Pete Hegseth is a prominent American television personality, author, and military combat veteran who served as an infantry officer in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Guantanamo Bay. He s served as the CEO of Concerned Veterans for America, where he championed policies to reform the Department of Veterans Affairs and improve the lives of those who have served our country. His commitment to these issues is also evident in his writing, having penned several books on topics ranging from military history to contemporary politics. In our conversation, we ll explore Pete s journey from the battlefield to the newsroom, discuss his views on the current state of American politics, and the shocking state of the military. We ll also touch on his personal experiences, the lessons he s learned through his service, and his vision for a stronger, more united America. This is the Sunday Special, and today we re proud to welcome Pete's dad, Dr. Pete Heg Seth, to the show. He s the author of The War on Warriors, a new book about his experience in the military and his thoughts on what it s like to be a father in a war zone. His father served in the U.S. Army, and is a dedicated family man who served alongside his son in the Marine Corps and served with the Joint Improvised Explosive Device Defeat Organization (JIEDDO). The War On Warriors is a book written by Pete s father, Pete, about his experiences in Afghanistan and the importance of a family connection to our nation s military family. . He has been a supporter of President Donald Trump, and has been an advocate for veterans and their families, and a passionate advocate for the country s values and a champion of veterans as well as a strong defense policy advocate for a strong, united America . He s been a regular contributor to conservative causes and advocate for our veterans and families who deserve a strong and fair and fair government a man who is dedicated to their share in the fight for their families and a better future. , and a person who understands what it means to have a strong sense of belonging in a community that s a strong community in a world that s full of respect and respect for their fellow man and a place where they can be proud of their country. ...and he s not just one, but a friend and a warrior of their families to their country an American hero, and he s a father, too.
00:00:00.000So I signed up 20 years ago to fight extremists, put my life on the line, and now I'm deemed one because of what I believe, because of my Christian faith, or because I work for Fox News, or because I support Donald Trump.
00:00:16.000Like, I've worn this uniform for the better part of 20 years for this country, and you're calling me an extremist.
00:00:21.000If they'll do that to me, They'll do it to anybody, and they did.
00:00:25.000Pete Hegseth is a prominent American television personality, author, and military combat veteran.
00:00:30.000Hailing from Minnesota, he served as an infantry officer in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Guantanamo Bay.
00:00:35.000Hegseth's dedication and leadership earned him numerous commendations, including two Bronze Star medals and a Combat Infantryman badge.
00:00:41.000Following his military service, Hegseth transitioned into the realm of media and political commentary.
00:00:45.000He became a familiar face on television as a contributor, and his insightful analysis and passionate advocacy for conservative values quickly garnered him a loyal following.
00:00:53.000As a co-host of Fox & Friends Weekend and a frequent commentator on Fox News, he brings a unique blend of first-hand experience and keen analysis to the discussion of national security, veterans affairs, and American values.
00:01:04.000In addition to his work in media, Pete is a passionate advocate for veterans and military families.
00:01:08.000He's served as the CEO of Concerned Veterans for America, where he has championed policies to reform the Department of Veterans Affairs and improve the lives of those who have served our country.
00:01:16.000His commitment to these issues is also evident in his writing, having penned several books on topics ranging from military history to contemporary politics.
00:01:23.000In our conversation today, we'll explore Pete's journey from the battlefield to the newsroom, discuss his views on the current state of American politics and the shocking state of the military, We'll also touch on his personal experiences, the lessons he's learned through his service, and his vision for a stronger, more united America.
00:01:36.000This is the Sunday Special, and today, we're proud to welcome Pete Hegseth.
00:01:41.000♪ Well, Pete, it's wonderful to see your dad.
00:02:26.000They don't like things they can't control.
00:02:28.000And they look at the DOD and they say, this is something we need to bring to heel.
00:02:31.000And something like CRT is perfect because it's Marxist in origins and it gets people turning on each other.
00:02:37.000I mean, this is really important stuff, and obviously your book is filled with important stuff.
00:02:40.000I want to start from the very beginning here.
00:02:42.000The most trusted institution in the United States by all polling data remains the military.
00:02:46.000But we have this weird situation where fewer Americans than probably any time in American history actually know somebody who is serving or has served in the military.
00:02:54.000How do you see that emerging in American life, that ignorance of the military?
00:03:08.000And if you have a break in that chain, then you see the kind of recruiting pitfalls we're seeing right now.
00:03:15.000But as much as I believe in, and I do think we should continue the all-volunteer force, it comes with that pitfall.
00:03:21.000Inherently, our warriors are detached from the Americans that they defend.
00:03:26.000And then, even more so, our wars are fought far-flung.
00:03:30.000So no part of the conflict comes home to anybody who's actually serving.
00:03:34.000So if you've got 1% serving, and a smaller fraction maybe has served at some point, A small percentage of Americans might know someone serving, but the idea that they would know someone in combat or someone that's been wounded or lost their life is almost minuscule.
00:03:48.000So it's easy to be pro-war or anti-war or pro-defense or just sort of rah-rah America without having a real sense of what the warriors are doing, which means that certainly is true for our political class.
00:04:02.000So in a second I want to get to the political class and talk about also sort of the public view of the military and war itself.
00:04:08.000Let's start from where the military has gone wrong in terms of the brass.
00:04:12.000So the everyday soldier on the line is as amazing as he ever was or she ever was.
00:04:18.000But when it comes to the brass, that has obviously changed.
00:04:20.000There's been something that the right has been increasingly noticing, obviously, and they've gotten a lot of criticism.
00:04:24.000People like you have gotten tons of criticism for noticing it, that if you notice the quote-unquote wokeness in the military, that this means you're somehow undermining the military.
00:04:31.000But obviously, it's the other way around.
00:04:32.000It's people who are injecting foreign values into the military who are undermining the military.
00:05:23.000So that's why it's different than education.
00:05:25.000The last book I wrote about the last 100 year takeover.
00:05:28.000This is a two decade, two and a half decade.
