All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show.
I am the Director of the Libertarian Institute, Editorial Director of Antiwar.com, author of the book Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and I've recorded more than 5,000 interviews going back to 2003, all of which are available at scotthorton.org.
You can also sign up for the podcast feed.
The full archive is also available at youtube.com slash scotthorton show.
All right, you guys, introducing Mark Perry.
He is a journalist, author, and contributing editor at the American Conservative Magazine and a famous Pentagon reporter.
His latest book is called The Pentagon's Wars, and this article at TAC is called The Real Reason the Navy Stood Up to Trump.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing, Mark?
It's great to be here.
It's really great to be here.
I'm doing fine.
I hope you're well.
Yeah, you too.
Hope you had a good Thanksgiving and all those kinds of things.
Oh, yeah, I sure did.
Great.
Listen, so this is a pretty big deal.
Donald Trump's pardoning convicted and or charged were criminals of different descriptions and the Secretary of the Navy resigned over it.
And there were, as you put it here, charges and counter charges about what exactly he resigned over and why.
And pretty big controversy.
And you apparently hang around at the Pentagon all day asking people what they think about stuff.
So, I guess, let us know, tell us, I guess, fill us in on the story, the Secretary of Defense and Trump and the Secretary of the Navy and the controversy here, especially, I guess, over this seal first, if you could.
Yeah, Eddie Gallagher was a Navy SEAL who was deployed to Iraq several times and was accused of murder, of murdering an ISIS fighter, of knifing him and killing him and was brought up on charges under the Uniform Code of Military Justice and put on trial.
He was acquitted because a medic in his platoon said that he did the deed, but he was convicted of posing with the body of the dead ISIS fighter that he allegedly knifed.
The issue here for the Navy is that a lot of the SEAL teams, their special forces units, are out of control.
They've had real problems with them over the last two or three years.
The Navy appointed a hard core disciplinarian and former SEAL to head up the special warfare units and he wanted to take Eddie Gallagher's Trident pin, designating that he was a SEAL and an honorary emblem of his being a SEAL, wanted to take it away from him.
And Trump intervened and said, absolutely not.
You can't do it.
At the same time, Trump pardoned and granted clemency to two other officers, Army officers intervening in the military justice system.
And it really caused a lot of turmoil inside the Pentagon and particularly inside the Navy.
And the Secretary of the Navy, Richard Spencer, threatened to resign unless Trump kept his nose out of the Navy's business and allowed the Navy to discipline SEAL members.
And Trump reading his base refused.
And so, the Secretary of Defense stepped in and fired the head of the Navy SEALs and the head of special warfare units, Admiral Colin Greene.
And this tiff had been going on for about a week, front page headlines, Washington Post, New York Times, LA Times, Chicago Tribune, you name it.
And I think it constituted and still constitutes probably the biggest breakdown in civil-military relations that we've had in this country since Vietnam.
That's the kind of complicated but short story.
The Navy is still in turmoil over this.
The Secretary of the Navy has been fired.
And I think that the President of the United States and the U.S. military are at loggerheads over this.
And for good reason.
Trump has taken a unilateral step in basically intervening in a court and legal proceeding to curry favor with his base.
And as you might imagine, the commentary from the military and from those outside the military has been appreciable.
So there it is.
That's the crisis of the moment.
Undoubtedly, it will be overawed by whatever today's crisis is from this president.
Well, so a couple of things there.
I guess first of all, is that even though they're all government employees here, it seems like the accusers are the ones with the burden on them.
And that for all I know, these men are being unfairly made an example of.
After all, this guy Gallagher was acquitted in a trial of the worst charges where the witnesses changed their story on the stand, I don't know, from a lie to the truth or the other way around.
What do you think?
Well, I think that, I mean, I've talked to a lot of the principals in the case, and I think that Eddie Gallagher was acquitted.
You're absolutely right.
And for all we know, he didn't do it.
But I think that the underlying and real issue here is that we have special warfare units, Green Berets, Navy SEALs, and others who are out of control.
I sat down for a long talk with a very close friend of mine who is a retired, very senior former general, retired general, who said that, you know, we have special warfare units now that are larger than they've ever been, more undisciplined than they've ever been.
