadler, talk a little bit about Rickover's interviews, what he would do.

01:14:40.440 He had a tradition of being – he wanted to see what people responded under pressure.

01:14:45.800 Well, that's right.

01:14:46.380 So he didn't just ask technical questions.

01:14:48.820 He tried to ask questions that you couldn't possibly anticipate.

01:14:53.080 And he was devastating.

01:14:56.300 If you didn't give the right answer, you were out.

01:14:58.380 And you're correct, Steve.

01:14:59.420 He interviewed absolutely everybody, every midshipman who wanted to be in the nuclear navy.

01:15:03.720 He interviewed them from the time he ran the nuclear navy in the 50s to the mid-80s when he left.

01:15:10.400 And we dramatized three or four of these interviews in the film, and people never forgot them.

01:15:17.500 There were many people traumatized by them.

01:15:19.820 One that I like that puts him in a nice setting is he demanded – he asked every person whether they repaired their own car.

01:15:28.540 And if they didn't repair their own car, they were out.

01:15:31.700 That was the end.

01:15:33.360 And he talked to a female who wanted to be in the nuclear navy. 1.00

01:15:36.760 He asked her if she repaired her car, and she said no.

01:15:39.300 And he said, well, you're out.

01:15:40.900 And then she called them on Monday and said, I've spent the weekend taking my car apart and putting it back together again.

01:15:46.260 Just wanted you to know.

01:15:47.220 And he said, well, if you did that, you're in.

01:15:49.680 So that's Rick Overt.

01:15:50.800 He asked a different kind of question, a question that tests who you are.

01:15:55.460 Hang on, hang on, hang on.

01:15:55.860 But he can always be talked back to.

01:15:57.620 This is the point I was trying to make about fighting the ship.

01:16:03.460 Why did Rick Overt put young men shipmen under these pressure situations?

01:16:07.680 Why did Rick Overt want to test what their mettle was?

01:16:10.140 Not their technical knowledge, which is very important.

01:16:12.140 They had to be brilliant, right?

01:16:13.260 You had to be the top of your class or close to it.

01:16:15.740 You 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?

01:16:34.560 Just like at Midway, just like at Pearl Harbor, just like at late takeoff, all the great naval battles.

01:16:39.840 Gruber's right.

01:16:40.860 It's that unforgiving minute is what Rick Overt is trying to do.

01:16:44.680 What is your character?

01:16:45.460 How are you going to respond under pressure?

01:16:47.220 I'm going to put you – you're 18 and 19 years old.

01:16:49.400 I'm going to put you under pressure.

01:16:50.900 And if you can't handle it, you're not going to be able to handle it later on.

01:16:54.000 And so you're out.

01:16:55.020 And he was brutal.

01:16:56.240 He was ruthless.

01:16:57.760 And he had to be.

01:16:58.740 We wouldn't have had a nuclear Navy.

01:17:00.240 We wouldn't have had – we wouldn't be the dominant sea power we are without Admiral Rick Overt.

01:17:05.180 And that's why he's one of the giants of the 20th century.

01:17:08.180 Hang on for one second.

01:17:09.260 We're going to take a break.

01:17:10.060 The president – I guess we're going to try to get our feedback of President Trump leaving Air Force One.

01:17:14.640 There we are right there.

01:17:15.720 We've got a clip from Jack Posobiec.

01:17:18.640 We're going to play it all.

01:17:19.620 We're going to juggle it all.

01:17:20.900 We're going to be back in a moment in the war room in Real America's Voice,

01:17:24.200 continuing coverage of Navy 250.

01:17:27.860 Back in a moment.

01:17:28.480 And as you, sir, thy love fulfill, be thou the shield forevermore from every burial to the cold.

01:17:55.480 We'll be right back with more Navy 250, Sea Power, and Freedom.

01:18:03.180 We want to thank our sponsor, AMAC, for standing with RAF.

01:18:13.040 Welcome back to Navy 250, Sea Power, and Freedom.

01:18:18.080 We want to thank our sponsor, Birch Gold Group, for standing with RAF.

01:18:25.480 Check this over here, awaiting the arrival of President Trump, First Lady Melania Trump, doing

01:18:36.480 Dave Andrews.

01:18:37.480 As you can see, Air Force One behind me.

01:18:40.480 President's farewell has been attached.

01:18:43.480 We're waiting for him to be here imminent.

01:18:46.480 If you understand, he may take some questions.

01:18:49.480 We'll see what goes on with that.

01:18:51.480 Navy 250 is getting underway down Mount Virginia.

01:18:54.480 We'll be down conducting exercises, a Sea Power demonstration from USS Bush.

01:19:01.480 Then we'll travel via helicopter to the USS Trilogy, where President Trump will get remarks.

01:19:07.480 The world's finest Navy on their 250th birthday.

01:19:11.480 Jack Pasobek, report it.

01:19:13.480 We'll speak for them today.

01:19:17.480 Jack Pasobek right there, Naval Intelligence Officer on the world's greatest Navy.

01:19:23.480 Fantastic.

01:19:24.480 He's on Air Force One.

01:19:25.480 We've got the Air Force taxiing right there, getting ready to take off.

01:19:27.480 There we go.

01:19:29.480 Taxiing out there.

01:19:30.480 We're going to cover that live.

01:19:31.480 Michael Pack, before I let you punch, and I'll try to get you back later in the day if you're available.

01:19:36.480 But, Michael, I want to also make sure people understand about Admiral Rickover.

01:19:40.480 Admiral Rickover is Jewish.

01:19:42.480 In 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.