00:05:30.000Started with Clinton, but it was mostly the fundamental transformation under Obama, who said, I will not tolerate What this institution is, and so I'm going to take my political appointees who will put pressure on the brass.
00:05:42.000The brass that comes to heel gets promoted.
00:05:46.000The rest of them slowly get filtered out.
00:05:48.000And over the course of eight years, we have a very complicit officer class inside the Pentagon.
00:05:53.000Now, here's the crazy part, though, because you mentioned the Warriors are just as good as they've always been.
00:06:05.000And your young privates going through Basic or going through ROTC or West Point are getting that woke ideology as part of their training as gatekeepers.
00:06:14.000So you almost have a donut hole in the military right now where you've got the general class that's complicit because they have to to get promoted on the gender stuff, on the climate stuff, on the DEI stuff, on the extremism stuff.
00:06:27.000And then you have the younger officers who have been baptized in this, either through left-wing universities of ROTC or West Point or Annapolis.
00:06:34.000And now they're enforcing it because maybe they don't believe it, but they have to if they want to advance their careers.
00:06:41.000It's the middle group that's going, wait, This isn't the military I signed up for.
00:06:44.000And if I want to be a colonel or a general, I have to give into this stuff I don't want to be a part of.
00:06:49.000And so they're leaving or they're being quiet or they didn't take the vaccine.
00:06:53.000So you've got a couple of different militaries right now, which means the next commander in chief is going to have a lot of work to do about how you actually change it.
00:07:01.000I guess the real question is, why didn't it happen sooner?
00:07:04.000Considering that Bill Clinton was the president, Barack Obama obviously was much more activist in terms of his feelings about social transformation than any of his predecessors.
00:07:14.000And you can see there's always been this gap in the military, and people have talked about this in literature and film since time immemorial.
00:07:20.000There's sort of the political generals, and then there's the everyday guy who's fighting on the line, and there's a big gap between those.
00:07:25.000If you want to rise to the top level, you do have to mirror back at the political leadership exactly what they want to hear.
00:07:31.000Is that sort of the story here, is that you had a bunch of people who wanted to rise up in the esteem of Barack Obama and his administration, and so they started mirroring back all the social engineering Big time.
00:07:42.000In addition to that, the military took on the ethos that it wants all of its senior officers going to elite universities.
00:07:49.000Almost a couple of gap years at some point.
00:07:51.000Going to Harvard, going to Columbia, going to Berkeley.
00:07:54.000The idea being, hey, the more the civilians at high levels interact with the military, the more understanding they'll have.
00:08:00.000You tighten the civil-military divide.
00:08:03.000What actually happened instead was these officers got cozy with types that will be the political class or the media class or the bureaucracy, the class of bureaucracy.
00:08:12.000And as a result, started to reflect more so the ethos of those institutions than the military.
00:08:17.000It's a lot easier to be liked by the media than to stand up for this warrior code that everyone says is hyper toxic and masculine.
00:08:25.000And so the formations, the leadership started to look a lot more like that.
00:08:29.000Add that to, really, Eisenhower was right.
00:08:32.000The military-industrial complex is a real thing.
00:08:35.000You've got generals who, if they get along to go along, from one star to two star to three star, have a handsome future corporate board on a military organization afterwards, contractor.
00:08:50.000And if you speak up, or if you cut against the grain, or if you don't get promoted, that job doesn't await you.
00:09:02.000If the incentive is to go along with systems that don't work, or grease the skids with money, or go along with social programs, that's how you get the corporate board or the next job.
00:09:11.000Then you never get the disruption you're supposed to have amongst men and women whose job has been the profession of arms.
00:09:18.000My job is making sure my unit is ready to fight, that the equipment we have is top-notch, that there's no division entering the ranks of our troops, so that when the Commander-in-Chief and the American people say, you're headed to war, I'm ready.
00:09:32.000Except Especially under Obama, the focus became, no, no, no, no, what about these gender issues?
00:09:45.000And certainly under Biden, it's been, what about extremism?
00:09:48.000And the sort of the myth of white supremacy inside the military, which is something that the book talks about.
00:09:53.000The shame is, in each example, the generals know what they're peddling isn't true.
00:09:58.000But they peddle it quietly because it's what they have to do.
00:10:00.000So let's talk about each of those issues. You mentioned the extremism problem,
00:10:04.000the supposed extremism promise been pushed by the Biden administration. This idea that there is this
00:10:08.000wellspring of white supremacy living inside the American military. It's a true threat that needs
00:10:12.000to be extirpated inside the American military. Where is that coming from? And why is it being
00:10:18.000promulgated? It's being promulgated because our general class, our Secretary of Defense,
00:10:26.000were interested in being liked by the chattering class of the woke moment of 2020.
00:10:30.000I mean, there was more DEI and things like that were bubbling under the surface.
00:10:33.000But when George Floyd happened and that moment happened, the military
00:10:39.000Those with political orientations inside the leadership of the Defense Department said, this is our moment to address this systemic problem.
00:10:47.000Because everyone will see systemic problems everywhere.
00:10:50.000There must be a systemic problem inside the DoD, even though racial integration inside the Defense Department, way ahead of the curve of everywhere else.
00:10:58.000The book talks about how it led the curve on things like that.
00:11:01.000I served, and racial issues were not an issue.
00:11:05.000I had black soldiers, white soldiers, Hispanics.
00:11:08.000We were so far beyond that that anybody you talked to pre-2020 would say, yeah, that's not an issue.
00:11:14.000And by the way, it's already illegal to be racist inside your units.
00:11:17.000And if you show racial preference, you can.
00:11:20.000But then you got Mark Milley at Testimony saying he wants to understand white rage.
00:11:24.000You have the military saying we need an extremism stand down.
00:11:30.000Because we think we have systemic racism.
00:12:22.000This was what the military class had to do to satisfy their political leaders at a certain moment.
