Pete Hegseth was great in front of the Senate Armed Services Committee yesterday during his confirmation hearing. He stood up to all of the Democrats who tried to attack him and did not only attack him but tried to delegitimize him.
00:00:24.000Pam Bondi, the Attorney General nominee, she's having her hearing today.
00:00:28.000But 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.
00:00:47.000Plus, celebrate with 47% off your Daily Wire plus annual membership.
00:00:51.000Join 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.
00:01:07.000The 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.
00:01:23.000And Hegseth was great, like not just good, great, iconically great yesterday in front of the Senate Armed Services Committee.
00:01:31.000Democrat after Democrat lined up to attack him, particularly on his personal life, and Hegseth weathered it like a champ.
00:01:37.000He came back at them where they said particularly stupid things, and he said some things that need to be said.
00:01:43.000This is a very different Secretary of Defense nominee.
00:01:46.000Not 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.
00:01:59.000He is not a political general who is elevated through the ranks for being able to get along with his superiors.
00:02:15.000Here, 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.
00:02:26.000The answer to that, by the way, is absolutely yes.
00:02:29.000Here was Hegseth yesterday talking about the difference between the guys in the air-conditioned offices and the guys with their boots on the ground.
00:02:35.000We are a country that fights by the rule of law.
00:02:57.000The Department of Defense should be about destroying the enemy.
00:03:00.000And 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.
00:03:10.000And Hegseth is going to put an end to it.
00:03:13.000Hegseth talked about diversity, equity, and inclusion, about the lowering of standards in order to, quote-unquote, diversify the American military.
00:03:20.000Here he was saying, you know what should matter?
00:03:50.000Where 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.
00:04:10.000This is why he's going to make an excellent Secretary of Defense.
00:04:13.000We are no longer going to have General Mark Milley talking about the problems of white rage.
00:04:17.000And how diversity is our greatest strength.
00:04:20.000It turns out the greatest strength of the military is effectiveness and lethality, its ability to kill the bad guys and pursue American interests.
00:04:29.000That also means thinning out the ranks of the political generals at the top.
00:04:32.000Here's Hegseth saying, listen, you know, we used to win wars when we had fewer generals is something I noticed.
00:04:51.000There's an inverse relationship between the size of staffs and victory on the battlefield.
00:04:58.000We don't need more bureaucracy at the top.
00:05:01.000We need more warfighters empowered at the bottom.
00:05:03.000So 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.
00:05:14.000He also said, you know what that encompasses?
00:05:16.000That encompasses us firing the bad generals.
00:05:18.000You don't get to lose wars and keep your job.
00:05:21.000Again, perfectly obvious stuff that was apparently unsayable for decades.
00:05:26.000Everybody in this room knows if you're a rifleman and you lose your rifle, they're throwing the book at you.
00:05:34.000But if you're a general who loses a war, you get a promotion.
00:05:39.000That's not going to happen in Donald Trump's Pentagon.
00:05:42.000There will be real standards for success.
00:05:45.000Everyone 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.
00:06:31.000And my answer is yes, exactly the way that you caveated it.
00:06:35.000Yes, 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.
00:06:49.000That'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.
00:06:59.000But 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.
00:07:11.000They decide to put their right hand up for our country.
00:07:14.000I 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.
00:07:20.000He also happens to be incredibly telegenic, right?
00:07:22.000He was a TV star, which means that he is great on TV and knows how to speak in front of a crowd.
00:07:28.000He also suggested, you know, as part of the extension of what he was talking about, women in combat roles.
00:07:32.000Politics should not play a part in how the military is run.
00:07:35.000And this all should be perfectly obvious.
00:07:37.000And as you will see, saying perfectly obvious things in front of Democrats is like a red flag in front of a bull.
00:07:42.000It's insane how Democrats went after Hegseth yesterday.
00:07:45.000So here's Hegseth saying politics should not play a part in how the military is run.