01:19:52.480 Very hierarchical, very in customs and traditions, a lot of those that came from the Royal Navy, and had certain ways of doing things.

01:20:02.480 Talk 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.

01:20:19.480 Indeed.

01:20:20.480 I mean, you mentioned this on the break.

01:20:22.480 You 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. 0.99

01:20:34.480 A very Navy persnickety thing, if you don't mind my saying, Steve.

01:20:38.480 And it was shocking. 0.62

01:20:39.480 I mean, his actual page, you know, next to it was a parody of a Jew with a hook nose. 0.72

01:20:45.480 I mean, you could not, these things were real, you know, he was not very Jewish, but his name was Hyman Rickover.

01:20:51.480 He was obviously Jewish.

01:20:52.480 He sounded Jewish.

01:20:53.480 Another 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. 0.77

01:21:07.480 And 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.

01:21:20.480 But he came here speaking only Yiddish and he learned English.

01:21:24.480 So he was here.

01:21:25.480 So, you know, they came to Chicago and he only went to the Naval Academy to get a free education.

01:21:31.480 So, 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.

01:21:41.480 And 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.

01:22:02.480 He was the engineer, the, the, the technical, the, the technology genius.

01:22:09.180 We'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?

01:22:16.040 At Trafalgar, it's, it's John Paul Jones.

01:22:18.200 You're on the bridge guns up.

01:22:19.900 You know, I've only begun to fight.

01:22:21.660 I have not yet begun to fight.

01:22:23.020 He was a, he was, there we go right there.

01:22:24.940 Air Force one talking about technology, air force one, leaving Andrews air force base, not joint base Andrews.

01:22:31.220 Come on, man.

01:22:31.620 We 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.

01:22:41.380 Steve Gruber is going to be deployed out, I think on a combatant here shortly.

01:22:44.500 So we're going to, we're going to have amazing coverage, camera coverage of all this, uh, pack.

01:22:49.840 He's an extraordinary individual and you're right.

01:22:52.240 He'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.

01:23:00.460 It's inside the hierarchy of the Navy, but he hammered his way through and most importantly convinced everybody.

01:23:06.960 And then he delivered it.

01:23:08.120 It just wasn't, it just wasn't making the sales pitch.

01:23:10.040 He delivered time and time and time and time again, because he said, we cannot have any mistakes.

01:23:15.760 If we have any mistakes, they're going to shut this whole program down.

01:23:19.380 Pack, where do people go get the last 600 meters?

01:23:21.600 I 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.

01:23:26.460 And, 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.

01:23:36.100 Uh, where do they go, sir?

01:23:37.660 Well, the, the Rickover film, Rickover, the birth of nuclear power, you can stream it, get it on Amazon, stream it or buy it.

01:23:45.340 Um, and the last 600 meters, which is about the biggest battles since Vietnam, Fallujah and Najaf, they were mainly Marine battles.

01:23:54.200 Now, look, the Marines are technically part of the Navy, though.

01:23:56.820 They don't like to admit it.

01:23:58.580 However, we are happy.

01:24:00.120 Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.

01:24:02.320 What do you mean?

01:24:03.280 Technically.

01:24:04.260 No, don't, don't buy into the Marine.

01:24:06.540 The Marine, the Marine, the, the, yeah, the Marines don't think they're any part of the Navy.

01:24:11.580 Trust me.

01:24:12.060 I 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.

01:24:27.020 The day before veterans day, the Marine Corps birthday.

01:24:30.140 I'm sure you'll have celebration of their birthday too, Steve.

01:24:34.280 And it's a perfect time clock for it.

01:24:37.760 And we hope everybody watches it.

01:24:39.800 I think that it does celebrate the, the warrior ethos.

01:24:44.560 You know, it's a different kind of warrior in the last 600 meters, not the Admiral Rickover kind.

01:24:49.300 And it takes both kinds to make a great military.

01:24:53.080 I 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.

01:25:02.060 But you need, and Curtis LeMay was very much in the tough military, you know, war at all costs kind of guy.

01:25:10.580 And it takes both kinds to make a great military.

01:25:13.420 America was lucky to have them both, even though they did not like each other.

01:25:16.960 Although both, although both, although they hated each other, although both of them understood technical proficiency and understanding.

01:25:24.980 It'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.

01:25:31.500 You're in the long, long, wrong line of work here in the nuclear Navy.

01:25:34.980 By 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.

01:25:42.880 And then you've got Admiral Rickover, which is a brilliant, uh, statement about human, uh, human excellence and pushing the envelope.

01:25:50.200 So thank you very much.

01:25:51.140 So where's your social media, Michael, where they go to go to your company?

01:25:54.580 Well, I see they can go to our websites, which is palladium pictures.com, which is our current films and our older films.

01:26:02.360 Like the last, like Admiral Rickover, Rickover is on the manifold productions website, manifoldproductions.com.

01:26:09.500 My own social media is Michael Pack underscore.

01:26:13.100 Um, and I, I encourage your people to come in.

01:26:17.340 And 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.

01:26:30.880 Perfect.

01:26:31.320 And 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.

01:26:48.800 He had every opportunity to quit.

01:26:50.260 He would not quit.

01:26:51.460 No matter how much they tore him apart, he says, I'm not going to do this. 0.90

01:26:54.020 If we fold, if I personally fold, if I personally fold, they'll kill everybody. 0.85

01:26:58.500 Right. 0.92

01:26:59.020 And I'm going to stand in here.

01:27:00.200 And that is why he is a moral hero, sir.

01:27:03.540 I remember you saying you didn't think I had it in me, Steve.