00:12:29.000And Trump pushed a lot of it out, but it wasn't all gone by the time he, I mean, there were plenty of people underneath still peddling DEI, so that by the time 2020 happened, and then once January 6th happened, And they saw Trump in the rearview mirror.
00:12:42.000They were able to fast forward everything that they wanted to do.
00:12:45.000Of course, then the military gets through with doing its actual study on white supremacy in the military.
00:12:51.000And it turns out the military is far less racist than the general population.
00:14:46.000And then January 6th, that's where it got personal for me in the story of purging patriots and extremists.
00:14:53.000January 6th happened and they had every excuse to fast forward the ideologies that gave them an opportunity to push out certain people they didn't like.
00:15:01.000We'll get to more on this in just one moment.
00:15:34.000We are big Helix fans at the Shapiro house.
00:15:37.000In fact, when we had our family from out of town stay at the house, they asked where we got the mattress because they wanted to get one of their own.
00:16:28.000There were a few reservists and others that were involved, some veterans that were involved.
00:16:32.000Shocker veterans, you know, care about their country.
00:16:35.000But they created a massive characterization of that this constituted a potential militaristic threat led by people who'd been extremists in the military.
00:16:47.000And therefore, as veterans later, they were following through on it.
00:16:50.000And I was caught right in the crosshairs.
00:16:54.000National Guard when the riots of 2020 happened in the summer of 2020.
00:16:58.000I was standing outside the White House with a riot shield and a face mask, staring down Antifa and BLM mobs.
00:17:05.000I'd been deployed three times to combat.
00:17:08.000And here I remember the surreal moment.
00:17:10.000There's like smoke bombs going, everything's going off.
00:17:12.000I look back and there's the White House lit up, you know, and there's Jersey barriers on the ground and concertina wire.
00:17:17.000I'm like, I feel like I'm in Baghdad, but I'm on in Lafayette Park with a square staring down my fellow Americans.
00:17:25.000Who at one moment, I actually remember thinking you could be 20 years ago, you might be on my side, but the government school system has done its work on you.
00:17:33.000I mean, there's a whole nother dynamic to all of this.
00:17:38.000You talk about an insurrection that looked like an insurrection to me.
00:17:43.000Fast forward to what happened on January 6th.
00:17:46.000Remember, Nancy Pelosi had the entire National Guard in the parking garage, sleeping in the parking garage, guarding the Capitol.
00:17:52.000So January 6th happens, and the boogeyman is, this might happen again, we have to put a fence around the Capitol, bring in all the National Guard.
00:18:20.000So I was going to be in New York for the weekend, be there for the inauguration to guard it, and then go back to my show on Saturday, Sunday.
00:18:25.000So shortened orders, but still ordered.
00:18:27.000And I'll never forget the day before I was supposed to go down there, I get a call from one of the commanders in my chain of command saying, Pete, you can stand down.
00:18:57.000I called back and spoke to someone that was privy to the decision-making, and they said, the chain of command went through your social media, saw a cross tattoo that you have, the Jerusalem cross, and dubbed it a white extremist tattoo, and that you were a threat and an extremist, and your orders were revoked.
00:19:30.000I've worn this uniform for the better part of 20 years for this country, and you're calling me an extremist.
00:19:36.000If they'll do that to me, They'll do it to anybody, and they did.
00:19:40.000They found guys, they found guys, guys and gals around the military who had particular points of view, either shamed them in a particular direction, pushed them to get out.
00:19:49.000The vaccine, again, did its work to a number of people.
00:19:52.000Zero religious exemptions given to anybody.
00:19:54.000I wonder who's standing up with a principled stance in those moments.
00:19:58.000Things like the Gadsden flag, not allowed on military bases.
00:20:02.000I mean, don't tread on me is something that's considered extremist.
00:20:06.000So you've got one political ideology and philosophy deemed, meaning conservatives or Trump supporters, or the new word that the Pentagon has used in briefings is patriot extremism.
00:20:19.000Is a catalog of the type of people that are a threat to the military.
00:20:26.000It was normal men from like Tennessee and Kentucky and Florida and all over the country of all backgrounds and all shades who joined our military because they love the country.
00:20:35.000Now they're the ones in the crosshairs.
00:20:37.000That goes back to our original premise of the conversation.
00:20:40.000Why aren't people joining the military?
00:20:42.000They look around and they see that, or their parents see that, and they say, Johnny, not the military I signed up for.
00:20:49.000I mean, the social engineering of the military obviously takes its most robust form when it comes to the question of, say, transgenderism.
00:20:54.000So there's been a wild push, of course, under Barack Obama and then mostly under Joe Biden to basically say that men and women are exactly the same, that you have a right to serve, which is a very weird way of thinking about service, is that it's really about your right to serve as opposed to whether the military needs you to serve or wants you to serve.
00:21:11.000I mean, we don't think that way about somebody who has schizophrenia We used to not think that way about somebody who had morbid obesity.
00:21:17.000Now we're changing all of the standards to let everybody in because they're desperate.
00:21:20.000I mean, they're sweeping the streets for anybody to come in because, as you mentioned, they have a massive recruitment problem.
00:21:24.000But that really goes back to something that was happening—I think there were the first inklings of this, even when I was much younger, 20 years ago, when you shifted from the messaging of the military, which was all about group and group cohesion and efficiency in America, To an army of one.
00:21:40.000The idea being like it's about the individual who's in the army, which is precisely the opposite.
00:21:44.000The army is not an individualistic place.
00:21:57.000At least when it was an army of one, they were tough looking, go get them army.
00:22:03.000But you're right, that was the subtle individual, the shifting toward an individual ad campaign.
00:22:08.000Now you just have the absurdity of I have two mommies and I'm so proud to show them that I can wear the uniform too.
00:22:13.000So it's just like everything else the Marxists and the leftists have done.
00:22:16.000At first it was camouflaged nicely and now they're just open about it.
00:22:19.000But it did, I mean it started with the Clinton under Don't Ask, Don't Tell, trying to change that policy.
00:22:25.000And then when he did, there was a lot of criticism on that.