00:07:50.000Unlike the current administration, politics should play no part in military matters.
00:08:15.000And then he was asked about foreign policy.
00:08:18.000And Hegseth said, my policy with regard to, for example, the Middle East is Israel should kill every member of Hamas.
00:08:23.000This seems like a very good policy to me.
00:08:25.000I have a generalized policy that Western powers should kill as many terrorists as humanly possible.
00:08:29.000This is my generalized military and foreign policy.
00:08:31.000Here's Senator Tom Cotton asking Hegseth about this.
00:08:35.000Do you consider yourself a Christian Zionist?
00:08:37.000Senator, 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.
00:08:47.000Because 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.
00:08:57.000In Gaza, I support Israel's existential war in Gaza.
00:09:02.000I assume, like me and President Trump, you support that war as well, don't you?
00:09:15.000A 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.
00:09:24.000I 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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00:11:31.000Okay, so as we'll see, Democrats lost their minds over all of this.
00:11:34.000They could not believe that Pete Hegseth was the nominee.
00:11:37.000So Senator Gary Peters of Michigan, he ripped into Hegseth saying, you are unqualified.
00:11:42.000Now again, all the Democrat qualifications in the world, they don't seem to matter.
00:11:48.000Because for Democrats, the qualification is not how you will actually run the Defense Department or whether your ideology on defense is correct.
00:11:56.000It'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.
00:12:04.000These are apparently the things that make you qualified to run the Department of Defense, as opposed to what you are going to do.
00:12:10.000So here is Senator Gary Peters getting very miffed, incredibly miffed, that Pete Hegseth is going to be Secretary of Defense.
00:12:17.000Do 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?
00:12:44.000I mean, well, if he hasn't run a giant organization.
00:12:46.000Then how can you possibly run the Department of Defense?
00:12:48.000Well, maybe by making it a smaller organization might be one answer.
00:12:51.000And then you have Senator Jack Reed, who dropped the laugh-out-loud funny line that we are a more lethal military thanks to diversity.
00:12:59.000I'm sorry, I don't see the correlation.
00:13:01.000It 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?
00:13:10.000That shouldn't be your first line of demarcation.
00:13:14.000In terms of an effective fighting force.
00:13:16.000But according to Jack Reed, this is the thing that makes the American military deadly, is that we have more minority lesbians or something.
00:13:23.000Here is this asinine senator from Rhode Island.
00:13:26.000Our military is more diverse than it has ever been, but more importantly, it is more lethal than it has ever been.
00:13:35.000Mr. 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.
00:13:58.000They have massive recruitment shortages.
00:14:00.000And 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?
00:14:06.000How are we going to solve our recruitment crisis without those people?
00:14:08.000Well, maybe the answer to solving the recruitment crisis is making it appear to be badass to be in the military.
00:14:14.000Every 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.
00:14:24.000They all joined up because they wanted to be part of the defense of the country.
00:14:29.000And yes, because the vast majority of people who joined the military are men.
00:14:34.000And there is a masculine energy to the military.
00:14:42.000But, you know, the Democratic objections continued.
00:14:47.000Senator 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.
00:15:54.000That Hegseth was going to shoot protesters.
00:15:57.000And there's a reason they couldn't lay a glove on Hegseth yesterday.
00:16:01.000In 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.
00:16:15.000Would you carry out such an order from President Trump?
00:16:20.000Senator, 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.
00:16:29.000Would you carry out an order to shoot protesters in the legs?
00:16:30.000I saw 50 Secret Service agents get injured by rioters trying to jump over the fence, set the church on fire, and destroy a statue.
00:16:51.000Maisie Hirono, by the way, then decided to go even further.
00:16:53.000She said, will you resign if you drink on the job?
00:16:56.000It 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.
00:17:06.000Here is Hirono claiming that Hegseth is a sloppy drunk.
00:17:11.000You recently promised some of my Republican colleagues that you stopped drinking.
