Fox News TV - The US must reorient the military, GOP lawmaker says
Sen. Tim Sheehy, R-Mont., unpacks the sweeping military transformation under President Donald Trump on 'The Ingraham Angle.
Sen. Tim Sheehy, R-Mont., unpacks the sweeping military transformation under President Donald Trump on 'The Ingraham Angle.
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00:00Accountability is finally coming to the Pentagon and its bloated bureaucracy.
00:05Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced a purge, ordering a minimum 20% reduction
00:10of four stars and flag officers in the active duty component,
00:14as well as a 20% reduction in the National Guard.
00:17We're going to shift resources from bloated headquarters elements to our warfighters.
00:22Now, this is not a slash and burn exercise meant to punish high-ranking officers.
00:26Nothing could be further from the truth.
00:27This has been a deliberative process, working with the Joint Chiefs of Staff with one goal,
00:34maximizing strategic readiness and operational effectiveness.
00:39Here with me to discuss this, Montana Senator and former Navy SEAL Tim Sheehy.
00:43Senator, I can already hear the complaints that Trump is just willy-nilly gutting all these essential personnel,
00:52endangering America.
00:53In war, there's no second place, and we have to be ready to win wars.
00:57And after every military disaster in American history, after the opening phase of the Civil War,
01:01when the Union was getting its butt kicked, to Pearl Harbor.
01:05President Lincoln and President Roosevelt both did a cleanse of our general officer ranks
01:09to, as Secretary Hex has just said, refocus on combat readiness.
01:14This is not an attack on these generals who served decades in uniform.
01:17We thank and honor them for their service, of course.
01:20But we have to reorient our military towards combat with battlefield readiness.
01:24The Navy has 300 admirals and 250 ships.
01:27Well, explain why is that?
01:29Well, normally a ship is commanded by a commander or a captain,
01:32and an admiral will command a flotilla or a squadron of four, five, ten ships at a time.
01:37Now we have ten times more admirals than we need as far as a ship count.
01:41And China builds ships 230 times faster than we do.
01:45So we have a structural challenge in our military-industrial complex,
01:48and that starts with the leadership.
01:50And in any organization, if you want to change it, you have to start at the top.
01:52The CNN military analyst is typical of those who are slamming Hegseth about what he's trying to do here.
02:00Watch this.
02:00I don't see the correlation between reducing the size of the general officer ranks, flag officer ranks,
02:07and increasing the size of the enlisted population.
02:11There's not a lot of real substance to what he's trying to achieve.
02:16I think he's flexing his muscles.
02:19Is the spider right?
02:20Well, so says a two-star general retired, still collecting a general's pension.
02:24Why don't we ask the sergeants and the privates and the captains and the majors,
02:26the people who are on the battlefield paying the price for poor decisions back home.
02:31And I can promise you when Afghanistan collapsed and folks like me and many of my friends,
02:35including my wife, who served on the ground in Afghanistan,
02:38we were pretty damn pissed off about the decisions made at upper echelons
02:41that led to a complete and utter disaster in Afghanistan
02:44that set off a domino effect around the world that we're now still seeing in Israel and Ukraine.
02:49So the simple fact is accountability starts at the top.
02:52There's never going to be performance in our leadership ranks without accountability.
02:55And what Secretary Hegsson and the president have directed
02:58is our military needs to refocus on battlefield effectiveness.
03:01We need to streamline our weapons systems and acquisition processes
03:04to focus on lethality, and that starts with the generals.
03:07That, to me, is just common sense.
03:09Trump says this isn't political. It's common sense.
03:11Great to see you, Senator. Thank you so much.