The Ben Shapiro Show - WAR FIGHTER: Hegseth Stuns Democrats At Confirmation Hearing

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00:00:15.000 Well, folks, a lot is going on.

00:00:19.000 Senator Marco Rubio, who is the nominee for Secretary of State.

00:00:23.000 He is having his hearing today.

00:00:24.000 Pam Bondi, the Attorney General nominee, she's having her hearing today.

00:00:28.000 But the big story of the day is what Pete Hegseth did as Secretary of Defense nominee in front of a Senate committee yesterday during his Senate hearing.

00:00:36.000 We'll get to all that in a moment.

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00:00:51.000 Join us at dailywire.com slash subscribe using code 47. So, Democrats thought that they were going to be able to get Pete Hegseth in the crosshairs, and then they were going to be able to do syrigous damage to Pete Hegseth and to Republicans for having nominated Pete Hegseth.

00:01:05.000 Boy, were they wrong.

00:01:07.000 The Wall Street Journal writes, During a Senate hearing, Hegseth pledged to restore the U.S. military's warrior culture, declaring his service as a National Guard junior officer in Iraq, Afghanistan, and U.S. military prison at Gitmo would bring a needed refocus to a Pentagon he claimed was concerned more with diversity and equity than lethality and readiness.

00:01:23.000 And Hegseth was great, like not just good, great, iconically great yesterday in front of the Senate Armed Services Committee.

00:01:31.000 Democrat after Democrat lined up to attack him, particularly on his personal life, and Hegseth weathered it like a champ.

00:01:37.000 He came back at them where they said particularly stupid things, and he said some things that need to be said.

00:01:43.000 This is a very different Secretary of Defense nominee.

00:01:46.000 Not only is he a person who actually served in the infantry, not only is he a person who's quite bright, obviously he has degrees from both Harvard and Princeton, but Hegseth also has the perspective of the guy on the ground who actually has to do the fighting.

00:01:59.000 He is not a political general who is elevated through the ranks for being able to get along with his superiors.

00:02:04.000 That's not who Pete Hegseth is.

00:02:05.000 He's an outsider who's being brought in to shake things up.

00:02:09.000 Because guess what?

00:02:10.000 The Department of Defense needs a good shaking up.

00:02:12.000 He said a lot of things yesterday.

00:02:14.000 Many of them were quite wonderful.

00:02:15.000 Here, for example, is Pete Hegseth yesterday who's being questioned about his adherence to things like the Geneva Conventions and his comments that American warfighters have to be given the ability to actually win.

00:02:26.000 The answer to that, by the way, is absolutely yes.

00:02:29.000 Here was Hegseth yesterday talking about the difference between the guys in the air-conditioned offices and the guys with their boots on the ground.

00:02:35.000 We are a country that fights by the rule of law.

00:02:38.000 And our men and women always do.

00:02:39.000 And yet we have too many people here in air-conditioned offices that like to point fingers at the guys in dark and dangerous places.

00:02:47.000 The gals in helicopters in enemy territory who are doing things that people in Washington, D.C. would never dare to do.

00:02:54.000 That is exactly right.

00:02:56.000 That is exactly right.

00:02:57.000 The Department of Defense should be about destroying the enemy.

00:03:00.000 And the attempts of so many on the left to hamstring our ability to actually win wars using every tool at their disposal, including lawfare, is awful.

00:03:10.000 And Hegseth is going to put an end to it.

00:03:13.000 Hegseth talked about diversity, equity, and inclusion, about the lowering of standards in order to, quote-unquote, diversify the American military.

00:03:20.000 Here he was saying, you know what should matter?

00:03:21.000 Skill.

00:03:22.000 Being good at your job.

00:03:23.000 These are basic notions.

00:03:24.000 The fact that the Democratic Party abandoned all of this is why they just got shellacked in the elections.

00:03:29.000 Because in those ground combat roles, what is true is that the weight of the ruck on your back doesn't change.

00:03:35.000 The weight of the 155 round that you have to carry doesn't change.

00:03:39.000 The weight of the 240 Bravo machine gun you might have to carry doesn't change.

00:03:43.000 And so whether it's a man or a woman, they have to meet the same high standards.

00:03:48.000 And Senator, in any place...

00:03:50.000 Where those things have been eroded or in courses, criteria have been changed in order to meet quotas, racial quotas or gender quotas, that is putting a focus on something other than readiness, standards, meritocracy and lethality.

00:04:08.000 Again, this is such common sense.

00:04:10.000 This is why he's going to make an excellent Secretary of Defense.

00:04:13.000 We are no longer going to have General Mark Milley talking about the problems of white rage.

00:04:17.000 And how diversity is our greatest strength.

00:04:20.000 It turns out the greatest strength of the military is effectiveness and lethality, its ability to kill the bad guys and pursue American interests.

00:04:29.000 That also means thinning out the ranks of the political generals at the top.

00:04:32.000 Here's Hegseth saying, listen, you know, we used to win wars when we had fewer generals is something I noticed.

00:04:37.000 Our staff numbers are exploding.

00:04:39.000 What are you going to do about that?

00:04:41.000 Senator, we're going to address that.

00:04:44.000 We won World War II with seven four-star generals.

00:04:47.000 Today we have 44 four-star generals.

00:04:51.000 There's an inverse relationship between the size of staffs and victory on the battlefield.

00:04:58.000 We don't need more bureaucracy at the top.

00:05:01.000 We need more warfighters empowered at the bottom.

00:05:03.000 So it's going to be my job working with those that we hire and those inside the administration to identify those places where fat can be cut so it can go toward lethality.

00:05:13.000 Of course, that's right.

00:05:14.000 He also said, you know what that encompasses?

00:05:16.000 That encompasses us firing the bad generals.

00:05:18.000 You don't get to lose wars and keep your job.

00:05:21.000 Again, perfectly obvious stuff that was apparently unsayable for decades.

00:05:26.000 Everybody in this room knows if you're a rifleman and you lose your rifle, they're throwing the book at you.

00:05:34.000 But if you're a general who loses a war, you get a promotion.

00:05:39.000 That's not going to happen in Donald Trump's Pentagon.

00:05:42.000 There will be real standards for success.

00:05:45.000 Everyone from the top, from the most senior general to the most lowly private, will ensure that they're treated fairly, men and women, inside that system.

00:05:54.000 Again, that is totally correct.

00:05:56.000 So, Hegseth was asked about his perspective on women in combat.

00:05:59.000 He had expressed his objections in the past to women in frontline combat roles.

00:06:02.000 And what he says is, listen, if women can fulfill the standards, sure.

00:06:06.000 The question is whether they can.

00:06:08.000 And that is, in fact, an open—don't change the standards for diversity's sake.

00:06:12.000 Here is Senator Joni Ernst, who is considered someone who's sort of on the fence about Hegseth.

00:06:15.000 After these hearings, she came out and said that she endorsed Hegseth for Secretary of Defense.

00:06:19.000 He's going to sail through.

00:06:20.000 He's going to get 51, 52, maybe even 53 votes.

00:06:23.000 Here was Hegseth with Joni Ernst.

00:06:25.000 Senator, first of all, thank you for your service, as we discussed extensively as well.

00:06:30.000 It's my privilege.

00:06:31.000 And my answer is yes, exactly the way that you caveated it.

00:06:35.000 Yes, women will have access to ground combat roles, combat rows, given the standards remain high, and we'll have a review to ensure the standards have not been eroded in any one of these cases.

00:06:49.000 That'll be part of one of the first things we do at the Pentagon, is reviewing that in a gender-neutral way, the standards, ensuring readiness and meritocracy is front and center.

00:06:59.000 But absolutely, it would be the privilege of a lifetime to, if confirmed, to be the secretary of defense for all men and women in uniform who fight so heroic.

00:07:10.000 They have so many other options.

00:07:11.000 They decide to put their right hand up for our country.

00:07:14.000 I mean, one of the things that Hegseth has going for him is not only his background, his military background, the fact that he's very bright.

00:07:20.000 He also happens to be incredibly telegenic, right?

00:07:22.000 He was a TV star, which means that he is great on TV and knows how to speak in front of a crowd.

00:07:28.000 He also suggested, you know, as part of the extension of what he was talking about, women in combat roles.

00:07:32.000 Politics should not play a part in how the military is run.

00:07:35.000 And this all should be perfectly obvious.

00:07:37.000 And as you will see, saying perfectly obvious things in front of Democrats is like a red flag in front of a bull.

00:07:42.000 It's insane how Democrats went after Hegseth yesterday.

00:07:45.000 So here's Hegseth saying politics should not play a part in how the military is run.

00:07:50.000 Unlike the current administration, politics should play no part in military matters.

00:07:57.000 We are not Republicans.

00:07:59.000 We are not Democrats.

00:08:00.000 We are American warriors.

00:08:02.000 Our standards will be high and they will be equal.

00:08:07.000 Not equitable.

00:08:09.000 That's a very different word.

00:08:12.000 Again, this is all great.

00:08:14.000 This is all great.

00:08:15.000 And then he was asked about foreign policy.

00:08:18.000 And Hegseth said, my policy with regard to, for example, the Middle East is Israel should kill every member of Hamas.

00:08:23.000 This seems like a very good policy to me.

00:08:25.000 I have a generalized policy that Western powers should kill as many terrorists as humanly possible.

