The Ben Shapiro Show - How The Military Went Woke | Pete Hegseth

00:00:00.000 So 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.

00:00:14.000 Any one of those is a wrong answer.

00:00:16.000 Like, I've worn this uniform for the better part of 20 years for this country, and you're calling me an extremist.

00:00:21.000 If they'll do that to me, They'll do it to anybody, and they did.

00:00:25.000 Pete Hegseth is a prominent American television personality, author, and military combat veteran.

00:00:30.000 Hailing from Minnesota, he served as an infantry officer in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Guantanamo Bay.

00:00:35.000 Hegseth's dedication and leadership earned him numerous commendations, including two Bronze Star medals and a Combat Infantryman badge.

00:00:41.000 Following his military service, Hegseth transitioned into the realm of media and political commentary.

00:00:45.000 He 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.

00:00:53.000 As 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.

00:01:04.000 In addition to his work in media, Pete is a passionate advocate for veterans and military families.

00:01:08.000 He'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.

00:01:16.000 His commitment to these issues is also evident in his writing, having penned several books on topics ranging from military history to contemporary politics.

00:01:23.000 In 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.

00:01:36.000 This 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.

00:01:51.000 Thanks so much for joining us.

00:01:52.000 Really appreciate it.

00:01:53.000 Great to be here.

00:01:53.000 So let's talk about your book, The War on Warriors.

00:01:55.000 For those who don't know, it has become also a series on Fox, a special on Fox.

00:02:00.000 I want to play a little bit of it so people understand how awesome it is.

00:02:03.000 People definitely need to tune over at Fox News and check it out.

00:02:06.000 Here's a little bit of your series.

00:02:08.000 There's new concepts like patriot extremism, which is a part of how they review the profile of people serving.

00:02:14.000 So there are real insidious aspects of what's happening inside the Pentagon.

00:02:18.000 A lot of ideological people with too much time staring down at a meritocracy that they don't control.

00:02:25.000 And you know the left.

00:02:26.000 They don't like things they can't control.

00:02:28.000 And they look at the DOD and they say, this is something we need to bring to heel.

00:02:31.000 And something like CRT is perfect because it's Marxist in origins and it gets people turning on each other.

00:02:37.000 I mean, this is really important stuff, and obviously your book is filled with important stuff.

00:02:40.000 I want to start from the very beginning here.

00:02:42.000 The most trusted institution in the United States by all polling data remains the military.

00:02:46.000 But 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.

00:02:54.000 How do you see that emerging in American life, that ignorance of the military?

00:02:58.000 Well, no doubt.

00:02:59.000 It's in some ways become a family business, the all-volunteer military.

00:03:03.000 My grandfather served.

00:03:04.000 My father served.

00:03:05.000 I'm going to serve.

00:03:06.000 I would encourage my kids to serve.

00:03:08.000 And if you have a break in that chain, then you see the kind of recruiting pitfalls we're seeing right now.

00:03:15.000 But as much as I believe in, and I do think we should continue the all-volunteer force, it comes with that pitfall.

00:03:21.000 Inherently, our warriors are detached from the Americans that they defend.

00:03:26.000 And then, even more so, our wars are fought far-flung.

00:03:30.000 So no part of the conflict comes home to anybody who's actually serving.

00:03:34.000 So 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.

00:03:48.000 So 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. 0.95

00:04:02.000 So 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.

00:04:08.000 Let's start from where the military has gone wrong in terms of the brass.

00:04:12.000 So the everyday soldier on the line is as amazing as he ever was or she ever was.

00:04:18.000 But when it comes to the brass, that has obviously changed.

00:04:20.000 There's been something that the right has been increasingly noticing, obviously, and they've gotten a lot of criticism.

00:04:24.000 People 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.

00:04:31.000 But obviously, it's the other way around.

00:04:32.000 It's people who are injecting foreign values into the military who are undermining the military.

00:04:35.000 Correct.

00:04:35.000 You can't blame me for pointing out what you're doing to an institution that's beloved to me and my fellow warrior class.

00:04:42.000 The book is not about how the military went woke.

00:04:44.000 The book is about how the military allowed itself to go woke.

00:04:48.000 Because this is an institution more focused than any other in our government, in our society, on meritocracy, on lethality, on readiness.

00:04:58.000 I mean, every aspect of it is, how good are you at your job, and how quickly can you execute it?

00:05:03.000 And that's what it's supposed to be.

00:05:05.000 And if you're a general officer inside the military, you raise your right hand to defend the Constitution, that's what you're defending.

00:05:11.000 You're not gonna let anything inside the ranks of your forces that tear that down.

00:05:16.000 We have a whole warrior general class that has done just that, starting a little bit under Clinton.

00:05:20.000 This is not a 100 year story.

00:05:22.000 This is a recent story.

00:05:23.000 So that's why it's different than education.

00:05:25.000 The last book I wrote about the last 100 year takeover.

00:05:28.000 This is a two decade, two and a half decade.

00:05:30.000 Started 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.

00:05:42.000 The brass that comes to heel gets promoted.

00:05:46.000 The rest of them slowly get filtered out.

00:05:48.000 And over the course of eight years, we have a very complicit officer class inside the Pentagon.

00:05:53.000 Now, here's the crazy part, though, because you mentioned the Warriors are just as good as they've always been.

00:05:56.000 I agree, kind of.

00:05:58.000 The challenge is, because it's a top-down organization, you start pushing things like DEI.

00:06:03.000 Now you're young lieutenants.

00:06:05.000 And 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.

00:06:14.000 So 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.

00:06:25.000 They have to go along to get along.

00:06:27.000 And then you have the younger officers who have been baptized in this, either through left-wing universities of ROTC or West Point or Annapolis.

00:06:34.000 And now they're enforcing it because maybe they don't believe it, but they have to if they want to advance their careers.

00:06:41.000 It's the middle group that's going, wait, This isn't the military I signed up for.

00:06:44.000 And 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.

00:06:49.000 And so they're leaving or they're being quiet or they didn't take the vaccine.

00:06:53.000 So 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.

00:07:01.000 I guess the real question is, why didn't it happen sooner?

00:07:04.000 Considering 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.

00:07:14.000 And 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.

00:07:20.000 There'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.

00:07:25.000 If you want to rise to the top level, you do have to mirror back at the political leadership exactly what they want to hear.

00:07:31.000 Is 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.

00:07:42.000 In addition to that, the military took on the ethos that it wants all of its senior officers going to elite universities.

00:07:49.000 Almost a couple of gap years at some point.

00:07:51.000 Going to Harvard, going to Columbia, going to Berkeley.

00:07:54.000 The idea being, hey, the more the civilians at high levels interact with the military, the more understanding they'll have.

00:08:00.000 You tighten the civil-military divide.

00:08:03.000 What 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.

00:08:12.000 And as a result, started to reflect more so the ethos of those institutions than the military.

00:08:17.000 It'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.

00:08:25.000 And so the formations, the leadership started to look a lot more like that.

00:08:29.000 Add that to, really, Eisenhower was right. 0.87

00:08:32.000 The military-industrial complex is a real thing.