01:27:06.140 And I didn't think I had it in me either.

01:27:07.860 But when push comes to shove, you have to either you're you back down and you're humiliated or you stand up.

01:27:16.200 I mean, it's just it's maybe it is my mild version of that of that hour of testing.

01:27:22.180 You know, who knows what you're going to do?

01:27:23.800 But oh, no, no, no, no, you came through the test.

01:27:28.500 There's hey, in that first term, there were so many people that quit and just said, I can't take it.

01:27:32.220 I'm a drop nomination.

01:27:33.360 You said I'm not going to do it.

01:27:34.280 Three years.

01:27:35.400 I think it's the longest the nomination that three years and three months.

01:27:40.020 The longest, I think, outstanding nomination ever be confirmed eventually in the history of the country.

01:27:45.200 You stood in the breach, dude.

01:27:46.260 You're a hero.

01:27:46.960 You're you're one of the toughest hombres because you've been tested.

01:27:50.040 You came through the test of fire, sir.

01:27:52.560 Appreciate you being on here today, Michael.

01:27:55.400 Thank you, brother.

01:27:57.840 He's one of the giants, right?

01:28:00.200 He's a pack.

01:28:01.440 Every opportunity to stand down and no, I'm not going to do it.

01:28:04.540 President Trump nominating me.

01:28:05.800 I'm going to stick out.

01:28:06.540 I don't care how they destroy me.

01:28:07.920 And man, that is the enduring moment.

01:28:11.140 Captain Sadler, you wrote a book on a couple of books, one amazing book on naval strategy.

01:28:16.160 You've also been a nuclear submarine officer.

01:28:17.740 I just want to ask you, we're going to go to break here in a couple of minutes.

01:28:19.920 The 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.

01:28:33.360 It was a good old United States Navy and submarines and Tomahawk missiles that took down, I don't know, 40% of the apparatus.

01:28:40.820 What do you think about that, that it's still the Navy?

01:28:43.700 When you want to land a blow, you know the Navy is going to be there, sir.

01:28:47.420 Absolutely.

01:28:49.740 And if you want to keep landing those blows at a distance, it's the Navy is really the only one that can do it.

01:28:55.320 The Air Force can surge, but again, even coming half a world away, it takes a long time.

01:29:00.860 It takes a lot out of the aircraft and the people to do that.

01:29:04.020 But 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.

01:29:13.360 We got about a minute before we go to break.

01:29:18.160 You wrote a book on naval strategy for the 21st century.

01:29:22.100 Do 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?

01:29:32.440 Yeah, I think they do, but it wasn't something that just happened overnight.

01:29:36.000 As 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.

01:29:45.360 And at my perch up here in Capitol Hill, I started engaging aggressively.

01:29:49.980 And 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.

01:29:56.140 It's an American issue.

01:29:57.180 They 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.

01:30:11.080 And the Navy is the best way to do that without having to pull the trigger most times.

01:30:15.180 But it took a lot of effort to get to that point.

01:30:17.660 Laws and legislations acknowledging that.

01:30:20.420 Title 10 changes in the last few years.

01:30:22.400 But 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. 0.58

01:30:31.820 Wow.

01:30:33.880 Captain, hang around.

01:30:34.980 We're going to talk about that in 2027 as kind of an inflection point.

01:30:38.560 We're here at Navy 250.

01:30:40.080 The president of the United States, the commander in chief, is heading towards Norfolk Naval Station.

01:30:44.840 Jack Posobiec's with him.

01:30:46.620 One o'clock, we're going to have a naval gunfire exercise.

01:30:49.180 We're going to have some speeches before then.

01:30:50.620 We'll be right back with more Navy 250, Sea Power, and Freedom.

01:31:04.280 We want to thank our sponsor, Birch Gold Group, for standing with RAV.

01:31:08.620 President, according to your plan, the Palestinian Authority may control Gaza the day after Hamas.

01:31:34.280 Now, 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?

01:31:42.220 Who are you with?

01:31:42.540 Who are you with?

01:31:42.940 Channel 14 Israel.

01:31:44.380 My name is Libby.

01:31:45.760 Well, it's a great deal for Israel, and it's a great deal for everybody.

01:31:49.320 And you want to get your hostages back, right?

01:31:51.420 You want them back or do you not want them back?

01:31:52.980 And it's a great deal for Israel.

01:31:55.500 It's a great deal for the entire Arab world, Muslim world, and world.

01:31:59.640 So we're very happy about it.

01:32:01.000 Thank you so much.

01:32:01.820 When do you think the hostages will start being freed?

01:32:04.520 I think very soon.

01:32:05.560 They're in negotiation right now as we speak.

01:32:08.880 They've started the negotiation.

01:32:11.000 It'll last a couple of days.

01:32:12.620 We'll see how it turns out.

01:32:13.780 But I'm hearing it's going very well.

01:32:15.640 President, are you open to extending the Affordable Care Act subsidies?

01:32:20.200 We want to fix it so it works.

01:32:22.500 It's not working.

01:32:23.680 Obamacare has been a disaster for the people, so we want to have it fixed so it works.

01:32:28.080 And what are the things that follow the judge of order in Portland?

01:32:32.580 We're going to look at that.

01:32:33.880 It was amazing.

01:32:35.060 Portland is burning to the ground.

01:32:37.220 It's insurrectionists all over the place.

01:32:40.120 It's Antifa.

01:32:41.640 And yet the politicians who are petrified.

01:32:43.640 Look, the politicians are afraid for their lives.

01:32:46.540 That's the only reason that they say, like, there's nothing happening.

