Welcome to today's podcast sponsored by Hillsdale College. All Things Hillsdale at Hillsdale dot ed or I encourage you to take advantage of the many free online courses there, and of course I listen to the Hillsdale Dialogue, all of them at Hugh for Hillsdale dot com or just Google, Apple, iTunes and Hilldale.
They now have the chance that is around to permanently abandon their nuclear ambitions and.
To join a new path forward. We'll see if they want to do it. If they don't, where they worse Nightman.
In the meantime, we'll just keep blowing them away, unimpeded, unstopped.
Well, there's not a thing they can do about it. They can't do anything about it.
You know, I'll tell you if they could, If they could, you'd be hearing about it.
You'd be hearing about it.
You don't hear anything about it. Born and Glory and even Grace America.
I'm you, Hewitt. That was President Trump in the cabinet the meeting about an hour ago. I begin today's program with Jim Garrity. If National Review also a calm for the Washington Post you ought to be getting. He is Morning Daily jolt. You ought to be listening to him on the Editors and the three Martini lunch Jim, I have been following you on the Editors. You're in the category of boy. I wish he'd explained it more clearly
at the beginning. I understand that. But we're just crushing these people, these bad guys, and we're not killing civilians. I think this is going very well, and I think it's a pivot point in history.
What do you think about that?
Militarily it is going really well. It dawned on me the other day, Hugh. Have we had casualties since the initial we had the plane.
The C seventeen that went down.
We had the initial casualties and a strike on one of the Gulf states.
Have we had military and uniform casualty?
We have lost thirteene we have not. There are some seriously wounded, one of whom may have died. I'm a little bit confused on what happens. Or it might be fourteen. Israeli has lost another one yesterday. Their death toll is up to eighteen. In our golf out, I lost twenty. So among all of the Allied power powers and those who have been attacked. The death toll is somewhere around sixty.
You and I from our haircuts, people can tell are on the longer side. I have good memories of the nineteen ninety one Gulf War. Somebody went back and looked at the number of US planes shot down.
During the Persian Gulf War.
This is nineteen ninety one, and there were more planes shot down over Iraq under Saddam Hussein and the technology available then. I'm from a small town in New Jersey called Mtuchen, and one of the POWs, Bob Wetzel, was from Mtuchen, so that really kind of brought everything home there.
So militarily is doing quite well.
I think if you had more ships going through the straight of war moves, I think everybody feel a lot better about this. This is in the one card the Iranians have had to play, and they've played it pretty effectively. They are effectively charging a toll to go through the straight of hor.
Moves, and this is one of their demands to end the war.
I would point out that this is you know, shooting drones and shooting rockets and shooting missiles and fast boats and mines.
This is the only card they have to play.
If the US can get enough mind sweeping equipment out there, and if we can eliminate their drone launchers and all that, they don't have a lot.
That they can do.
I do think the ballistic missile that they launched that was aimed at Diego Garcia.
That was a bit ominous.
No, I've heard folks saying that it Actually they did that by taking out all the extra explosives and putting an extra room for fuel. Of course, that just proves that the regime was lying when it said it did not have missiles that could strike anywhere near that. That does put you know, London in Paris are either right outside the range of those missiles or a little bit for a little bit, you know, beyond it. You take out the explosives, on the one hand, it's not going
to be nearly as powerful. On the other hand, if I throw a school bus going at like mock fourteen into the middle of a city, it's still going to do some damage.
So, you know, militarily, it's going very well.
I think we can take The real question is the straight That's what's causing the gas prices, that's what's causing oil prices.
That's you know all that stuff.
I would point out, according to Triple A though it's been at three ninety eight for the national average for the last three days.
That's that's not great, but that is kind of indicating we may they may have hit.
A ceiling there right in California where my sign is with his family at six and a half dollars a gallon, But we're used to that in California because of the crazy air quality stuff and the mix that they've got to use.
We're actould say only six and a half.
Well, yeah, it's kind of crazy out there. But even if this went on for another month and gas stayed high, what would you say to your grandchildren When you're an old man like me and you've got grandchildren, Jim, what would you say about the cost benefit if the regime is toppled or crumbles and we had to pay two and a half months of higher gas prices.
At that point, it's a bargain, that is, you know, if you can topple the regime and replace it with regime.
Never mind democracy, although that would be very nice. Let's say a regime that.
Is responsive to the voices of the people, then.
It would have a situation, which that would be, you know, definitely worth this price.
And then you know, six days a week and twice on Sundays where I think there's like on the editors last time, Rich put in a question to me, if we keep the regime in place but they verifiably give up their nuclear weapons ambitions, is that worthwhile?
And very much I would like to see this regime toppled.
I think, you know, the President himself said to the Iranians, help is on the way.
He told them to overthrow their oppressors.