00:08:29.000 This is my generalized military and foreign policy.

00:08:31.000 Here's Senator Tom Cotton asking Hegseth about this.

00:08:35.000 Do you consider yourself a Christian Zionist?

00:08:37.000 Senator, I support, I am a Christian and I robustly support the state of Israel and its existential defense and the way America comes alongside them is their great ally.

00:08:47.000 Thank you.

00:08:47.000 Because another protester, and I think this one was a member of Code Pink, which by the way is a Chinese communist front group these days, said that you support Israel's war.

00:08:57.000 In Gaza, I support Israel's existential war in Gaza.

00:09:02.000 I assume, like me and President Trump, you support that war as well, don't you?

00:09:06.000 Senator, I do.

00:09:07.000 I support Israel destroying and killing every last member of Hamas.

00:09:13.000 Again, that is exactly right.

00:09:15.000 A little bit later on in the show, we're actually going to sit down with the chief technology officer of Palantir, which is one of the new defense firms, not one of the kind of old dinosaurs, that is trying to think differently about how defense policy should be done.

00:09:24.000 I want to get into the specifics of what needs to happen at the DOD. While Joe Biden is handing off to Pete Hegseth and team, an uncertain world with an uncertain economic landscape.

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00:11:31.000 Okay, so as we'll see, Democrats lost their minds over all of this.

00:11:34.000 They could not believe that Pete Hegseth was the nominee.

00:11:37.000 So Senator Gary Peters of Michigan, he ripped into Hegseth saying, you are unqualified.

00:11:42.000 Now again, all the Democrat qualifications in the world, they don't seem to matter.

00:11:48.000 Because for Democrats, the qualification is not how you will actually run the Defense Department or whether your ideology on defense is correct.

00:11:56.000 It's apparently whether you ran a big business beforehand or whether you spent 30 years climbing the ranks of the military by kissing enough ass.

00:12:04.000 These are apparently the things that make you qualified to run the Department of Defense, as opposed to what you are going to do.

00:12:09.000 Of course.

00:12:10.000 So here is Senator Gary Peters getting very miffed, incredibly miffed, that Pete Hegseth is going to be Secretary of Defense.

00:12:17.000 Do you think that the way to raise the minimum standards of the people who serve us is to lower the standards for the Secretary of Defense, that we have someone who has never managed an organization, more than 100 people, is going to come in and manage this incredibly important organization and do it with a professionalism and has no experience that they can tell us that they have actually done that?

00:12:41.000 I have real problems with that.

00:12:43.000 Wow.

00:12:44.000 I mean, well, if he hasn't run a giant organization.

00:12:46.000 Then how can you possibly run the Department of Defense?

00:12:48.000 Well, maybe by making it a smaller organization might be one answer.

00:12:51.000 And then you have Senator Jack Reed, who dropped the laugh-out-loud funny line that we are a more lethal military thanks to diversity.

00:12:59.000 I'm sorry, I don't see the correlation.

00:13:01.000 It doesn't seem to me that if you were just recruiting a military from scratch, your first question would be, how many black, Hispanic, Jewish, and Asian people are there in this military?

00:13:10.000 That shouldn't be your first line of demarcation.

00:13:14.000 In terms of an effective fighting force.

00:13:16.000 But according to Jack Reed, this is the thing that makes the American military deadly, is that we have more minority lesbians or something.

00:13:23.000 Here is this asinine senator from Rhode Island.

00:13:26.000 Our military is more diverse than it has ever been, but more importantly, it is more lethal than it has ever been.

00:13:33.000 This is not a coincidence.

00:13:35.000 Mr. Hegstead, I hope you'll explain why you believe such diversity is making the military weak and how you propose to undo that without undermining military leadership and harming readiness, recruitment and retention.

00:13:50.000 harming recruitment...

00:13:51.000 We can't recruit or retain anyone right now.

00:13:54.000 Everybody who's showing up to the office is too fat.

00:13:56.000 It's really a massive problem.

00:13:58.000 They have massive recruitment shortages.

00:14:00.000 And Jack Reed's like, well, I mean, what are we going to do if we don't have enough overweight transgender people in the military?

00:14:06.000 How are we going to solve our recruitment crisis without those people?

00:14:08.000 Well, maybe the answer to solving the recruitment crisis is making it appear to be badass to be in the military.

00:14:14.000 Every single member of the military I've ever met, and I've met many, many, many members of the military, they all joined up because they thought that it was an awesome thing to do.

00:14:24.000 They all joined up because they wanted to be part of the defense of the country.

00:14:29.000 And yes, because the vast majority of people who joined the military are men.

00:14:34.000 And there is a masculine energy to the military.

00:14:36.000 This is just the way it works.

00:14:38.000 Restoring that is not a bad thing.

00:14:40.000 It's a very good thing.

00:14:42.000 But, you know, the Democratic objections continued.

00:14:47.000 Senator Elise Slotkin of Michigan, she suggested that Hegseth is going to follow illegal orders given by President Trump, and Hegseth just wasn't even buying the premise.

00:14:56.000 What are you scared of?

00:14:58.000 Did he do the right thing by apologizing?

00:15:01.000 I'm not scared of anything, Senator.

00:15:03.000 Then say yes or no.

00:15:04.000 You can say no.

00:15:04.000 I'm interested in upholding the laws and the Constitution in any particular scenario.

00:15:08.000 Donald Trump asked for the active-duty 82nd Airborne to be deployed during that same time.

00:15:13.000 Secretary Esper has written that he convinced him against that decision.

00:15:18.000 If Donald Trump asked you to use the 82nd Airborne in law enforcement roles in Washington, D.C., would you also convince him otherwise?

00:15:27.000 I'm not going to get ahead of conversations I would have with the president.

00:15:30.000 However, there are laws and processes inside our constitution that would be followed.

00:15:34.000 That is the basic answer.

00:15:36.000 How is he supposed to evaluate whether something is legal or not before the situation arises?

00:15:41.000 But Maisie Hirono, who is legitimately the stupidest person in the Senate.

00:15:45.000 I mean, Maisie Hirono, the senator from Hawaii, who is a full-scale moron.

00:15:49.000 I mean, this lady, if she's got a triple-digit IQ, I would be absolutely astonished.

00:15:53.000 So, she suggested...

00:15:54.000 That Hegseth was going to shoot protesters.

00:15:57.000 And there's a reason they couldn't lay a glove on Hegseth yesterday.

00:16:01.000 In June of 2020, then-President Trump directed former Secretary of Defense Mark Esper to shoot protesters in the legs in downtown D.C., an order Secretary Esper refused to comply with.

00:16:15.000 Would you carry out such an order from President Trump?

00:16:20.000 Senator, I was in the Washington, D.C. National Guard unit that was in Lafayette Square during those events holding a riot shield on behalf of my country.

00:16:29.000 Would you carry out an order to shoot protesters in the legs?

00:16:30.000 I saw 50 Secret Service agents get injured by rioters trying to jump over the fence, set the church on fire, and destroy a statue.

00:16:38.000 You know what?

00:16:38.000 That sounds to me that you will comply with such an order.

00:16:40.000 You will shoot protesters in the leg.

00:16:42.000 You will shoot protesters.

00:16:43.000 What is she talking about?

00:16:45.000 He says he's going to abide by the law, and then she refuses to hear his answer.

00:16:48.000 But this is the way.

00:16:49.000 They work.

00:16:51.000 Maisie Hirono, by the way, then decided to go even further.

00:16:53.000 She said, will you resign if you drink on the job?

00:16:56.000 It is all based on these anonymous smears that Hegseth is a heavy drinker, despite the fact that everybody at Fox has said that that is not true, despite the fact that pretty much all of his former colleagues say that's not true.

00:17:06.000 Here is Hirono claiming that Hegseth is a sloppy drunk.

00:17:11.000 You recently promised some of my Republican colleagues that you stopped drinking.

00:17:17.000 And won't drink if confirmed, correct?

00:17:22.000 Absolutely.

00:17:23.000 Will you resign as Secretary of Defense if you drink on the job, which is a 24-7 position?

00:17:30.000 I've made this commitment on behalf of the men and women I'm serving.

00:17:34.000 Will you resign as Secretary of Defense if you drink on the job?

00:17:35.000 I've made this commitment on behalf of the men and women I'm serving because it's the most important deployment of my life.

00:17:41.000 I'm not hearing an answer to my question, so I'm going to move on.

00:17:43.000 He literally answered the question.

00:17:45.000 I don't even know what she's talking about.

00:17:48.000 But again, this is how the Democrats decided to go after him.

00:17:50.000 Same thing with Mark Kelly, the senator from Arizona.

00:17:54.000 He also tried to get Hegseth on the you're a heavy drinker routine.

00:17:59.000 On Memorial Day 2014, at a CVA event in Virginia, you needed to be carried out of the event for being intoxicated.

00:18:09.000 Senator Anonymous smears.

00:18:11.000 Just true or false?

00:18:13.000 Very simple.

00:18:14.000 Summer of 2014 in Cleveland, drunk in public with the CVA team.

00:18:21.000 Anonymous smears.

00:18:22.000 I'm just asking for true or false questions.

00:18:25.000 True or false answers.