01:32:50.140 And you've seen it.

01:32:51.400 The place is burning down and they pretend like there's nothing happening.

01:32:55.360 So we'll take a look at the order.

01:32:56.760 We haven't seen the order yet.

01:32:57.840 Mr. President, you're going to celebrate the Navy today.

01:33:00.380 The Navy is deployed in the Caribbean against the cartels.

01:33:03.140 What is the next step on this war against drug trafficking in South America?

01:33:07.020 Well, we're going to stop drug trafficking.

01:33:09.100 And we've done a lot.

01:33:10.520 There's nobody coming in on the water.

01:33:12.980 That I can tell you.

01:33:13.940 The water is like, there's nobody.

01:33:16.100 There's no drugs coming in on the water.

01:33:18.160 And we'll take a look at what phase two is.

01:33:21.320 It made a big difference.

01:33:24.980 What is the flexibility on the Hamas plan?

01:33:28.960 We have very little.

01:33:30.660 We don't need flexibility because everybody's pretty much agreed to it.

01:33:33.680 But there'll always be some changes.

01:33:35.900 But the Hamas plan, I tell you, it's amazing. 1.00

01:33:38.220 You're going to have peace, if you think about it, peace in the Middle East for the first time in, they say, really, 3,000 years.

01:33:47.040 So I'm very honored to be a big part of that.

01:33:49.100 Look, they've been fighting for a plan for years.

01:33:53.460 We get the hostages back almost immediately.

01:33:56.960 Negotiations are going on right now.

01:33:58.780 We'll probably take a couple of days.

01:34:01.200 And people are very happy about it.

01:34:04.980 Sir, our government's side down.

01:34:09.200 Well, if they put judges like that on, I wasn't served well by the people that pick judges, I can tell you.

01:34:29.160 Things like that are just too bad.

01:34:33.000 I appointed the judge and he goes like that.

01:34:35.220 So I wasn't served well.

01:34:36.840 Obviously, I don't know the judge.

01:34:39.200 But if he made that kind of a decision, Portland is burning to the ground.

01:34:44.320 You have agitators, insurrectionists.

01:34:47.220 All you have to do is look at the television, turn on your television, read your newspapers.

01:34:53.060 It's burning to the ground.

01:34:54.880 The governor, the mayor, the politicians are petrified for their lives.

01:34:58.520 Mr. President, you have a judge like that.

01:35:00.500 That judge ought to be ashamed of him.

01:35:02.940 Mr. President, you say you're targeting the worst of the worst.

01:35:05.940 But Governor Christopher said that most of the people I have taken in history is criminal conviction.

01:35:12.980 So which is it?

01:35:13.700 He's wrong.

01:35:14.340 Number one, he's wrong.

01:35:15.620 Number two, I really believe he's afraid for his life somehow.

01:35:18.460 When you can have 40 or 50 people killed over the last couple of months, hundreds of people wounded.

01:35:27.820 There's no place like that in the world.

01:35:30.340 Hundreds of people wounded.

01:35:32.580 50, 55 people shot and killed.

01:35:36.420 And Pritzker gets up and says, what a wonderful place it is.

01:35:40.660 They need help.

01:35:42.300 Washington, D.C. is now a safe place.

01:35:45.580 You're not going to get mugged or hit. 0.91

01:35:47.660 You're not going to get raped. 0.62

01:35:49.100 You're not going to get anything. 0.99

01:35:50.420 Washington, D.C. went from a hellhole to a safe place.

01:35:55.060 I love the way you nod.

01:35:56.080 Is it true, though?

01:35:57.260 I mean, people, a lot of the people right here were, wait, a lot of the people right here were mugged, reporters.

01:36:04.860 And you know what?

01:36:05.480 You're safe now.

01:36:06.860 Nothing.

01:36:07.440 We've had no crime.

01:36:08.960 It took 12 days to solve the problem.

01:36:11.660 12 days.

01:36:13.120 And we're going to do that in Chicago.

01:36:15.200 We're going to do that in Portland.

01:36:16.900 Now, Portland is different.

01:36:18.160 That's a bunch of paid insurrectionists. 0.96

01:36:20.840 But you have a lot of paid people in Chicago, too.

01:36:23.120 I believe the politicians are under threat because there's no way somebody can say that things are wonderful in Chicago.

01:36:31.640 Almost 55, I think it was 55 people over a short period of time have been murdered in Chicago, have been shot.

01:36:42.640 222 people over a short period of time have been hit, have been wounded, not died.

01:36:48.400 But 55 people died over a short period of time.

01:36:51.040 You're telling me there's no city in the world like that.

01:36:54.980 We're going to straighten it out. 1.00

01:36:56.600 And I think that Pritzker, he's not a stupid person. 0.96

01:36:59.680 I think that Pritzker is afraid for his life. 0.98

01:37:01.700 We're federal government, Mr. President, I'm a Navy.

01:37:03.900 We want to make it better.

01:37:06.840 What about the layoff?

01:37:08.900 Well, I call them Democrat layoff.

01:37:12.700 They're Democrat layoff.

01:37:14.440 They're causing it.

01:37:15.600 We're ready to go back.

01:37:16.720 You know, we have a record-setting economy.

01:37:19.360 We have a record-setting country.

01:37:21.260 Prices are way down.

01:37:22.900 We're doing better than the country has ever done.

01:37:25.320 And the Democrats hate seeing that.

01:37:27.340 It's up to them.

01:37:28.640 Anybody laid off, that's because of the Democrats.

01:37:31.360 Thank you.

