Breaking Stuff and Killing Bad Guys: The Case for Western Military Dominance

Ladies and gentlemen, up next, breaking stuff and killing bad guys. The case for Western military dominance. Please welcome, retired Navy SEAL, Lieutenant Jason Redman. CPAC board member, Eric Prince. Force Recon Marine and host of The Resilience Show, Chad Robichaud. And CPAC board member, Gordon Chang. This is day 38 of the war. Eric Prince, what do we do now? I counseled as loud as possible against doing this in the first place. We face an extremely difficult challenge. The Iranians learned their lesson from what happened to Iraq. Decapitation of the leadership structure of the Iraqi army. The Iranians have done the exact same thing. There's 31 different military districts. All clear direction given to those 31 commanders is to continue to wage war against whoever they can with whatever they can. That's why you've had so many strikes across the GCC. That's all kind of entrepreneurialism. The only person that can counter man that order is the supreme leader. Not the president, not their foreign minister, not their chief of military, only the supreme leader. And we've killed the supreme leader now, his father, his wife, his sister, other family members in an ancient society. In an ancient society that understands blood oath. So I don't see, I don't share the optimism of the administration that there's going to be a peaceful stop to this. They will burn it down. And my real concern is that if they try to put boots on the ground, force the Straits of Hormuz, you will see imagery of burning American warships in the next couple of weeks. And I don't think people are really prepared for that. The level, the U.S. military for two years tried to bomb the hell out of the Houthis and to open the Red Sea and the Battle of Mandab. And it didn't work. And to think that we're going to force that on the IRGC that's prepared for this moment for the last 46 years, I am extremely concerned. So I would, look, Iran doesn't have an Independence Day because they've not really been conquered since Alexander the Great. I would stop with a very conventional approach and go to a very unconventional approach. There's a lot of doors that can be unlocked to the different ethnic minorities. For all the talk of regime change, there's never been a real preparation of an armed opposition inside the country. And a lot of ways to do that from the periphery that doesn't require U.S. boots. Jason, you just heard that this is going to be an extremely difficult task. Your thoughts, please. I do agree it would be an extremely difficult task. But I also believe that, unfortunately, whether you agree or disagree, we have launched on this endeavor. And, unfortunately, I served in Iraq and Afghanistan. And if you look at the time we spent in both those nations when we decided, you know, in Iraq, when we said, hey, we're pulling out and we're leaving, it led to the collapse of what was there and the collapse of that government and the uprising of ISIS. Same thing in Afghanistan with the Taliban back in power, the same Taliban that Chad and I fought against for 20-plus years. Friends are buried fighting against them. I think in Iran, we have given an opportunity to the people of Iran to step up and have a level of freedom against a repressive regime that hasn't existed in almost 40 years. Iran has been a clear and present danger against the United States of America. I lost friends on my deployment in 2007 due to Iranian EFPs. We knew that Quds Force commanders were on the ground. Unfortunately, I think this will get more difficult, as Eric alluded to. But I think, unfortunately, the American people have to understand we can't stop now that we've started. And here's why I believe that. I fought for 21 years. Amen. I fought. I fought for 21 years and almost sacrificed my life and sacrificed the lives of friends of mine against terrorism so that hopefully my kids would never have to take that fight against terrorism. I have my first grandchild coming. I don't want my grandchild to have to fight Iran in 20 years. Eric, I know that however this war in Iran ends, and I know that President Trump will win it for the reasons that Jason says. We're going to have to rebuild our military. Our stocks are way down. Our ships are worn out. Our people are worn out. What do we do to get the United States military back to the point where it is the strongest in the world and when no one will take us on? Look, in the Ukraine-Russia fight right now, 70 percent of the casualties are caused by drones, small, cheap drones. The cost of delivering energy, right? There's two things a military commander does. Coordinates information and releases energy. Fly that ship from here to there. Move that aircraft. Put that warhead on a forehead. The cost of doing that in the West has gotten grotesquely too high. When it takes a $4 million interceptor to shoot down a $20,000 Iranian drone, we have a fundamental problem. The lessons learned, the innovation that's happened at the edge of battle in Ukraine, those lessons have to be absorbed here. Look, the Department of War has started that with a drone dominance program, a rapid-fire competition for that space. They need to do that across all parts of weapon development because for the last 30 years, we've allowed basically a defense cartel of five supermajors to massively overcharge what it costs to deliver energy for a U.S. decision-maker. And that's why you've had to pull 50 percent of your interceptors, your war stocks that are supposed to protect us in Indo-Pakistan, the Pacific theater, to make up and to try to fill that gap in Iran. If they decide to put combat troops into Iran, it will be vastly