00:18:26.000 An event in North Carolina, drunk in front of three young female staff members after you had instituted a no-alcohol policy and then reversed it.

00:18:36.000 True or false?

00:18:37.000 Anonymous smears.

00:18:38.000 And again, you actually have to evidence the smear.

00:18:41.000 In order for you to move forward those accusations, but apparently not, according to the Democrats.

00:18:46.000 Then Tim Kaine joined the fund, senator from Virginia, and long-forgotten vice presidential candidate for Hillary Clinton.

00:18:52.000 He went after Hegseth for his extramarital affairs.

00:18:56.000 Which again, I'm sorry, you're the party of Bill Clinton, guys.

00:18:58.000 You are.

00:18:59.000 That's what you are.

00:19:01.000 You're the party of Ted Kennedy.

00:19:02.000 Like, give it a rest.

00:19:04.000 Here's Tim Kaine.

00:19:06.000 I want to return to the incident that you referenced a minute ago that occurred in Monterey, California in October 2017. At that time, you were still married to your second wife, correct?

00:19:18.000 I believe so.

00:19:19.000 And you had just fathered a child by a woman who would later become your third wife, correct?

00:19:25.000 Senator, I was falsely charged.

00:19:28.000 Fully investigated and completely cleared.

00:19:31.000 So you think you are completely cleared because you committed no crime.

00:19:34.000 That's your definition of cleared?

00:19:36.000 You had just fathered a child two months before by a woman that was not your wife.

00:19:41.000 I am shocked that you would stand here and say you're completely cleared.

00:19:45.000 Can you so casually cheat on a second wife and cheat on the mother of a child that had been born two months before and you tell us you are completely cleared?

00:19:55.000 How is that a complete clear?

00:19:57.000 Senator, her child's name is Gwendolyn Hope Hegseth.

00:20:01.000 And she's a child of God, and she's seven years old.

00:20:03.000 And you cheated on the mother of that child less than two months after that daughter was born, didn't you?

00:20:10.000 Those were false charges.

00:20:12.000 It was fully investigated, and I was completely cleared.

00:20:14.000 And I'm so grateful for the marriage I have to this amazing woman behind me.

00:20:19.000 Okay, that last line is the key.

00:20:21.000 He's still married to that woman.

00:20:22.000 And by the way, he's experienced conversion.

00:20:24.000 He's become a very religious Christian.

00:20:26.000 So Senator Mark Wayne Mullen eventually had had enough of this, the senator from Oklahoma.

00:20:31.000 What I think is one of the great moments in modern Senate history, where he effectively stood up on his hind legs and he said, listen, all you drunken leches in the Senate, and there are a lot of them, the amount of drinking that goes on in the Senate, the Senate could provide the entire market for grain alcohol in the United States.

00:20:48.000 There are so many drunks, so many cheaters on their wives in the Senate.

00:20:53.000 It is not a place filled with virtuous men.

00:20:56.000 It really is not.

00:20:57.000 And Mark Wayne Mullen makes this point.

00:20:59.000 So you're going after Hegseth for something that he's lived through and apologized for in a way that, by the way, Bill Clinton never did.

00:21:04.000 Tim Kaine ripping into Hegseth.

00:21:06.000 He ran with the wife of the person who is the biggest cheater as president, exposed before the American public, and the woman he ran with literally threatened alleged victims.

00:21:18.000 I mean, that is who Tim Kaine ran.

00:21:21.000 And then he sits there judging Pete Hegseth, who, again, has repented of the sin.

00:21:26.000 Here's Mark Wayne Mullen going after his fellow senators.

00:21:29.000 And then Senator Cain, or I guess I better use the senator from Virginia, starts bringing up the fact that what if you showed up drunk to your job?

00:21:38.000 How many senators have showed up drunk to vote at night?

00:21:44.000 Have any of you guys asked them to step down and resign from their job?

00:21:48.000 And don't tell me you haven't seen it because I know you have.

00:21:51.000 And then how many senators do you know have got a divorce before cheating on their wives?

00:21:56.000 Did you ask them to step down?

00:22:00.000 No, but it's for show.

00:22:03.000 Correct.

00:22:03.000 It's for show.

00:22:05.000 But the show continued.

00:22:06.000 I don't know what Democrats thought they were doing here, but it absolutely backfired.

00:22:09.000 It did not look good in any way, shape, or form.

00:22:12.000 The Democrats continued.

00:22:13.000 Senator Tammy Duckworth of Illinois.

00:22:15.000 She tried to mock Hegseth for not knowing, off the top of his head, the countries in ASEAN, which is a compendium of 11 countries in Southeast Asia.

00:22:26.000 And somehow this was supposed to be disqualifying, which again is unbelievably stupid.

00:22:30.000 Because if somebody refers to that and you don't know, you ask your phone and it tells you in legitimately 0.0 seconds.

00:22:38.000 Here is Tammy Duckworth going after Hegseth.

00:22:41.000 How many nations are in ASEAN, by the way?

00:22:44.000 I couldn't tell you the exact amount of nations in that.

00:22:47.000 But I know we have allies in South Korea, in Japan, and in AUKUS with Australia, trying to work on submarines with them.

00:22:54.000 None of those countries are in ASEAN. None of those three countries that you've mentioned are in ASEAN. I suggest you do a little homework before you prepare for these types of negotiations.

00:23:05.000 Okay, you literally put on the Supreme Court a woman who doesn't know what a woman is.

00:23:10.000 I think we all know what a woman is.

00:23:12.000 It might take a few of us, you know, like a quick check of the internet to figure out which countries are in ASEAN. But like, that's the disqualifier?

00:23:20.000 That one is the disqualifier?

00:23:22.000 Well, in this year, Pete Hegseth is going to become Secretary of Defense, but you've got goals for the new year as well.

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00:25:30.000 Well, the Democrats were particularly mad about Hegseth's comment previously on women in the military.

00:25:36.000 Kristen Gillibrand, who's a long-forgotten senator from New York.

00:25:39.000 At one point, she ran for president of the United States.

00:25:41.000 I know, you forgot about that too.

00:25:43.000 Time has not treated Kristen Gillibrand particularly well.

00:25:47.000 And here she was, absolutely melting down on Pete Hegseth yesterday.

00:25:52.000 So women, you have denigrated.

00:25:54.000 You have also denigrated members of the LGBTQ community.

00:25:57.000 Did you know that when Don't Ask, Don't Tell was in place, we lost so many crucial personnel, over a thousand in mission-critical areas.

00:26:06.000 We lost 10% of all our foreign language speakers because of a political policy.

00:26:11.000 You said in your statement, you don't want politics in the DOD. Everything you've said in these public statements is politics.

00:26:18.000 I don't want women.

00:26:19.000 I don't want moms.

00:26:20.000 What's wrong with a mom, by the way?

00:26:22.000 Once you have babies, you therefore are no longer able to be lethal?

00:26:25.000 I mean, you're basically saying women, after they have children, can't ever serve in the military in a combat role.

00:26:30.000 It's a silly thing to say.

00:26:32.000 It's a silly thing to say.

00:26:34.000 Beneath the position that you are aspiring to.

00:26:37.000 To denigrate LGBTQ service members is a mistake.

00:26:40.000 If you are a sharpshooter, you're as lethal, regardless of what your gender identity is, regardless of who you love.

00:26:46.000 So please know this to be a true statement.

00:26:50.000 Oh, wow, wow.

00:26:51.000 Do you feel it in the heart?

00:26:52.000 You don't?

00:26:53.000 Because it's stupid?

00:26:54.000 Yeah, that would be Kristen Gillibrand, the useless senator from New York.

00:26:58.000 But don't worry, there are more useless senators.

00:27:00.000 Jean Shaheen, she continued along these lines, grilling Hegseth on women in the military.

00:27:05.000 Mr. Hegseth, do you know what percentage of our military is comprised of women?

00:27:12.000 I believe it's 18 to 20 percent, Senator.

00:27:14.000 It's almost 18 percent.

00:27:16.000 And in fact, DOD's 2023 demographic report indicated that there are more women serving now and there are fewer separations.

00:27:25.000 So they make up a critical part of our military.

00:27:28.000 Wouldn't you agree?

00:27:29.000 Yes, ma'am.

00:27:30.000 Women in our military, as I have said publicly.

00:27:33.000 Have and continue to make amazing contributions across all aspects of our battlefield.

00:27:39.000 Well, you also write in your book, The War on Warriors, with the chapter, The Deadly Obsession with Women Warriors, that, quote, not only are women comparatively less effective than men in combat roles, but they are more likely to be objectified by the enemy and their own nation in the moral realms of war.

00:27:58.000 Mr. Hegseth.

00:27:59.000 Should we take it to believe that you believe that the two women on this committee who have served honorably and with distinction made our military less effective and less capable?

00:28:10.000 I'm incredibly grateful for the two women who've served our military in uniform.

00:28:16.000 Okay, but the whole point he's making is if you lower the standards to get more women into the military, it makes it weaker.

00:28:22.000 Which, of course, is not true.

00:28:23.000 Probably the senator who humiliated herself the worst towards Elizabeth Warren, or Chief Elizabeth, as we like to call her.

00:28:29.000 She asked Pete Hegseth about his status as a general, which shouldn't go amazing since he's not one.

00:28:36.000 Will you put your money where your mouth is and agree that when you leave this job, you will not work for the defense industry for 10 years?