01:37:31.760 He states that was his gaggle before he took Marine One to, to, there, I think he's waiting

01:37:48.480 for the First Lady to join him, to Andrews Air Force Base.

01:37:51.580 The President now is, I think, close to arriving in Norfolk, the Norfolk Naval Station there.

01:38:00.320 President and the First Lady.

01:38:02.420 We'll watch that.

01:38:05.040 I'm going to go momentarily live to Steve Gruber.

01:38:08.540 Like I said, there are going to be some talks, I think, around 1220.

01:38:11.580 Ambassador Monica Crowley, who's also in charge of overseeing American 250, is in charge of,

01:38:17.580 I think with Justin Caporell, of doing Navy 250, which is today.

01:38:22.020 There's the First Lady and the President getting on Marine One. 0.98

01:38:27.020 And doing a fantastic, just an amazing job.

01:38:32.880 Do we have Gruber?

01:38:34.460 Ambassador Monica Crowley is going to say a few words, I think around 1220, 1230.

01:38:38.580 Going to be joined by two Navy SEALs.

01:38:40.660 We're there with Steve Gruber right now.

01:38:42.080 Steve Gruber, what do you got for us?

01:38:47.580 Mr. Bannon, I got Jason Redman here with me.

01:38:50.500 He is a wounded warrior, retired Navy SEAL, served in Afghanistan, Iraq.

01:38:55.440 Jason, thank you for being here today.

01:38:57.200 Steve, honored.

01:38:58.100 What an amazing thing to be a part of.

01:39:00.160 What an amazing thing.

01:39:01.080 You've got the Purple Heart there on your lapel.

01:39:03.360 Obviously, you've been in some tough spots.

01:39:05.540 You've got New York Times bestsellers.

01:39:07.800 But even so, what an amazing thing.

01:39:09.760 Tell us what comes to mind when you look around here.

01:39:11.980 Well, it's a lot of what I'm getting ready to deliver in the speech I'm going to deliver.

01:39:16.980 And my speech is really written for all these sailors.

01:39:20.120 You know, I grew up looking at the history.

01:39:23.300 My grandfather served in World War II.

01:39:25.620 My dad served in Vietnam.

01:39:27.480 And then moving forward, it was naturally for me to choose this life of service.

01:39:31.080 But really, this is a celebration of the amazing history of the Navy.

01:39:35.260 From the beginning of our inception, the Revolutionary War, we beat the greatest naval might in the world.

01:39:42.480 You know, the British fleet at that time.

01:39:44.460 And we've carried that forward over, you know, for 250 years.

01:39:48.240 Well, now the challenge is, how do we maintain that supremacy?

01:39:52.060 How do we encourage these young sailors to understand you are laying the foundation for the next 250 years?

01:39:58.100 Absolutely.

01:39:58.680 An absolute inspiration to talk to this man.

01:40:01.120 Obviously, you paid a price.

01:40:03.120 Clearly, you paid a price.

01:40:03.920 You have no regrets from what I can tell here.

01:40:06.420 No.

01:40:06.940 I am so thankful for the service I had.

01:40:09.580 I talk about this.

01:40:10.500 I literally served with some of the legends of the 9-11 generation.

01:40:14.500 My story is part of the 250-year history.

01:40:17.980 The things I was able to do, hitting targets in Iraq and Afghanistan, sacrificing brothers in this war, 0.60

01:40:25.920 that's all part of the fabric that makes the Navy great.

01:40:28.980 And that's what we're celebrating here.

01:40:30.380 And not only that, to showcase to the world, we have one of the greatest military forces in the world.

01:40:36.120 There's a little bit of a narrative, oh, is the military getting weak?

01:40:39.200 The answer is no.

01:40:40.360 And with this new focus on, hey, we are the Department of War.

01:40:43.340 We need to be lethal.

01:40:44.220 Our sailors, our Marines, they need to understand that.

01:40:48.500 And that is the focus, and I think what President Trump wants to showcase.

01:40:51.920 Let me ask you something about that, because I saw Pete Hegstaff show up at an event here over the last couple of days.

01:40:58.620 And they just flocked to him, to the military personnel.

01:41:01.740 If you listen to left-wing media, you'd think that he was a disliked individual.

01:41:04.860 I'm not feeling that from you.

01:41:06.220 Well, I have an inside track.

01:41:09.000 I'm friends with Pete.

01:41:10.180 I worked with him with the Concerned Veterans for America tour.

01:41:13.140 When they tried to tear Pete down and say he did this and he did that, I was there.

01:41:17.960 So I didn't see that.

01:41:19.640 Pete understands that the military is about war.

01:41:24.300 At the end of the day, make no mistake, we achieve peace by being in a strong posture to execute war if it comes.

01:41:32.320 None of us want war.

01:41:33.380 But I think what the Secretary understands is we must train for war.

01:41:37.620 And the stronger we are, the more capable we are, the more lethal we are, our adversaries, it makes them afraid.

01:41:43.960 And it makes them question, should I engage, should I press against the United States?

01:41:48.980 That's what we're showing here.

01:41:50.540 Secretary Hegstaff understands that.

01:41:52.840 Jason 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.

01:41:59.400 But I'm super blessed, joined the Navy in 1992, both pre-9-11.

01:42:05.180 So I got to experience that, conducted counter-drug operation, Central South America.

01:42:10.100 Got a commission right down the street here, become a young SEAL officer, made some mistakes, which is part of my journey.

01:42:15.900 Growing up, understanding what it is to lead Iraq or Afghanistan, then Iraq.

01:42:20.420 Severely 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.