00:08:35.000 You'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.

00:08:50.000 And if you speak up, or if you cut against the grain, or if you don't get promoted, that job doesn't await you.

00:08:57.000 That's a real problem in politics.

00:08:59.000 It's a real problem in business.

00:09:01.000 Military is another thing.

00:09:02.000 If 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.

00:09:11.000 Then you never get the disruption you're supposed to have amongst men and women whose job has been the profession of arms. 0.94

00:09:18.000 My 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.

00:09:32.000 Except Especially under Obama, the focus became, no, no, no, no, what about these gender issues?

00:09:39.000 What about these trans issues?

00:09:41.000 What about these women in combat issues? 1.00

00:09:43.000 What about climate change?

00:09:45.000 And certainly under Biden, it's been, what about extremism?

00:09:48.000 And the sort of the myth of white supremacy inside the military, which is something that the book talks about.

00:09:53.000 The shame is, in each example, the generals know what they're peddling isn't true.

00:09:58.000 But they peddle it quietly because it's what they have to do.

00:10:00.000 So let's talk about each of those issues. You mentioned the extremism problem,

00:10:04.000 the supposed extremism promise been pushed by the Biden administration. This idea that there is this

00:10:08.000 wellspring of white supremacy living inside the American military. It's a true threat that needs

00:10:12.000 to be extirpated inside the American military. Where is that coming from? And why is it being

00:10:18.000 promulgated? It's being promulgated because our general class, our Secretary of Defense,

00:10:26.000 were interested in being liked by the chattering class of the woke moment of 2020. 0.73

00:10:30.000 I mean, there was more DEI and things like that were bubbling under the surface.

00:10:33.000 But when George Floyd happened and that moment happened, the military

00:10:39.000 Those with political orientations inside the leadership of the Defense Department said, this is our moment to address this systemic problem.

00:10:47.000 Because everyone will see systemic problems everywhere.

00:10:50.000 There must be a systemic problem inside the DoD, even though racial integration inside the Defense Department, way ahead of the curve of everywhere else.

00:10:58.000 The book talks about how it led the curve on things like that.

00:11:01.000 I served, and racial issues were not an issue.

00:11:05.000 I had black soldiers, white soldiers, Hispanics.

00:11:08.000 We were so far beyond that that anybody you talked to pre-2020 would say, yeah, that's not an issue.

00:11:14.000 And by the way, it's already illegal to be racist inside your units.

00:11:17.000 And if you show racial preference, you can.

00:11:20.000 But then you got Mark Milley at Testimony saying he wants to understand white rage.

00:11:24.000 You have the military saying we need an extremism stand down.

00:11:30.000 Because we think we have systemic racism.

00:11:32.000 Here's the thing.

00:11:33.000 They could never name an instance.

00:11:35.000 This is how the left often works.

00:11:37.000 It's this ubiquitous threat that can't be defeated, but it's ever-present, and it doesn't have a name, right?

00:11:44.000 But it gives you every justification to crack down everywhere.

00:11:48.000 So the extremism stand-down happened.

00:11:51.000 We had to suddenly rename all of our bases, all these confederates.

00:11:54.000 Here's one example.

00:11:55.000 Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs.

00:11:58.000 Mark Milley was the commander of Fort Hood for many years.

00:12:02.000 Why wasn't he clamoring about the Confederate general named after Fort Hood when he was the commander of the base?

00:12:07.000 Didn't seem to be a problem then, or when he was commandering all the other divisions as he was a younger officer.

00:12:12.000 Where, if white extremism is everywhere, what were you doing, Mark Milley?

00:12:17.000 Why weren't you sounding the alarm?

00:12:18.000 Pounding the table?

00:12:18.000 We gotta purge the rest.

00:12:19.000 Because it was never about that.

00:12:22.000 This was what the military class had to do to satisfy their political leaders at a certain moment.

00:12:29.000 And 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.

00:12:42.000 They were able to fast forward everything that they wanted to do.

00:12:45.000 Of course, then the military gets through with doing its actual study on white supremacy in the military.

00:12:51.000 And it turns out the military is far less racist than the general population.

00:12:56.000 It's like 0.005.

00:12:57.000 They found 100 extremists amongst 2.1 million service members.

00:12:59.000 That's 0.005.

00:12:59.000 They found 100 extremists amongst 2.1 million service members.

00:13:03.000 That's 0.005, when the general population is like 7%, if you believe the statistics.

00:13:10.000 So the military's done a phenomenal job forging a multi-ethnic force over the years.

00:13:16.000 But the left knows by pushing DEI, well, now they've got black soldiers looking 0.96

00:13:20.000 at white soldiers and white soldiers looking at black soldiers, wondering who really deserved what

00:13:24.000 or why they're in a position, which is really toxic for an organization primed on unity, 0.99

00:13:30.000 which is why the biggest piece of garbage, the military pedals, you hear these generals say it 0.99

00:13:34.000 all the time. 1.00

00:13:35.000 Our diversity is our strength. 1.00

00:13:37.000 What a load of crap. 0.99

00:13:38.000 It's the exact opposite in every way. 1.00

00:13:42.000 In uniform, our unity is our strength.

00:13:44.000 That's it.

00:13:45.000 I get a bad haircut because my hair doesn't look different.

00:13:48.000 I shave because we all look the same.

00:13:50.000 I wear the same camo because we all look... I don't know how much money you make.

00:13:53.000 You don't know what I make.

00:13:54.000 All you know is our rank and our name tape.

00:13:56.000 That's the only thing that makes us different.

00:13:58.000 That's how you forge a fighting team.

00:14:01.000 Any general, Mark Milley would have known that.

00:14:02.000 Lloyd Austin would have known that.

00:14:04.000 Until they got to the political phase of their careers, gave in to politicians.

00:14:09.000 By the way, the military is run by, ultimately you have civilian control of the military.

00:14:14.000 I recognize that.

00:14:16.000 No one has thrown their stars on the table.

00:14:18.000 No one has stood up and said, I won't be complicit in a Marxist infiltration of our military.

00:14:23.000 People get all, ooh, it's so radical.

00:14:26.000 Look at where CRT comes from.

00:14:27.000 Look at where these ideas come from.

00:14:29.000 Look at who pedals them.

00:14:31.000 And these military officers should know better.

00:14:33.000 But instead, you have Milley saying, well, I read Mao, and I read, you know, he almost said Hitler, but he didn't.

00:14:38.000 I read all these guys, and that doesn't make me a Marxist.

00:14:42.000 So why wouldn't I want to read about and understand white rage?

00:14:45.000 Said everything.

00:14:46.000 And then January 6th, that's where it got personal for me in the story of purging patriots and extremists.

00:14:53.000 January 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.

00:15:01.000 We'll get to more on this in just one moment.

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00:16:04.000 So let's talk about that.

00:16:05.000 So January 6th happens, and again, there is this broad media push that suggests

00:16:10.000 that undergirding January 6th is some sort of quasi-military conspiracy, or that there are

00:16:16.000 an outsized number of military members who are members of the January 6th rioters

00:16:22.000 or trespassers or the protesters.