00:22:28.000I spoke to dozens and dozens of guys actively serving of all ranks for this book, and then a lot of people who got out.
00:22:34.000One of them was a black gay soldier who had protested outside the White House for the repeal of Don't Ask, Don't Tell.
00:22:40.000And I remember him saying, I did it because I thought anybody should be able to serve.
00:22:45.000But what became clear to him quickly was that it was never about that for the ideologues.
00:22:50.000And so a lot of the original people who pushed for the overhaul of Don't Ask, Don't Tell are no longer public about it and regret it because it was really just a costume for a trans agenda pushed into the military.
00:23:01.000Uh, which is full on, by the way, inside the ranks.
00:23:04.000You talk to people, you don't have to go very far to find someone that says, well, I've got a trans member of my unit and that means we have a lot more, uh, you know, counseling on pronouns and, and, and, you know, you can't no jokes.
00:23:17.000And because the threat is so serious, it permeates the culture of units.
00:23:23.000Everyone's, most especially, commanders walking on eggshells.
00:23:28.000Because if they make one wrong mistake with this soldier, and
00:23:31.000it happens with race and gender too, but it's one of the easiest analogies is asthma or dental exams.
00:23:38.000Like, when we would deploy to Iraq and Afghanistan, you always get a dental exam before you go.
00:23:42.000And if you were cat 4, meaning you had serious issues, they just pulled your tooth.
00:23:50.000Because you can't be downrange with a toothache that's debilitating where you don't have a dentist.
00:23:56.000Or when you go to basic training, they take away your asthma medication because if you're downrange, you can't rely on that.
00:24:04.000The whole thing undermines readiness at every level.
00:24:07.000It's the easiest, hard stop, no, which the Trump administration did, by the way, to their credit.
00:24:13.000But it's sort of the perfect end state of what the left would like.
00:24:18.000You are an individual automaton that we will celebrate Um, just like Harvard does with its aggrieved constituencies, now we're going to do that with Pride Month, with every other, you know, there's, there's now rainbow colored patches for, for the units that you can wear during Pride Month inside your unit.
00:24:36.000Like the army birthdays in June, like how about we do that?
00:24:39.000No, we're doing, we're doing Pride Month.
00:24:42.000So it, it has become an ethos of what commands are expected to do because the DEI, Infrastructure, the bureaucracy grows ever more powerful, just like inside corporations.
00:24:55.000The DEI officer comes in and says, no, no, you can't.
00:24:57.000That same dynamic is coming to play in the military, where it used to be, if you were the company commander or you were the battalion commander of a unit, you were like, Closest thing to God on Earth, to that private.
00:25:10.000Anything you said happened, because you are not an individual.
00:25:54.000The formal or informal quota system is kicked into gear.
00:25:57.000And what that means is, formal or informal standards have to be lowered.
00:26:02.000Because, you raised the point, men and women are different.
00:26:05.000Lung capacity, bone density, you name it, they're fundamentally different down to every single cell.
00:26:11.000Yet, I had a Marine Corps officer yesterday, I was speaking to, who proudly said it was one of his biggest accomplishments to integrate basic training.
00:26:55.000They could be medics or helicopter pilots or whatever, but they create all sorts of variables and complications that have nothing to do with being anti-woman and everything to do with having the most effective military you can.
00:27:08.000Underlying all of this is a massive recruitment problem.
00:27:11.000You mentioned at the very top that because it's a volunteer military, that usually means that it is a family business and all it takes is one break in that chain to basically destroy the entire downstream recruitment pipeline.
00:27:22.000You mentioned that you'd want your kids to serve.
00:27:24.000At what point, given how woke the military is going, do you start saying to your kids, maybe something else ought to be on the table because how do you serve your country under these conditions?
00:27:36.000I actually, the last chapter of the book is a letter to my five sons because, and I wrote it last because I didn't know what the letter was going to say while I was writing the whole book.
00:27:47.000I'm going, okay, I want to dive in as deep as I can into the entirety of this and what ultimately came to bear in that last chapter was the depth of the leftist
00:27:57.000takeover is real, but it's not like education where it's deep, it's thin, it's
00:28:05.000Most people in the military don't buy it, they don't want any part of it. They know it's not
00:28:10.000helpful for the units, but they have to kind of go along with it or they say, well, that's over there.
00:28:14.000Or they try to join more elite units where it's not as prevalent.
00:28:18.000That's where I think some of my different, I was in rank and file regular role units, including National Guard, where some of this stuff percolates a lot faster than some of the more elite units, which is why some people you see on TV are talking about it.
00:28:28.000Sometimes they're a little bit more insulated and more hesitant to criticize because it's not, you know, the Navy SEALs aren't seeing a lot of wokeness these days.
00:29:59.000Join something where a lot of this garbage isn't there and you're going to be used on more vital core national security interests.
00:30:07.000And that's the way warfare in many ways is moving anyway.
00:30:09.000So that's kind of my hedge for the moment, but I just think we can't say stop joining Full Stop to our boys.
00:30:16.000We need those patriots pushing back in the hopes that a commander-in-chief, and the next commander-in-chief, if it's Donald Trump, and I pray it is, needs to clean house.
00:30:25.000I mean, clean house of these woke generals.
00:30:27.000And bring back guys that you know are rock solid.
00:30:30.000Promote guys and gals that you know are rock solid.
00:30:33.000Get rid of all the DEI, all of the not transgender nonsense, all of the quotas.
00:30:39.000If you want to have different standards, fine, but have different standards for different jobs.
00:30:44.000So if you're in the infantry, they're up here for everybody.
00:30:46.000If you're a drone operator, then you can beat 300 pounds and as long as your thumbs work, you're good to go.
00:31:04.000He's the new chairman of the Joint Chiefs.
00:31:09.000And he was obsessed with the color and background of Air Force pilots.
00:31:13.000Who has ever cared what race their pilot is?
00:31:17.000Just how good can you fly and can you shoot while you're flying?