01:42:29.420 But got another name for myself of resilience and overcoming with a sign I posted on my door.

01:42:35.200 Today, author, huge veteran advocate.

01:42:38.540 I want to make sure our veterans are taken care of.

01:42:40.620 I 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.

01:42:47.660 All these things, that's my heart and soul.

01:42:50.240 And take care of marriages in the American family.

01:42:52.180 You care about that, too.

01:42:53.200 Amen.

01:42:53.820 Yeah, our book, Miss an Invincible Marriage, focused on how do we help our service members understand that you can have both.

01:43:01.700 God bless America.

01:43:02.700 Jason Redman.

01:43:03.500 It's an honor.

01:43:04.920 Steve Manning, it's an honor to be here today.

01:43:07.160 Steve, just ask Jason to stick around.

01:43:10.900 We're going to take a short commercial break at the top of the hour.

01:43:12.700 I've got a couple questions for him when we get back.

01:43:15.320 Navy 250, the Commander-in-Chief of the United States, is headed to Norfolk Naval Station right now.

01:43:21.360 We'll land momentarily.

01:43:22.920 We'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.

01:43:31.380 We're going to explain it all to you, including the Battle of the Virginia Capes, when we return in the war room.

01:43:38.120 We'll be right back with more Navy 250, sea power, and freedom. 0.61

01:44:01.660 We want to thank our sponsor, Patriot Mobile, for standing with RAF.

01:44:08.120 Welcome back to Navy 250, sea power, and freedom.

01:44:16.680 We want to thank our sponsor, Birch Gold Group, for standing with RAF.

01:44:21.200 It is Sunday, 5 October, in the year of the Lord, 2025, a very special day.

01:44:33.300 Navy 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.

01:44:47.240 Yes, that would be correct.

01:44:48.680 I don't know, eight or nine months before the Declaration of Independence, because guess what?

01:44:52.460 The revolutionary generation understood they were in a gunfight from Lexington Commons and Concord Bridge to the Battle of Bunker Hill.

01:45:00.460 A couple of months later, they realized two things.

01:45:02.320 We need an Army.

01:45:03.820 We need a Navy. 1.00

01:45:04.780 And 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.

01:45:12.320 First question, Steve Groover, if you can ask Jason, what was his rank?

01:45:16.140 And talk to us about understanding he started as enlistment and finished as an officer.

01:45:19.780 How did that work?

01:45:20.500 Jason, 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.

01:45:33.780 Yeah, I started out right here in Virginia Beach.

01:45:35.960 I went through A school at Dam Neck.

01:45:37.640 I 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.

01:45:46.940 I 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.

01:45:56.780 And you went to the school out in San Diego, went through the whole deal.

01:46:00.580 That's right.

01:46:01.160 Yeah, BUDS training.

01:46:02.320 For all SEALs younger, there was a period of time we did SEAL training, both coasts, in the 60s and 70s.

01:46:08.460 But after the 70s, anybody who goes through SEAL training happens out in San Diego.

01:46:12.460 Right.

01:46:12.740 So there's the progression of how he got educated, Steve.

01:46:15.320 I know you also wanted to ask about this.

01:46:18.720 He wanted to ask about the fact that – go ahead, Steve.

01:46:26.800 Steve, hang on one second.

01:46:28.200 We're going to just hold right there.

01:46:29.180 We're going to go to, I think, the president's landing.

01:46:31.320 Let's go ahead and go.

01:46:32.280 Let's jump.

01:46:37.580 Just stop.

01:46:39.720 Let's go.

01:46:40.360 Steve Gruber, real quickly, how did he end up fighting in Afghanistan?

01:46:45.320 And real quickly, Steve Bannon wants to know how you ended up fighting in Afghanistan.

01:46:53.360 It's a long way from water.

01:46:56.020 Well, for many, SEAL is an acronym that stands for Sea, Air and Land.

01:47:00.600 So we are trained to operate in any environment.

01:47:02.720 Obviously, when the nation calls upon us, it's one of the SEALs' job to find, fix, and finish the enemy.

01:47:09.640 The enemy was in Afghanistan, and we found them and finished them. 1.00

01:47:12.820 Find, fix, and finish.

01:47:14.200 That's right.

01:47:15.080 And that's one of the great things I'll speak about at that.

01:47:17.520 What a historic moment.

01:47:18.940 I wasn't on the bin Laden raid, but I had friends on that mission.

01:47:22.140 What a culmination of the 9-11 generation to take out Osama bin Laden. 0.52

01:47:26.880 And God bless you, and thank you for standing watch for all of us and the work you did.

01:47:31.220 Amen.

01:47:31.620 My honor.

01:47:32.620 It was an honor, Steve, no question, by a man like this.

01:47:36.060 All right?

01:47:36.460 What a day.

01:47:38.160 Amen.

01:47:39.280 One of our heroes, one of our patriots.

01:47:40.820 Thank you so much, Lieutenant Jason Redman.

01:47:44.440 Let's go.

01:47:45.100 Do we have now, is the president going to land?

01:47:46.960 We're going to juggle a few things.

01:47:48.280 Okay, let's bring it.

01:47:48.980 Do we have Alex de Grasse?

01:47:50.840 Let's get Alex de Grasse up.

01:47:52.120 By the way, Ambassador Monica Crowley is going to take the stage momentarily.

01:47:55.180 We've got the Navy SEALs that are going to make presentations.

01:47:58.820 De Grasse, we're going, the president, the commander-in-chiefs is going off the Virginia

01:48:03.280 Capes today to participate in a naval gunfire exercise, and we're going to see multiple

01:48:10.400 types of Navy warfare.

