Pete Hagseth is the Secretary of the Department of Defense's Chief of Staff. He is also the President of Turning Point USA, a powerful youth organization that has over 7,000 members across the country. In this episode of the CharlieKirkShow, Pete talks about his experience as the head of the Joint Improvised Explosive Device Defeat Organization (JIEDDO), the Iran strike, and what happened with this strike in Iran.
00:00:41.000His spirit, his love of this country, he's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created, Turning Point USA.
00:00:49.000We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
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00:01:58.000Well, thank you, Charlie, and thanks for everything you do.
00:02:00.000It is, I mean, it's the honor of a lifetime, and glory to God for the opportunity to do it, to serve our warfighters, to serve a department that was ill-served under the previous administration and under Obama to Biden and was left looking for leadership.
00:02:19.000And they found it in a commander-in-chief in President Trump who sets the tone.
00:02:23.000I mean, really, anything is possible when you have a fearless leader at the top.
00:02:28.000And so when he, the shield that he provides gives me an opportunity to say, what is the art of the possible about how we restore the warrior ethos and rebuild the military and reestablish deterrence and put America first with common sense and peace through strength?
00:02:44.000You can do those things when you've got a boss that has your back.
00:02:47.000And that's why my message to the troops is always, guys, gals, he has your back, and so do I. So go do the tough things on behalf of the nation.
00:02:56.000And we're going to give you what you need.
00:02:57.000We're going to give you clarity in the mission.
00:02:58.000We're not going to start things we can't finish, clear objectives that advance the national interest.
00:03:17.000And by the way, you know, we have young men that were coming up to us at our chapter leadership summit saying, I'm going to sign up for the military because I believe President Trump has the country's best interests and they're inspired by you.
00:03:27.000Walk through the numbers of how recruitment is going right now.
00:03:29.000Well, I think we do have a room full of 15, 16, and 17-year-olds.
00:03:35.000Future potential members of the military.
00:03:38.000So it's a target-rich environment, as we say.
00:03:40.000But it has been incredible to watch young Americans respond to the leadership of President Trump and then what we're doing at the department.
00:03:49.000And a lot of it is the family business, too.
00:03:51.000I mean, one of the challenges I saw when I wrote the book, The War on Warriors, and just inside military formations, is you had men and women who have served who were starting to say, I don't know that I can recommend to my kids or grandkids that they serve because of what's been done to the military.
00:04:07.000And seeing that generational change where vets and others are saying, I see what you guys are doing.
00:06:11.000We're getting wokeness totally out of the military.
00:06:14.000So kind of give us, and by the way, this is lesser reported of what's so great about the military is when you have someone like Pete, you can actually remove stuff pretty quick as long as the courts don't get in the way, right?
00:06:23.000Is that you've been able to remove a lot of the wokeness very quickly.
00:06:27.000I mean, we went because we are a top-down Organization, which is part of the reason why they were able to insert a lot of the woke nonsense so quickly.
00:06:37.000Because it was either comply, follow lawful orders from a previous commander-in-chief on these woke ideological gender stuff, DEI stuff, critical race theory stuff, or you're out.
00:06:48.000And so you have a lot of folks that probably didn't want to go along with it, but they wanted to continue to serve, and so they did.
00:06:54.000So in many parts of the government, it's been a hostile takeover, right?
00:06:58.000You think of other departments, education department, labor department, HHS, you name it, it's a fight, right?
00:07:04.000I feel like for the most part at the Defense Department, it's been a liberation exercise.
00:07:12.000Because the vast majority of the men and women, and there's problem sets and we've fired folks and for the right reasons, but the vast majority of folks in uniform and contractors and civilians that work at DOD are patriots who want to do right by the nation.
00:07:25.000And it's not because they're Republicans or Democrats.
00:07:28.000It's because they want to serve the country and serve our warfighters.
00:07:31.000And so we've gotten the politics, the ideology, the climate worship, the gender confusion.
00:09:05.000Everyone listening here understands this.
00:09:07.000Like if you're on the battlefield, a 155 round or a rucksack or a human being or, you know, lifting something, it doesn't care if you're a man or a woman.
00:09:22.000And that's the standards we're injecting into physical fitness, into combat standards, into preparedness standards.
00:09:27.000And if high-speed individuals from any background can make it, great.
00:09:31.000But if you can't cut it, you're not going to be in the infantry or you're not going to be in special forces because we need the best of the best.