I think if the regime is still in control at the end of this war, it will be a frustrating, but I think that would be a significant deal sweetener for a mixed bag.
So I'll be very critical if they are in control, because that means they, as Guy Benson said on Special.
Report to Kicking the Fan down the Road, Yeah, they lie.
When they breathe, they immediately start digging another tunnel and ordering centrifuges from the chicoms, and they'll start all over again. And they still have four hundred and sixty pounds of what the President called nuclear dust. That's like dirty bomb central. For the next one hundred years. We really can't let this regime stay in place. And I don't think, my gosh, the pounding. I know that that cannard is that you can't topple a regime from the air.
Well.
We've never had this kind of precision munition strike over the course of six weeks on a regime that is that unpopular among its people. That's the difference. It's not like the German people chance to kill Hitler.
Yeah. The economists cover this week shows the Iranian.
Flag and the world like as a map of the world, the Iranians squeezing it and the signified and they have a state of saying that the Trump's war has achieved nothing in Iran.
That's kind of ridiculous.
I may not be quite as optimistic as say my colleague Noah Roffman.
Uh, maybe not as optimistic as you, Hugh.
But in the end we're very optimistic. You we're not as optimist.
I think it myself as pretty hawks compared so hawkish.
And you know, I want to see us get to a new regime here.
Short of that, a you know, regime that has had you know, doesn't have an army anymore, doesn't have a nuclear program, doesn't have ballistic missile program. That's all good steps, but I think I concur with you that at some point this is simply this would be you know, Iran War one, and at some point, hopefully far in the future, but likely at some point we would have to do it.
And you know, when you get into a fight with the world's largest state sponsor of terrorism, you have to be very worried about the fact that they may sponsor terrorism. They may not be able to do it now. They may still be the newest Ayatola, might be a little shorthanded, or you know whatever other metaphors you want to use for a guy who looks like he's auditioning for the Mummy. But whatever, you know, he's not in a situation where
he can order terrorist attacks against America. But in six months to a year they'll be back on their feet, no fun intended and uh probably looking for revenge in one.
Form always a ten yure pun. Let me ask you about not Mission creep. Everyone knows what Mission creep is, but victory creep. Five years ago, the Israelis would have been happy with what we did at four Doah in midnight hammer and I say, all a who Barack asked for was three hours with our deep penetrators over at four doh.
That was a victory, and we celebrated as such.
Now we've got victory creep beyond destroying the nuclear program, I mean really into bits and beyond the missile program. Now we want the regime instruments of terror, and we want the regime to fall.
Our victory creep mode.
Here maybe, But also keep in mind, you know, how did we get here. And I'm sure there's some people go, oh, go back to the Shah or ah, go back to the you know, the CIA back in the fifties and all that. This really started because of the protests against the Iranian regime. It really was peaked in January, continued to bid into February. Presidents said help is on the way. People genuinely thought this might be the end of the regime.
They managed to stay in power by killing everybody agrees some five figure sum some say closer to ten thousand, some say up in the neighborhood of thirty thousand.
Right.
All of this started because they were in dire economic straits, because the Iranian currency is the single least worth of valuable currency in the entire world. The value of the money was absolutely declining. Assuming the Mollas stay in power before all this, which you and I are hoping, you know, is not the case. If they do that, they still
have all the same problems. You know, the people may not be out on the street, you know, they might not come out in the street in the first month after the war, second month after the war, But if the regime can't fix the economy, they're going to be back where they started from, back in December of last year, where they you know, people are marching in the streets simply out of hunger, simply out of the fact that what they're getting paid cank over the cost.
Of bread at the markets.
So long term, this regime is in real trouble if they don't get toppled in this war.
One of these problems.
Thirty seconds on the way out the door, if the regime's still in place, should we blow up their oil, blow up their bridges, blow up their power grid to make it easier for the people to rise up?
Thirty seconds Would it make it easier for the people to rise up?
I'm not completely convinced of that, and I think it also would drive oil markets and the world energy Markets Haywire, So I would recC connection of how that would help them, help them overthrow.
The regime, guarrity the Indispensable, follow them on Exit Jim Garrety, read them in the Washington Post, treat them in National Review, Listen to them on the Editors and at the three Martini Lunch and stay tuned.
W right back on the Uuit Show. Welcome Back in America.
I'm jet inside the beltweigh today in the Relief Factor studio, So please to welcome Chip Keating to the program. Chip is a candidate for governor in the great state of Oklahoma. A little bit later in the are I'm talking to Jim Lankford, Senator from Oklahoma. Oklahoma's been in the news all week long, so I thought I would talk with Chip. Chip, how are you and how goes the campaign?
Hey you, I'm doing great. Thanks for having me on. The campaign's terrific. We've got a ton of momentum and we're going to go win for greater Oklahoma.