00:16:25.000 What is that?

00:16:26.000 What do you make of that?

00:16:26.000 Yeah, that was not true, by the way.

00:16:28.000 There were a few reservists and others that were involved, some veterans that were involved.

00:16:32.000 Shocker veterans, you know, care about their country.

00:16:35.000 But they created a massive characterization of that this constituted a potential militaristic threat led by people who'd been extremists in the military.

00:16:47.000 And therefore, as veterans later, they were following through on it.

00:16:50.000 And I was caught right in the crosshairs.

00:16:51.000 So I'm a major.

00:16:52.000 I was a major in the D.C.

00:16:54.000 National Guard when the riots of 2020 happened in the summer of 2020.

00:16:58.000 I was standing outside the White House with a riot shield and a face mask, staring down Antifa and BLM mobs. 0.97

00:17:05.000 I'd been deployed three times to combat.

00:17:08.000 And here I remember the surreal moment.

00:17:10.000 There's like smoke bombs going, everything's going off.

00:17:12.000 I look back and there's the White House lit up, you know, and there's Jersey barriers on the ground and concertina wire.

00:17:17.000 I'm like, I feel like I'm in Baghdad, but I'm on in Lafayette Park with a square staring down my fellow Americans.

00:17:25.000 Who 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.

00:17:33.000 I mean, there's a whole nother dynamic to all of this.

00:17:36.000 So I was a part of that, saw that.

00:17:38.000 You talk about an insurrection that looked like an insurrection to me.

00:17:43.000 Fast forward to what happened on January 6th.

00:17:46.000 Remember, Nancy Pelosi had the entire National Guard in the parking garage, sleeping in the parking garage, guarding the Capitol.

00:17:52.000 So 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.

00:17:59.000 So every member of the D.C.

00:18:00.000 National Guard was there and from satellite states, over 25,000.

00:18:03.000 So of course, I had orders to defend the inauguration of Joe Biden.

00:18:08.000 And I've served under Obama.

00:18:09.000 I've volunteered to deploy to Afghanistan under Barack Obama.

00:18:13.000 It was never about the politics of the commander-in-chief.

00:18:16.000 And everyone was going.

00:18:18.000 So I host the weekend morning show.

00:18:20.000 So 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.

00:18:25.000 So shortened orders, but still ordered.

00:18:27.000 And 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.

00:18:35.000 We don't need you.

00:18:35.000 What do you mean you don't need me?

00:18:37.000 Like, I mean, everybody's there.

00:18:39.000 I have orders.

00:18:39.000 No, no, you're good.

00:18:41.000 You're good.

00:18:42.000 And he wouldn't say any more than that.

00:18:43.000 And I pressed him on it.

00:18:44.000 He couldn't say any more than that.

00:18:46.000 I didn't know exactly what it was, but I figured what it was.

00:18:50.000 And then during the writing of the book, and there's a lot more that goes into that, I decided to resign.

00:18:54.000 I decided to get out.

00:18:55.000 Like, that was enough for me.

00:18:57.000 I 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.

00:19:13.000 Wait, wait.

00:19:14.000 So I signed up 20 years ago to fight extremists, put my life on the line, and now I'm deemed one.

00:19:20.000 Because of what I believe, because of my Christian faith, or because I work for Fox News, or because I support Donald Trump.

00:19:28.000 Any one of those is a wrong answer.

00:19:30.000 I've worn this uniform for the better part of 20 years for this country, and you're calling me an extremist.

00:19:36.000 If they'll do that to me, They'll do it to anybody, and they did.

00:19:40.000 They 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.

00:19:49.000 The vaccine, again, did its work to a number of people.

00:19:52.000 Zero religious exemptions given to anybody.

00:19:54.000 I wonder who's standing up with a principled stance in those moments.

00:19:58.000 Things like the Gadsden flag, not allowed on military bases.

00:20:02.000 I mean, don't tread on me is something that's considered extremist.

00:20:06.000 So 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.

00:20:19.000 Is a catalog of the type of people that are a threat to the military.

00:20:23.000 Last time I checked, it was patriots.

00:20:26.000 It 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.

00:20:35.000 Now they're the ones in the crosshairs.

00:20:37.000 That goes back to our original premise of the conversation.

00:20:40.000 Why aren't people joining the military?

00:20:42.000 They look around and they see that, or their parents see that, and they say, Johnny, not the military I signed up for.

00:20:48.000 And it makes them question it.

00:20:49.000 I mean, the social engineering of the military obviously takes its most robust form when it comes to the question of, say, transgenderism.

00:20:54.000 So 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.

00:21:11.000 I 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.

00:21:17.000 Now we're changing all of the standards to let everybody in because they're desperate.

00:21:20.000 I mean, they're sweeping the streets for anybody to come in because, as you mentioned, they have a massive recruitment problem.

00:21:24.000 But 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.

00:21:40.000 The idea being like it's about the individual who's in the army, which is precisely the opposite.

00:21:44.000 The army is not an individualistic place.

00:21:46.000 I mean, you are in the military.

00:21:47.000 I've seen it way better than I do.

00:21:49.000 Militaries are not about the individual.

00:21:51.000 They are about the collective.

00:21:52.000 They are about the ability to form a team and then go do a thing.

00:21:55.000 Absolutely right, you're onto it.

00:21:57.000 At least when it was an army of one, they were tough looking, go get them army. 0.94

00:22:03.000 But you're right, that was the subtle individual, the shifting toward an individual ad campaign.

00:22:08.000 Now 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.

00:22:13.000 So it's just like everything else the Marxists and the leftists have done.

00:22:16.000 At first it was camouflaged nicely and now they're just open about it.

00:22:19.000 But it did, I mean it started with the Clinton under Don't Ask, Don't Tell, trying to change that policy.

00:22:25.000 And then when he did, there was a lot of criticism on that.

00:22:28.000 I spoke to dozens and dozens of guys actively serving of all ranks for this book, and then a lot of people who got out.

00:22:34.000 One of them was a black gay soldier who had protested outside the White House for the repeal of Don't Ask, Don't Tell.

00:22:40.000 And I remember him saying, I did it because I thought anybody should be able to serve.

00:22:45.000 But what became clear to him quickly was that it was never about that for the ideologues.

00:22:50.000 And 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.

00:23:01.000 Uh, which is full on, by the way, inside the ranks.

00:23:04.000 You 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.

00:23:17.000 And because the threat is so serious, it permeates the culture of units.

00:23:23.000 Everyone's, most especially, commanders walking on eggshells.

00:23:28.000 Because if they make one wrong mistake with this soldier, and

00:23:31.000 it happens with race and gender too, but it's one of the easiest analogies is asthma or dental exams.

00:23:38.000 Like, when we would deploy to Iraq and Afghanistan, you always get a dental exam before you go.

00:23:42.000 And if you were cat 4, meaning you had serious issues, they just pulled your tooth.

00:23:47.000 Like, no Novocain.

00:23:49.000 You're going to war!

00:23:50.000 Because you can't be downrange with a toothache that's debilitating where you don't have a dentist.