00:09:37.000So it's common sense application of stuff that a lot of folks are responding to.
00:09:50.000And at least that's what I'm getting from the grassroots, like finally, because it was going in a very trepidatious direction where the military felt like a social experiment under Biden.
00:10:00.000I got to be honest, Pete, regardless of people's opinion of what happened, I think President Trump handled it beautifully with Iran.
00:10:07.000It gave me faith back in our military, though, that we were able to fly bombers from Missouri all the way across the world.
00:10:14.000Can you just go bring us as much as you can?
00:10:16.000I know you got plenty of classified information, but bring us into the mindset, into how spectacular of a military operation that was.
00:10:25.000Because I think it's time to brag on our military, because from the refueling to the stamina, no military in the world could have done this.
00:10:33.000Not only could no military in the world do this, it's not even close.
00:10:37.000Let alone do it and do it effectively and nearly flawlessly, while some deception operations, some of which are classified, ensured that the eyes of the world were somewhere else.
00:10:49.000And Iran and their allies, no one in the world had any idea that our seven B-2 bombers, escorted by dozens and dozens of refuelers, what it takes for them to fly across the country.
00:11:05.000I've had a chance to watch it in the cockpit.
00:11:08.000I mean, you're going 500 miles an hour.
00:11:10.000You're connecting with basically a flying gas station, which pumps fuel into the B-2s, but also the fighters, while you're flying 500, 600 miles an hour.
00:11:40.000And by the way, the B-2, as beautiful as the B-2 is, is we already have online the next generation of the B-2, the B-21, which is publicly known.
00:11:50.000I mean, we're not stopping at where we are.
00:11:52.000We're staying ahead with where we're going to include the F-47, which we announced, the sixth-generation fighter jet, even more stealth, even more capable than the F-35.
00:12:01.000So, I mean, it's the best tools in the world in the hands of the best warfighters.
00:12:07.000And President Trump gave him very clear guidance.
00:12:09.000They trained on this for years and years.
00:12:12.000The munitions we used were specifically designated, as Raisin Kane pointed out, for that target.
00:12:19.000And you had the fighter jets, the deception, the ability to fly.
00:12:24.000I mean, we were watching in real time in the situation room as it was going on, the 30 tomahawks shot from a submarine in real time that hit simultaneously with our bombers coming in.
00:12:36.000Iran didn't see any of it, and the world didn't know until President Trump put out a truth, which is exactly how you want it to be.
00:12:47.000Our boys and bombers, as I said at the press conference, and then the media was like, you can't call them boys and bombers.
00:13:17.000And it was a huge step in reestablishing deterrence so that the world understands, you know, the Afghanistan debacle you saw under Biden is not the reality of the world under President Trump.
00:14:06.000But no, I just want to reinforce what I said, because I'll be honest, I was starting to lose faith in the capability of our military under Biden.
00:14:15.000I don't know if you guys in the audience felt the same, but it was like so woke.
00:14:31.000And it does go to the skill of from the CENTCOM commander down to all the wing commanders to the base commanders to the air defenders with the Patriot missile systems.
00:14:41.000But what we keep hearing time and time again is morale is up because we're being allowed to do our job.
00:14:48.000To go back to the basics and focus on what we do well, which is train, be ready, hold people accountable.
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00:16:13.000You mentioned something, and again, I never want to put you on the spot on stuff you can't talk about, but you said it established deterrence.
00:16:18.000I think it was a shot hurt around the world.
00:16:19.000I think our other adversaries were studying it closely, especially China, and they were just flummoxed by this.
00:16:26.000Can you elaborate that to the best ability that you can?
00:16:29.000Well, I mean, nothing happens in a vacuum.
00:16:31.000Just like Afghanistan didn't happen in a vacuum.
00:16:36.000You had Ukraine, you had October 7th, you had Vladimir Putin, and you had Hamas, who believed they were emboldened in a world where America looked weak.
00:16:45.000I think the actions, not just of this B-2 of Operation Midnight Hammer, which is the primary, but even our campaign against the Houthis, which went on for 50 days or so, we've since learned reflections.
00:16:56.000Part of the reason the Houthis didn't join in with any real solidarity on the Iran effort is because they've been decimated in their capabilities.
00:17:04.000They'll bark a lot, but they know exactly what they can't do and how decimated they are.