Now, I go down to Oklahoma every three or four years for one reason or another, and it's always the most welcoming state in the Union, unless Baker Mayfield is playing Ohio State and planting the flag in the Ohio state middle of the stadium. That's the only thing I've got against Oklahoma. And then Baker came and came and brown. What are the issues that people are fighting about in Oklahoma? Because it's such a nice place to.
Visit, Oklahoma is great. Look the biggest issues in Oklahoma right now. The old the slogan in Oklahoma used to be used to be Oklahoma's Okay. That means we're average and marginal. But the reality is right now, we are fiftieth in education, we haven't modernized our tax structure since nineteen teen thirty. We've got an illicit drug crisis in our state from the passage of a liberal ballot initiative that delivered medical marijuana.
And it's anything but that.
And so we are a triple Trump all seventy seven counties, all three election cycles for President Trump were very red state. But we're dealing with blue state issues. And so we've been big government in Oklahoma, and it's time for a real conservative to step up and uphold our conservative values that we know and love in Oklahoma.
Now, I would have assumed that Oklahoma was pretty dog on good in education chick keating just because oh you so good in Oklahoma. State's pretty good at the state, the state universities are so good. What happened to your primary K through twelve schools?
Yeah, it's a great question.
And we do have great higher ed in Oklahoma USU or our flagship universities, but K through twelve, one in four of our eighth graders are illiterate in the state of Oklahoma. And so we adopted and you hear the Mississippi miracle around literacy in K through three and emphasis on phonics and emphasis on having literacy coaches. We passed that in twenty twelve. In twenty thirteen, Mississippi adopted it. They've gone from fiftieth to seventeenth. Their per capita GDP
just sur passed the UK. And in twenty fourteen, Oklahoma repealed it. We repealed literacy in reading proficiency, and so Republicans repealed it.
And so enough's enough. Parents are outraged. Reading education.
It's a fundamental genesis of everything. We're per capita number one in incarceration in Oklahoma and fiftieth in literacy, and those two statistics fit hand in glove, and so it's time for us to get our act together and not governed like a blue state anymore.
Now, how does Oklahoma raise its money?
California tax I fled California to Virginia because they just taxed everything. What is Oklahoma tax and it is there reform to be had.
There, There's a lot of reform to be had in Oklahoma.
Look, we're so blessed.
To be in a fossil fuel stated. You think about migration shifts in our country. Why are people migrating, you know, fleeing blue state you know, horrific tax policy, woke agenda states and coming to states like you know, the Midwest. And if Oklahoma's really going to be a winner in that net migration.
And we have the power and power is a big deal. Right now.
We're blessed to have fossil fuels everywhere in our state. But where are the real migration patterns going.
Well, they're going to really pro.
Tax policy, good public policy, states that have great education, no income tax, conservative values. And so the reality is Oklahoma is a great place. I mean, we are an incredible place to be. And if we really want to win the migration race, we have to figure out how to get rid of our state income tax.
Look at Mississippi.
I think Mississippi is a good example for Oklahoma to study. Went from fiftieth to seventeenth in education, they got rid of their income tax. They're per capita GDP just surpassed the UK. I mean, look at Tennessee, a great landlocked state like Oklahoma. Thirty years ago, Oklahoma Tennessee's GDP were very comparable. Now Tennessee's a third fastest growing state in the country.
And so what are they doing? I mean, frankly, the reality is, Hugh, they're.
Doing really good public policy. And so, as I traveled the campaign trail, I'm not a career politician. I'm not an officehopper. I'm a businessman, a former state trooper. It's time for us to get serious. Look to other states, and we know that work, and just do that. This is not our seventeen seventy six moment where we have to figure things out. We know what works, what's good public policy, and we out are replicated.
You know, my friend's over at the American Legislative Exchange Council. Every year they do they rank the states one through fifty, rich state, poor state. I don't have my book with me it's in Maine. I don't know where Oklahoma is, but you're right next door to Texas and they don't have an income tax. How can Oklahoma have an income tax if Texas doesn't have an income tax.
I mean, that's where I'm saying.
I mean, good public policy is replicatable, and the reality is not every state is blessed to have a neighbor like Texas where we do in Oklahoma.
And Texas is a country on a standalone.
Basis, they're the seventh largest GDP in the world, And so you are exactly right, Hugh.
We should replicate really good policy like Texas does.
Because, as I tell people traveling the state, we don't want to beat Texas. We want to beat them in football when we play them, but certainly we want to be like them from a good governing and public policy and conservative value perspective, because the crumbs that come out of Texas are very real. And look, we are living through a fourth Industrial Revolution.
Right now, energy power. It is a big deal.
And Oklahoma's blessed to have unlimited natural resource potentials in fossil fuels, and that's the industry that I've been in, and it's time to really lean in on it. It's a national security issue. We have unlimited natural gas potential in Oklahoma.