00:31:20.000That's all that should matter, and that's not what we're doing right now.
00:31:22.000So it's a tough question with kids, and I know a lot of vets would disagree with me on that, and I understand why.
00:31:27.000And maybe I will if things continue to go amiss, but right now we need them.
00:31:32.000So, let's talk about your own personal experiences in the military as sort of a backdrop to a broader discussion about where the military should be used, how the American people should see the military.
00:31:41.000So, what got you into the idea of going into military service in the first place?
00:31:45.000You say you weren't from a military family.
00:31:46.000So, what made you think of doing that?
00:31:47.000Well, you know, we're in and around Memorial Day weekend time frame, which It was always a meaningful moment for me as a kid, because my parents used to take me to the Memorial Day parade down in Wannamingo, Minnesota.
00:31:59.000It's a nothing farm town in southern Minnesota of 300 people.
00:32:03.000But every Memorial Day, they'd have a huge parade.
00:32:05.000And, of course, the vets would—it's like the sheriff's car, the one fire truck, the band, and the vets.
00:33:04.000Let's pretend, let's not pretend like it's something else.
00:33:06.000So women have made immense contributions, but it's mostly men in those graveyards, and rightfully so.
00:33:12.000And so I thought if those men would be willing to do it, I should too.
00:33:15.000And that was really it, which is why I'm a huge believer in civic ritual.
00:33:18.000I mean, first, religious ritual, but second, civic ritual, if you don't have parades and demonstrate reverence and salute the flag, We are, you know, societies, what you celebrate is a reflection of what you value.
00:34:22.000It was at the height of the lack of popularity of the Iraq War, and I just remember sitting at my desk being like, I'm a qualified infantry lieutenant, and there's a hot war going on right now.
00:34:50.000It's all just, like, just crap all over it.
00:34:53.000But he was at Benning at that time, and he needed a platoon leader in the 101st Airborne, and I was able to make some phone calls and maneuver.
00:35:00.000It took a long time, and it was a bureaucratic battle, but I joined them on their way to Iraq, and I was a platoon leader in Iraq for six months.
00:35:06.000And then I was a civil military operations officer, which means I worked with the Iraqi
00:35:10.000people, the tribes, the sheikhs, and the imams on some semblance of civil governance.
00:35:15.000But that was, if you remember when the Golden Mosque was bombed, I was in Samarra when that
00:35:26.000But we effectively learned to build trust and understand networks and garner intelligence.
00:35:31.000And we helped dismantle Al Qaeda cells in that area.
00:35:35.000But I came back, you know, really invested in my, in that war.
00:35:39.000And when I look back at my advocacy and I fought for the surge and all of those things, like I was just a warrior invested in the legacy of winning the war.
00:35:46.000My government sent me to fought and I believed in winning the war.
00:36:03.000The most demoralizing moment for me as a vet is when the flag of ISIS and the caliphate flew.
00:36:09.000Over Ramadi and Fallujah and Samarra in a way that you're like, wow, we spilled all that blood and now a worse enemy controls that area than we ever did because of our feckless policies.
00:36:22.000But you can't deny the limits of foreign adventurism too, like the idea that we're going to remake these societies in our own image.
00:36:27.000So this book grapples with a lot of that too, the understanding of I'm proud of the legacy of what I fought for and believed
00:36:34.000in and the warfighters I was there with, but you can simultaneously look at the disaster in
00:36:38.000Afghanistan and say, what the hell, as well.
00:36:41.000So I went out after that. I was an advocate for vets in the military for years.
00:36:45.000And then I ended up going to grad school and I went to did one more tour in Afghanistan.
00:36:53.000So all the units coming in would kind of get the latest and greatest on what the Taliban was trying to do and al-Qaeda was trying to do, and we'd brief them up on it and send them out in the country.
00:37:04.000It was right there, 2011-2012, where I realized I'm briefing a strategy that does not work.
00:37:09.000I went to Iraq pessimistic in 05, came back optimistic.
00:37:13.000I went to Afghanistan in 2011 optimistic and came back pessimistic.
00:37:18.000I've just seen enough to say this whole nation building thing that we're trying to do like the Afghans get our weapons for their units and they just sell them on the black market in Pakistan.
00:37:27.000Like, we build them a school and then they steal all the air conditioners and sell them on the black market.
00:37:46.000Well, maybe we should look at the impact of what we've done in some of these things.
00:37:50.000You can believe in American power and American strength without believing that a lot of the things we've done over the last 20 years made us stronger in that context.
00:37:59.000We'll get to more on this in a moment.
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00:39:00.000So let's talk about that, because I think one of the things that's happened with American military policy is because it's an all-volunteer military since Vietnam, and because we tend to think of the military largely now as almost a tech-based force.
00:39:14.000We think of it as drones, and we think of it as F-35s and F-22s and missiles that are fired from submarines and all this kind of stuff.
00:39:21.000Because of that, we tend to think of war as antiseptic, and that Yeah.
00:39:24.000actually leads to two false conclusions.
00:39:27.000One is that war is easy and clean, so why not get into one since they're easy and clean?
00:39:31.000And two is that once we're in it and it takes quote unquote too long or starts to get ugly,
00:39:40.000I mean, really, from what I, you know, obviously I have a lot of friends who are in the military, and what they have said universally is that what has always been true, war is unbelievably ugly, war is unbelievably terrible, the sacrifices are very large, you should be hesitant to get in, but once you are in, you really need to actually go to win.
00:39:57.000And it feels like the American military, whether it's the brass or the political leadership, has spent the last half century, basically, more than that, maybe since World War II, Playing not to lose as opposed to playing to win in all of these places.
00:40:38.000So Congress can sort of, whether it's the pro-war side or the anti-war side, play their political game without many implications on their own lives.
00:40:47.000Uh, so it does become quickly conversation becomes quickly very, very detached, uh, from the American people.
00:40:55.000I mean, it goes all the way back to, we're not even declaring wars anymore because no one wants their, their, their, their so politically untenable as to what way they'll go.