01:48:12.820 Walk us through, why is it ironic that we're going to the Virginia Capes today, given how

01:48:17.160 important that is in the history and the freedom of our country, sir?

01:48:21.660 Thanks, Steve.

01:48:22.300 Well, it's huge.

01:48:22.880 I think the battles of the Cape, or the Battle of the Chesapeake, is probably the most important

01:48:29.300 turning point in the Revolutionary War, and it's something that's not really spoken or

01:48:32.660 taught a lot about, which is kind of interesting.

01:48:34.940 The key was that it was a set-piece naval battle between the French Admiral de Grasse that came

01:48:41.600 up from Haiti in the West Indies.

01:48:43.280 He had been coordinating with General Washington, who had been for three years understanding,

01:48:49.340 and I did want to rewind after we get through this top line and walk through that, hey,

01:48:53.440 the key to victory is going to be a combined naval and army engagement to pin the British.

01:48:59.620 He understood that.

01:49:00.500 He had been pleading with the French after they aligned with us that, hey, we need a decisive

01:49:05.760 set-piece battle.

01:49:07.280 And I'll explain through the campaigns in Virginia why it all led to this battle at Yorktown, where

01:49:13.380 Cornwallis was holed up and then under siege by General Lafayette, a French general who was

01:49:19.000 also commanding a combined American army unit.

01:49:22.160 But the French fleet really is what defeated the British that were coming down from New York

01:49:28.140 and then prevented them from relieving Cornwallis either with reinforcements or having him be

01:49:33.120 able to retreat.

01:49:33.820 And so if I can't see for a couple of minutes, I think just kind of leading up in the Revolutionary

01:49:38.920 War of a plane.

01:49:40.480 Okay, that's good.

01:49:41.380 So we all know, important to remind everyone, April 19th, 1775, the war starts when British

01:49:47.920 troops went to seize the armaments, right?

01:49:51.880 So the first attempt, you know, when we think of the importance of the Second Amendment, that's

01:49:55.660 the shot heard around the world.

01:49:56.900 Obviously, then the colonists besieged Boston, where the British were held up.

01:50:01.260 And once we took the cannons from Ticonderoga and we fortified Dorchester Hill, again, you

01:50:07.580 see the importance of the Navy.

01:50:08.800 The British were forced to flee Boston using their ships.

01:50:12.040 Most went to Nova Scotia.

01:50:13.640 Someone back down in New York was, you know, obviously somewhat of a victory.

01:50:17.820 And then again, the importance of the naval power, this side on the British side, they

01:50:23.000 landed over 30,000 troops in New York and totally crushed us in Long Island and in Manhattan.

01:50:28.560 George Washington fleeing down to New Jersey.

01:50:30.480 There were obviously some engagements, certainly the Christmas attack on Trenton, somewhat of

01:50:35.520 a moral victory.

01:50:36.900 And that was sort of gets us through 1776.

01:50:39.660 In 1777, you've got the grand strategy the British had, which is they were trying to divide

01:50:44.620 and conquer and cut off, Steve, obviously New England, which is where the heart of the

01:50:48.700 revolution and where they were producing a lot of arms and recruits and then sort of the

01:50:52.520 rest of the colony.

01:50:53.240 So Howe was supposed to, I think, move up from New York.

01:50:58.360 You had troops marching down from Montreal and Quebec, as well as troops moving from Erie

01:51:03.460 to converge in Saratoga.

01:51:04.900 Thanks to the Patriots, both in Oriskanese, to bleed the British army moving from the West. 0.75

01:51:11.540 The New York army never made it up.

01:51:13.240 And then the army was obviously soundly defeated at Saratoga, which is one of the most, at that

01:51:19.100 point, historic battle.

01:51:20.320 That brings the French into play, Steve. 0.99

01:51:22.860 Benjamin Franklin and Washington and all these folks in the Continental Congress were desperate,

01:51:27.160 obviously, really because they needed a navy, a real navy. 0.95

01:51:30.700 Of course, we had the American navy, but we needed to shift the line.

01:51:33.820 We needed to be able to stop the British free flow of troops up along the coast.

01:51:38.360 And that was really key.

01:51:39.920 So at this point, after Saratoga, the French say, hey, I think they think we could win this.

01:51:44.800 They get on board.

01:51:45.960 They give money, the troops, they give a navy.

01:51:48.660 And that was huge, OK?

01:51:50.320 And so that gets us into 1778, OK?

01:51:53.460 And also, the Spanish got involved, the Dutch later in 1780.

01:51:57.280 And this really became a world war.

01:51:58.760 So I think that's important for everyone to understand.

01:52:01.780 The surrender of the Battle of Saratoga, I think, was the largest single surrender of British

01:52:06.560 troops or the first time on foreign soil in the empire that they had, you know, sort of imploded.

01:52:11.640 So at this point now, they're getting kind of frustrated because there's kind of a stalemate

01:52:15.740 in the north.

01:52:16.360 So the British then called it, they pivot to a southern strategy, OK, betting on loyalist

01:52:21.580 support down in the Carolinas and Georgia and want to sort of cut off the Americans down there.

01:52:27.240 OK, they took Savannah, then they took Charleston in 1780. 0.79

01:52:30.280 And I think that was the largest American defeat in the entire war, over 5,000 captured.

01:52:34.940 Cornwallis then takes command and crushed Horatio Gates.

01:52:40.660 I mean, probably the second biggest defeat at Camden.

01:52:44.420 Washington pulls him, puts in Nathaniel Green.