00:23:56.000 Or when you go to basic training, they take away your asthma medication because if you're downrange, you can't rely on that.

00:24:04.000 The whole thing undermines readiness at every level.

00:24:07.000 It's the easiest, hard stop, no, which the Trump administration did, by the way, to their credit.

00:24:13.000 But it's sort of the perfect end state of what the left would like.

00:24:18.000 You 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. 0.90

00:24:36.000 Like the army birthdays in June, like how about we do that?

00:24:39.000 No, we're doing, we're doing Pride Month.

00:24:42.000 So 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.

00:24:52.000 You're a leader of a department.

00:24:53.000 You think you can make decisions?

00:24:54.000 No.

00:24:55.000 The DEI officer comes in and says, no, no, you can't.

00:24:57.000 That 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.

00:25:10.000 Anything you said happened, because you are not an individual.

00:25:13.000 You are collected, to your point.

00:25:14.000 But now that private says, you can't say that about my beard.

00:25:18.000 I have a shaving profile.

00:25:19.000 Or you can't say that about my hairdo.

00:25:21.000 That's a cultural, you're dissing me culturally for doing that.

00:25:26.000 Or you can't say anything about my weight.

00:25:28.000 Look at the standards, they're lower.

00:25:30.000 And the standards have lowered, by the way.

00:25:32.000 Because every time, in the military, every time a commander asks a question, It's like bosses, too, but it's not a question.

00:25:39.000 It's, Lieutenant, why are there only two black females in your unit? 1.00

00:25:45.000 Lieutenant, why aren't there enough women graduating ranger school? 1.00

00:25:49.000 And that captain or that lieutenant says, Roger that, sir.

00:25:52.000 I'll see you in a year.

00:25:53.000 And in a year?

00:25:54.000 The formal or informal quota system is kicked into gear.

00:25:57.000 And what that means is, formal or informal standards have to be lowered.

00:26:02.000 Because, you raised the point, men and women are different.

00:26:05.000 Lung capacity, bone density, you name it, they're fundamentally different down to every single cell.

00:26:11.000 Yet, 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.

00:26:22.000 Male and female.

00:26:24.000 Who basically pushed aside the idea that men and women soldiers are different. 0.87

00:26:28.000 I mean, it's just sort of, he was a three star.

00:26:30.000 He's not in anymore.

00:26:32.000 But they're so baptized with these woke views, they can't confront them.

00:26:37.000 And that's why this book is going to tick a lot of people off.

00:26:39.000 They said, no, women and men are different. 1.00

00:26:42.000 Women shouldn't be in combat at all. 1.00

00:26:44.000 Not at all.

00:26:44.000 They're life givers, not life takers.

00:26:47.000 I know a lot of wonderful soldiers, female soldiers, who I've served with, who are great. 0.63

00:26:52.000 But they shouldn't be in my infantry battalion.

00:26:54.000 Not once.

00:26:55.000 They 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.

00:27:08.000 Underlying all of this is a massive recruitment problem.

00:27:11.000 You 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.

00:27:22.000 You have kids.

00:27:22.000 You mentioned that you'd want your kids to serve.

00:27:24.000 At 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?

00:27:35.000 Great question, Ben.

00:27:36.000 I 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.

00:27:47.000 I'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

00:27:57.000 takeover is real, but it's not like education where it's deep, it's thin, it's

00:28:04.000 broad, but it's shallow.

00:28:05.000 Most people in the military don't buy it, they don't want any part of it. They know it's not

00:28:10.000 helpful for the units, but they have to kind of go along with it or they say, well, that's over there.

00:28:14.000 Or they try to join more elite units where it's not as prevalent.

00:28:18.000 That'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.

00:28:28.000 Sometimes 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.

00:28:34.000 Thank goodness.

00:28:36.000 They'll want to bring that to heel eventually too.

00:28:39.000 But I balance out my criticism with, this is an institution I revere, I love, we need.

00:28:46.000 You can change schools, you can get rid of Harvard and do something else.

00:28:50.000 You only have one 101st Airborne, one 82nd Airborne.

00:28:54.000 If we lose it, it's gone.

00:28:56.000 So the question percolating in my mind the entire time was, if not my boys, then who's it gonna be?

00:29:02.000 I mean, honestly, we're gonna have to have a military to defend our country in the future.

00:29:09.000 But I did reserve the right in that letter to say, let's see what the world looks like in five years.

00:29:13.000 This is what I'd say right now.

00:29:15.000 And what I said to them is, boys, I hope you would choose to serve.

00:29:18.000 It's my job to help fix it before you get to that age or help get there.

00:29:23.000 But we can't have an army full of emasculated, racially obsessed wokesters.

00:29:29.000 We need patriots willing to Sling lead downrange if need be to defend the country.

00:29:36.000 And the Hegseth boys are as qualified as any other boys.

00:29:40.000 And I would be proud if you did it.

00:29:42.000 But the piece of advice I gave them is if you do it, go all in.

00:29:46.000 I didn't know the difference between the Army and the Marine Corps when I served.

00:29:49.000 I didn't come from a military family.

00:29:50.000 I kind of found my way through.

00:29:53.000 I will say to them, if you're going to do it, then join Special Operations.

00:29:57.000 Join the Army Rangers.

00:29:58.000 Join MARSOC.

00:29:59.000 Join something where a lot of this garbage isn't there and you're going to be used on more vital core national security interests.

00:30:07.000 And that's the way warfare in many ways is moving anyway.

00:30:09.000 So that's kind of my hedge for the moment, but I just think we can't say stop joining Full Stop to our boys.

00:30:16.000 We 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.

00:30:25.000 I mean, clean house of these woke generals.

00:30:27.000 And bring back guys that you know are rock solid.

00:30:30.000 Promote guys and gals that you know are rock solid. 0.57

00:30:33.000 Get rid of all the DEI, all of the not transgender nonsense, all of the quotas. 1.00

00:30:39.000 If you want to have different standards, fine, but have different standards for different jobs.

00:30:44.000 So if you're in the infantry, they're up here for everybody.

00:30:46.000 If you're a drone operator, then you can beat 300 pounds and as long as your thumbs work, you're good to go.

00:30:51.000 Whatever, that's different.

00:30:53.000 But inject that kind of seriousness into it.

00:30:56.000 No more of, we need X number of this racial background as fighter pilots. 1.00

00:31:02.000 CQ Brown's a great example.

00:31:04.000 He's the new chairman of the Joint Chiefs.

00:31:09.000 And he was obsessed with the color and background of Air Force pilots.

00:31:13.000 Who has ever cared what race their pilot is?

00:31:17.000 Just how good can you fly and can you shoot while you're flying?

00:31:20.000 That's all that should matter, and that's not what we're doing right now.

00:31:22.000 So it's a tough question with kids, and I know a lot of vets would disagree with me on that, and I understand why.

00:31:27.000 And maybe I will if things continue to go amiss, but right now we need them.

00:31:32.000 So, 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.

00:31:41.000 So, what got you into the idea of going into military service in the first place?

