Hunter Biden's deal with U.S. Attorney David Weiss blows up a deal that would have allowed him to avoid jail time if he cooperated with the FBI. Will they revisit the deal? Is it possible they re going to revisit it?
00:12:05.460And what I mean by that, he's taken the Constitution and he's looked at it and he said,
00:12:11.040you know, when you look at we the people, and he really does focus in on people,
00:12:16.160and he's not a political animal at all.
00:12:17.820In fact, a lot of, he never even spent the night in Washington, D.C. until he, you know, became an elected official.
00:12:26.520He even never ran for any public office before.
00:12:30.260So what I liked about him is he was somebody that said the most important thing about running for office is focusing on the American people and what's important for them.
00:13:52.060It was almost he really wasn't a politician.
00:13:54.260And I wanted to make sure people knew that because everybody else that was surrounded him in the White House, that was of a political nature.
00:14:02.680And I mean, everybody, they thought of politics and they thought of policies, how it affected either party.
00:14:27.040And the greatest president, certainly Abraham Lincoln.
00:14:31.520And I can't find a single person who would argue that he wasn't absolutely honest with the American people about who and what he meant to do.
00:16:01.960And when these foreign leaders would come in and sit with him in the cabinet room, the first question out of his mouth was always, what's our trade balance, our trade deficit with you?
00:16:10.400And so he looked at the world from an economic view first.
00:16:49.360He said, well, I put some of that money at LaGuardia in the airport because the undercarriage of my airplane gets damaged every time I land there.
00:16:56.140And I said, well, that's kind of the whole attitude Kennedy's was you spend the money home, you don't spend it abroad.
00:17:50.880We're back talking with General Keith Kellogg.
00:17:53.160Now, Keith, I want to turn to the military appropriately, I would think.
00:17:59.400What I'm watching in the Pentagon is a complete unmitigated disaster.
00:18:05.500I just want to get that out of the way.
00:18:07.000I cannot believe that the military has turned over the value structure, the culture of our military to transgender affirmation, to wokeness, to all of this politically correct madness.
00:18:23.700And I think it's clearly at the expense of readiness and lethality and just simple good old military, good military order.
00:18:40.800And I think you see that in the fact that all the military services, except for the Marine Corps, cannot meet their recruiting goals because people don't want to come into the military because they see where their military is going.
00:18:52.400Somebody actually – and now, I have a daughter who served.
00:19:15.960And if deterrence fails, fight and win our nation's wars.
00:19:18.560It's not everything else that you're hearing about.
00:19:20.920And if you focus on something other than that, you're not going to get the great young men and women to come into the military that are going to be willing to put their lives on the line and stand at the gates and repel the barbarians.
00:19:35.740It's not the young men and women who come in or are serving.
00:19:38.480It's the senior leaders that you have that have basically forgotten their way, the importance of the military and warfighting.
00:19:45.960And I think there's going to have to be a real restructure of leadership in the next administration if they look at it hard, let's say a Republican administration, on how they're going to have to restructure the Defense Department and how they approach the military because I think they've lost their way.
00:19:59.560And everything emanates from the leadership.
00:20:33.000He said, after eight years in the military, I loved it, but I'm going to do something different in life.
00:20:37.800And because of that, it just has permeated the military.
00:20:40.640And we're going to have to take a hard look.
00:20:42.840And I go back to what George C. Marshall did in 1939 and also what Bob Gates tried to do in the 80s and 90s is basically do a restructure or purge.
00:20:56.260It's a strong word, and I use it advisedly.
00:20:58.780Purge the senior military leadership and say until we get the right people there.
00:21:02.220You know, people forget that when you get in the military, you get promoted.
00:21:05.420You're promoted by merit up to two stars.
00:21:07.480And after that, when you're three and four stars, you're politically selected individually.
00:21:12.260And I think maybe we need to sit down and look really hard at who's leading our military and their thought process.
00:21:18.260We've accepted the fact that we lost a 20-year war in Afghanistan.
00:21:22.020There's been no accountability for that, Lou.
00:21:24.020Nobody's ever talked about how did we get there, how did it then, what happened.
00:21:28.140We talked about the debacle three years ago and getting out of Kabul.
00:21:31.000And then you look at the same thing happening right now with the extension of what we're trying to do with Ukraine and the money we're spending there.
00:24:04.880I would have fired him in a heartbeat.
00:24:06.960And probably after Afghanistan, they both should have left.
00:24:09.680So, again, it goes back to what I said earlier, Lou, about it's very important that people understand that how the military is handled is from the very senior levels, and they set the tone.
00:24:21.900The young men and women in uniform, they just execute the job that they're bringing in and they're told what to do.
00:24:27.040But, you know, you look at the – and I blame the president because under Article 2, Section 2 of the Constitution, he's the commander-in-chief, and he sets the tone.
00:24:35.860And, look, I'll give you a couple of examples.
00:24:37.400One is I reminded everybody, you know, just recently there were some problems in Africa, and we drew down the embassy there.
00:24:44.740You know, this administration, this current administration, they've pulled out of five different embassies.
00:24:49.240Our administration didn't pull out of a single one.
00:25:03.760We don't know who our friends are any longer because this administration seems hell-bent on making adversaries, if not enemies, out of every country with which we had strong relationships.
00:25:16.060And I mean, whether it's Canada or whether it's Saudi Arabia, you name it, this administration is – nothing about it seems to be multilateral other than its association with communist nations or other totalitarian nations.
00:25:33.780We're talking with General Keith Kellogg.
00:25:35.840We're coming right back in just a few moments.
00:25:38.940We're back talking with General Keith Kellogg.
00:25:47.920General, let's kind of hone in a little bit on what you're talking about with Lloyd Austin, with Mark Milley.