He described them as the guys with the tomahawks and the tattoos.
They're out of control.
They need to be brought under control.
They need to be disciplined.
When the head of the Navy special warfare units, General Admiral Green, was appointed to take over as commander of these special warfare units, he imposed real strict discipline, the kind that we saw in the movie Patton.
You know, shave your beards, get rid of your tattoos, start wearing clean uniforms, get rid of the tomahawks, and adhere to Navy regulations and rules.
They're put in place for a reason.
And it was, you know, he landed hard on these special warfare units.
That's the issue here, is whether these guys in these special warfare units are going to adhere to not just rules and regulations, but the laws that the Pentagon takes very seriously in the Uniform Code of Military Justice, or whether they're going to be just allowed to do whatever they want, which is to run around the world as a kind of a murder ink in the war on terrorism.
And that's the issue.
And Trump is on the one side of the issue, which is leave the guys with the guns alone.
And the Navy, which is, we need good order and discipline in these units, is on the other side of the issue.
That's what's really at the heart of this controversy.
And the president's intervention in this means more of the same for America.
More embarrassment, more murders on our front lines, more special warfare guys out of control in all kinds of places around the world.
Eddie Gallagher was not just accused of killing one.
He was accused of killing women and children in Iraq.
And members of his platoon testified that they, you know, they fixed the sights on his weapon so that he wouldn't kill anyone.
It really split the special warfare community, and the Navy is trying to get it under control, and Trump doesn't want it under control.
And without really knowing everything about it, it sure seemed like the testimony change was really the result of pressure, that these witnesses decided they didn't want to help convict him after all.
Not that what they had said originally was wrong, but that they didn't want to say it in his petit trial or at his court martial anymore.
And so they changed their story for those reasons.
Oh no, I'm the one who did it, even though that guy's not charged.
It's enough to cast doubt.
Nobody really believes it, but it's enough to cast enough doubt on the thing and the rest of it.
Well, you know, I spent a lot of time talking to the special warfare people out in San Diego, which is the home of these Navy SEALs, which is SEAL Team 7.
And Gallagher's own platoon was split right down the middle, pro-Gallagher and anti-Gallagher.
And it was in real chaos.
And that never happens, right?
I mean, these guys, thin green line and all that stuff, huh?
Right.
They hang together and they're supposed to be unit cohesion, and they're usually is.
So this is, this was really chaotic and the nasty, angry, deep charges and counter charges were something I'd never heard before among military officers, real hatreds.
Of course, these guys have been on multiple deployments overseas.
So there were six or seven times, and that tends to wear on you.
But it's very clear that this kind of divisiveness, these kinds of divisions, in fact, the special warfare community, whether it's Air Force, Army, Navy, Marines, it's across, and it's divided the military.
The general I told you about, who I was talking to, said, you know, well, Mark, you have to make a distinction between tier one and tier two.
Tier one are the real guys.
There are only four units that are tier one.
SEAL Team Six and Delta in the Army are among them.
Very, you know, you don't, you don't hear their names and you don't hear people talk about them because they're really good and they really are the elite.
And then there's the tier two, which is the rest of the special warfare community.
It's very large, 60,000 members.
They do train and assist.
And he called them the wannabes.
And he was very critical of SEAL Team Seven, that is Gallagher's unit, and said, these are a bunch of wannabes.
Tomahawks, tattoos, beards, he said, and they need to get their shit together.
They need to be landed on hard.
And that's what the Navy is trying to do.
And they ought to be allowed to do it.
Trump playing to his base does not want them to do it.
Hey, man, you guys are going to love No Dev, No Ops, No IT by Hussain Badakhshani.
It's a fun and interesting read all about how to run your high tech company like a good libertarian should.
Forget all the junk.
Read No Dev, No Ops, No IT by Hussain Badakhshani.
Find it in the margin at ScottHorton.org.
Hey, y'all, here's the thing.
Donate $100 to the Scott Horton Show and you can get a QR code commodity disc as my gift to you.
It's a one ounce silver disc with a QR code on the back.