00:31:45.000 You say you weren't from a military family.

00:31:46.000 Yeah.

00:31:46.000 So, what made you think of doing that?

00:31:47.000 Well, 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.

00:31:59.000 It's a nothing farm town in southern Minnesota of 300 people.

00:32:03.000 But every Memorial Day, they'd have a huge parade.

00:32:05.000 And, of course, the vets would—it's like the sheriff's car, the one fire truck, the band, and the vets.

00:32:12.000 Like, that's the whole parade.

00:32:14.000 But it was, you know, half a dozen guys in their uniforms walking down Main Street, and everyone's saluting them in this small town.

00:32:22.000 Of course, it's not about the vets, because it's Memorial Day, so it's about the guys that aren't there.

00:32:27.000 And we went down to Memorial Park, and they'd have a ceremony.

00:32:30.000 But you start to think about it, you're like, wow, this is a small town, and that many men gave.

00:32:35.000 And you add up all these small towns, and you start to get a sense of what was required.

00:32:38.000 And I didn't put all that together as a kid, but I just remember saying, man, Man, they must have done something special.

00:32:44.000 Like, if this town reveres them, it's men.

00:32:46.000 And I use men because it's been mostly men.

00:32:50.000 I mean, we always say men and women, and I appreciate every woman that serves.

00:32:54.000 But one of the lines in the book is, all of America's wars have been fought and won mostly by normal men.

00:33:00.000 Prove me wrong.

00:33:02.000 It's what it is.

00:33:02.000 It's what it's always been.

00:33:04.000 Let's pretend, let's not pretend like it's something else.

00:33:06.000 So women have made immense contributions, but it's mostly men in those graveyards, and rightfully so. 1.00

00:33:12.000 And so I thought if those men would be willing to do it, I should too.

00:33:15.000 And that was really it, which is why I'm a huge believer in civic ritual.

00:33:18.000 I 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.

00:33:32.000 And we don't celebrate those things.

00:33:34.000 So kids don't think they're worth anything.

00:33:36.000 And so we find those ceremonies and do those things to show that, that was really it for me.

00:33:40.000 I didn't, so I got in right before 9-11 in, would have been May of 2001.

00:33:48.000 I was in ROTC.

00:33:49.000 I was a sophomore in college.

00:33:51.000 All I cared about was basketball and I thought I was going to be an NBA player.

00:33:53.000 And all I did was sit on the bench.

00:33:55.000 The whole time.

00:33:57.000 But I did ROTC, got out, I signed a National Guard contract when I signed it and that's what I had.

00:34:02.000 So I went, first I went to work at Bear Stearns out of college.

00:34:07.000 May it rest in peace.

00:34:11.000 And I soon realized I have no business being on Wall Street.

00:34:13.000 I'm not interested in it.

00:34:14.000 I just follow the herd like everybody else.

00:34:16.000 But I deployed to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, as a guard for a year with my National Guard unit first.

00:34:21.000 Came back.

00:34:22.000 It 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.

00:34:29.000 Like, why am I not there?

00:34:31.000 And the book tells a little bit of this story, but I emailed my company commander from my infantry training.

00:34:37.000 Which was at Fort Benning, which is no longer Fort Benning.

00:34:39.000 It's Fort Moore, and Hal Moore's a great guy, but like, there's also a generational link that breaks when you rename Benning and Bragg.

00:34:45.000 Like, where'd you serve?

00:34:46.000 Bragg.

00:34:46.000 Where'd you serve?

00:34:47.000 Benning.

00:34:47.000 Where'd you serve now?

00:34:48.000 Liberty? 1.00

00:34:49.000 Like, it's just, it's garbage. 1.00

00:34:50.000 It's all just, like, just crap all over it. 0.99

00:34:53.000 But 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.

00:35:00.000 It 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.

00:35:06.000 And then I was a civil military operations officer, which means I worked with the Iraqi

00:35:10.000 people, the tribes, the sheikhs, and the imams on some semblance of civil governance.

00:35:15.000 But that was, if you remember when the Golden Mosque was bombed, I was in Samarra when that

00:35:19.000 happened.

00:35:20.000 And that was the second day of my job trying to work on governance in Samarra.

00:35:23.000 It was an interesting job.

00:35:26.000 But we effectively learned to build trust and understand networks and garner intelligence.

00:35:31.000 And we helped dismantle Al Qaeda cells in that area.

00:35:35.000 But I came back, you know, really invested in my, in that war.

00:35:39.000 And 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.

00:35:46.000 My government sent me to fought and I believed in winning the war.

00:35:49.000 Like that was it.

00:35:50.000 I saw my lane.

00:35:51.000 Let's go for it.

00:35:52.000 I can easily step back in retrospect now and say, well, what good did the Iraq war give the American people? 0.87

00:35:58.000 Iran more influence? 0.90

00:36:00.000 You know, destabilizing the region?

00:36:02.000 ISIS?

00:36:03.000 The most demoralizing moment for me as a vet is when the flag of ISIS and the caliphate flew.

00:36:09.000 Over 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.

00:36:22.000 But 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. 0.67

00:36:27.000 So 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

00:36:34.000 in and the warfighters I was there with, but you can simultaneously look at the disaster in

00:36:38.000 Afghanistan and say, what the hell, as well. 0.78

00:36:41.000 So I went out after that. I was an advocate for vets in the military for years.

00:36:45.000 And then I ended up going to grad school and I went to did one more tour in Afghanistan.

00:36:49.000 I was a counterinsurgency instructor.

00:36:53.000 So 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.

00:37:03.000 And that was the moment.

00:37:04.000 It was right there, 2011-2012, where I realized I'm briefing a strategy that does not work.

00:37:09.000 I went to Iraq pessimistic in 05, came back optimistic. 0.90

00:37:13.000 I went to Afghanistan in 2011 optimistic and came back pessimistic.

00:37:18.000 I'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. 0.99

00:37:27.000 Like, we build them a school and then they steal all the air conditioners and sell them on the black market.

00:37:32.000 This ain't gonna work.

00:37:34.000 So, two things can be true at the same time.

00:37:36.000 All of that, you know, some of, many of the things Donald Trump said about the Iraq war originally, like, mortified me. 1.00

00:37:44.000 Stupid war. 1.00

00:37:45.000 Yeah, you can't call us stupid. 1.00

00:37:46.000 Well, maybe we should look at the impact of what we've done in some of these things. 0.73

00:37:50.000 You 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.

00:37:59.000 We'll get to more on this in a moment.

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00:39:00.000 So 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.

00:39:14.000 We 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.

00:39:21.000 Because of that, we tend to think of war as antiseptic, and that Yeah.

00:39:24.000 actually leads to two false conclusions.

00:39:27.000 One is that war is easy and clean, so why not get into one since they're easy and clean?

00:39:31.000 And two is that once we're in it and it takes quote unquote too long or starts to get ugly,

00:39:37.000 the best move is always to pull out.

00:39:38.000 And those are both terrible ideas.

00:39:40.000 I 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.

00:39:57.000 And 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.

00:40:10.000 Totally right.