It's time really.
For us as a state to plan our flag and be part of this fourth Industrial Revolution that's.
Going on real time.
I mean, we have an opportunity to be an incredible state, much more incredible than where we are today.
Yeah.
My last hour today, I'm going to be talking with Sean Sankar, who wrote the book Mobilized, about the new defense industries that are springing up everywhere. One of the things they need is a business friendly and climate. And they need lots of energy, especially if they're doing data centers. And I assume you guys have got whatever they need when it comes to natural gas.
Yeah, that's exactly right.
So we think about AI and I propose bringing the Trump National Lab to Oklahoma. And national labs are a very real thing from a GDP perspective, jobs perspective, energy, AI and aerospace. Oklahoma's second largest industry is the aerospace industry.
Number one is oil on gas. We have both.
What does AI need. AI is a critical part of the aerospace defense race. It's a big industry in Oklahoma. It's time for us to lean in. We have the natural gas and as President Trump has laid out sound policy around, we're not going to jam our rate payers on grid. We can't use our precious resources with water. There's a way to do it in Oklahoma where we can do both, not be on grid, we can be behind the meter power this stuff directly with natural gas.
And every natural gas well in Oklahoma produces water, and it's not good water. And there's a way for us to lean in on American ingenuity and utilize the bad produced water that's called salt water and descale it, utilize it for the cooling needs for data centers, and we can really lean in and help win on this very important national security issue.
Chif Kating, good to talk to you. We'll stay in touch. Kating twenty twenty six. Is your website Kating twenty twenty six dot com.
When is the primary chip June sixteenth.
So for all of your wonderful viewers and listeners that are in Oklahoma, we hope to add.
You on team Keaty and your boat and you. It's a pleasure to be with you, sir.
Thank you, so thank you, Chef.
Talk to you again, Sue. Welcome back to America. I'm Hugh Hewittt. We're joined now by Senator James Langford of Oklahoma. He's on three big committees, Senate Finance Committee, Homeland Security, and Intel and Senator welcome. I got to talk to you about very important stuff and very stupid stuff. Let's
start with the very important stuff. I know you won't tell us anything that is an open source, but what do you think about the war with on how it's going and the performance of the American military.
Yeah, the performance of the American military has been stellar.
I don't think anyone Republican, Democrat, independent would challenge that at all. Based on open source and by classified information. They moved to tremendous speed and professionalism. All of these operations are incredibly complicated. You think to be able to drop one munitions on a country thousands of miles away, think about how many people that takes some logistics to get there, and refueling and equipment and food and everything
else that has to be able to happen. All of those things that are happening like clockwork to be able to do it. So their performance has been absolutely exceptional through this process. The challenges you're dealing with a deeply seated radical regime that the functioning the operation of that regime they know is completely dependent on them staying in power. Now they have millions of people that want them out, but that regime knows that if ever they're out, they're
going to be exposed to international criminal courts. They're going to be locked away because of the oppression and what they have done to their own people for so many decades. So they are literally fighting for their lives as a regime. At the same time the people of Iran are fighting for their freedom. At the same time, we are saying, just make it stop. You've got to stop carrying out acces terrorism.
On the United States and on our allies.
So it is a complicated situation try to get this to resolution. But the military has been spectacular in this process.
Now, Senator, I've covered every war since the first Golf four. I went on the air in nineteen ninety and so I didn't get Panama, but every war since then, I have never seen negative coverage like this. And it's not mission creep, it's victory creep. Everyone keeps redefining victory is something that we haven't seen or haven't got yet, and they wanted it. Yet it's been less than four weeks. We've had ten thousand targets. We've had fourteen terrible casualties
at the Israelis eighteen our golf allies around twenty. So it's not it's an enormous cost for those families, But in terms of war, this is an extraordinary achievement. And I can't believe this regime can survive even if we stop the bombing.
I don't think they'll be there in a year, do you.
Yeah, I pray that they are not. For the people of Irun and for all of us that want to live in peace.
In the region.
The reason we have bases in Barrois and we US we have basis in Saudi Arabia and in UAE and in all of that area Diego Garcia in the corporation is because of Iran. We spend billions of dollars a year just protecting Americans and shipping in that area. Because Iran is this radical terrorist regime that they open and close the strait of our moves based at their own preferences.
They carry out acts of terrorism the entire region based on their will and their preferences on this So to have a moment that we could finally say, after forty seven years, they're going to stop. They're not going to do this anymore. Is a tremendous gain for the American people. So the presidents stayed very focused, he say, focused on they can have a nuclear weapon, they can have this ballistic missile program, they can have a program for these
one way attack drones they're going to use. They can have a terrorist proxy network that they're going to continue to fund, and they can't have a navy that's going to open and close the strait of our moves. He's been very focused on that. Israel has been very very focused on regime change. They know every single day, every single Jew in the world is at risk as long
as that regime is actually in power. So you've got two different nations, both taken on the same nation, different priorities on this, but we both think it's very very important.