00:41:02.000So no one actually wants to invest in them or is willing to.
00:41:05.000Uh, and so you get these, These forever wars, which is a bad phrase because they're not forever wars, but it's the way it ends up being described because there is no actual end state.
00:41:16.000Tell me what the end state is in Ukraine.
00:41:17.000I could tell you what the end state is in Israel.
00:41:19.000And what's the only thing the American military and the American diplomats are doing right now?
00:41:24.000Trying to stop Israel from finishing the fight.
00:41:26.000Like there's one thing that Israel could do, kill every last one of those Hamas mother Now, and then the war stops.
00:41:34.000And by the way, Israel didn't start it.
00:42:33.000The other reality is that when we talk about forever wars, people tend to think of a forever war in the way that Vietnam was a hot war for ten years and then sort of petered out and got out.
00:42:43.000But the reality is that technically, Korea is a forever war.
00:42:47.000There was an armistice signed in Korea and we still have troops in South Korea.
00:42:51.000We don't think of it that way because whatever is the status quo is the status quo.
00:43:05.000That's more accurate than the opposite, which was happy talk from both parties basically
00:43:09.000saying, either we're going to win it immediately or we're going to pull out immediately.
00:43:12.000Like, that's actually not how war typically works.
00:43:14.000You can make the argument we shouldn't have been there in the first place and therefore we don't want to be there for a hundred years if the interests are not worth it or any of the rest of that sort of thing.
00:43:21.000But the reality is that in an era of guerrilla warfare, which, I mean, when's the last time we saw a war?
00:43:27.000Ukraine and Russia is actually sort of a throwback war in the sense they actually have armies in a field that are fighting against one another.
00:43:32.000As opposed to the news type of war, which is in the Middle East, which is the kind of war you were fighting in Iraq or the kind of war you were fighting in Afghanistan, which is essentially a counterinsurgency war.
00:43:40.000And that's a war where basically the only way to win it is to occupy in clear areas for an extraordinarily long period of time with a really, really big footprint.
00:43:50.000And if the American people are unwilling to do that, then they shouldn't get into the war in the first place.
00:43:55.000Because I don't think the American people would support that.
00:43:58.000Even with a small amount of casualties.
00:44:01.000Although, if the casualty count is low enough for long enough, most people get distracted enough that whatever that necessary op tempo is can mostly be sustained if it's keeping an enemy at bay.
00:44:13.000I think most people wouldn't mind if we had troops, per se, in Iraq or Syria, keeping ISIS at bay, if those troops weren't threatened.
00:44:20.000But now here they are in the middle of Iran staring them down, and drones could swarm those bases and Americans could be killed, and that would have real consequences.
00:44:31.000I look at how our government and our Pentagon conducted Iraq and Afghanistan, and I say, if that's the model for clear hold build, if that's the model for counterinsurgency and asymmetric warfare, And we're never going to win.
00:44:55.000I mean, the guys responsible for 9-11 or those involved in enemy... We didn't have enough guts to try them in a military tribunal and kill them, hang them.
00:45:04.000You don't fight, the cops deal with it every day now in our streets, the catch and release program.
00:45:12.000You spend all this time finding an insurgent, but then because lawyers are running the show, you hand them over and then ultimately the system spits them out three weeks later.
00:45:21.000They're back on the street and everybody that told on them is dead.
00:46:11.000The trajectory of governments and civilizations is not over.
00:46:14.000The advances in technology, I mean, China is building an entire hypersonic missile capability that's meant to defeat every single one of our aircraft carriers in the first 30 minutes of any conflict.
00:46:25.000When our whole strategy is predicated on power projection on those aircraft carriers, what do we do when they're all gone?
00:46:32.000What do we do when drones are swarming all of our remote bases, which have very rudimentary air defense systems, and you've got hundreds of American casualties?
00:46:42.000So I think, tragically, it would take a jarring moment, like a 9-11 or like an October 7th, and I'm not cheering for either of those things, for anybody.
00:46:55.000To jar awake the American people to the need for what it would take to actually fight a war.
00:47:00.000Even then, I look at our education system, and I look at our culture, and I wonder how much of the left would say, well, you had it coming.
00:47:09.000So is national consensus really something that's possible?
00:47:11.000So the book ponders our ability to fight and win wars, and I think errs more on the side of Don't fight them if you're going to fight them the way we've been fighting them, pussyfooting around.
00:47:21.000If you're going to fight them, then you better unleash these really badass dudes to do stuff in dark places that you don't need to know about that keep you safe.
00:47:30.000And it means a lot of people that hate us are going to be dead.
00:47:41.000And one of the things that has happened in the way that we think about foreign policy is that we refuse to acknowledge the reality, which is that it's always going to be a series of choices between bad and worse.
00:47:49.000There's no such thing as an amazing choice where you're unleashing the military.
00:47:55.000It's always going to be a choice between a more antiseptic, legalistic war that we tire of and then leave and lose, like Afghanistan or Iraq, Or it's going to be what you're talking about, which is something quick and bloody, but we get the job done.
00:48:07.000Or it's going to be we delegate the quick and bloody to somebody else and that person gets the job done, but then we have people yelling in our ear about how their human rights violations.
00:48:15.000There is no fourth choice where everybody magically just becomes good today.
00:48:19.000And if there is something like that fourth choice, what that would be is an extraordinary amount of American intimidation.
00:48:24.000So I remember I was sitting with President Trump at a fundraiser that we did with him, and President Trump was talking about how he was intimidating foreign leaders.
00:48:31.000He's told the story publicly, so you can tell him.
00:48:35.000The one where he was talking about how he met with, how he's on the phone with the leader of the Taliban, and he, Abdul, they call him Abdul, and President Trump says, He says, Your Excellency, Your Excellency, but why are you sending me a picture of my house?
00:48:51.000He says, Because, Abdul, if you kill an American soldier, I'm going to blow up your house.
00:48:56.000And that is actually an effective strategy.