more expensive, and people need to read stories about Gallipoli and what happened there and what happened in the Battle of Jutland. Empires don't live forever, and you have to be exceedingly cautious in how you expend force. Just because we've won the last few we've been through doesn't mean it's inevitable. Yeah, the important thing here, warfare, of course, is changing, but we also need a Pentagon that will adapt. We need a Pentagon that will be able to do the things that Eric talks about. And, of course, the rebuilding of the military starts with people. Chad, when my wife and I were having dinner at Sassy's truck stop in Limestone, New York, when we got the news that President Trump had nominated Pete Hegseth as Secretary of Defense, and my wife said to me, he has put number one priority, the president has put the number one priority, on retention in the military and recruitment. This is an important issue for you. It's a very important issue with me, and it's why I got behind Pete Hegseth when he was nominated to be Secretary. I believe in my time around the military, the number one issue in our current state is morale, recruitment, and retention, and Pete Hegseth had aligned with that. Bringing someone from inside the institution to the military, we've seen that systemically continue to be a problem through multiple administrations, but primarily during the years of the Biden-Harris administration, what I've seen in my 30 years in and around the military was the lowest morale that I had seen in 30 years. The worst recruiting since Vietnam, and the retention, we were losing all of our GWAT warfighters who had tremendous amount of experience, and they were going away. Look, we have the biggest, baddest, best military, not in the world, in the history of the world. However, it doesn't matter what equipment, what technology we have, if we don't have the right men and women, the best and brightest of our nation, raising their hand to serve, then we're not ready, and readiness is important to our national security. I believe it's an imminent threat to our national security, and Pete Hegseth not only was up for that challenge, but in two years, we've seen him turn that, all those things into the highest morale I've seen, and I work through the Mighty Oaks Foundation. I'm always around troops. I've spoken to over half a million troops. I'm at base to base to base. Jason and I just went and did Marines and Navy 250. We have a motivated military force right now. The recruitment is a 15-year high, and the retention, we have the retention that we need to be able to fight these wars, and so Pete, it's amazing to see. Pete is in the trenches. I mean, I see him doing PT and getting out there with the guys, but he's in ranges shooting, and it's not just for photo ops. He's wanting to hear from them. He's wanting to hear from the warfighter what they need, and it's a long stretch away from the double mass, triple backs, absent on duty Secretary Austin, and so it's very, very necessary. Amen, Chad. Jason, what does a warfighter need? I'm having a hard time hearing you. Say that again. What does the warfighter need? The warfighter needs the support of the American people. The warfighter needs the equipment. They need the training, and they need the technology to move forward on the battlefield. They also need a leadership that's willing to be smart about when we employ them. I think peace through strength, this idea, it is how do we build the latest technology? How do we build the greatest fighting force? And we have been that for years, but that's been degrading. After the war on terror, there was a degradation in the amount of ships and the amount of technology in our jets, all the infrastructure that now is needed to be built back up. But there's an additional caveat to that, which is when do we employ our forces? When do we utilize that peace through strength? Where do we project power around the world? How are we smart about that? I think for decades and decades, we have placed ourselves in locations around the world to project that power so that we can support the warfighter and we're strategically positioned around the world. I feel like we're pulling away from that. I feel like there's this idea, oh, if we place a base in this location, this is a poor representation of the American people, or it's a fallback on this colonial idea or things like this, colonialism. Why didn't we keep the base in Afghanistan? In my opinion, we absolutely should have kept Bagram. We should have parked strategic bombers there. We should have left troops there and special operations forces. We could have prevented the fall of Afghanistan if we had been smart and strategic and had been willing to focus on that peace through strength instead of this pullback. That is what will enable our troops to be successful, build morale, and know that they have the strength and backing of not only the American people, but the leadership. I think, Eric, what Jason said is so important. Had we kept Bagram Air Force Base in Afghanistan, we would be in a lot different strategic position with Iran right now. We get told that we are maybe warmongers for keeping our sons and daughters at risk by having these contingencies around the world. We withdrew from Afghanistan with this lie that we had been in this endless war, this 20-year war, and we had America's sons and daughters there. We had 2,500 troops there. At the time of the withdrawal, we had 4,000 troops. We still have 80,000 troops in Japan since World War II. We have 40,000 or so in Germany, 35,000 in South Korea. We don't stay in wars because of these contingencies around the world. We prevent wars through our presence. Eric, you are, I