Now that's the very important stuff. Let's move to the stuff that's so dumb it makes my head hurt. The terrorist regime we are fighting would blow us all up through one of their proxies, or has blow if they could. But the Department of Homeland Security is shuttered are the and the TSA lines might be to my front door now from Reagan National is the Democrat? Is there any Democrat other than John Fetterman who said, well, we really shouldn't be doing this to the American people.
There are finally a few I can't say their names, but they're finally a few saying enough is enough. We've got to be able to resolve this. We've been pounding on this over and over and over again. There is a very real risk. We are in current conflict with Iran, who has a very extensive cyber network that they use for attacks.
They're a terrorist nation that they're.
Looking for ones and twos of people to be able to find people to be able to attack anywhere in the world they can do that. Iran is not afraid to be able to partner with other terror networks, even if they don't philosophically agree with them, to be able to partner with them to get their will. They also cooperate with gangs and with other thugs and mafia groups that they want to be able to pay off and
partner to do their dirty work. This is a regime that they like, this kind of asymmetric warfare to be able to type because they know they can't reach us. So, yes, homeland security is incredibly important. That's including border security. That's including picking up individuals that were here during the Biden administration that we need to be able to remove because
we don't have any idea what their background is. But that also includes FEMA operations, Coast Guard operations, Secret Service operations.
All of those things are important.
We've got to get them going again. This is enough? Is enough?
Do any of your Democratic colleagues read about Sheridan Gorman, the eighteen year old who was shot in the back my illegal immigrant waved into the country in twenty twenty three, arrested and released in Chicago without getting a notification. Do they aren't they ashamed at what happened under Joe Biden?
Is this is not an isolated incident. Yeah.
They will say alex Pretty's name over and over again and that's an incredibly tragic event. But they will not repeat the name of Lake and Riley. They will not repeat the name of Sharon Gorman, They will not repeat those other names. They just want to ignore that and assume there is no problem with illegal immigration. This is something that the Trump administration just manufactured when all of us as Americans.
Know that's just not true.
There is a very religious let's just admit and be honest about what's really happening here, and let's work through the process on this. And yes, there are moments that every agency, every law enforcement agency, makes mistakes, and they deal with life and death every single day. But they're also protecting the American citizens every single day, and we've got to allow them to do that.
So last question, where we get more votes on DHS. I don't know what the leader is planning. I know you're doing the Save Act debate, but I wish you'd vote on it every day because the Democrats are just making everyone crazy at the airport and we're all aware of the danger.
Yeah, we will continue to vote on every single day. As you know, we've been in continuous session every single day the last two weeks.
John Thune and myself.
And others have said we should stay in session every single day until we get DHS SALVETD.
This is the best way to be a resolve.
This is one of the things that I've been an advocate for for weeks and weeks that as soon as this started, I've said we should stay here every day and debate this until we actually solve it.
We should never leave on it.
Now we finally reach that point that everyone else agrees with me on it. Everybody's staying until we solve the DHS issue.
We need These folks paid the.
Senator James Leifrid of Oklahoma. Thanks, welcome back in America. I'm Hugh Hewett. Eleon and Y Johnson is editor in chief of the Washington Free Beacon. She is also a regular contributor on the commentary podcast ely On Moments ago. A minute ago, President Trump posted on true Social this as per Iranian government request. Please let this statement serve to represent that I am pausing the period of energy plant destruction by ten days to Monday, April sixth, twenty
twenty six, at eight pm Eastern Time. Talks are on going in despite erroneous statements to the contrary by the fake news media and others, they are going very well. Thank you for your attention to this matter, President Donald J.
Trump. What do you think, Eliana, Well.
Hugh, it seems to me that in the talks, the US is asking for what it's always been asking for, including that Iran never pursue nuclear capabilities and destroy what's there of its existing nuclear capabilities, and vow never to pursue nuclear enrichment. These are not new things, so I'm
quite skeptical that negotiations will be productive. And Iran now is coming to the table in an extraordinarily weakened state and making demands that I just can't see the President agreeing to, including the payment of reparations, payment for tankers to transit the Strait of war moves, and they're demanding that we shutter our military bases in the region. At the same time, the President saying they better get serious about negotiations as our marines arrive in the region and
the Pentagon prepares options for a final blow. So part of me wonders if the President isn't buying some time for additional military assets to get in the region and to talk to his advisors about what these which of these options might make the most sense.
Well, in the spectrum of possibilities, there's he's blowing smoke, but the Iranians don't know that, and they're looking at
each other wondering who's talking to him. On the other hand, that someone's talking to him, and we know what victory is the victory is the Marines or the eighty second Airborne surround Fodor and we spend a month getting the yellow cake or whatever the what do you call them, radioactive dust out of there, and we have instant inspections everywhere in the country and we leave with it.