00:17:17.000And won't drink if confirmed, correct?
00:18:26.000An 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.
00:19:06.000I 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?
00:19:36.000You had just fathered a child two months before by a woman that was not your wife.
00:19:41.000I am shocked that you would stand here and say you're completely cleared.
00:19:45.000Can 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?
00:20:22.000And by the way, he's experienced conversion.
00:20:24.000He's become a very religious Christian.
00:20:26.000So Senator Mark Wayne Mullen eventually had had enough of this, the senator from Oklahoma.
00:20:31.000What 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.
00:20:48.000There are so many drunks, so many cheaters on their wives in the Senate.
00:20:53.000It is not a place filled with virtuous men.
00:21:06.000He 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.
00:21:21.000And then he sits there judging Pete Hegseth, who, again, has repented of the sin.
00:21:26.000Here's Mark Wayne Mullen going after his fellow senators.
00:21:29.000And 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?
00:21:38.000How many senators have showed up drunk to vote at night?
00:21:44.000Have any of you guys asked them to step down and resign from their job?
00:21:48.000And don't tell me you haven't seen it because I know you have.
00:21:51.000And then how many senators do you know have got a divorce before cheating on their wives?
00:22:15.000She 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.
00:22:26.000And somehow this was supposed to be disqualifying, which again is unbelievably stupid.
00:22:30.000Because if somebody refers to that and you don't know, you ask your phone and it tells you in legitimately 0.0 seconds.
00:22:38.000Here is Tammy Duckworth going after Hegseth.
00:22:41.000How many nations are in ASEAN, by the way?
00:22:44.000I couldn't tell you the exact amount of nations in that.
00:22:47.000But I know we have allies in South Korea, in Japan, and in AUKUS with Australia, trying to work on submarines with them.
00:22:54.000None 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.
00:23:05.000Okay, you literally put on the Supreme Court a woman who doesn't know what a woman is.
00:23:12.000It 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?
00:23:22.000Well, 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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00:27:30.000Women in our military, as I have said publicly.
00:27:33.000Have and continue to make amazing contributions across all aspects of our battlefield.
00:27:39.000Well, 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.
00:27:59.000Should 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?
00:28:10.000I'm incredibly grateful for the two women who've served our military in uniform.
00:28:16.000Okay, but the whole point he's making is if you lower the standards to get more women into the military, it makes it weaker.
00:28:23.000Probably the senator who humiliated herself the worst towards Elizabeth Warren, or Chief Elizabeth, as we like to call her.
00:28:29.000She asked Pete Hegseth about his status as a general, which shouldn't go amazing since he's not one.
00:28:36.000Will 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?
00:28:45.000Senator, it's not even a question I've thought about.
00:29:29.000In 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.
00:29:39.000Sheehy said to Hegseth, listen, this is all very basic.
00:29:42.000Let's start with, like, that baseline question, which is something that apparently Mark Milley, that chairman of the Joint Chiefs, can't answer.
00:31:10.000The two other controversial nominees are going to have their hearings in very short order.
00:31:16.000Those two most controversial nominees are, of course, RFK Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard.
00:31:19.000Tulsi Gabbard has been making significant inroads with the Senate.
00:31:22.000She'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.
00:31:36.000Also, because Democrats are going so hard at Hegseth, they're actually expending all their ammo that they theoretically could have aimed at Tulsi Gabbard.
00:31:45.000This is a point being made by Jonathan Martin over at Politico.
00:31:48.000He says the disproportionate attention to Hegseth's nomination.
00:31:51.000by the press and senators in both parties has been a gift to Gabbard.
00:31:55.000Since 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.
00:32:03.000However, they have not actually turned their fired to Tulsi Gabbard at this point.
00:32:09.000Meanwhile, RFK Jr. The Trump team is working to sort of smooth off the rough edges of the RFK Jr. nomination.