00:28:45.000 Senator, it's not even a question I've thought about.

00:28:48.000 You can think about it right now.

00:28:50.000 It's not one.

00:28:51.000 My motivation for this job has never been about what could conceivably come next.

00:28:57.000 Time is short.

00:28:58.000 I just need a yes or no.

00:28:59.000 I would consult with the president about what the policy should be in the defense department.

00:29:02.000 In other words, you're quite sure that every general who serves should not go directly into the defense industry for 10 years?

00:29:11.000 You're not willing to make that same pledge?

00:29:14.000 I'm not a general, Senator.

00:29:18.000 You'll be the one, let us just be clear, in charge of the generals.

00:29:27.000 They're all so awful.

00:29:28.000 They're all so awful.

00:29:29.000 In the end, it was Tim Sheehy, again, another member of the military, who was questioning Hegseth in what was, I think, probably the best exchange of the day.

00:29:39.000 Sheehy said to Hegseth, listen, this is all very basic.

00:29:41.000 How many genders are there?

00:29:42.000 Let's start with, like, that baseline question, which is something that apparently Mark Milley, that chairman of the Joint Chiefs, can't answer.

00:29:49.000 How many genders are there?

00:29:51.000 Tough one.

00:29:53.000 Senator, there are two genders.

00:29:55.000 I know that well.

00:29:55.000 I'm a Sheehy, so I'm on board.

00:30:02.000 Senator Sheehy is awesome.

00:30:03.000 I campaigned with him up in Montana.

00:30:04.000 He is a fantastic new addition to the Senate.

00:30:06.000 In the end, as Mark Wynn-Mullen says, Hexeth is going to get 51-52 votes in the Senate minimum, and he should.

00:30:12.000 He will be your new Secretary of Defense, and that is going to happen this week.

00:30:16.000 Meanwhile, other nominees are having their hearings as well.

00:30:21.000 Apparently, Marco Rubio is having his hearing today.

00:30:25.000 In that hearing, he said, in his opener speech, he said, placing our core national interests above all else is not isolationism.

00:30:33.000 It is the common sense realization that a foreign policy centered on our national interest is not some outdated relic.

00:30:38.000 The post-war global order is not just obsolete.

00:30:40.000 It is now a weapon being used against us.

00:30:42.000 That is absolutely correct.

00:30:45.000 That is absolutely correct.

00:30:46.000 This idea that there is a quote-unquote liberal world order that requires us to pre-clear our actions with the United Nations.

00:30:52.000 That international law from the ICJ and ICC is something that is worth our respect.

00:30:59.000 Or that the most important thing to the United States should be upholding some vague standard of Wilsonian international justice.

00:31:06.000 It's nonsense.

00:31:07.000 Rubio knows that.

00:31:08.000 Rubio will be confirmed as well.

00:31:10.000 The two other controversial nominees are going to have their hearings in very short order.

00:31:16.000 Those two most controversial nominees are, of course, RFK Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard.

00:31:19.000 Tulsi Gabbard has been making significant inroads with the Senate.

00:31:22.000 She's been vowing, for example, that she is going to, as Director of National Intelligence, not get rid of Section 702, which is the way that the U.S. intelligence community actually can monitor the communications of foreign entities.

00:31:36.000 Also, because Democrats are going so hard at Hegseth, they're actually expending all their ammo that they theoretically could have aimed at Tulsi Gabbard.

00:31:45.000 This is a point being made by Jonathan Martin over at Politico.

00:31:48.000 He says the disproportionate attention to Hegseth's nomination.

00:31:51.000 by the press and senators in both parties has been a gift to Gabbard.

00:31:55.000 Since Hegseth's November nomination, Democrats have focused the bulk of their attention on the former Fox& Friends weekend host, effectively taking their cues from the extensive press coverage.

00:32:03.000 However, they have not actually turned their fired to Tulsi Gabbard at this point.

00:32:09.000 Meanwhile, RFK Jr. The Trump team is working to sort of smooth off the rough edges of the RFK Jr. nomination.

00:32:16.000 According to the Wall Street Journal, two vaccine skeptics who'd been advising RFK Jr. have been sidelined by the Trump transition officials.

00:32:22.000 Advisor Stephanie Spear and lawyer Aaron Seary had asked prospective administration hires about their beliefs around vaccines, even if they were interviewing for posts that had little to do with immunizations.

00:32:31.000 The questions were different from those asked in separate meetings with President Trump's staff, according to some of the people.

00:32:35.000 Trump's team asked about topics traditionally important to conservatives, like the size of government and deregulation.

00:32:41.000 Syria is no longer advising the presidential transition.

00:32:44.000 Speer was passed over for the post of chief of staff in favor of a veteran of the first Trump administration.

00:32:50.000 And again, one of the reasons for that is because RFK Jr.'s opposition to vaccines is not relegated to his opposition to, for example, the mRNA vaccines, treatment of COVID and all the rest of that, which again has become highly controversial and the data of which was skewed when it was first released.

00:33:05.000 It extends to many other vaccines.

00:33:07.000 He's made statements in the past that...

00:33:09.000 Broad writ applied to lots of vaccines.

00:33:11.000 And so one of the things that the Trump team is attempting to do in getting RFK Jr.'s nomination shepherded through Congress is ensure that he doesn't have people around him who can be characterized as totally anti-vax in general, which again is a smart move by Team Trump.

00:33:26.000 Well, meanwhile, the House of Representatives is already getting active.

00:33:28.000 Yesterday, they passed a ban on men who say they are women from participating in women's sports.

00:33:35.000 The bill passed 218 to 206. All Republicans present voted yes.

00:33:40.000 Only two Democrats, only two Democrats voted yes.

00:33:44.000 And Democrats cannot shake the woke.

00:33:46.000 They cannot.

00:33:47.000 It is amazing.

00:33:49.000 Okay, this is a death knell for Democratic electoral prospects.

00:33:52.000 Their continued maintenance of the idea that boys can be girls, girls can be boys, and men should compete against women while pretending to be women is a horrifyingly bad political decision.

00:34:02.000 And yet they still continue to trot out absolute imbeciles.

00:34:05.000 Like Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez to make the case here yesterday was Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez explaining that it's terribly sexist not to allow boys to compete with girls.

00:34:17.000 I know who loves this bill.

00:34:20.000 Yes, bigoted folks love this bill.

00:34:23.000 Assalters love this bill.

00:34:25.000 But also, CEOs love this bill.

00:34:28.000 Because Los Angeles is on fire right now.

00:34:32.000 And this is the number one priority this majority has.

00:34:35.000 Thank you, and I yield back.

00:34:37.000 CEOs love this bill because of the fire.

00:34:40.000 Like, what is she even jabbering about?

00:34:41.000 But they are so attached to their woke principles, they cannot let it go.

00:34:46.000 Meanwhile, Speaker Johnson, again, passed his first test with flying colors, somehow cobbling together enough of the House Republican majority to be re-enshrined as Speaker of the House with the very important support of President Trump.

00:35:00.000 He said, listen, this is pretty obvious.

00:35:01.000 Protecting women in sports is commonsensical.

00:35:04.000 It's an executive branch function.

00:35:06.000 I mean, it is a big issue.

00:35:08.000 I mean, probably the most famous ad of the campaign cycle was the one that the Trump administration ran on this issue, and it resonates with the American people.

00:35:16.000 Congressman Stubbe mentioned it in the opinion polls.

00:35:19.000 This is an 80%, 90% issue or more, depending on which poll you look at, because, again, it comports with common sense.

00:35:27.000 It should not be a partisan issue.

00:35:29.000 We should have every single member of Congress united on this.

00:35:32.000 And I would challenge all of you to go ask the questions of the Democrats who voted against it, how in the world they can justify that?

00:35:39.000 Because I don't understand the argument at all.

00:35:41.000 And that, of course, is exactly correct.

00:35:43.000 But common sense left the Democratic Party long ago.

00:35:45.000 Speaking of which, we'll get into the latest from California, which continues to be just insane, in one second.

00:35:51.000 First, are you tired of winning yet?

00:35:52.000 Well, I'm not.

00:35:53.000 The Daily Wire will be live from D.C. for the inauguration of President-elect Donald J. Trump, as he has sworn in as the 47th President of the United States.

00:36:00.000 We're not just going to watch history.

00:36:02.000 We're going to bring it to you live and uncensored.

00:36:03.000 To celebrate the 47th president, we are giving you 47% off new Daily Wire Plus annual memberships.

00:36:09.000 Clever, right?

00:36:09.000 Plus, we're including a free $20 gift as a thank you for joining the fight, which is pretty awesome.

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00:36:29.000 Meanwhile, the situation in California continues to be quite dire.

00:36:32.000 It is not as though these fires are under control.

00:36:35.000 The fires are still raging out of control.

00:36:39.000 The winds are picking up once again.

00:36:41.000 The wildfire map continues to be extraordinarily large.

00:36:44.000 The Palisades Fire has been burning for eight days.

00:36:46.000 It is still only 18% contained.

00:36:48.000 It has burned almost 24,000 acres, and the winds are expected to pick up today as well.

00:36:53.000 The Eaton Fire, which has burned 14,000 acres, is only 35% contained.