We know how to measure victory.
We got to get the enriched uranium out, otherwise it's not a victory.
Do you agree that's like a baseline.
Well, that's one option.
I think the president's also looking at other options. I'm just reading the reporting on this of invading or blockading carg Island, of seizing other islands. And you know, we heard from the ambassador of the UAE that they're deploying forces to help us reopen the Strait of Hormuz, which I think is an unconditional aspect of ending hostilities here. We cannot end anything with that straight close. But in the meantime, we're sending several fighter jet squadrons and thousands
of troops to the region. And the head of the IRGC Navy, who is running this operation to keep the straight closed, has been assassinated by the Israeli military overnight.
So yes, I agree with you.
The uranium has to get out of there, or Iran has to have a new leadership that vows to destroy this in a way that's verifiable to the US and the rest of the world. And Hugh, I also think it's noteworthy that the president, our golf allies are now invested in this. The President's hearing from the UAE, the Saudis, and other golf allies that he must finish the jobs.
So while he may have advisors in the White House and elsewhere pressing him or showing him polls telling him that this has gone on too long, he's hearing from others around the world that he can't end this prematurely. And I think there's a tremendous amount of concern that he will do that.
You know, you and I and no Ah A. Rothman, Jim Garritty to there's a group of iron warhawks, and I'm in there, Guy Benson, there are a bunch of us, and certainly Jack Keene is number one warhawk. Finish the job, And by finish the job, I mean let the Iranian people be free, and let's get all of the nuclear stuff out of there and they can begin to rebuild a normal regime. Of course, the strait of horror moves has to be open. And I haven't seen the statement
by Ambassador of Taiba. I read what he wrote in the Wall Street Journal yesterday. He may be the most influential man in Washington, d C. Who's not an American. I'm very glad to see that. What do you make of our NATO allies, Eliana, Well.
I think it's unfortunate that they're not joining this. Of course, you know, the President's determination to seize Greenland that came before this probably soured them to a certain extent. But nonetheless I think it's too bad and the UK in particular not backing the president on this. I think it's shameful and people will remember it this way. Certainly the President will remember it for the next three years of his presidency.
It's unfortunate.
I think Mark Rudy is looking to, you know, lean on them to join this fight. But where our NATO allies are not stepping up our golf, you know, frenemies certainly are and pressing him to the folks in the region know how important this is, and our Israeli allies are certainly pressing him to stay the course on this and I think the President himself, you know, thinks in historical terms.
He did before, but.
Certainly after that assassination attempt in Butler even more so, he's thinking in historical terms, and this is really his opportunity to leave a mark on history.
This is the worlds visit by far the most important thing.
I mean, there's no there's no question, you know, ridding ridding Venezuela of Maduro and bringing him to face a trial in the United States was important, but this is far more important. It's a country that's menace not just the region, but the world and the United States for nearly five decades, and he he has an opportunity. And
not only that, you know, he's halfway there. It seems from what General General Kine and others have said that, you know, we're about two or three weeks out from finishing this up.
So Elean, I want to switch topics. I have.
I've hesitated to talk about this, but pretty much every crazy person in the world now knows we have the softest targets in the world. At every major airline airport in the country, hundreds of people stacked outside of TSA, one hundred thousands of people congregated with luggage and children and all that sort of if anything goes wrong at any of these airports, who gets blamed for this? I think the Democrats do. But do you agree with me.
You know, Hugh, I'm not sure. It doesn't seem to this point that they're paying a price. And that's in part,
I think because of the message around it. My former colleague Rachel Baide made a great point in her wonderful newsletter yesterday that people are wondering why Republican lawmakers aren't holding press conferences in airports with the lines behind them and with TSA agents at the who aren't getting paid at the lecterns talking about what they're suffering and what the dangers are to the public in the middle of
a war. While this is happening, and you know, we're on the heels of spring break, there could also be a wonderful ad campaign. My colleague Christine Rosen mentioned about who ruined spring Break? That's a lighter, you know, lighter way to go about it, but it's serious, and I think the idea of having press conferences in airports and drawing attention to this is a good one. But I think because the White House has put such a priority on passing this Save Act about Voting, which has no
chance of really passing the Senate. The messaging has gotten mixed and muddled, and people aren't really clear who's responsible for this.
Well, from your lips to every Republican listening, that is a great idea. I say kudos to Rachel Bade for me because it is a Democrat problem, and it is a soft target, and it's a disaster. I'm worried about. Always got to talk to you. Eleana follow her on exit. Eleana y Johnson listened to her on the commentary Pod most of mornings because it's just simply the best podcast out there. Stay tuned, America.
I'm here. Welcome back America.