00:49:02.000Exactly, because it turns out that, as he said, even if what I'm saying is a bluff, if it's a 5% shot that it's true, nobody's screwing with you.
00:49:09.000But that's something that even the Biden administration doesn't understand.
00:49:11.000They don't even understand the ability to flex.
00:49:13.000Forget about use the American military.
00:49:14.000Even flexing the American military is too much for these guys.
00:49:23.000The abdication of any responsibility whatsoever to defend our own interests, our own interests first, and then defend our allies and actually stare down our enemies is completely gone.
00:49:35.000Now you even have the military trying to... I love when I see stories that the American military is trying to coach or condone the Israeli military about how they're conducting house-to-house operations in Gaza.
00:49:47.000Excuse me, have you seen our track record in the last couple of years?
00:49:51.000And you think you're going to tell those guys?
00:49:53.000And by the way, I mean, you know this stuff better than I, but the traditional ratio of civilian casualties to military is 9 to 1 over history.
00:50:05.000Like, they're fighting the most precise urban warfare the world's ever seen.
00:50:10.000Military academies will study this, not just for the military, you've got all the political and international limitations, but just on the military side, especially if they're allowed to finish it.
00:50:20.000Like, this stuff is really, really hard.
00:50:22.000So if you're not clear-eyed about, like, we're the home team, we're the good guys, We have interests and we have natural people to protect.
00:50:33.000We're going to do whatever it takes to defend it.
00:50:36.000Then you're already off on the wrong foot and everything else is going to go sideways.
00:50:39.000And so when you look at like our southern border is a perfect example.
00:50:42.000Like we don't even care about our own borders, but we're obsessed with the Donbass.
00:50:47.000Like that's why you have people like me who say like, What are we doing?
00:50:54.000So I mean, I'm also a, I've described myself as a neoconservative who was mugged by reality a long time ago and recovering because I went along.
00:51:02.000I mean, we all want to believe in the possibility of exporting freedom and giving people opportunity and all of it.
00:51:09.000And that was music to the ears of, you know, after 9-11, a better world and turn the corner and American dominance.
00:51:14.000And we're going to, and then you look at it and you go, no, no, no, no.
00:51:17.000There's evil everywhere, and there's good and there's evil, and the human condition is real.
00:51:37.000And that's why, you know, even a Clinton, even there was a bipartisan consensus that we were the good guys and that there was no listening to international institutions in the process.
00:51:48.000I mean, you saw what the ICC just recently did.
00:51:50.000I mean, the ICC is an America and Israel hating organization.
00:51:53.000We should do everything we can to bring it to its knees forever.
00:51:56.000Like they should have no orientation whatsoever on anything we ever do.
00:52:00.000The problem is in Washington, you know this, the entire foreign policy establishment is wedded to the post-World War II ideal of the global order.
00:52:10.000That NATO and eventually the EU and the UN and the ICC, all of these things that were created by the West to cement the gains of World War II are permanent.
00:52:21.000Except all of those institutions are now being used against the West.
00:52:24.000So that's why when Donald Trump talked about NATO, everyone bristled and then everyone realized, well, maybe he's right.
00:52:30.000Because I think when I see the stat, I can't remember if it's, if it's, I think it's the French.
00:52:36.000They have like, if Russia were to actually invade France, they've got three days worth of ammo.
00:52:41.000Like they literally can't defend themselves.
00:52:49.000And now, because of our fecklessness, we've pushed Russia and China together in this unholy alliance that seeks just our abdication of the leadership role, which we're happily doing.
00:53:02.000And we're doing it culturally, and we're doing it politically, and we're doing it economically, and with debt, and everything else.
00:53:08.000So all of that comes around to A new election means a new commander-in-chief, which means new clarity, but it's also going to mean new conflicts on some level.
00:53:18.000and how we use that military and whether it's ready is an open question.
00:53:23.000You mentioned very briefly there the possibility of October 7th or 9-11 bringing Americans
00:53:27.000together and I do wonder if there's enough social fabric left in the United States to
00:53:32.000actually bring Americans together around something like a terrorist attack.
00:53:35.000I think that if there were a major terrorist attack in the United States under Joe Biden
00:53:37.000there actually would be a pretty solid rally around the flag effect because conservatives
00:53:50.000Or would the left say it's Donald Trump's fault, this is all because of Donald Trump,
00:53:53.000it's all because America is a nefarious force in the world.
00:53:57.000There's a reason there are hundreds of thousands of people who are marching in solidarity with
00:53:59.000Hamas and they're burning American flags.
00:54:01.000I mean, to pretend that the protesters that you're seeing in Europe or on college campuses are predominantly there because of a conflict in a corner of the Middle East that they didn't care about five seconds ago, and they can't define the river or the sea when they say the river or the sea, that those people care deeply about this, other than a small coterie of radical Islamists.
00:54:20.000They just don't like America and they don't like the West and they don't like the idea that there is a Western country in this place that is very successful and its enemies are very unsuccessful and quite evil, actually.
00:54:30.000And so I wonder, you know, because that idea has been inculcated over the course of generations, and this is your last book about the education system, Is there enough of a remnant left of Americans, enough normies, to stand up to the radicals that if something really, really bad happens, there will be enough people rallying around the flag?
00:54:53.000We're literally trying to keep a republic while simultaneously training up a generation of young people to, at best, be skeptical of that republic, at worst, hate it.
00:55:02.000And so when asked to galvanize in that moment, Do we have even just the foundations to actually muster that defense of our own nation?
00:55:14.000Or at least it will quickly become partisan unless it is so devastating.
00:55:19.000If it were to happen right now under Joe Biden, I know a lot of conservatives would rally.
00:55:24.000But at the same time, you might also look around and say, well, you let 10 million people into the country who we didn't know who they were.
00:55:30.000And now there are overwhelming amounts of Middle Easterners and Chinese nationals who China knows where their people are going, and why are they coming across our border, and why aren't you accounting for that?