00:36:59.000 It seems as though the most populated areas have basically been prevented from being eaten by the fire, particularly the Palisades fire.

00:37:09.000 And it looks like the map is moving more out to the west than it is to the east at this point.

00:37:14.000 So the map has not moved more toward Bel Air or Brentwood, for example, but it is moving out more toward the Ventura area, toward Malibu West and such.

00:37:22.000 Meanwhile, the person with the priorities is Gavin Newsom, the governor of California.

00:37:27.000 It is truly incredible how unbelievably incompetent they are and how wedded they are to their left-wing ideals.

00:37:35.000 So, let's say that your house burned down in this fire.

00:37:38.000 God forbid.

00:37:39.000 It's really terrible.

00:37:41.000 Let's say that your house burned down in the fire and you are left with the charred remnants of your old family home in an area that's not going to be livable for a while because after a wildfire hits an urban area, after it burns down a bunch of homes, It's not as though the rebuilding takes place immediately.

00:37:55.000 There's toxic waste there.

00:37:57.000 There's serious problems in these areas.

00:37:59.000 And let's say a developer comes to you and says, listen, you didn't have fire insurance because the state of California made it nearly impossible for you to buy affordable fire insurance.

00:38:06.000 It's going to be a long time until you see a check.

00:38:08.000 I'll give you $2 million today for your property.

00:38:10.000 According to Gavin Newsom, that developer is a leech, cruel, and must be stopped.

00:38:16.000 That sort of free market activity, that can't be allowed.

00:38:18.000 They're bringing you an unsolicited...

00:38:20.000 Now, listen, you could say no to that offer, but the fact that they are even making an offer shows how greedy and terrible they are.

00:38:25.000 Here is Gavin Newsom speaking up against free markets after his complete botchery of this fire.

00:38:31.000 I'm here in Altadena.

00:38:32.000 I just signed an executive order with community leaders to deal with the issue that is becoming a bigger and bigger issue every day.

00:38:38.000 And that's land developers that are engaging in predatory efforts to make unsolicited offers for properties at significantly below market value.

00:38:49.000 This predatory behavior is disgusting in the best of times.

00:38:53.000 And of course, here in the midst of this tragedy at scale, it's disgraceful.

00:38:58.000 So we're going to hold those folks accountable.

00:38:59.000 I'm very grateful for the leadership here in the community that promoted this approach and this executive order's reflection of their direction and their commitment to preserving the unique character of this community for generations to come.

00:39:14.000 I'm sorry, totally psychotic.

00:39:15.000 So somebody comes to you and they offer you money, and Gavin Newsom's response is, I'm going to prosecute that money.

00:39:20.000 You could just say no.

00:39:22.000 What he's really attempting to do is stop people from selling.

00:39:25.000 He's not stopping people from buying.

00:39:26.000 He's stopping people from selling.

00:39:28.000 You know what stops people from buying?

00:39:29.000 A seller saying no.

00:39:32.000 You know what stops?

00:39:33.000 A seller from selling only the government.

00:39:37.000 Unbelievable.

00:39:38.000 But, you know, they have your best interests at heart.

00:39:40.000 Meanwhile, the Los Angeles mayor, embattled Los Angeles mayor, Karen Bass, she was asked why she was in Africa in the first place.

00:39:46.000 She'd actually pledged earlier in her term that she would not do any foreign travel.

00:39:49.000 Of course, that wasn't true.

00:39:51.000 So here she was ignoring that question.

00:39:53.000 Looking back, would you have taken that trip overseas?

00:39:56.000 You know, I am going to focus today on what we know.

00:40:03.000 Well, I mean, I'm convinced.

00:40:06.000 Well, it wouldn't be a full-scale tragedy without Jimmy Kimmel tearing up on air because this is what you want from your late-night comedians is lectures about politics and tearing up, which is what Jimmy Kimmel has become famous for.

00:40:18.000 He's no longer famous for making jokes.

00:40:20.000 It is truly impressive how, in our culture-centric universe, I think I speak for all of us when I say it has been a sickening,

00:40:43.000 shocking, awful experience, but has also been, in a lot of ways, a beautiful experience because Once again, we see our fellow men and women coming together to support each other.

00:40:57.000 People who lost their own homes were out volunteering in parking lots helping others who lost theirs.

00:41:03.000 And tonight, you know, I don't want to get into all the vile and irresponsible and stupid things our alleged future president and his scumbags chose to say during our darkest and most terrifying hour.

00:41:18.000 The fact that they chose to attack our firefighters who apparently aren't white enough to be out there risking their lives on our behalf is it's disgusting, but it's not surprising.

00:41:29.000 They weren't attacking the firefighters.

00:41:30.000 They were attacking the entire system that allowed this to happen, including the underfunding of the fire department for paying gigantic pensions and salaries negotiated by unions, which prevented the staffing up of the fire department.

00:41:43.000 Yeah, it seems to me that if your top priority is hiring people who literally say that it's not their job to pull men out of burning buildings because the men shouldn't have been there in the first place, that seems like that should be a question that should be asked.

00:41:53.000 I mean, anytime, let alone in the middle of the most devastating wildfire in American history.

00:41:59.000 So thanks to Jimmy Kimmel for, as always, his moral clarity.

00:42:02.000 Meanwhile, Joe Biden is expected to make his valedictory address tonight.

00:42:06.000 He's going to explain why he was such a wonderful president.

00:42:08.000 And honestly, I'm grateful to Joe Biden for ripping the lid off the incompetence of the Democrats.

00:42:13.000 For bringing us a second Donald Trump term, that is what he's mostly going to be remembered for.

00:42:17.000 On his way out, he's doing everything he can to screw things up.

00:42:19.000 According to the Wall Street Journal, days before President Biden's term ends, his administration said it would remove Cuba from the U.S. list of state sponsors of terrorism as part of a deal worked out with the help from the Catholic Church to free political prisoners on the island.

00:42:32.000 U.S. officials said the decision, which comes less than a week before President-elect Trump's inauguration for a second term, would lead to the release of many dozens of Cuban political prisoners.

00:42:41.000 The Cuban foreign ministry said it would free 553 prisoners.

00:42:44.000 But what exactly does this do?

00:42:45.000 Well, it actually just frees up banking for Cuba.

00:42:48.000 That's actually what it does.

00:42:49.000 It gives the Cuban dictatorship access to cash.

00:42:52.000 According to the Wall Street Journal, banks almost universally shun Cuba because of the terrorism listing.

00:42:56.000 The decision to take it off the list if it stands could be the first step in helping Havana obtain some financial...

00:43:01.000 Relief.

00:43:03.000 Biden officials described the action as a gesture of goodwill after a U.S. review found, quote, no credible evidence at this time of ongoing support by Cuba for international terrorism.

00:43:12.000 Well, suffice to say, I do not trust the Biden administration in their assessment.

00:43:16.000 Senator Rick Scott of Florida slammed the move as a parting gift to dictators and terrorists around the world.

00:43:20.000 Florida Democrats, too, condemned it.

00:43:21.000 They said, quote, we condemn in the strongest terms Cuba's removal from this list.

00:43:27.000 That seems exactly correct, but again.

00:43:29.000 They're going to do as much damage as they can on the way out the door.

00:43:31.000 That's also true of the Securities and Exchange Commission, just days before Donald Trump is set to take office, just days before Doge is set to get to work.

00:43:38.000 That is the Elon Musk, Vivek Ramaswamy-led agency that is focused in on governmental efficiency.

00:43:44.000 U.S. securities regulators, according to the New York Times, have now sued Elon Musk in federal court in Washington on Tuesday in an enforcement action arising from his $44 billion purchase of Twitter, now called X. The SEC contends that in buying Twitter in 2022, Musk violated securities laws by amassing a large stock position in the social media company without filing proper notification.

00:44:05.000 The complaint said he waited 11 days before filing the required disclosure with the SEC. Well, he ended up taking Twitter private at a price of $44 billion.

00:44:18.000 According to the SEC, because Musk didn't disclose his position, he was able to continue buying Twitter stock at an artificially low price.

00:44:25.000 The move allowed him to underpay by at least $150 million for the additional shares before disclosing his stake.

00:44:30.000 He paid $44 billion for a social media service that, at this point, I have no idea what it's worth.

00:44:37.000 They named $44 billion.

00:44:38.000 So in other words, here's how the process went.

00:44:41.000 He offered that he was going to buy the place at like $44 billion.

00:44:45.000 And he was starting to buy up shares.

00:44:48.000 And everybody was like, okay, that's sure.

00:44:51.000 Twitter's like, okay, we'll take it.

00:44:53.000 And then he was like, okay, hold up a second.

00:44:55.000 It seems as though there's a lot of bots on the service and a lot of fake numbers around the service, and I don't want to pay that $44 billion.

00:45:01.000 And the government stepped in and sued, and he was like, okay, fine.

00:45:05.000 I guess you've got, fine, sure.

00:45:07.000 I'll buy it for $44 billion.

00:45:08.000 Now the government's like, well, you're not, you know, you paid too much money.

00:45:12.000 And he's like, I know I paid too much money.

00:45:14.000 They're like, but you didn't pay enough.

00:45:15.000 Like, what in the world?

00:45:17.000 What in the world?

00:45:18.000 His lawyer, Alex Spiro, Denounced the filing.