Jim tell Its, senior fellow for the Regular Suit Center for Peace, joins me. Now former Senator Talent, welcome. You're military expert. How do you think the war in Iran is going.
The way anybody who understands the American military knew it was going to go. We're pounding the stuffing out of them. Essentially, the military action is not over because we have some
cleanup to do. You if you're running a let me give you some advice you if you're if you're running a country that has a coastline and you or an adversary of the United States, do not give the United States Navy an air force two months to build up unless you have very good integrated air defenses, because they're gonna just they can destroy your economy, your military apparatus. That is exactly what is happening. And anybody who thinks it isn't happening you is not living in the real world.
But if you want to stop an adversary, you have to change their intention or destroy their capability. President Trump tried to change their intentions, so did every other president. They wouldn't change. So now we're destroying their capability and that's going to stop them.
Now, Senator, I'm afraid of something that I call victory creep. You know, admission creep is victory creep is. No matter what we do, the Left is going to say it wasn't enough. To me, it's clear we've destroyed their offensive capability. The one thing the really the straits got to be open, and we will open that. That every like Mark Montgomery tell me we're going to open this train. That's a
question of will and time, and we've got it. We got to get the highly enriched uranium or it's not a win win win because that notes can be dirty bombs.
Do you agree with me on that?
Not really you, because we've just we've destroyed I believe we did last summer.
We destroyed the complex.
You have to not you have to be able to make a bomb, and then you have to be able to weaponize the bomb. And they may have It's not a good thing if they have the uranium. But if we get the rest of it and the regime staggers on, we can police that. I mean, I think they're years and years behind in terms of nuclear production, and you I don't think they're ever going to be able to rebuild. The economy was a basket case before this, and the Israelis are going to police this, and they obviously know
everything that's going on in Iran. So I would like to get it now. I would not set that as a bar I never did.
I mean, Okay, what's in my definition by the program, I will yield it. Let me ask you this. The Israelis can kill whomever they want. Should they kill a Rachi and the speaker and the new head of the IRGC before they're done.
Well, that depends on something you and I don't know, which is whose game are those people playing? Whose game might they play? And this is one of the things Trump is doing in these negotiations. And by the way, can I make a comment about the negotiations that I haven't heard anybody else make?
Please?
Okay, I've watched Trump, I read his book. I did a lot of negotiation when I was younger and in the Congress. This man has been negotiating longer than the Islamic Republicans has been around. He is aiming master at it, and he wants everybody speculating as to what he's doing. When you do that, you are entering his domain. You're
fighting the shark in the water. The only two things we know that I feel certain that he's doing here is number one, having destroyed their capability, he's checking in with them to see if they're going to change their intention. In other words, he's saying, look, have you had enough yet? And then the second thing I know about this is he is not a man who's going to give the other side a better deal than they could have gotten a month ago before. He's pounded the crud out of them.
I mean, that is not going to happen. I mean, I think I would. I would think an alien had taken over Donald Trump's body if he gives them a better It's just not in the soul of a negotiator to do that. Remember, I saw a clip the other day where he was speculating. He says they're in a very weak bargaining position. I mean, that's a.
Red crack bull.
The richest man in Rome and part of the original Triumvirate with Julius Caesar and puppy Marcus Crassus used to pull a private fire brigade up to a house that was burning or a building it was burning an ancient Rome, and he'd make an offer on the property and if they turn him down, they.
Just wait till some more of it burned down.
And so that's what he did.
That's what he's doing.
Trump is I'm sure he's also thinking way ahead and thinking about things like, hmm, once we get controlled the straight, how much of that oil can we get a piece of that oil? I mean, he's thinking about all that stuff. I don't think he's worried about the politics, and I wouldn't be either. Because this is going to be over well before the midterms. It doesn't matter what all these people now are saying, the Economist magazine and the rest
of it. It's going to be seen as a win by the American people, and the American people liked their were short and successful. Again, this is not something I would love the campaign on this if I was running the cycle.
So about NATO, Jim, you and I both like NATO and I'm mad at him for the first time in my life.
Well, I mean, NATO consists of more, remember than just the Spanish or the British or the French. This has told us what we already knew, is that there are certain partners in NATO who have neither the capability nor the resolution to really add anything to the alliance. And that's that's the truth that the President has sent. It's the truth Vance has sent, Rubio has sent. Mike Johnson sent it when he spoke to the to the House
of Commons. I mean, it's you know, and I know some of the Western Europeans are very angry about this, but when I hear that, it reminds me of a line from the Book of Galatians. Okay, both you and I are Christian men. Where Paul wrote the Galatian Church and he said, am I now your enemy? Because I'm
telling you the truth. That's all the That's all we're telling them, which is, if you want to have a vital alliance and you want to be part of it, you have to bring something to the table the way the Israelis do, the way the Japanese are doing, and you're not bringing anything to the table. The British are down to less than thirty surface combatants, and many of them are laid up in maintenance.