00:25:55.180How is it that our military academies are producing officers who would descend to the depths that these two have?
00:26:06.400And I know they're not unusual because I have gotten to know a few general officers who, frankly, I would never have dreamed had graduated West Point.
00:26:15.180By the way, I've talked to a number – I've talked to two commandants of West Point, and I've asked each the same question.
00:26:22.880Do you guys ever teach what happens when you make mistakes in strategy, in tactics, and lose battles?
00:26:30.880And you know what the answer was, General?
00:26:32.600I don't know what your experience has been, but they told me they don't.
00:26:36.860Why in the world would we not at least do that?
00:26:40.080Yeah, you know, and it's a great question, Lou.
00:26:42.460And I think one of the first things I'd do is I wouldn't allow – I'd allow a military officer to spend most of the time is two years in Washington, D.C., and get them out of town.
00:26:50.700You know, a lot of these people spend time in Washington, D.C.
00:26:54.000Number two is it's all based on accountability, and we've lost that ability to do – until we went back to the generals in the Army, at least Gordon Sullivan, years ago, when we did the after-action review.
00:27:05.740We looked at the loss of the first battles.
00:27:08.420We required reading of everybody, and it was called First Battles, and how we lost – we seem to have lost every first battle we ever fought in the U.S. military.
00:27:16.920And he said, look at that, and you reflect on that.
00:27:20.040And I think it's a good thing to do to reflect on what you've done or haven't done.
00:27:24.900And that's the reason I've been so critical about Afghanistan, the fact that we're in a 20-year war, thousands killed, thousands wounded, and we lose it.
00:27:38.000And I think that there's some strong lessons learned, and I think there's been an officer corps that has grown up in Afghanistan, from Afghanistan, that forgot the lessons of how to fight and win our nation's wars.
00:27:48.340And you look back – I remember – you may not remember back when Colin Powell was the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and he stood next to Secretary of Defense Cheney when the Iraq war first kicked off, when they had gone into Kuwait and we had started offensive.
00:28:02.620And they said, well, what are you going to do with the Iraqi armies?
00:28:05.380And Colin Powell said, we're going to go over it, we're going to go under it, we're going to go through it, and we're going to kill it.
00:28:15.320And his point was, that was how you fight wars.
00:28:18.340And we've forgotten that, Lou, and we're going to have to pick that up.
00:28:21.320And I blame the senior officer corps for getting how to do that.
00:28:25.440That's the reason I made up a comment earlier about what George C. Marshall did in 1939, where he actually did a purge of the officer corps.
00:28:31.740And at that time, think of the numbers, he eliminated about 1,000 senior officers.
00:28:36.260And that's why Dwight D. Eisenhower went from 330th on the seniority list to about number five.
00:28:42.540And I think that's going to have to be done.
00:28:47.800But I think you have to make a point that we need to change the culture of the United States military, that they need to focus on one thing, fighting and winning our nation's battles if deterrence fails.
00:28:58.340And I know it's a harsh statement, but, boy, the consequences of that are not going to be on my watch or on your watch, but they're going to be on my kid's watch and my grandkids' watch.
00:29:08.620You know, the money that we are spending on the military right now without oversight or consequence or for performance and for effectiveness of the billions spent, what we're doing in terms of the education of our officers and creating that officer corps for the future.
00:29:27.380But we have we had a military, the United States Army adopts his doctrine, this idiotic David Petraeus nonsense, the long war doctrine.
00:29:38.400It was a doctrine, it was a rationalization that became a doctrine.
00:29:44.180And, my God, I just cannot to this day understand how we can have these protracted conflicts because of pseudo-intellectual idiots posing as something other than a United States general officer.
00:29:57.940Well, it goes back to what I said earlier.
00:29:59.740You know, that comes out of this thing with Afghanistan.
00:30:01.760That's where the book was Iraq and Afghanistan.
00:30:38.700And then there's really no plan when you think about it.
00:30:41.380If you look at the national security strategy, it's just there's nothing there.
00:30:45.200They talk about diversity and they talk about climate change, but they don't talk about winning our nation's wars.
00:30:50.360You know, there's one thing, a little quick story on that.
00:30:52.680But I'll show you, President Trump, when the Iraqi pro-military forces were basically supported by Iran trying to take our embassy on New Year's Day, I guess it was 19, let's see, 2019.
00:31:10.660You know, I remember him picking up the phone and calling Mark Milley.
00:32:19.280He's trying to give away more billions of dollars through Biden and his regime to Iran, despite the fact that we're at the same time trying to arm ships with our weaponry and our Marines in the Persian Gulf.
00:32:38.820And we don't hear a single peep from the so-called bright thinkers of academia in geopolitics and history and governance in in just plain common sense.
00:32:52.480One understands these conflicts within and contradictions within the administration.
00:32:58.460General, there's a lot to talk about here.
00:33:01.320It's a troubling time, a perilous time, if you will.
00:33:05.560We always give our guests the last word here on The Great America Show, General, as you well know.
00:33:10.320And if you will now, your concluding thoughts.
00:33:24.520And I think this election coming up is going to be very, very important for the American people because this path we're on right now is a very, very bad path when it comes down to national security.
00:33:34.000And if you keep making mistakes like this, you end up fighting a major war.
00:33:38.020And we are right on the precipice of doing something stupid because wars are fought by accident.
00:33:42.740And the accident is if the other side thinks you're vulnerable or that you won't fight, then they will continue to take strong actions.
00:33:50.020And you look at somebody like the Russians or you look at the Chinese or even in the Middle East with the Iranians and them developing a nuclear weapon.
00:33:57.400It changes the whole dynamic of the world.
00:33:59.680And we're not ready for that right now.