00:45:21.000 Quote, today's action is an admission by the SEC. They can't bring an actual case because Musk has done nothing wrong and everyone sees this sham for what it is.

00:45:28.000 This is the third time the SEC has gone to court with Musk.

00:45:32.000 The first was when they went to court claiming that he'd made an inappropriate market-moving post on social media talking about taking Tesla private.

00:45:42.000 Gary Gensler, who's been just an awful SEC commissioner, is leading the way.

00:45:46.000 All these agencies are staffed up by some of the worst people in America, truthfully.

00:45:50.000 And they need to go.

00:45:52.000 Alrighty, folks.

00:45:53.000 So, because we are going to have a new Secretary of Defense, I wanted to discuss in depth what a better defense policy would look like.

00:46:01.000 And so I sat down just a couple of days ago with the Chief Technology Officer of Palantir, which is one of the new defense firms that is doing significant work in modernizing the military, taking creative approaches to the military.

00:46:15.000 It is not one of the dinosaurs, one of the old dinosaurs that are getting paid billions of dollars to generate parts for the F-35.

00:46:21.000 They are thinking differently.

00:46:22.000 Here's what our interview sounded like.

00:46:24.000 I think it's fascinating and really important listening for people who want to see changes in policy direction at the Defense Department.

00:46:29.000 Sean, thanks so much for stopping by.

00:46:33.000 I wanted to have you stop by and talk to us about defense policy.

00:46:36.000 What should that look like?

00:46:37.000 So, obviously, the first question that people are going to ask is, you're in the defense industry.

00:46:40.000 That just means that you're a warmonger who wants more wars and wants to spend more.

00:46:45.000 On defense?

00:46:45.000 That's like your top priority.

00:46:47.000 I'm sure you get that a lot.

00:46:48.000 What's your sort of response to that?

00:46:49.000 Well, I mean, the goal of defense is to deter conflict.

00:46:53.000 And actually, I think in many ways, the budget should be much less.

00:46:57.000 I think a lot of what we're spending on defense right now ends up being effectively a jobs program.

00:47:02.000 And the part that we're spending on actually deterring our adversaries, actually scaring she.

00:47:08.000 Now, I think there's a lot of ways that we can do that well within our fiscal means and constraints, and that's really what I argue for in the Defense Reformation.

00:47:16.000 So one of the things that you talk about in the Defense Reformation is something you call monopsony.

00:47:20.000 You say this is the way that defense budgeting has been practiced.

00:47:23.000 Why don't you define that, and what exactly is the problem?

00:47:25.000 Yeah, so people are very familiar with the term monopoly, and we look at monopolies with great skepticism, where there's a single seller of a product in the market.

00:47:32.000 Well, monopsony is the mirror image of that, where there's a single buyer for a thing.

00:47:36.000 And as free market patriots in America, we believe in the value of the free market.

00:47:41.000 So when you have a monopsony, when you have a single buyer, when there's only one person who's interested in buying an aircraft carrier, you lose all of the benefit of the free market, all the benefit of a million individual voices trying to decide what a good product is and the signal that comes from that.

00:47:56.000 So the monopsony is accrues a lot of power in deciding what it is that they should have.

00:47:59.000 And it deprives power from the entrepreneurs, from the engineers, the innovators on what they could do to solve your problems.

00:48:07.000 And so this dynamic that kind of leans into the fetishization of control of like, no, I'm telling you, this is what the plane needs to do.

00:48:14.000 That's how you end up with programs like the F-35, where that project was conceived of in So, how do you solve that problem?

00:48:26.000 Because obviously, the United States is, in fact, the single buyer of these technologies.

00:48:30.000 How do you solve for that?

00:48:31.000 Yeah, that's right.

00:48:31.000 So I think monopsony is the root of what ails us.

00:48:33.000 But you do your best to approximate free market forces.

00:48:37.000 And this is not some pie-in-the-sky fantasy.

00:48:39.000 If we look at when we used to do projects where they really worked, like how did we build the intercontinental ballistic missile back in the 50s and 60s?

00:48:46.000 Well, we actually had all the services competing against each other.

00:48:50.000 The Army, the Navy, the Air Force.

00:48:52.000 There was no monopoly.

00:48:53.000 There was no one who was saying like, well, this is obviously the Air Force.

00:48:55.000 Today we think about it as the Minuteman.

00:48:57.000 That's who won.

00:48:58.000 But that was not a...

00:49:00.000 Forgone conclusion.

00:49:02.000 When you think about submarine-launched ballistic missiles, Admiral Rayburn actually had four competing programs within the Navy to produce those things.

00:49:08.000 The challenge that we have with that is really an aesthetic challenge, where we look at it today with almost a Soviet aesthetic, where we say, that sounds duplicative, that sounds wasteful.

00:49:16.000 Shouldn't we just have one effort where we put all of our energy and resources behind it, and we lose out on the magic, the American magic of competition?

00:49:24.000 And the idea that actually there are lots of competing ideas and we're all going to do better because there are four competing programs instead of a single unitary effort where there's no innovation, there's no incentive to actually disrupt yourself in order to win.

00:49:36.000 I mean, that's really fascinating because it's so counterintuitive.

00:49:38.000 The way that most people tend to think of bureaucracy is, well, as the bureaucracy multiplies, then you get more confusion and more cost and more waste.

00:49:48.000 You're suggesting is actually when you have a monopoly of demand inside, say, the Defense Department, it's one guy deciding, here's the things I want, that's when you get the most waste.

00:49:56.000 I think that's right, because there's just no check and balance, right?

00:49:59.000 Like, how do you know this zombie program, is it a zombie program or is it the definitive program that's going to deliver deterrence or not?

00:50:06.000 And so you need some of that pressure.

00:50:07.000 I think one of the great advantages that we really have, if you think about how the department is structured, is we have what we call the combatant commands, right?

00:50:14.000 So we have these 13 different places, like...

00:50:17.000 Like the Indo-Pacific, as one example, or CENTCOM, where the geographic combatant commanders, they actually fight the war.

00:50:24.000 And to use it in business parlance, they're responsible for responding to real-world demand.

00:50:28.000 The services, the Army, the Air Force, the Navy, they're responsible for the supply side, for presenting forces, for building the equipment and the material and training the soldiers and providing that to the combatant commanders.

00:50:39.000 But we have 13 of them.

00:50:40.000 We can actually use this to approximate a market.

00:50:42.000 And why should we presuppose that what Admiral Paparo needs in the Pacific is going to be exactly the same thing as what General Crilla needs in the Middle East?

00:50:50.000 That doesn't really make sense.

00:50:52.000 So we need to create mechanisms for each of these combatant commanders to express their demand.

00:50:56.000 This is what I need from the services and the forces.

00:50:58.000 Be able to control some of that budget, which today we don't let them do, so they can match their own in supply and demand.

00:51:04.000 So how does defense lobbying play into all of this?

00:51:07.000 Because obviously you see some real dinosaurs in the defense industry that are wildly inefficient.

00:51:12.000 And that are charging up the wazoo.

00:51:14.000 And we've tried to control that with something called cost plus, which is essentially, okay, what's your cost?

00:51:18.000 And we'll add a percentage on top of it the same way that you might see a contractor do that under certain circumstances.

00:51:23.000 What's the problem with that system?

00:51:24.000 Why are we still contracting with so many dinosaurs?

00:51:26.000 Well, the other industry that loves cost-plus is general contracting.

00:51:30.000 And I don't know if anyone's gone through a home remodel who's listening to this, but most people are not pretty happy with how that's gone.

00:51:35.000 Somehow, for the contractor to get more plus, the cost has to go up, and that's what seems to happen.

00:51:41.000 And it lacks the natural incentive to figure out how to manage this within your own means or to drive innovation against that cost phase.

00:51:47.000 So cost-plus, where did this really come from?

00:51:49.000 It came from the era of mobilization around World War II, where it makes a lot of sense.

00:51:53.000 We took a bunch of...

00:51:54.000 Auto companies and other parts of the American industry, and this was complete mobilization of our economy.

00:51:59.000 You're going to have to build things you never built before.

00:52:01.000 You don't know what it's going to cost you to build it.

00:52:03.000 I'm going to just tell you, build it.

00:52:04.000 The nation needs it.

00:52:06.000 And here's some baked-in profit.

00:52:08.000 So that was the right model for the moment.

00:52:10.000 It's not the right model anymore.

00:52:12.000 If you look at what SpaceX has been able to do with Space Launch, you know, I grew up in the shadow of the Space Coast.

00:52:16.000 I used to love watching the shuttle launch.

00:52:19.000 The shuttle, it was $50,000 a kilogram to get to orbit.

00:52:24.000 With Starship-heavy reuse that's imminently coming, Elon has made that $10.

00:52:29.000 $10!

00:52:30.000 You know, and so if you were doing this under a cost-plus regime, he would have reduced his profit a huge amount there because the cost just went down a huge amount.

00:52:40.000 That doesn't make sense.

00:52:41.000 Elon should be rewarded for the massive innovation that means that our nation has the most assured access to space, and that is...

00:52:49.000 Both delivering untold national security and prosperity for us.

00:52:52.000 And I think a big part of what mobilized Elon to do that is not national security, it's getting to Mars.

00:52:57.000 He needs that price performance in order to get to Mars and the whole of nation benefits.