00:32:16.000According to the Wall Street Journal, two vaccine skeptics who'd been advising RFK Jr. have been sidelined by the Trump transition officials.
00:32:22.000Advisor 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.
00:32:31.000The questions were different from those asked in separate meetings with President Trump's staff, according to some of the people.
00:32:35.000Trump's team asked about topics traditionally important to conservatives, like the size of government and deregulation.
00:32:41.000Syria is no longer advising the presidential transition.
00:32:44.000Speer was passed over for the post of chief of staff in favor of a veteran of the first Trump administration.
00:32:50.000And 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.
00:33:07.000He's made statements in the past that...
00:33:09.000Broad writ applied to lots of vaccines.
00:33:11.000And 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.
00:33:26.000Well, meanwhile, the House of Representatives is already getting active.
00:33:28.000Yesterday, they passed a ban on men who say they are women from participating in women's sports.
00:33:35.000The bill passed 218 to 206. All Republicans present voted yes.
00:33:40.000Only two Democrats, only two Democrats voted yes.
00:33:49.000Okay, this is a death knell for Democratic electoral prospects.
00:33:52.000Their 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.
00:34:02.000And yet they still continue to trot out absolute imbeciles.
00:34:05.000Like 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.
00:34:37.000CEOs love this bill because of the fire.
00:34:40.000Like, what is she even jabbering about?
00:34:41.000But they are so attached to their woke principles, they cannot let it go.
00:34:46.000Meanwhile, 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.
00:35:00.000He said, listen, this is pretty obvious.
00:35:01.000Protecting women in sports is commonsensical.
00:35:08.000I 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.
00:35:16.000Congressman Stubbe mentioned it in the opinion polls.
00:35:19.000This is an 80%, 90% issue or more, depending on which poll you look at, because, again, it comports with common sense.
00:35:53.000The 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.
00:36:00.000We're not just going to watch history.
00:36:02.000We're going to bring it to you live and uncensored.
00:36:03.000To celebrate the 47th president, we are giving you 47% off new Daily Wire Plus annual memberships.
00:36:09.000Plus, we're including a free $20 gift as a thank you for joining the fight, which is pretty awesome.
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00:36:48.000It has burned almost 24,000 acres, and the winds are expected to pick up today as well.
00:36:53.000The Eaton Fire, which has burned 14,000 acres, is only 35% contained.
00:36:59.000It seems as though the most populated areas have basically been prevented from being eaten by the fire, particularly the Palisades fire.
00:37:09.000And it looks like the map is moving more out to the west than it is to the east at this point.
00:37:14.000So 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.
00:37:22.000Meanwhile, the person with the priorities is Gavin Newsom, the governor of California.
00:37:27.000It is truly incredible how unbelievably incompetent they are and how wedded they are to their left-wing ideals.
00:37:35.000So, let's say that your house burned down in this fire.
00:37:41.000Let'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.
00:37:57.000There's serious problems in these areas.
00:37:59.000And 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.
00:38:06.000It's going to be a long time until you see a check.
00:38:08.000I'll give you $2 million today for your property.
00:38:10.000According to Gavin Newsom, that developer is a leech, cruel, and must be stopped.
00:38:16.000That sort of free market activity, that can't be allowed.
00:38:18.000They're bringing you an unsolicited...
00:38:20.000Now, 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.
00:38:25.000Here is Gavin Newsom speaking up against free markets after his complete botchery of this fire.
00:38:32.000I just signed an executive order with community leaders to deal with the issue that is becoming a bigger and bigger issue every day.
00:38:38.000And that's land developers that are engaging in predatory efforts to make unsolicited offers for properties at significantly below market value.
00:38:49.000This predatory behavior is disgusting in the best of times.
00:38:53.000And of course, here in the midst of this tragedy at scale, it's disgraceful.
00:38:58.000So we're going to hold those folks accountable.
00:38:59.000I'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.
00:40:06.000Well, 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.