00:55:41.000There is responsibility to be had there, and there will be finger-pointing for something like that.
00:55:48.000I don't know, and I don't mean that to be, to dodge the question.
00:55:51.000It would, I hate to say this, it would depend on what happened, depend on who the oppressor was, who the oppressed was, who the victim was, what the circumstance was, what the nationality or background of the perpetrators were, whether or not they did it from stolen land or on our stolen, like it's just so many stupid factors on the calculation of the left that is written off Western civilization, written off Christianity, written off Judaism, written off America and Israel, As the oppressor class permanently.
00:56:21.000And if you are the oppressor class permanently, then you can't cheer for the oppressor.
00:56:25.000You don't have an American flag in your garage to pull out when that moment exists.
00:56:30.000Because you've decided the only flag that matters is the new trans flag.
00:56:34.000And that's the one we fly at our embassies under Biden too.
00:56:40.000So, and that's civilizationally devastating for any country.
00:56:44.000I mean, it means you can't defend your own interests.
00:56:46.000Pretty soon you don't have people filling the ranks, which means you look to foreign... I mean, this has happened many times in many civilizations where you become decadent internally.
00:56:55.000And that's why there's so much... That's why there's...
00:56:59.000I mean, every once in a while I look around at our own country and I go, are we the bad guys?
00:57:03.000Like, the most important thing we can do is repent.
00:57:08.000And so it's, the problems we have are so much deeper than who's wearing four stars on their shoulder.
00:57:16.000And larger, that I don't know if we can muster it, but all I know is when that moment happens, if we don't have a Marine Corps that knows how to shoot straight, full of well-trained people, then we really don't have a chance.
00:57:27.000And if we haven't learned from other conflicts around the world, if we don't fix our military-industrial conflicts, which is obsessed with pumping out certain types of boats and certain types of planes because that's what the pipeline is, but what you really need is thousands of cheap drones, you know what I mean?
00:57:40.000I mean, if we don't make those changes, then We will be beaten in the most important first moments of that next conflict.
00:57:47.000And big empires go down slowly at first, but then quickly.
00:57:52.000And you could conceive of our interests being attacked simultaneously around the globe with the wrong commander-in-chief, with some stunning defeats, which makes the world say the era of America is over, and then the rest of it just starts to cascade.
00:58:10.000I mean, it's China, the Europeans, it's nobody!
00:58:15.000So, we really are freedom's last best hope, and that's why when they come for the camouflage class, which is the first chapter, then they came for the camouflage class, they're coming for the last bastion of what could actually defend us.
00:58:26.000Okay, so let's say that President Trump, God willing, is reelected.
00:58:34.000Because what we saw from the first Trump administration, there's a lot of good policy, but the big foible of the first Trump administration is that given the fact he'd never held elected office before, He didn't know which levers to pull.
00:58:44.000I mean, the executive branch is enormous.
00:58:50.000You have a real deep state, people who are career bureaucrats, who are oriented against the agenda that President Trump will bring to the table.
00:58:57.000What do you say to him when he says, how do I fix this problem?
00:59:00.000First of all, across the government writ large, I mean, I think you've got to get arbitrary.
00:59:04.000If you want to get so big, you've got to get arbitrary.
00:59:06.000Something like, if your Social Security number ends in 7, 4, 2, or 6, you're fired.
00:59:29.000So as much as I love Donald Trump, that was very much a pitfall of the beginning of his administration.
00:59:33.000Who are the people that truly believe in America first, that truly believe in unleashing our war fighters, that reject every aspect of DEI, not just Not the whole like, well, you know, we do diversity, but we're not really, no, no, no, we're out of this whole game.
00:59:49.000We only want lethality and meritocracy.
01:00:39.000I do think it's the type of institution that can turn differently than, say, a Department of Education, which we should just get rid of completely.
01:00:46.000Or if you weren't going to get rid of, you couldn't pull the roots out fast enough or hard enough.
01:00:51.000Because I think the core of that Pentagon would be with all of those moves.
01:00:55.000Most of your 06s and 07s and 05s and E7s and E8s who fought these wars and saw the nonsense, serve with people who were killed will say, yeah, yeah, let's
01:02:19.000Whoever was involved in any of those types of things, you can see the door and you'll be replaced by a junior officer who can be promoted more quickly.
01:02:28.000I mean, I didn't get into it in this book, but there's huge issues with a promotion system that yes, it's a meritocracy, but there's incredible limits on who could move as quickly.
01:02:36.000So you've got little Eisenhowers out there who are stuck at captain rank for six years, even though they should be a lieutenant colonel based on what they're capable of doing.
01:02:45.000So there's things you can change there too that are long haul, but a lot of firings and then Hire whoever made Maverick, the movie, and say, make me a dozen ads for every branch of the military that show just badass dudes getting to work.
01:03:04.000And get ready for an influx of young men under a commander-in-chief they respect to come on it.
01:03:15.000My point is, that's not an issue, so we don't have to worry about the issues.
01:03:19.000The reason I say that is because that's what the left is saying.
01:03:22.000The leftists say, oh, it's Donald Trump's shock troops coming in.
01:03:26.000You know, Donald Trump's shock troops are the guy you went to synagogue with, or the guy I went to church with, who decided not to join the military, but instead now is working for the power company, or doing construction, but otherwise would have joined.
01:03:41.000And they go to church, and they have families, and kids, and they're productive, and they work hard, and they're good, honest people.
01:03:48.000Lay out in the book those types of guys I went to school with in high school, some of which probably would have been toxic males if they hadn't been forged through the military.
01:03:57.000And then they get wounded in combat, silver stars, like just amazing guys.
01:04:02.000Or they were just patriotic and they were kind of wimps.
01:04:05.000But they went into the military and then they served 20 years and now they're lieutenant colonels and they're, you know, large and in charge and the military forged them too.
01:04:12.000Right now we're not recruiting either of those groups.
01:04:15.000So, you recruit those groups with a different ethos of the entire military, you could be back in the game.