You take a picture of it with your phone and it gives you the instant spot price and lets you know what that silver, that ounce of silver is worth on the market in Federal Reserve notes in real time.
It's the future of currency in the past to CommodityDiscs.com or just go to ScottHorton.org slash donate.
Hey, guys, Scott Horton here for ExpandDesigns.com.
Harley Abbott and his crew do an outstanding job designing, building and maintaining my sites, and they'll do great work for you.
You need a new website?
Go to ExpandDesigns.com slash Scott and save 500 bucks.
You know, I want to mention here the journalism of Matthew Cole, and I know he's kind of suspect because he got both John Kiriakou and Reality Winner thrown in prison, but he's also done some good journalism before and he did a thing which, and this caused some controversy, too.
I'm not saying it's all one side.
People should go look at it.
But he did a thing for The Intercept about, again, yeah, the second tier Navy SEALs and exactly what you're talking about, going around with tomahawks.
And I guess he talks about SEAL Team Six as well, that, you know, the thing about where they shot Osama bin Laden at the very top of his head, they call it canoeing, where they kind of shoot a trench across the very top of your skull or something.
That's like their mark that they go around, you know, maiming corpses in that fashion as their calling card, as they run around, you know, creating havoc around Afghanistan, that kind of thing.
I guess bin Laden was just one example, but they do that to everybody, I guess.
This is their thing.
That's how you know they've been there.
And then, yeah, carrying around the tomahawks and using them.
They start out, oh, no, it's just ceremonial, that like, yeah.
But no, they're scalping people and they're cutting people's limbs off and God knows what out there.
Well, this isn't the military that we should have.
You know, the military that I have been covering for 30, 35 years is the military of enlisted personnel and officers that is very tightly disciplined, that carries on the good fight, that doesn't stand around and mutilate corpses or use tomahawks.
And these special warfare units, we've always had problems with them since John Kennedy established them in the early 1960s.
We've always had problems, everything from allegations and convictions for rape, mutilation of corpses, bribery, theft of government funding, the buying of yachts.
Intelligence support activity was buying yachts with his money back in the 1980s.
This is, you know, and I think it's reached a crisis proportion.
When you have a very staid and conservative branch of the service like the U.S. Navy appointing somebody like Admiral Colin Greene to bring them under control, and in August he issues a three-page letter and says to the special warfare community, here's what you will do.
You will one, you know, shave your beards, get ship shape, obey regulations, follow orders.
I mean, when you have to, when you have an admiral that has to repeat what he shouldn't have to repeat and give directives that he shouldn't have to give because they're already in place, that shows you the kind of crisis that, uh, that we're facing in, in these kinds of units.
So is it, what happened was some of the officers let it be known in the White House that they really didn't like this guy and they would prefer their free reign how it is.
And that's what Trump's responding to, or is it just talk radio kind of pressure from below based on these particular convicts or particular accused?
That's a great question.
Uh, I, a lot of the partisans of Eddie Gallagher, the Navy SEAL accused of murder went on Fox News and defended him and raised a ruckus about this.
And Gallagher said, um, prior to his, prior to the Trump intervention, that he had evidence and was filing an IG report with the Navy that, uh, Admiral Green, his commanding officer had said things against president Trump.
I mean, this is, this is ugly, ugly stuff, real divisions in the Navy that I've, I mean, I in, in the post-World War II era, I've never heard this kind of stuff said about commanding officers who are, you know, who are trying to impose discipline and the people they're trying to impose discipline on are pushing back by saying they're Trump partisans.
I mean, this is, I mean, I don't think that I'm exaggerating it here.
And I say it with, with, uh, with real, um, worry.
This is the stuff of civil war.
I mean, we can't have this, uh, orders are given to our enlisted personnel and to officers to obey, uh, they're not debatable.
And, uh, when you undermine the status of commanders, as Mr. Trump has done, that's, you know, that's handing a license to, uh, murderers.
And it's, um, that's how it's seen in the Navy.
Trump's intervention in this just rippled through the U S military, very worrisome.
And we have to remember, this is a military that gave 80% of their vote to Donald Trump and, and his, uh, well, and when you say that, you mean that officers everywhere are worried that all their subordinates are just going to do whatever they want.