00:40:18.000He's no longer famous for making jokes.
00:40:20.000It 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,
00:40:43.000shocking, 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.
00:40:57.000People who lost their own homes were out volunteering in parking lots helping others who lost theirs.
00:41:03.000And 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.
00:41:18.000The 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.
00:41:29.000They weren't attacking the firefighters.
00:41:30.000They 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.
00:41:43.000Yeah, 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.
00:41:53.000I mean, anytime, let alone in the middle of the most devastating wildfire in American history.
00:41:59.000So thanks to Jimmy Kimmel for, as always, his moral clarity.
00:42:02.000Meanwhile, Joe Biden is expected to make his valedictory address tonight.
00:42:06.000He's going to explain why he was such a wonderful president.
00:42:08.000And honestly, I'm grateful to Joe Biden for ripping the lid off the incompetence of the Democrats.
00:42:13.000For bringing us a second Donald Trump term, that is what he's mostly going to be remembered for.
00:42:17.000On his way out, he's doing everything he can to screw things up.
00:42:19.000According 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.
00:42:32.000U.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.
00:42:41.000The Cuban foreign ministry said it would free 553 prisoners.
00:43:03.000Biden 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.
00:43:12.000Well, suffice to say, I do not trust the Biden administration in their assessment.
00:43:16.000Senator Rick Scott of Florida slammed the move as a parting gift to dictators and terrorists around the world.
00:43:21.000They said, quote, we condemn in the strongest terms Cuba's removal from this list.
00:43:27.000That seems exactly correct, but again.
00:43:29.000They're going to do as much damage as they can on the way out the door.
00:43:31.000That'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.
00:43:38.000That is the Elon Musk, Vivek Ramaswamy-led agency that is focused in on governmental efficiency.
00:43:44.000U.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.
00:44:05.000The 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.
00:44:18.000According to the SEC, because Musk didn't disclose his position, he was able to continue buying Twitter stock at an artificially low price.
00:44:25.000The move allowed him to underpay by at least $150 million for the additional shares before disclosing his stake.
00:44:30.000He paid $44 billion for a social media service that, at this point, I have no idea what it's worth.
00:44:53.000And then he was like, okay, hold up a second.
00:44:55.000It 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.
00:45:01.000And the government stepped in and sued, and he was like, okay, fine.
00:45:18.000His lawyer, Alex Spiro, Denounced the filing.
00:45:21.000Quote, 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.
00:45:28.000This is the third time the SEC has gone to court with Musk.
00:45:32.000The 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.
00:45:42.000Gary Gensler, who's been just an awful SEC commissioner, is leading the way.
00:45:46.000All these agencies are staffed up by some of the worst people in America, truthfully.
00:45:53.000So, 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.
00:46:01.000And 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.
00:46:15.000It 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.
00:46:49.000Well, I mean, the goal of defense is to deter conflict.
00:46:53.000And actually, I think in many ways, the budget should be much less.
00:46:57.000I think a lot of what we're spending on defense right now ends up being effectively a jobs program.
00:47:02.000And the part that we're spending on actually deterring our adversaries, actually scaring she.
00:47:08.000Now, 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.
00:47:16.000So one of the things that you talk about in the Defense Reformation is something you call monopsony.
00:47:20.000You say this is the way that defense budgeting has been practiced.
00:47:23.000Why don't you define that, and what exactly is the problem?
00:47:25.000Yeah, 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.
00:47:32.000Well, monopsony is the mirror image of that, where there's a single buyer for a thing.
00:47:36.000And as free market patriots in America, we believe in the value of the free market.
00:47:41.000So 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.
00:47:56.000So the monopsony is accrues a lot of power in deciding what it is that they should have.
00:47:59.000And it deprives power from the entrepreneurs, from the engineers, the innovators on what they could do to solve your problems.
00:48:07.000And 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.
00:48:14.000That'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?