00:40:11.000 I talk a lot in the back part of the book about lawyers and lawfare and the way we fight our wars.

00:40:17.000 In some really politically incorrect ways I talk about it in the book because I saw exactly what you're talking about.

00:40:22.000 We fought the Iraq War 20 times, one year at a time.

00:40:26.000 Every new unit's relearning every single aspect of it. 0.96

00:40:29.000 So there's no investment to fight to finish the way that World War II vets would say, well, I'm not going home until this sucker's done.

00:40:36.000 And there isn't broad involvement.

00:40:38.000 You're right.

00:40:38.000 So 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.

00:40:47.000 Uh, so it does become quickly conversation becomes quickly very, very detached, uh, from the American people.

00:40:53.000 And that's, that's problematic.

00:40:55.000 I 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.

00:41:02.000 So no one actually wants to invest in them or is willing to.

00:41:05.000 Uh, 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.

00:41:16.000 Tell me what the end state is in Ukraine.

00:41:17.000 I could tell you what the end state is in Israel. 0.90

00:41:19.000 And what's the only thing the American military and the American diplomats are doing right now?

00:41:24.000 Trying to stop Israel from finishing the fight. 0.93

00:41:26.000 Like there's one thing that Israel could do, kill every last one of those Hamas mother Now, and then the war stops. 1.00

00:41:34.000 And by the way, Israel didn't start it. 0.98

00:41:36.000 Like, that's how wars end.

00:41:37.000 That's how peace breaks out.

00:41:40.000 For thousands of years, somebody actually wins the war.

00:41:44.000 And when they win the war, then there's a new reality, a new geopolitical reality.

00:41:48.000 We don't fight that way.

00:41:49.000 We let the lawyers lead.

00:41:51.000 We let international institutions have too much say.

00:41:53.000 And it percolates.

00:41:54.000 I tell stories directly as a platoon leader, down to, can you shoot?

00:41:57.000 Can you not shoot?

00:41:59.000 Are guys being criminalized after the fact?

00:42:01.000 I mean, Donald Trump pardoned a bunch of guys I advocated for in his last couple years in office.

00:42:07.000 They killed the right guys in the wrong way, according to somebody.

00:42:10.000 I'm done with that.

00:42:12.000 We need to fight total war against our enemies when we do.

00:42:15.000 And yeah, you don't kill civilians on purpose.

00:42:18.000 But you kill bad guys.

00:42:19.000 All of them. 1.00

00:42:19.000 You stack bodies. 1.00

00:42:20.000 And when it's over, then you let the dust settle and you figure out who's ahead.

00:42:24.000 But it turns out we're the ones with the big guns right now.

00:42:26.000 So if we want to assert our will, we better do it.

00:42:30.000 And not fight these pussyfoot wars. 0.91

00:42:31.000 Which is what they are.

00:42:32.000 And then they never end.

00:42:33.000 The 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.

00:42:43.000 But the reality is that technically, Korea is a forever war. 0.62

00:42:47.000 There was an armistice signed in Korea and we still have troops in South Korea.

00:42:51.000 We don't think of it that way because whatever is the status quo is the status quo.

00:42:55.000 The status quo right now is not war. 0.99

00:42:57.000 And so what that means is that the reality is, John McCain got all sorts of crap for

00:43:01.000 this saying in 2008, but what he said when he said, if we want to win Iraq, we might

00:43:04.000 have to be there for 100 years.

00:43:05.000 That's more accurate than the opposite, which was happy talk from both parties basically

00:43:09.000 saying, either we're going to win it immediately or we're going to pull out immediately.

00:43:12.000 Like, that's actually not how war typically works.

00:43:14.000 You 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.

00:43:21.000 But the reality is that in an era of guerrilla warfare, which, I mean, when's the last time we saw a war?

00:43:27.000 Ukraine 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.

00:43:32.000 As 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.

00:43:40.000 And 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.

00:43:50.000 And if the American people are unwilling to do that, then they shouldn't get into the war in the first place.

00:43:54.000 That's correct.

00:43:54.000 So what do you do?

00:43:55.000 Because I don't think the American people would support that.

00:43:58.000 Even with a small amount of casualties.

00:44:01.000 Although, 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.

00:44:13.000 I 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.

00:44:20.000 But 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.

00:44:31.000 I 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.

00:44:44.000 And we don't have the guts for it.

00:44:46.000 Because we won't kill enough of the right people.

00:44:50.000 We can't even hold the detainees at Guantanamo Bay. 0.60

00:44:54.000 You know what I mean? 1.00

00:44:55.000 I 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. 0.92

00:45:04.000 You don't fight, the cops deal with it every day now in our streets, the catch and release program. 0.83

00:45:10.000 We joked about it in Iraq.

00:45:11.000 I mean, it's terrible.

00:45:12.000 You 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.

00:45:21.000 They're back on the street and everybody that told on them is dead.

00:45:24.000 You know what I mean? 1.00

00:45:24.000 It's just, it's stupid warfare. 1.00

00:45:27.000 And this is coming just from an infantry captain's perspective, but you have to know these generals are aware that this isn't working. 0.99

00:45:34.000 And there's no sense that the Pentagon is planning all that differently for a future war.

00:45:41.000 That's the folly of our current system is that this Pentagon is planning to fight the last war, whereas you look at China.

00:45:48.000 And they're preparing and building a military prepared to defeat the United States of America in 2027 or 2028.

00:45:56.000 And that's why I just want to go back to where you started this question.

00:46:00.000 History is not over.

00:46:01.000 It's just not over.

00:46:03.000 But we sit in this cozy, comfy moment where America's on top and America's strong and we got this military.

00:46:10.000 History's not over.

00:46:11.000 The trajectory of governments and civilizations is not over.

00:46:14.000 The 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.

00:46:25.000 When our whole strategy is predicated on power projection on those aircraft carriers, what do we do when they're all gone?

00:46:32.000 What 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?

00:46:41.000 What do you do then?

00:46:42.000 So 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.

00:46:55.000 To jar awake the American people to the need for what it would take to actually fight a war.

00:47:00.000 Even 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.

00:47:09.000 So is national consensus really something that's possible?

00:47:11.000 So 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.

00:47:21.000 If 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.

00:47:30.000 And it means a lot of people that hate us are going to be dead.

00:47:34.000 Don't ask questions.

00:47:35.000 Leave it be.

00:47:35.000 They're not war criminals.

00:47:36.000 They're warriors.

00:47:37.000 And they're going to get it done.

00:47:38.000 And that's kind of the view that I take.

00:47:39.000 I mean, I think that's totally right.

00:47:41.000 And 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.

00:47:49.000 There's no such thing as an amazing choice where you're unleashing the military.

00:47:52.000 It's an amazing choice.

00:47:53.000 Everything's going to be wonderful.

00:47:55.000 It'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.

00:48:07.000 Or 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.

00:48:15.000 There is no fourth choice where everybody magically just becomes good today.

00:48:19.000 And if there is something like that fourth choice, what that would be is an extraordinary amount of American intimidation.

00:48:24.000 So 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.