Cause I know the president has their back from now on.
That's a worry.
I, you know, I taught, I quote in the article, a good friend of mine, um, Colonel Kevin Benson, who had a long and distinguished career as an army planner, West Point graduate, intelligent, articulate, and his reaction to this, uh, in a quote at the end of the article was, well, Mark, these guys might be welcome on Fox news, but they wouldn't be welcome in my platoon.
And his enlisted guys wouldn't want them around either.
They would rather be disciplined than run that wild.
That's exactly right.
And he painted a very stark picture for me.
He said, I can visualize myself standing out in front of my platoon and looking down the ranks and seeing Eddie Gallagher standing there and thinking to myself, they are this knucklehead I'll take care of him.
The military doesn't want these guys in their the military doesn't want these guys in their units.
They want them out.
Uh, and it's not just the officers, enlisted personnel too.
And for, well, you know, and again, all of this is just because we've been at war for 20 years for no good reason this whole time.
I think there's a, there's a, I think that's a good point.
Uh, I think that we saw this in Vietnam, not to bring up that canard again, but there it is.
Oh, we saw this in Vietnam where question, you know, the deployments, the questions about the war got so deeply embedded in all of the units with, uh, sergeants wondering, you know, why they were there that, uh, you know, the longer these wars last, the more of this kind of stuff goes on.
You know, at some point you got to come home and just say, all right, listen, we need to rebuild this.
We need to rethink the whole thing.
And I, I think we're, we're at that point, uh, where, you know, we deployed these guys for too long in too many places with, uh, not much of a mandate to do things.
We're not even sure why we're doing anymore.
And, uh, that causes real discipline and morale problems and, uh, the good order and good conduct of our, of our soldiers, sailors, Marines, and airmen are now being called into question across the board by the military itself.
So it's a, you know, it's a, you're not going to wake up tomorrow morning and read it on the front page of the New York times, but it ought to be there.
Listen, there are half a million or half a million men and women in uniform in this country, 70,000 of them are in special operations.
It doesn't make any sense.
And essentially they're fighting in, in all these theaters.
In very few cases, they really fighting Al Qaeda guys.
They're fighting local militia men is what they're doing.
So you could see how that's a pretty savage game, right?
You sign up, you think you're going to meet the Wehrmacht out on some French field somewhere where everybody's a combatant and everybody's life is forfeit.
And that's what they get for serving Hitler or whatever.
But then no, instead you're, you're kicking in some guy's door in the middle of the night.
And so, no, but he's a militant, get it?
So, but he's really just a civilian.
So we're got the superpower waging war against fighting age males, AKA civilians with rifles all over the world.
So that's a pretty kind of lopsided and weird way to wage war.
So it's no surprise when you see things like the kill team or whatever, where the reasoning is, look, all these people are our enemy, aren't they?
So why would we not shoot them?
You know?
It used to be that if you wanted to assassinate somebody, you tasked the CIA with doing it.
You wrote a finding.
If you were the president of the States and you consulted with the U.S. Congress and you said, you know, we're going to kill this guy.
He's a threat to the United States of America.
And the, the, you know, the eight members of the U.S. Congress that you consulted with, the gang of eight, they're called, you know, were informed the president signed off on it.
It was a piece of paper.
You had to actually sign it and you gave the assignment to the CIA.
Well, when you have SEAL Team 7 running around, you don't need a finding.
You just give the order.
And it's that kind of thing.
The deployment of these special operations forces under the guise of protecting the country under the Patriot Act have led to serial abuses.
We don't, you know, I, I think a lot of good journalism has been done on this.
A lot more can be done.
Who exactly is it that we're killing?
I mean, these are terror, well, they're ISIS, they're terrorists, they're all kind of, they're, after a while, it looks like the people we're killing just don't like the United States.
Is that a good reason to kill somebody?
So here we are, you know, we've got special operations forces.
They're all over Africa.
They're all over the Middle East.
They're all over the Middle East.
They're all over the Africa.
They're all over the Middle East.
And they're out of control.