01:52:47.200 But most importantly for the MAGA down there who loved this part of history, you've got all these

01:52:51.300 partisans, all this guerrilla warfare, you know, Francis Marion, Thomas Sunter, eventually the

01:52:56.960 Over Mountain Boys, which are the Appalachian guys.

01:52:59.440 They marched, I think, over 400 miles from Tennessee through the Blue Mountains and crushed

01:53:03.940 the loyalists, I think, at the Kingsmountain or Guilford Courthouse at the start of 1781.

01:53:10.300 OK, all of these guerrilla engagements sort of bled the British, who sort of abandoned their

01:53:17.280 Carolinas strategy at the time in the South and moved to Virginia.

01:53:20.480 OK, so a lot of specifics here, but all of this is kind of leading into this set piece

01:53:24.700 battle, OK, where Lafayette's now the French are on the ground with about 5,000 men, Steve,

01:53:31.000 and working.

01:53:31.740 And I mean, there was Americans under the French command on the ground.

01:53:35.300 At this point, Washington's in the north.

01:53:37.080 They're sort of shadowing New York.

01:53:38.560 And the French have Rochambeau up there as well with a large army.

01:53:43.320 And the British are mostly housed in New York.

01:53:46.140 And they develop this strategy to say, hey, let's trap them in Chesapeake.

01:53:50.960 And they're talking to Admiral de Grasse with these fast frigates, which is crazy to think

01:53:54.500 about he's in West Indies with about 20 ships, OK, maybe a little more than 20, 25 ships, OK?

01:53:59.780 They sail to the Chesapeake.

01:54:01.660 The British maybe think he's going to go there.

01:54:03.720 They send their fleet down.

01:54:04.840 They don't see the French.

01:54:05.680 They go back to New York.

01:54:06.760 At this time, Lafayette and, sorry, Rochambeau and George Washington are March, I think,

01:54:13.940 400 miles from New York down towards Yorktown, where Lafayette is starting to engage Cornwallis.

01:54:21.080 Admiral de Grasse gets there first, goes in the Chesapeake, starts unloading, brings about

01:54:26.080 4,000 additional French troops, which is huge, 3,500, I think, from the Caribbean.

01:54:31.200 And now they're engaged in this.

01:54:32.480 Out of nowhere, Steve, they get surprised, and the British Navy appears.

01:54:37.140 They've got about, I wrote this down, I think they had 19 ships.

01:54:40.340 So they had less.

01:54:41.700 Yeah, there you go.

01:54:42.260 19 ships from the British.

01:54:43.660 Out of nowhere, de Grasse sees this.

01:54:44.900 He's got, I think, about 24.

01:54:46.820 That's right, ships of the line.

01:54:47.800 So these are big ships.

01:54:48.600 This is like the first really set piece naval battle.

01:54:51.600 And de Grasse panics and actually quickly loads the troops up and the sailors, and they

01:54:57.620 go out quickly.

01:54:58.400 Some of the ships were not even fully manned and missing, like 100, 200 people.

01:55:02.100 And there was a good opportunity for Graves, who's the British commander, to engage and

01:55:07.500 probably crush the French, since they were not organized.

01:55:10.160 They had the wind, as, you know, I forget that term.

01:55:14.400 And I sent a picture to Cameron, but you've got, this was like a historic, I mean, like

01:55:21.140 the old, you know, they've got two converging lines, the British and the French fighting

01:55:25.620 in like old style, lining up, single line.

01:55:28.600 And the start of the lines engage fully, and it gets to the middle.

01:55:32.680 The British take more casualties.

01:55:35.520 The French take some casualties as well, but sort of sustain.

01:55:39.000 And for the next couple of days, they're sort of cat and mouse.

01:55:41.400 At this time, an additional French fleet from Rhode Island that had about nine ships were

01:55:48.300 bringing siege cannons and entrenchment tools and other supplies from the French from Rhode

01:55:52.880 Island get there.

01:55:53.660 They were already back in the bay.

01:55:55.560 So at this point, the British realized, hey, now they've got over about 30 ships.

01:55:59.320 They're outnumbering them almost two to one.

01:56:00.740 So they flee back to New York.

01:56:02.580 French are able to land, bring more troops.

01:56:06.040 Washington arrives, Lafayette, they ferry them across the bay.

01:56:09.080 And they trapped the British in Yorktown, forcing the surrender and forcing the entire 0.86

01:56:14.100 war to end, Steve.

01:56:15.420 So hopefully that wasn't too much or too fast for folks.

01:56:19.340 But that's sort of a topic.

01:56:20.280 No, it was fabulous.

01:56:21.860 Fabulous.

01:56:22.800 I studied this intensely.

01:56:24.400 Hang around.

01:56:25.500 Yeah.

01:56:27.200 You're directly related to one of the heroes, if not the hero, the Battle of the Virginia

01:56:32.580 Capes.

01:56:33.160 President Trump's going to be out there today in a naval gunfire exercise, everything.

01:56:39.080 You're going to have the great naval air.

01:56:41.520 You'll have submarine forces.

01:56:43.260 You'll have surface warfare.

01:56:45.920 The true naval officers, I might add.

01:56:48.060 Just kidding.

01:56:48.760 Short break.

01:56:49.300 Back in the warm in just a moment.

01:56:50.380 We'll be right back with more Navy 250, sea power, and freedom. 0.61

01:57:02.980 We want to thank our sponsor, Birch Gold Group, for standing with RAV.

01:57:07.340 We'll be right back.

Bannon's War Room - October 05, 2025

WarRoom Special： Sea Power And Freedom Prelude

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