00:48:26.000Because obviously, the United States is, in fact, the single buyer of these technologies.
00:48:31.000So I think monopsony is the root of what ails us.
00:48:33.000But you do your best to approximate free market forces.
00:48:37.000And this is not some pie-in-the-sky fantasy.
00:48:39.000If 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?
00:48:46.000Well, we actually had all the services competing against each other.
00:49:02.000When you think about submarine-launched ballistic missiles, Admiral Rayburn actually had four competing programs within the Navy to produce those things.
00:49:08.000The 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.
00:49:16.000Shouldn'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?
00:49:24.000And 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.
00:49:36.000I mean, that's really fascinating because it's so counterintuitive.
00:49:38.000The 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.
00:49:48.000You'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.
00:49:56.000I think that's right, because there's just no check and balance, right?
00:49:59.000Like, 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?
00:50:06.000And so you need some of that pressure.
00:50:07.000I 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?
00:50:14.000So we have these 13 different places, like...
00:50:17.000Like the Indo-Pacific, as one example, or CENTCOM, where the geographic combatant commanders, they actually fight the war.
00:50:24.000And to use it in business parlance, they're responsible for responding to real-world demand.
00:50:28.000The 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.
00:50:40.000We can actually use this to approximate a market.
00:50:42.000And 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?
00:51:24.000Why are we still contracting with so many dinosaurs?
00:51:26.000Well, the other industry that loves cost-plus is general contracting.
00:51:30.000And 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.
00:51:35.000Somehow, for the contractor to get more plus, the cost has to go up, and that's what seems to happen.
00:51:41.000And it lacks the natural incentive to figure out how to manage this within your own means or to drive innovation against that cost phase.
00:51:47.000So cost-plus, where did this really come from?
00:51:49.000It came from the era of mobilization around World War II, where it makes a lot of sense.
00:52:30.000You 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.
00:52:41.000Elon should be rewarded for the massive innovation that means that our nation has the most assured access to space, and that is...
00:52:49.000Both delivering untold national security and prosperity for us.
00:52:52.000And I think a big part of what mobilized Elon to do that is not national security, it's getting to Mars.
00:52:57.000He needs that price performance in order to get to Mars and the whole of nation benefits.
00:53:00.000So I think the cost plus locks you into basically very linear outcomes that don't allow you to have transformational defense capabilities at all.
00:53:08.000And 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.
00:53:17.000You know, America's capital markets are the deepest and richest in the world.
00:53:21.000Let'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.
00:53:27.000And they can buy it as a commercial product.
00:53:29.000You 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.
00:53:37.000So one of the things that you've talked about is the fact that...
00:53:53.000And this is probably the most important point, which is dual use and I'd say dual purpose.
00:53:57.000So 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.
00:54:21.000And I think we've lost a lot by how it's rotated.
00:54:25.000And 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.
00:54:33.000Most of the spending went to these dual-purpose companies like a Chrysler.
00:54:37.000Now, if you look at that figure, it's 86% goes to defense specialists.
00:54:43.000And that's a consequence of the luxury of having, quote-unquote, you know, having won the Cold War.
00:54:48.000You 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.
00:55:09.000So when we look at the big problems facing America, obviously lack of innovation, cost problems, supply chain problems as well.
00:55:17.000What is the solution to many of the supply chain problems?
00:55:19.000And we're getting resources for our military from many countries that actually are geopolitical opponents.
00:55:24.000Yeah, I think reindustrializing the nation is, you know, it's a complete clarion call.
00:55:29.000If 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.
00:55:45.000You know, it's the ability to make the stockpile.
00:55:48.000So 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...
00:55:57.000That's not going to provide deterrence.
00:55:59.000And I think Ukraine was a painful lesson to that.
00:56:01.000Regardless 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.
00:56:10.000And we have grossly under-resourced the lines of production and exercising those lines of production.
00:56:15.000We have this fantasy that it'll be just like World War II where we just...