Well, you know, we know from the Iraq and Afghan model, really who they're killing is somebody whose cell phone once called somebody else's cell phone somewhere.
They have no idea who they're killing.
You know, in other words, they're dropping 500 pound bombs on nobodies.
It's a, it's a problem.
I mean, it's a problem.
I don't know how you get it under control.
But I think the military is trying to get it under control.
I've talked to a lot of officers who are very disturbed by the way this is going and the way this has gone, who question who's doing it, why they're doing it, what their mandate is.
Hey, tell me a little bit now about the actual conflict between the Secretary of the Navy and the White House.
The White House leaked that he wanted to do it their way, but wanted to continue to pretend to be in a dispute with them or something.
Can you clarify that?
Sure, the whole thing, the dispute with the Secretary of the Navy, whose name is Richard Spencer, by the way, Richard v.
Spencer, really a smart, intelligent guy, 67 years old and a veteran.
Anyway, after Gallagher was acquitted, which in itself sent disturbing signs to the Navy because they thought he did it, many of them still think he did it, believe he did, absolutely convinced he did it, and other things that charges weren't brought against.
Anyway, Secretary of the Navy Spencer said, well, I'm going to take his Trident pin away.
The Trident pin is the emblem of the US Navy SEALs, and it's worn very proudly.
He said, I'm going to take his Trident pin away, and I'm going to demote him.
And Trump intervened with a tweet and said, no, you're not.
Get back to business.
I remember the tweet said, the last words of the tweet were, get back to business.
Spencer's response was, if I get, I will not take an order in a tweet.
If I get the order in writing, I'll do it.
I'll follow the order, but it has to be in writing.
I'm not going to respond to a tweet.
Mark Esper, the Secretary of Defense, and General Milley talked to Trump on Air Force One and then went to the White House and said, why don't you just let the military handle this?
Good reason for this.
They had a long discussion with him on the Uniform Code of Military Justice and allowing the Navy to police its own.
And the problem was special warfare guys.
And as it turns out, Spencer was talking behind the scenes with Trump's people and trying to get a resolution.
He didn't want to break down in civil-military relations.
But it was very clear that Trump was really angry with Spencer for defying him and wanted him fired.
And so, when Esper found out that Spencer was talking to the White House on this subject, outside of channels, he fired him.
Solved the problem.
President didn't need to fire Spencer, Esper could fire Spencer.
The lesson could be thereby learned.
And they fashioned an agreement whereby Gallagher could retire, but he would keep his trident pin and he would be restored to his regular rank and not demoted.
So, Trump won, basically.
Well, he is the president.
He is the president.
And that's- Not that that makes his decision right, just that there's no question that it is his to make, right?
That's all.
The question is now, that's what Colonel Melbourne, my Marine guy who knows this stuff inside out, said.
We're not questioning whether he has the right to do it.
He has the right to do it.
What we're questioning is whether it's right.
Yeah, well.
And he has the right to do it.
He did it.
But now, what was the thing where they, was this just some red herring where they said that he tried to say to them that he would go along?
I'm paraphrasing it wrong, I guess, here.
You know what I mean?
Where he was saying they claimed that he was trying to give in, but still make it look like he wasn't, and that that was why they were firing him?
Yeah.
I mean, Spencer admitted that he'd gone outside of regular channels and that he deserved to be fired for going outside of regular channels.
But his best defense is that, his argument that the Navy ought to be allowed to police its own, and that it was a bad precedent for the president to intervene on this.
He says that point is fair and has been won.
Depends on your point of view.
Since last week, since I wrote the article last week, things have quieted down a bit.
But this is simmering under the surface, and it's only a matter of time before it reemerges.
There's going to be other interventions in other cases.
And Trump is even talking about taking Eddie Gallagher on a campaign rally with him.
Oh, God, yeah.
I don't know how well that'll play.
I guess pretty well.
If you take a Navy SEAL who has been accused of murder on a campaign rally with you, it feeds to your base.
That is nuts.
The article that I wrote in the American Conservative on this, which I thank you for promoting, you go take a look at the comments of that article, theamericanconservative.com.