believe, the preeminent thinker on the U.S. military. What do you think about what the warfighter needs? Look, the redirect of the administration has been fantastic in terms of focusing on merit and lethality. A military should not be a social engineering organization. It should really be a snarling attack dog that's held on leash until it's off leash, and then it's go time. Cutting away a lot of the completely distracting aspects that happens to every federal bureaucracy, and then when it is go time, then they need every possible resource. Again, in a year, in a couple of months, it's not enough time to fix decades of true mistakes in procurement, in promotions, and everything else. One of the problems of the global war on terror is nobody got fired. Remember, what took Lincoln five heads of the military, he fired five chiefs of staff to finally get to victory. The generals that finished World War II were not the ones that won, so I don't think the thinning has gone nearly deep enough into the general officer corps, into the officer corps. We have about the same level of flag officers today that we did in World War II, but we have 10% of the troops. So in an era of digital instantaneous communications, you have an extremely bloated top-end organization. So my hat's off to Pete Hegsteth for trying to change the wheel of the vehicle while you're rolling down the highway. But there's a lot of work to be done, and I think we need to be extremely cautious before we stress. Because remember, if you're going to force the Straits of Hormuz, Keshem Island is the size of Okinawa. Larrick Island is the size of Iwo Jima. Any American with any memory knows how many tens of thousands of casualties and dead we took taking those islands. And that's before you even get to Karg Island, another 500 miles up the Gulf. So proceed with great caution. Eric, while you were talking, you mentioned about Lincoln firing all the generals until he got to Grant. This is the same thing that George Marshall did at the end of the 1930s. He actually established a firing board. He got rid of his friends who were in the military because they were not warfighters. And really what you're talking about is absolutely critical. You need to have at the top—we got warfighters here. We got Chad, we got Jason. But what we really need at the top right now is a military leadership that are fighters. And we had, because of peace, we've got a lot of people there who shouldn't be there. And because of that, those bad decisions that you talked about, those generals and admirals were responsible for them. Church, can you imagine a general Patton today, how long ago he would have been drummed out of the military, but he killed and captured more enemy, more enemy territory than any general in U.S. history. I don't care how many F-bombs the guy dropped, he knew how to fight. We're running out of time. I'd like to ask each of you what you want to say to the American people right now. We'll start with you, Chad. I mean, I agree. First of all, I agree with Eric. I'm praying that we do not put boots on the ground. I believe in an unconventional solution to this over a conventional solution. But whatever route we go, the American people need to know that we have the most amazing, bravest young men and women that are out there standing in line for us, for each of us, that we can sit here free. And I'm sure Eric, too. We get to go and see them at their units and around the world and speak to them. And they are just—it's hard to believe because when you turn on the news, we just still have such a patriotic nation, and these young men and women are representatives of that as they raise their hand. That's only half a percent of our nation, by the way, and serve our military. So just keep them in your prayers, and I ask that you continue to pray for each one of them, whichever choice our administration makes. Jason, you know, I am the last person to want to go to war. I mean, I've lost friends. I mean, I'm wounded. That being said, my message to the American people is to understand that sometimes we have to endure short-term pain to endure long-term gain. And that's easy—well, it's easy to say when there—I have kids who are now fighting age. They can serve in the military. They can go forward no different than us. Twenty years from now, I'll have a grandson that will be in the same place. So it's easy to say that, but we have to recognize that for the future of our country, we need to address the threats that are out there. And if we've started something, and in my opinion, we must finish it, because if we don't, we only create larger problems later down the road. We only embolden our enemies greater if we don't finish. Eric is 100 percent right. We must tread lightly. But I also—we've committed to this, and I think now I hope the pressure of the American people don't back off and don't say, hey, we have to stop because this hurts too much. In the short term, think about the long term and the future of our nation. We started with you, and we're going to end with you. USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! Beware the dangers of foreign entangling alliances, and beware the leverage of foreign governments and foreign influence on decision-making. And for all the people that want to—I agree, USA all the way. But for all the people that are cheering, make sure you put skin in the game, because we have an all-volunteer force. Don't put up—or don't shut up unless people are going to put up. Put skin in the game. These guys have had skin in the game. I have skin in the game. Let's make sure America is first, not any other country, period. Chad, thank you for being a warfighter. Eric, you are an inspiration.