00:53:00.000 So I think the cost plus locks you into basically very linear outcomes that don't allow you to have transformational defense capabilities at all.

00:53:08.000 And what we really want to move to is a world that has powered all of America's prosperity, which is an entrepreneur, founder-driven innovation economy where people actually invest their own capital.

00:53:17.000 You know, America's capital markets are the deepest and richest in the world.

00:53:21.000 Let's invest American capital, build things, and show them to the department and let the department decide if they want to buy it or not.

00:53:27.000 And they can buy it as a commercial product.

00:53:29.000 You know, not having sunk U.S. taxpayer R&D into developing these things, but rather putting that risk on private capital and deciding what works for them.

00:53:37.000 So one of the things that you've talked about is the fact that...

00:53:39.000 Yeah.

00:53:47.000 Yeah.

00:53:53.000 And this is probably the most important point, which is dual use and I'd say dual purpose.

00:53:57.000 So we forget that the industrial base, we call it today the defense industrial base, but the industrial base that won World War II and the early Cold War was an American industrial base.

00:54:06.000 Chrysler built cars and missiles.

00:54:08.000 Ford built satellites until 1990. General Mills, the serial company, made torpedoes and artillery.

00:54:13.000 So the entire structure of the U.S. economy, we were all invested as corporations in both.

00:54:19.000 National security and prosperity.

00:54:21.000 And I think we've lost a lot by how it's rotated.

00:54:25.000 And if you look at the fall of the Berlin Wall, that moment in 89, only 6% of major weapons system spending went to defense specialists, the so-called primes.

00:54:33.000 Most of the spending went to these dual-purpose companies like a Chrysler.

00:54:37.000 Now, if you look at that figure, it's 86% goes to defense specialists.

00:54:41.000 So we've lost quite a bit.

00:54:43.000 And that's a consequence of the luxury of having, quote-unquote, you know, having won the Cold War.

00:54:48.000 You know, without a near-peer or a peer threat and kind of the lack of pace that we needed to follow, you know, we got to kind of lean into the monopsonous preferences for control and the fetishization of how they were going to go about doing this rather than leveraging the breadth of the American economy to deliver national security and prosperity for its people.

00:55:09.000 So when we look at the big problems facing America, obviously lack of innovation, cost problems, supply chain problems as well.

00:55:17.000 What is the solution to many of the supply chain problems?

00:55:19.000 And we're getting resources for our military from many countries that actually are geopolitical opponents.

00:55:24.000 Yeah, I think reindustrializing the nation is, you know, it's a complete clarion call.

00:55:29.000 If you look at, you know, the amount of weapons that we have on hand to fight China, it's roughly, war games put it at eight days.

00:55:35.000 It should be closer to 800 days.

00:55:37.000 And I think one of the things that we lost as a consequence of, you know, winning the Cold War, we got confused at the stockpile.

00:55:44.000 It's not the stockpile.

00:55:45.000 You know, it's the ability to make the stockpile.

00:55:48.000 So if it takes you eight years to make a Patriot battery or two years to make a long-range anti-ship missile and you're only making them in quantities of tens or hundreds...

00:55:57.000 That's not going to provide deterrence.

00:55:59.000 And I think Ukraine was a painful lesson to that.

00:56:01.000 Regardless of how you feel about our support for Ukraine, if you realize that they went through 10 years of our production in 10 weeks of fighting, you realize you have a problem.

00:56:10.000 And we have grossly under-resourced the lines of production and exercising those lines of production.

00:56:15.000 We have this fantasy that it'll be just like World War II where we just...

00:56:18.000 Quote, unquote, flip a switch and, you know, we can just go back to making these things.

00:56:21.000 But that's not even what happened in World War II. We started, you know, it took 18 months to mobilize it, you know, 12 months to build factories, six months to retool them.

00:56:29.000 And so there's a certain sort of seriousness that we need to have to this if we want to deter conflict here.

00:56:34.000 Okay, so let's say that you were called by the Secretary of Defense and he says, Sham, lay out for me.

00:56:42.000 Exactly.

00:56:42.000 The ten steps, the five steps I need to take first.

00:56:45.000 What are the big key things that the Defense Department needs to do going forward immediately?

00:56:49.000 Well, I think there are probably like four or five priority areas, including counter-UAS. The things that right now we have real issues with, how our level of deterrence and overmatch against the threat is not high enough.

00:57:01.000 And those areas is where we need to have more multiple competing programs and efforts, less unitary efforts.

00:57:06.000 And we need to bring the breadth of the American industrial base.

00:57:09.000 You could ask yourself the question, Counterfactually, how bad would the world have to be before you wanted to bring Tesla into munitions productions using DPA authorities?

00:57:18.000 Because it's not true that we're not good at making things in this country.

00:57:22.000 It's just that the ability to do that in a modern way is asymmetrically distributed.

00:57:27.000 You know, SpaceX makes so much of what they do vertically integrated internally, and they do it at a price that is eye-watering.

00:57:34.000 Tesla, it's really a software-defined production line.

00:57:37.000 How they do it and how they version it, it's quite exquisite.

00:57:40.000 And then you have all these founders now who have grown up in the school of Elon, who are building their own companies in El Segundo, who are bringing modern manufacturing techniques back to America.

00:57:50.000 I think we need to invest in that and really harness that.

00:57:52.000 Now, I think a lot of this has been hollowed out through the kind of MBA-ification of how we run our companies here.

00:57:59.000 We've traded real engineering for financial engineering.

00:58:02.000 You know, when I interact with, you know, 50% of what we do is actually commercial, working, you know, building Airbuses and Chryslers and, you know, hundreds of thousands of users on the factory floor using the software.

00:58:12.000 When I interact with these companies, their understanding of their supply chain is very shallow.

00:58:16.000 You know, they kind of treat it as a black box where I have these suppliers, I buy these things.

00:58:16.000 very shallow.

00:58:17.000 They kind of treat it as a black box where I have these suppliers, I buy these things.

00:58:20.000 They don't know how to make those things.

00:58:22.000 They don't understand how far down it goes.

00:58:23.000 That couldn't be any more different than how Elon and SpaceX view the world and the deep control.

00:58:29.000 So I think the future of American manufacturing looks much more like that, getting to a place where we, you know, David's slingshot, so to speak now, is both software defined and we're competing differently than China.

00:58:40.000 So, So unfortunately, at the dawn of World War II, we were the best at mass production.

00:58:44.000 Today, our adversary is.

00:58:46.000 So we shouldn't compete symmetrically in re-industrializing.

00:58:49.000 We're going to have to use a different approach to doing it.

00:58:50.000 And I think we've already seen that that approach can work in America.

00:58:53.000 We need to give American workers superpowers with the technology that we have a unique advantage in.

00:58:58.000 And we need to use the techniques that Elon and others have shown can really work to bring that work back.

00:59:03.000 So, there's going to be, obviously, a lot of systemic resistance to this sort of stuff inside DOD. The new Secretary of Defense is going to face down people who have been in these jobs for decades.

00:59:12.000 I mean, this is true throughout all of the agencies, but it's particularly true at DOD, which, of course, we're spending trillions of dollars on every year.

00:59:19.000 What exactly needs to happen in terms of staffing?

00:59:22.000 Because we can have these ideas, but it's the implementation that's really going to matter.

00:59:26.000 Well, I think that the person is the program is what I like to say.

00:59:29.000 We call it the Apollo program, but maybe more accurately, we should call it Gene Kranz's program.

00:59:32.000 You know, is the F-16 the F-16 or is it John Boyd's plane?

00:59:36.000 You know, we have the nuclear Navy because Admiral Rickover worked on it for 30 years and he had to be protected by Congress.

00:59:42.000 Like today, having an admiral in place for 30 years, we couldn't even imagine that.

00:59:45.000 And these personnel, Edward Hall built the Minuteman, you know, Kelly Johnson built 41 airframes in his career.

00:59:52.000 He built the U-2 in 13 months.

00:59:54.000 So there is something, you know, Profoundly valuable about these founder personalities.

01:00:00.000 And I think of all nations in the world, we understand that.

01:00:02.000 There's a reason we call them the founding fathers.

01:00:04.000 And I think what we've kind of lost is we've built a military cadre where they need to rotate every two to three years.

01:00:11.000 It's about collecting experiences, about filling out a bingo card, rather than the deep work of actually delivering capabilities for the nations, focusing on the output here.

01:00:20.000 So I think by recognizing that first.

01:00:23.000 And then putting the right people in place for the duration that's required against the capabilities we need, that's a precondition.

01:00:30.000 The second one is, let's not grant monopolies on these efforts.

01:00:33.000 We're going to have to have multiple players in the field, multiple competing efforts that enable us to focus on winning.

01:00:38.000 You know, we can't be so focused on the inputs on, like, is this efficient?

01:00:42.000 Is it not?

01:00:43.000 It's very hard.

01:00:43.000 You know, innovation is messy and chaotic.

01:00:46.000 And the reason we have this weird sclerotic system is because every time something went wrong in this messy and authentically chaotic process, we try to come up with a rule to make it less messy and less chaotic.

01:00:55.000 And what you're really doing is if you're chopping off all of the tail of bad outcomes, you can't do that without chopping off all the tail of good outcomes.

01:01:03.000 So it locks you into this really mediocrity.