00:48:31.000 He's told the story publicly, so you can tell him.

00:48:33.000 I think I know.

00:48:34.000 Yeah, I'm sure you know it.

00:48:35.000 The 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? 0.93

00:48:51.000 He says, Because, Abdul, if you kill an American soldier, I'm going to blow up your house. 0.70

00:48:56.000 And that is actually an effective strategy. 0.92

00:48:59.000 And no American soldiers died.

00:49:01.000 Right.

00:49:01.000 In that time period.

00:49:02.000 Exactly, 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.

00:49:09.000 But that's something that even the Biden administration doesn't understand.

00:49:11.000 They don't even understand the ability to flex.

00:49:13.000 Forget about use the American military.

00:49:14.000 Even flexing the American military is too much for these guys.

00:49:17.000 No, they won't.

00:49:20.000 Everything you said there is true.

00:49:23.000 The 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.

00:49:33.000 It's completely gone.

00:49:34.000 And Israel is a great example.

00:49:35.000 Now 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.

00:49:47.000 Excuse me, have you seen our track record in the last couple of years?

00:49:51.000 And you think you're going to tell those guys?

00:49:53.000 And 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.

00:50:02.000 It's not around them.

00:50:04.000 Israel's one-to-one. 0.59

00:50:05.000 Like, they're fighting the most precise urban warfare the world's ever seen.

00:50:10.000 Military 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.

00:50:20.000 Like, this stuff is really, really hard.

00:50:22.000 So 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.

00:50:33.000 We're going to do whatever it takes to defend it.

00:50:36.000 Then you're already off on the wrong foot and everything else is going to go sideways.

00:50:39.000 And so when you look at like our southern border is a perfect example.

00:50:42.000 Like we don't even care about our own borders, but we're obsessed with the Donbass.

00:50:47.000 Like that's why you have people like me who say like, What are we doing?

00:50:52.000 Defend our border.

00:50:54.000 So 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.

00:51:02.000 I mean, we all want to believe in the possibility of exporting freedom and giving people opportunity and all of it.

00:51:09.000 And that was music to the ears of, you know, after 9-11, a better world and turn the corner and American dominance. 0.81

00:51:14.000 And we're going to, and then you look at it and you go, no, no, no, no.

00:51:17.000 There's evil everywhere, and there's good and there's evil, and the human condition is real.

00:51:23.000 The garden happened to all of us.

00:51:26.000 And we have to be realistic about what's possible and fight to defend those we love and the things that we have.

00:51:34.000 That's what Trump understood.

00:51:36.000 That's what a commander in chief.

00:51:37.000 And 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.

00:51:48.000 I mean, you saw what the ICC just recently did.

00:51:50.000 I mean, the ICC is an America and Israel hating organization.

00:51:53.000 We should do everything we can to bring it to its knees forever.

00:51:56.000 Like they should have no orientation whatsoever on anything we ever do.

00:52:00.000 The 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.

00:52:10.000 That 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. 0.55

00:52:21.000 Except all of those institutions are now being used against the West.

00:52:24.000 So that's why when Donald Trump talked about NATO, everyone bristled and then everyone realized, well, maybe he's right.

00:52:30.000 Because I think when I see the stat, I can't remember if it's, if it's, I think it's the French.

00:52:36.000 They have like, if Russia were to actually invade France, they've got three days worth of ammo.

00:52:41.000 Like they literally can't defend themselves.

00:52:44.000 And they can't.

00:52:44.000 So we're the outsourced defender of the entire world.

00:52:48.000 You can't defend everybody.

00:52:49.000 And 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. 0.86

00:53:02.000 And we're doing it culturally, and we're doing it politically, and we're doing it economically, and with debt, and everything else.

00:53:08.000 So 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.

00:53:18.000 and how we use that military and whether it's ready is an open question.

00:53:23.000 You mentioned very briefly there the possibility of October 7th or 9-11 bringing Americans

00:53:27.000 together and I do wonder if there's enough social fabric left in the United States to

00:53:32.000 actually bring Americans together around something like a terrorist attack.

00:53:35.000 I think that if there were a major terrorist attack in the United States under Joe Biden

00:53:37.000 there actually would be a pretty solid rally around the flag effect because conservatives

00:53:42.000 Yeah.

00:53:42.000 to rally around the flag.

00:53:43.000 Yeah.

00:53:44.000 But I do wonder if Donald Trump were to be reelected, if there were a major terrorist

00:53:47.000 attack, would the left jump on board?

00:53:50.000 Or would the left say it's Donald Trump's fault, this is all because of Donald Trump,

00:53:53.000 it's all because America is a nefarious force in the world.

00:53:57.000 There's a reason there are hundreds of thousands of people who are marching in solidarity with

00:53:59.000 Hamas and they're burning American flags.

00:54:01.000 I 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.

00:54:20.000 That's not true.

00:54:20.000 They 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.

00:54:30.000 And 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?

00:54:46.000 Great question.

00:54:46.000 I mean, your answer would be as interesting to me as anybody's.

00:54:51.000 We're in uncharted territory.

00:54:53.000 We'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.

00:55:02.000 And so when asked to galvanize in that moment, Do we have even just the foundations to actually muster that defense of our own nation?

00:55:13.000 I don't know that we do.

00:55:14.000 Or at least it will quickly become partisan unless it is so devastating.

00:55:19.000 If it were to happen right now under Joe Biden, I know a lot of conservatives would rally.

00:55:24.000 But 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.

00:55:30.000 And 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? 0.97

00:55:41.000 There is responsibility to be had there, and there will be finger-pointing for something like that.

00:55:46.000 I don't know, Ben.

00:55:48.000 I don't know, and I don't mean that to be, to dodge the question. 0.67

00:55:51.000 It 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. 0.81

00:56:21.000 And if you are the oppressor class permanently, then you can't cheer for the oppressor.

00:56:25.000 You don't have an American flag in your garage to pull out when that moment exists.

00:56:30.000 Because you've decided the only flag that matters is the new trans flag. 1.00

00:56:34.000 And that's the one we fly at our embassies under Biden too.

00:56:37.000 Like it's just not there.

00:56:40.000 So, and that's civilizationally devastating for any country.

00:56:44.000 I mean, it means you can't defend your own interests.

00:56:46.000 Pretty 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.

00:56:55.000 And that's why there's so much... That's why there's...

00:56:59.000 I mean, every once in a while I look around at our own country and I go, are we the bad guys?

00:57:03.000 Like, the most important thing we can do is repent.

00:57:06.000 By far.

00:57:08.000 And so it's, the problems we have are so much deeper than who's wearing four stars on their shoulder.

00:57:16.000 And 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.

00:57:27.000 And 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?

00:57:40.000 I mean, if we don't make those changes, then We will be beaten in the most important first moments of that next conflict.

00:57:47.000 And big empires go down slowly at first, but then quickly.

00:57:52.000 And 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.

00:58:04.000 Well, who else is out there?

00:58:07.000 Where else am I sailing to?

00:58:08.000 There's nowhere else!