It's more comments than I've gotten on any article I've written for any publication in the last four years.
And the anger at the Navy, not at Trump, at the Navy, for disciplining Gallagher is palpable.
This is Trump's base.
One of the points is, well— Well, in fact, they're the anti-war right over there.
Well, you'd never know it from reading these comments.
But one of the commentators said, one of the commentators said, well, these are all Obama's admirals and generals anyway.
No, they're not.
No, they're not.
That's not the way it works.
President of the United States doesn't sweep out generals and put in his own generals and admirals.
That's the ambassadors and the prosecutors.
And they say, well, our gender-engineered military, they need to have tough guys like Gallagher.
What?
I mean, what is that?
I mean, it's ridiculous.
It's just a rationalization, you know.
And, you know, the idea, you know, this is what we ought to do to Muslims.
Anyway, can't punish a guy for killing a Muslim.
Who cares?
I mean, the anger on this is seething.
And this is in a country that has incredible respect for the military.
I mean, you know, you can say a lot of things.
There are a lot of things not to like about the U.S. military, but let's not let's not confuse the issue.
You know, like you're saying, allow them to police their own.
I mean, that's the complaint is that they're the ones in charge of prosecuting themselves.
They let themselves get away with murder all the time.
We're talking about the one, two or three cases where there's the slightest bit of accountability.
Well, here you know, and here we are.
It's not as if the guys who are generals and admirals haven't served in uniform for 30 years and know what's going on.
I mean, the head of the special warfare branch at the U.S. Navy was a special warfare veteran.
You know, it's not like Obama put in a professor at Columbia University as an admiral.
It's just it's ridiculous.
You know, are we going to get this thing under control or not?
If we don't have a president who wants to get it under control, who's going to do it?
And, you know, I, you know, you know me.
I mean, I don't, you know, it's not that often that I take the side of the military in anything.
But on this one, they got it right.
We cannot have guys with tattoos and tomahawks running around the world assassinating people.
It just can't happen.
And you can accuse me, Bill, it's going to happen anyway.
Don't be naive.
I'm not being naive.
How about not for another generation?
How about 20 years of this is enough?
Cheney, Rumsfeld and Barack Obama, who he never rolled any of this back.
He only expanded every bit of it across the world, didn't he?
Yeah.
But it is possible.
I mean, I, you know, I'm one of these naive optimists.
It is possible to bring it under control.
And if it's not possible, what are we doing?
What am I doing on the radio?
Why am I writing all about this?
I mean, there's there's got to be a way out of this.
We work hard at it and make decent decisions and don't let people like Eddie Gallagher run our political process.
That would be a good start, it seems to me.
Yeah.
And just think of it.
Just think of it for one second.
Eddie Gallagher appearing on stage in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, with Donald Trump.
Kind of a message.
Does that send to our men and women in uniform?
If you go out and kill Muslims, the president's going to forgive you.
That's no, I really I think you're right that this is kind of a turning point.
We're going to.
It's like that time that Brennan tried to call the FBI on the Senate Intelligence Committee staff for investigating his torture program and that kind of thing.
It's one of these signposts where the the as you say, the good order and discipline on the most lethal killers in our government's employ.
You know, all the checks and balances and rules and regulations are breaking down.
Confident.
In fact, that's the only institution anybody has any faith in at all anymore is the military.
They all the other institutions even more than that or, you know, trust them far less.
So these are the ones these lawless men with the total killing capability are the inheritors of, you know, essentially what's left as all the rest of this falls apart.
And and right as all of the rules and regulations no longer apply to them in any way.
It's kind of a perfect storm, you know.
Let's wait till the next bubble crash.
I mean, let's you're exactly right.
But I mean, let's think about it.
Trump says, well, we need to unleash the military.
Well, you know, and we need to pulverize, we need to send Mosul or Idlib back to the Stone Age and pulverize ISIS.
And the military's answer to that very quietly behind the scenes was we'd rather not do, we'd rather not carpet bomb Mosul.
You know, so you got to let you know, Trump says, let them loose.
And what you end up with are guys like Eddie Gallagher.
And Eddie Gallagher has served more time in uniform by by years than I ever have.