01:01:08.000 So, when you look at sort of the weapons systems from a layman's perspective, when I think of military equipment, I'm thinking of aircraft carriers, I'm thinking of F-35s.

01:01:16.000 How much of that is a waste?

01:01:17.000 I mean, what are the things that we should be looking at as the American public, the sort of technologies of the future, in your opinion?

01:01:24.000 Obviously, people have talked about drones, people are talking about automation.

01:01:27.000 Where do you think the future lies?

01:01:29.000 I think the future requires both of these.

01:01:32.000 So I think there's almost like a false choice presented in, is it going to be all unmanned autonomous systems, or are we committed to the big legacy platforms?

01:01:41.000 Really, the question is, what is the forced employment concept?

01:01:43.000 How are we going to use these things to drive effects on the battlefield that deter our adversaries from creating problems in the world?

01:01:49.000 I think we need a lot more experimentation on that.

01:01:52.000 Right now, this stuff has been pretty siloed.

01:01:55.000 And what we see with the Ukrainians, I think one of the lessons there is really how fast you can go when you have these, the right sort of effort.

01:02:01.000 So one of the conclusions people have that I think might be slightly wrong is like, isn't it amazing that even though they didn't have a Navy, they were able to sink half the Black Sea Fleet, the Russian Black Sea Fleet.

01:02:11.000 I think, no, no, no, it's it's.

01:02:13.000 Because they didn't have a Navy, right?

01:02:14.000 They were not constrained by the legacy platforms and ideas here.

01:02:18.000 So they could come up with entirely new force employment constructs.

01:02:21.000 So that may seem like a contradiction, but what I'm really saying is you need these platforms, but maybe the folks who are in charge of using these platforms today are going to be the slowest to develop the new force employment constructs.

01:02:33.000 And that's where you can think of this as a thought exercise as opposed to literal, but maybe you need a Navy too.

01:02:39.000 And Navy 2 is entirely focused on unmanned approaches to delivering this, and we figure out how to bring these things together here.

01:02:45.000 So when you look at the Trump administration, you look forward to the next four years, the orientation has changed.

01:02:52.000 Obviously, this administration that is stacked with people who are from the outside of many of these agencies, it's creative and it's innovative and it's interesting.

01:02:59.000 What are your kind of hopes for what the administration looks like over the course of the next four years?

01:03:03.000 A real focus on winning.

01:03:04.000 You know, I think there's been too much of a focus on process.

01:03:07.000 How did these things happen?

01:03:08.000 You know, my core critique is like everyone, including the Russians and the Chinese, have given up on communism, except for Cuba and the DoD.

01:03:14.000 You know, somehow the DoD uses five-year plans.

01:03:17.000 It's like essentially centrally planned or at worst centrally unplanned process.

01:03:21.000 It takes two years to program for money for a new start.

01:03:25.000 Can you imagine going to an American commercial company?

01:03:28.000 You have the greatest mousetrap in the world and they say, oh, this is amazing.

01:03:32.000 I can't wait to go get the money to start experimenting with this two years from now.

01:03:36.000 And certainly our adversaries don't have those constraints.

01:03:40.000 And those are self-imposed.

01:03:41.000 That's not the physics of the universe.

01:03:43.000 That's how we are choosing to organize ourselves to go slow.

01:03:46.000 And so why?

01:03:47.000 Why can't that take two weeks or at most two months?

01:03:50.000 And so I think a lot of these problems are actually problems of will and can be solved with folks who are very focused on winning and what does winning really look like.

01:03:59.000 And when I look at our past, we had all of that.

01:04:02.000 So I know with great certainty that we can do this again once we realize that we've kind of accumulated all these barnacles.

01:04:08.000 The barnacles are bigger than the ship at this point.

01:04:10.000 People love criticizing David Packard, a Silicon Valley technologist co-founder.

01:04:14.000 He founded HP. He served as a deputy secretary of defense.

01:04:17.000 So he came up with the, I think they call it the 5000 series, Rules on Acquisition.

01:04:22.000 Today, that's a 2,000-page document.

01:04:24.000 When he wrote it, it was seven pages.

01:04:26.000 So people love criticizing his sclerotic, bureaucratic contribution, but it wasn't that when he did it.

01:04:31.000 We made it that.

01:04:33.000 And I think, you know, being, you know, what can we cut back in terms of regulations?

01:04:36.000 How can we enable our warfighters to have the room to experiment they deserve?

01:04:41.000 One of the things that always breaks my heart, you hear senior generals, senior general officers, they talk about...

01:04:47.000 Something like this shibboleth is like, well, you know, we really need the oversight because we've proven that we're not very good at spending the U.S. taxpayers' money.

01:04:54.000 And I don't think that's true.

01:04:56.000 You know, when you're doing things that are this hard and this innovative, there's going to be some part of it that doesn't work.

01:05:02.000 You know, maybe one out of 10 Silicon Valley companies end up working.

01:05:05.000 Why should we think the success rate is going to be wildly different than that?

01:05:08.000 And if we kind of pretend that 10 out of 10 of these things need to work, you're just going to get people who lie about it, who, you know, effectively the incentives are all wrong.

01:05:15.000 And so we, these people have signed up to die for the nation.

01:05:19.000 We need to put a little bit of trust in them and give them some discretion.

01:05:22.000 And yeah, not all of it's going to work, but you know what doesn't work?

01:05:26.000 2,000 page documents to tell you how to run these programs.

01:05:29.000 So when you look at sort of the threats that are facing the United States right now, the sclerotic DOD procurement process, when you look at the kind of systems that are sort of legacy systems that keep pouring billions of dollars into those systems, what are your sort of top threats that you see facing the country that we need to handle in short order?

01:05:48.000 Well, the biggest opportunity that we have, maybe to flip it a little bit, is like we have lots of individual exquisite systems.

01:05:55.000 We need to be able to bring these things together to actually drive deterrence here.

01:05:59.000 So how do these platforms work together from sensor to shooter?

01:06:03.000 And how do you do that across all the domains and theaters and do it at the speed of the machine as opposed to the speed of the human?

01:06:09.000 When you look at the kill chain, the term of art from going from sensor to shooter, finding the enemy to applying effects to them.

01:06:15.000 What are all those stages today that are actually pretty manual, pretty mandraulic, not as effective?

01:06:20.000 You know, as a term of like doctrinally to the military, a strike that happens inside of 72 hours is considered dynamic.

01:06:28.000 So the expectation is that you're going to have three days to plan these sorts of things or more.

01:06:33.000 And that's not realistic on the modern battlefield, right?

01:06:36.000 Like we, everything's going to be dynamic is the reality.

01:06:38.000 So if everything's going to be dynamic, how are we investing in the AI enabled technologies to do that?

01:06:43.000 The reason I think that's...

01:06:44.000 Actually, also really important is it plays to our American unique advantage here.

01:06:48.000 We tend to, as a nation, underestimate how good we are at software.

01:06:53.000 There's a yawning gap between number one and number two.

01:06:56.000 And the reason, because if software was just about IQ, it would be evenly distributed.

01:07:01.000 There's smart people everywhere in the world.

01:07:02.000 But think about the fact that there are zero Indian or Chinese enterprise software companies that are competitive on the world stage.

01:07:08.000 So what explains our unique outperformance in America?

01:07:13.000 Sometimes when people look at Silicon Valley, they think, oh, maybe we imported this from India or Israel.

01:07:17.000 You know, we did import it to Silicon Valley, but we imported it from Iowa.

01:07:20.000 It came from Bob Noyce, the co-founder of Intel, the co-inventor of the transistor, and our unique software advantage is cultural.

01:07:28.000 And it comes from a Midwestern culture.

01:07:29.000 This sensibility, a willingness to play positive sum games, open communication, high trust environments.

01:07:35.000 You can see all these things are very hard to scale in a place like India or China.

01:07:38.000 They don't scale.

01:07:39.000 They don't work there.

01:07:40.000 And the shape of their businesses reflect that.

01:07:43.000 So Bob Noyce came up with the term open door policy.

01:07:46.000 We don't understand the degree to which actually all of American tech is descendant from this Iowan culture.

01:07:52.000 And that's what's very special.

01:07:53.000 It's very hard to replicate.

01:07:54.000 If you're a Singaporean and you come to Stanford and you're like, oh, I'm going to copy.

01:07:57.000 Be the university or Sand Hill Road, you're kind of missing the whole thing.

01:08:01.000 And the one thing you need to copy is the one thing you don't want to copy.

01:08:04.000 You're very committed to your culture.

01:08:05.000 You're not interested in becoming Iowan, but that's what it takes.

01:08:08.000 Well, Sean, really appreciate the time and the insight.

01:08:11.000 And obviously, I hope that the DOD takes a lot of that advice.

01:08:14.000 Really appreciate it.

01:08:15.000 Thank you, Ben.

01:08:16.000 All right, you guys, coming up, the media are doing their best to stand for anti-Semitic regimes.

01:08:21.000 This is what they do.

01:08:22.000 If you're not a member, become a member.

01:08:23.000 Use code Shapiro.

01:08:24.000 Check out for two months free on all annual plans.

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The Ben Shapiro Show - January 15, 2025

WAR FIGHTER: Hegseth Stuns Democrats At Confirmation Hearing

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