00:56:18.000Quote, unquote, flip a switch and, you know, we can just go back to making these things.
00:56:21.000But 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.
00:56:29.000And so there's a certain sort of seriousness that we need to have to this if we want to deter conflict here.
00:56:34.000Okay, so let's say that you were called by the Secretary of Defense and he says, Sham, lay out for me.
00:56:42.000The ten steps, the five steps I need to take first.
00:56:45.000What are the big key things that the Defense Department needs to do going forward immediately?
00:56:49.000Well, 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.
00:57:01.000And those areas is where we need to have more multiple competing programs and efforts, less unitary efforts.
00:57:06.000And we need to bring the breadth of the American industrial base.
00:57:09.000You 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?
00:57:18.000Because it's not true that we're not good at making things in this country.
00:57:22.000It's just that the ability to do that in a modern way is asymmetrically distributed.
00:57:27.000You know, SpaceX makes so much of what they do vertically integrated internally, and they do it at a price that is eye-watering.
00:57:34.000Tesla, it's really a software-defined production line.
00:57:37.000How they do it and how they version it, it's quite exquisite.
00:57:40.000And 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.
00:57:50.000I think we need to invest in that and really harness that.
00:57:52.000Now, I think a lot of this has been hollowed out through the kind of MBA-ification of how we run our companies here.
00:57:59.000We've traded real engineering for financial engineering.
00:58:02.000You 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.
00:58:12.000When I interact with these companies, their understanding of their supply chain is very shallow.
00:58:16.000You know, they kind of treat it as a black box where I have these suppliers, I buy these things.
00:58:17.000They kind of treat it as a black box where I have these suppliers, I buy these things.
00:58:20.000They don't know how to make those things.
00:58:20.000They don't know how to make those things.
00:58:22.000They don't understand how far down it goes.
00:58:22.000They don't understand how far down it goes.
00:58:23.000That couldn't be any more different than how Elon and SpaceX view the world and the deep control.
00:58:29.000So 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.
00:58:40.000So, So unfortunately, at the dawn of World War II, we were the best at mass production.
00:58:46.000So we shouldn't compete symmetrically in re-industrializing.
00:58:49.000We're going to have to use a different approach to doing it.
00:58:50.000And I think we've already seen that that approach can work in America.
00:58:53.000We need to give American workers superpowers with the technology that we have a unique advantage in.
00:58:58.000And we need to use the techniques that Elon and others have shown can really work to bring that work back.
00:59:03.000So, 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.
00:59:12.000I 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.
00:59:19.000What exactly needs to happen in terms of staffing?
00:59:22.000Because we can have these ideas, but it's the implementation that's really going to matter.
00:59:26.000Well, I think that the person is the program is what I like to say.
00:59:29.000We call it the Apollo program, but maybe more accurately, we should call it Gene Kranz's program.
00:59:32.000You know, is the F-16 the F-16 or is it John Boyd's plane?
00:59:36.000You know, we have the nuclear Navy because Admiral Rickover worked on it for 30 years and he had to be protected by Congress.
00:59:42.000Like today, having an admiral in place for 30 years, we couldn't even imagine that.
00:59:45.000And these personnel, Edward Hall built the Minuteman, you know, Kelly Johnson built 41 airframes in his career.
00:59:54.000So there is something, you know, Profoundly valuable about these founder personalities.
01:00:00.000And I think of all nations in the world, we understand that.
01:00:02.000There's a reason we call them the founding fathers.
01:00:04.000And 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.
01:00:11.000It'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.
01:00:43.000You know, innovation is messy and chaotic.
01:00:46.000And 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.
01:00:55.000And 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.
01:01:03.000So it locks you into this really mediocrity.
01:01:08.000So, 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.
01:01:29.000I think the future requires both of these.
01:01:32.000So 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?
01:01:41.000Really, the question is, what is the forced employment concept?