00:17:10.000They're going to bark, but when they shot those 14 missiles at our base, as President Trump has said, they told us where they were shooting and when they were shooting to make sure we would shoot them down because they didn't want an escalation and because they understand what we're capable of.
00:17:25.000And I don't say that in any cavalier sense.
00:17:28.000President Trump used that moment alongside what Israel did so successfully to bring about peace.
00:17:34.000We have a chance now for a deal that ensures Iran doesn't have nuclear capabilities and we have a peace, something that wasn't possible before that.
00:17:42.000Same thing with the Houthis, the reality that under Joe Biden, we allowed our ships to get shot at with no consequence.
00:17:50.000We can't live in a world where American military ships are shot at and nothing happens, or you just shoot an empty building.
00:17:55.000President Trump said, change that dynamic.
00:18:44.000And I'll tell you, anybody that routinely would host Fox and Friends weekend and get up at 3.30 in the morning, that's how I know you were cut out for the job, because that's no joke.
00:18:53.000But Pete, you made an announcement, I think yesterday, the day before, that's a little wonky, but it's actually one of the most important things I've heard from our government, which is he who controls the drones controls the future.
00:19:02.000And if you don't make your own drones, you're actually going to be a vassal state to those who make the drones.
00:19:07.000And I know this, like, some in the audience might say, what are you talking about?
00:19:10.000This is one of the most important things.
00:19:12.000I think it's all about AI and drones going forward for defense.
00:19:15.000I don't know if you agree with that, Pete, or not, but you signed, it wasn't an executive order, it was proclamation, something with drones.
00:19:27.000Well, you unleash American innovation to actually not just scale up, but outscale our adversaries who just look at where warfare is and where it's going.
00:19:37.000It's going to be AI-enabled and it's going to be drone-fueled, and you're seeing it right now.
00:19:41.000And we can either sit back and fight the way we think we should, or we wanted to, or we thought warfare was going, or recognize where it's going and outpace our adversaries.
00:19:49.000And we have the economic engine, the defense industrial base, to do that.
00:19:53.000But the Defense Department, especially under the previous administration, can be very good at being a big, bloated bureaucracy that defeats itself.
00:20:01.000And so it creates lots of rules, lots of restrictions, lots of red tape, lots of reasons why.
00:20:07.000I mean, I can go through two or three examples, but I'll spare you, that held back our ability to make cheap, attritable, American-made drones that you can use as one-way attack.
00:20:43.000We are unleashing innovators by thinking outside the box, taking off the shelf, incentivizing private industry to compete in a way that DOD has never done before and is required because of the environment we live in.
00:20:56.000America either leads or we're left without options.
00:21:00.000And the reason we had a B-2 that could do that is because someone 40 years ago was willing to say, this is a technology of the future that will put decisions in the hands of presidents.
00:21:11.000And our job is to look around the corner and say, what are the technologies of the future that somebody 40 years from now is going to use?
00:21:18.000And hopefully they look back and say, Secretary Hegseth and that generation saw the value in that, invested in it, even though I'm never going to see it while I'm the Secretary of Defense.
00:21:26.000And so that's part of putting your shoulder to the plow for.
00:21:29.000And you think about the profundity of that.
00:21:30.000Someone 40 years ago gave President Trump the ability to remove a nuclear program with no troops, no endless war, no quagmire, no U.S. troops dead.
00:21:38.00040 years ago, you would have had to have bodies and boots on the ground, right?
00:21:41.000Or you'd have to at least have some stationed aircraft.
00:21:51.000What's your message to these students going to be?
00:21:53.000You're going to do a little recruiting, and then a little bit of a pump-up.
00:21:58.000What's your message to these students, and generally the people watching at home?
00:22:00.000What is your message to the young people of this country?
00:22:03.000Well, the overall message of this administration is, hey, we are putting America first.
00:22:08.000It is peace through strength, and it's the application of common sense.
00:22:10.000But also, I'm going to start by talking about, hey, yeah, I got an incredible, I've been gifted with an incredible day job on behalf of our warfighters.
00:22:18.000But ultimately, you know, it's about God and family first.
00:22:27.000And I don't, you know, we all get caught up in what we're doing and where we're going and the purpose life we want to live.
00:22:34.000But what's really important, a quick reminder up front with that, and then maybe we'll tell a few fun stories because I know when I'm talking to my kids, they don't want to hear what I have, they don't want to hear about my throne memo.
00:22:45.000They want to hear a few good stories too.