I admit to that.
And I'm not in a position to critique what he's done.
But he was brought up on charges not by me, but by the U.S. Navy.
So, you know, it's not we're not asking too much for the legal processes to to work.
If the commanders of the U.S. Navy are indicting their own officers from murder, it's time to pay attention.
And that's what we have here.
And Trump says, never mind, there's nothing going on behind the curtain.
Well, there is.
And it's bad news for this country.
And, you know, it's because of all the partisanship, too.
It just means if you disagree with him, then I guess you're on the side of the Democrats and I don't have to listen to you and just complete communication breakdown everywhere based on whose side you're on and everything, you know?
Well, you have you have members of the U.S. military appearing on Fox News critiquing their commanders.
Yeah, I mean, I've never seen that.
I mean, Douglas MacArthur didn't do that.
I mean, it's just it's it's it's I think it's chilling.
And I think it's I think we're only at the beginning of this.
I think that if there are more interventions like the Gallagher intervention on the part of the president of the United States, we're going to see resignations at the top of our military.
These guys are going to just flat out refuse to, you know, turn a blind eye to units and personnel that are out of control.
They're going to impose discipline and they're going to make it known that they need to impose a discipline.
Yeah.
Well, you know, going back to 2016, Trump had pretty much every single power faction in the country against him and for the Democrat.
And except for the military seemed like the army and the Marines, I don't know what the Air Force had to say.
I guess they were happy with it.
But it seemed like he had the military said he's OK.
Well, we've got enough of us.
We'll stand on stage around him to, you know, show that we have confidence in his leadership and it's OK to vote for him and that kind of thing, while everyone else from, you know, I don't know, maybe not the New York office of the FBI, but everybody else seemed to be out to get the guy and that kind of thing.
So it's a real question of and I'm not talking about, you know, the people out here in the country, but I mean, to the power factions with the, you know, the real sway up there.
I wonder whether this is going to really cost him or whether this is really going to.
I guess it'll cut both ways.
I guess we'll have to see.
But it'll be interesting to see whether it's a hell.
It's a hell of a question.
And because, you know, you go walking through the halls of the Pentagon, all the TVs are turned to Fox News.
And 80 percent of those in uniform voted for Donald Trump.
But I think that's going to change.
I do believe that, you know, we've had a we've had a break in this now where especially senior officers, but also enlisted personnel who don't like this going on are saying, hey, wait a second, you know, don't don't give us a license to kill.
We, you know, we have enough problems.
And I'd be something if that was really the thing that caused the break was his pardoning of war criminals.
And they just were too insistent on law and order.
And that was what it came down to, as opposed to example, they want to bomb Iran and he doesn't or vice versa or something like that.
You know, I don't know.
I think I think that I think that that's a point eloquently made.
I wouldn't it be something?
Yeah.
Yeah, it would.
In terms of like, hey, history's being written here.
That would be an important thing that that was finally what caused the loss of confidence.
You're a senior.
If you're a senior military, I spent 25 years in uniform.
You've now reached the rank of rear admiral.
And the service that you're leading is out of control.
And discipline is breaking down as it did in the last days of the Vietnam War.
You do anything to get it back under control.
You know, the life of the nation is at stake, but your service is at stake.
You've dedicated your life 25 years to building a military, and it's being shredded.
I think that I don't care how conservative you are.
You turn against a guy like Donald Trump, who was shredding your service.
And that I think that that could happen.
Yeah, in the name of conservatism, not contrary to it.
In the name of conservatism.
That's right.
That's exactly right.
All right.
Well, speaking of which, here it is, the American Conservative Magazine.
Again, the great Mark Perry.
This one is called The Real Reason the Navy Stood Up to Trump.
Thanks again, Mark.
My pleasure, as always.
Thank you.
All right, you guys.
And don't forget his book is The Pentagon's Wars.
All right, y'all.
Thanks.
Find me at libertarianinstitute.org, at scotthorton.org, antiwar.com, and reddit.com slash scotthortonshow.
Oh, yeah.
And read my book, Fool's Errand, Timed and the War in Afghanistan at foolserrand.us.