01:01:43.000How are we going to use these things to drive effects on the battlefield that deter our adversaries from creating problems in the world?
01:01:49.000I think we need a lot more experimentation on that.
01:01:52.000Right now, this stuff has been pretty siloed.
01:01:55.000And 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.
01:02:01.000So 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.
01:02:13.000Because they didn't have a Navy, right?
01:02:14.000They were not constrained by the legacy platforms and ideas here.
01:02:18.000So they could come up with entirely new force employment constructs.
01:02:21.000So 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.
01:02:33.000And that's where you can think of this as a thought exercise as opposed to literal, but maybe you need a Navy too.
01:02:39.000And Navy 2 is entirely focused on unmanned approaches to delivering this, and we figure out how to bring these things together here.
01:02:45.000So when you look at the Trump administration, you look forward to the next four years, the orientation has changed.
01:02:52.000Obviously, 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.
01:02:59.000What are your kind of hopes for what the administration looks like over the course of the next four years?
01:03:08.000You know, my core critique is like everyone, including the Russians and the Chinese, have given up on communism, except for Cuba and the DoD.
01:03:14.000You know, somehow the DoD uses five-year plans.
01:03:17.000It's like essentially centrally planned or at worst centrally unplanned process.
01:03:21.000It takes two years to program for money for a new start.
01:03:25.000Can you imagine going to an American commercial company?
01:03:28.000You have the greatest mousetrap in the world and they say, oh, this is amazing.
01:03:32.000I can't wait to go get the money to start experimenting with this two years from now.
01:03:36.000And certainly our adversaries don't have those constraints.
01:03:47.000Why can't that take two weeks or at most two months?
01:03:50.000And 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.
01:03:59.000And when I look at our past, we had all of that.
01:04:02.000So I know with great certainty that we can do this again once we realize that we've kind of accumulated all these barnacles.
01:04:08.000The barnacles are bigger than the ship at this point.
01:04:10.000People love criticizing David Packard, a Silicon Valley technologist co-founder.
01:04:14.000He founded HP. He served as a deputy secretary of defense.
01:04:17.000So he came up with the, I think they call it the 5000 series, Rules on Acquisition.
01:04:33.000And I think, you know, being, you know, what can we cut back in terms of regulations?
01:04:36.000How can we enable our warfighters to have the room to experiment they deserve?
01:04:41.000One of the things that always breaks my heart, you hear senior generals, senior general officers, they talk about...
01:04:47.000Something 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.
01:04:56.000You 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.
01:05:02.000You know, maybe one out of 10 Silicon Valley companies end up working.
01:05:05.000Why should we think the success rate is going to be wildly different than that?
01:05:08.000And 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.
01:05:15.000And so we, these people have signed up to die for the nation.
01:05:19.000We need to put a little bit of trust in them and give them some discretion.
01:05:22.000And yeah, not all of it's going to work, but you know what doesn't work?
01:05:26.0002,000 page documents to tell you how to run these programs.
01:05:29.000So 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?
01:05:48.000Well, the biggest opportunity that we have, maybe to flip it a little bit, is like we have lots of individual exquisite systems.
01:05:55.000We need to be able to bring these things together to actually drive deterrence here.
01:05:59.000So how do these platforms work together from sensor to shooter?
01:06:03.000And 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?
01:06:09.000When you look at the kill chain, the term of art from going from sensor to shooter, finding the enemy to applying effects to them.
01:06:15.000What are all those stages today that are actually pretty manual, pretty mandraulic, not as effective?
01:06:20.000You know, as a term of like doctrinally to the military, a strike that happens inside of 72 hours is considered dynamic.
01:06:28.000So the expectation is that you're going to have three days to plan these sorts of things or more.
01:06:33.000And that's not realistic on the modern battlefield, right?
01:06:36.000Like we, everything's going to be dynamic is the reality.
01:06:38.000So if everything's going to be dynamic, how are we investing in the AI enabled technologies to do that?