00:58:10.000 I mean, it's China, the Europeans, it's nobody! 0.99

00:58:15.000 So, 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.

00:58:26.000 Okay, so let's say that President Trump, God willing, is reelected.

00:58:29.000 Yep.

00:58:30.000 And you're called to the White House and he says, okay, how do I fix this problem?

00:58:34.000 Right?

00:58:34.000 Because 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.

00:58:44.000 I mean, the executive branch is enormous.

00:58:46.000 It has millions of employees.

00:58:47.000 You've got the military, but that's just a piece of the executive branch.

00:58:49.000 It's huge.

00:58:50.000 You have a real deep state, people who are career bureaucrats, who are oriented against the agenda that President Trump will bring to the table.

00:58:57.000 What do you say to him when he says, how do I fix this problem?

00:59:00.000 First of all, across the government writ large, I mean, I think you've got to get arbitrary.

00:59:04.000 If you want to get so big, you've got to get arbitrary.

00:59:06.000 Something like, if your Social Security number ends in 7, 4, 2, or 6, you're fired.

00:59:13.000 I don't care who you are.

00:59:14.000 I don't care what you do.

00:59:15.000 We can fill your slot.

00:59:16.000 You're replaceable.

00:59:17.000 We're at that point where we just need a massive shrinking of the size of the government.

00:59:23.000 Don't worry about what their nickname was when they were in the military.

00:59:26.000 You know, what was it? 1.00

00:59:27.000 Mad dog, mad ass. 1.00

00:59:29.000 So as much as I love Donald Trump, that was very much a pitfall of the beginning of his administration. 0.99

00:59:33.000 Who 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.

00:59:49.000 We only want lethality and meritocracy.

00:59:51.000 That's it.

00:59:53.000 And then what's key is not that person.

00:59:55.000 You'll have a figurehead there at DoD that does that.

00:59:57.000 It's the series of dozens of underlings who have to be just as committed and understanding everything that's being peddled and pushed.

01:00:04.000 to help recommend everybody that you fire.

01:00:06.000 I mean, mass firings at the general officer.

01:00:09.000 Were you involved in pushing that?

01:00:10.000 Okay, you're fired.

01:00:11.000 Were you involved?

01:00:12.000 And fine, pick five or six symbolic firings of generals.

01:00:15.000 Well, guess what happens at some level there?

01:00:17.000 The whole incentive structure changes.

01:00:20.000 They're politicians wearing camouflage at many levels at that level.

01:00:24.000 They're going to start to return back, I would think, for many of them, to what they really were supposed to be doing in the first place.

01:00:31.000 Oh, the incentive is having more ammo and more training, not more diversity trainings? 0.79

01:00:37.000 How about we do that?

01:00:39.000 I 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.

01:00:46.000 Or if you weren't going to get rid of, you couldn't pull the roots out fast enough or hard enough.

01:00:51.000 Because I think the core of that Pentagon would be with all of those moves.

01:00:55.000 Most 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

01:01:05.000 get back to the real right now.

01:01:08.000 And they would do it. And then you switch the military academies and you say, we're not teaching

01:01:11.000 DEI anymore. And then more importantly, I think you go back to standards across the military and

01:01:16.000 say, whatever the standards were in 1980, 1996, those are the standards. Whatever it took to

01:01:23.000 pass Ranger School or Airborne School or become a Marine or whatever.

01:01:28.000 I mean, I just, and that doesn't mean going backwards.

01:01:31.000 It means returning to colorblind standards, returning to gender-affirming or gender-recognizing standards, to use the wrong phrase.

01:01:41.000 Men and women are different.

01:01:42.000 There's a whole chapter on that.

01:01:45.000 One of the examples I use in the book is the Marine Corps, when Obama wanted to push women in combat, the Marine Corps did a study.

01:01:51.000 And this study was, let's test 400 male Marines versus 300 male Marines and 100 female Marines together in a grueling exercise of tests.

01:02:00.000 And shocker, the 400 male Marines crushed the whole thing. 0.97

01:02:04.000 And this was a 300 and 100, not a 200 and 200.

01:02:05.000 100, not a 200, 200.

01:02:07.000 I mean, this is, and what did Ray Mavis,

01:02:09.000 the Secretary of the Navy do?

01:02:11.000 I'm like, throw the study out, because it's not what the political

01:02:14.000 folks wanted, even though they were told if you do a study and

01:02:18.000 it shows differences.

01:02:19.000 Whoever 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.

01:02:28.000 I 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.

01:02:36.000 So 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.

01:02:45.000 So 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.

01:03:04.000 And get ready for an influx of young men under a commander-in-chief they respect to come on it.

01:03:09.000 And guess what? 1.00

01:03:09.000 Don't bring any of your racist crap. 1.00

01:03:13.000 It's not already an issue. 1.00

01:03:15.000 My point is, that's not an issue, so we don't have to worry about the issues.

01:03:19.000 The reason I say that is because that's what the left is saying.

01:03:22.000 The leftists say, oh, it's Donald Trump's shock troops coming in.

01:03:26.000 You 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.

01:03:41.000 And they go to church, and they have families, and kids, and they're productive, and they work hard, and they're good, honest people.

01:03:48.000 Lay 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.

01:03:57.000 And then they get wounded in combat, silver stars, like just amazing guys.

01:04:02.000 Or they were just patriotic and they were kind of wimps.

01:04:05.000 But 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.

01:04:12.000 Right now we're not recruiting either of those groups.

01:04:15.000 So, you recruit those groups with a different ethos of the entire military, you could be back in the game.

01:04:20.000 Now, we have to build more ships.

01:04:22.000 I mean, one of the devastating, and I'll stop here, but China's Exponentially larger ability to create naval ships than we do. 0.94

01:04:33.000 We have like four shipyards, and China has a dozen, and each of their shipyards can create more ships than all of ours combined.

01:04:42.000 I mean, it's staggering what their capabilities are compared to ours.

01:04:45.000 So we're behind on a lot of levels, but I think that's where you start.

01:04:49.000 Well, the book is The War on Warriors, and so is the series.

01:04:51.000 You go check it out over at Fox News and also at Fox Nation.

01:04:54.000 Pete, thanks so much for your time.

01:04:55.000 Thanks, brother.

01:04:56.000 I appreciate everything you do.

01:04:57.000 I appreciate it.

01:05:08.000 Associate producers are Jake Pollack and John Crick.

01:05:11.000 Editing is by Chris Ridge.

01:05:13.000 Audio is mixed by Mike Corimina.

01:05:15.000 Camera and lighting is by Zach Ginta.

01:05:17.000 Hair, makeup, and wardrobe by Fabiola Cristina.

01:05:20.000 Title graphics are by Cynthia Angulo.

01:05:22.000 Executive assistant, Kelly Carvalho.

01:05:24.000 Executive in charge of production is David Wormus.

01:05:27.000 Executive producer, Justin Siegel.

01:05:29.000 Executive producer, Jeremy Boring.

01:05:31.000 The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special is a Daily Wire production.

The Ben Shapiro Show - June 02, 2024

How The Military Went Woke | Pete Hegseth

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