I think the UAE and Saudi Arabia have stepped up in my esteem, have they in yours?
Absolutely?
Yes.
I mean Trump is he's not as shoeing alliances. He wants partners who will at least burden share, And in the case of the Israelis, I think going forward, they're going to own the burden of military activity in the Middle East. I think we're going to see a partnership emerging based on economics, Israeli military power, and the diplomatic leadership of the United States. And I think it's going to We're going to have a peaceful region.
From your lips to God's ears, Jim Talent. Follow him on ext Jim Talent, Thank you. Stay tuned America. I have a Seam Sanker coming up an hour number three about his book Mobilize not Rebuilding an American defense industry. Boy, you gotta read his book. Stay turned on. You've heard me talk a lot about Consumer Cellular. How you can switch your carrier save money without the sacrifice. That's because
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Grace America has promised. I'm joined up by Sham Sankar, who is the chief technology officer of Pallenteer, one of America's the most amazing companies.
You've got a brand new book out.
Called Mobilize, How to Reboot the American Industrial Base and Stop World War III, And it's a fabulous book.
I have read half of it. I've listened to half of it, Sham.
I got to tell you that until I listened to the book on tape for the second half of the book, I always thought we'd pronounce your first name.
Shyam, but it's Shum.
How many people make that mistake a day.
I can't even count. O.
Okrect, Well, it's a fabulous book.
I'm going to start your backstory, by the way, it's fascinating.
If we have time, I'm going to go back to your father, youngest of nine kids in India, your trip to moving to Nigeria, while you fled in Nigeria, How your father went to floor. I want to get all that in, but I'm going to start with where you are right now, sort of your end story.
You are in.
The Reserve Executive Innovation Corps. You are one of the first recruits to it. I've never heard of it before. What is it and what are you doing for the government.
Yeah, it's a new reserve unit that the Army stood up about.
A year ago.
It's me, it's the CTO of META, the guy who admitted chat GPT Bob McGrew and the chief product Officer now head of Science at open Aye. And really the idea behind it is much like World War Two and keeping with the themes of the book around mobilized. We direct commission one hundred thousand people from our economy. Some of them worked at Disney and they were put in charge of war communication. Some of them worked in manufacturing and they helped build the weapons and materiel.
We should do that again. We have a bounty of.
Knowledge and skill in this country and it's a great way for us to re establish the bridge between technology and our national security. It's a great way for people to serve. You know, I'm not sure I really had anything truly unique to give the government when I was twenty four years old, But having built a four hundred billion dollar company in the hyper competitive world of the US commercial sector, I think I have a lot to give it forty four and this is a really cool opportunity to do that.
I'm not going to miss the chant. Forty eight years ago, I help Richard Nixon write The Real War. So if the Reserve Executive Innovation Court needs a ghost writer, give me a call. Although I got to say, Madeline Heart, you gave her a cover credit. That is very cool. Not a lot of people do that. Why did you do that? And this is just writers stuff. I just love the fact you gave her cover credit.
Well, she's really my co author. I mean, you know, Matteline, it's hard to find and someone who knows more about defense innovation history than Madeline, And you know, we just we kind of inspire each other to get deeper and more nuanced uncover stories. And you know, we built the first breakfast sub stack together. That's been writing on these issues for a couple of years now. So you know, she's on the cover because she deserves it.
Well, I got to tell you, it's a fabulous book, and I want to recommend it to everyone who cares about national security. Everyone in uniform, everyone in the business, in the industry, everyone on hill.
To go get mobilized. Here are the two top lines.
My interview notes are kind of disaggregated between the part that I read and the part that I listened to, So just bear with me. Two top lines. Number one, the stockpile isn't the deterrent. Mass production is deterrent. Mass production must be put back at the center of our economy and our military. Now those two sentences are a little bit apart from each other, But explain why the stockpile isn't the deterrent.
Mass production is the deterrent.
Yeah, I think it's one of the calculuses we really got wrong at the end of the Cold War. We kind of thought that the stockpile would scare our adversaries from doing things. But if you empirically.
Looked at the world for the last twelve years.
In twenty fourteen, you had the annexation of Crimea, the militarization of the Spratleys in fifteen, a run with breakout capability to get the bomb in seventeen, you had a program in Israel, you have the Hooty's holding trade hostage
in the Red Sea, and of course current operations. So it's very clear, and particularly if you look at the Ukraine case, we went through ten years of production in ten weeks of fighting, and so actually the calculus was against us that the more that we did the fighting, the less deterrent we actually had. And we had told ourselves this lie that we could just run all these lines at minimum rate production or at some point we'd have enough on the shelf. And I think we should
have modeled all of these things as consumables. Essentially, we are going to make them to use them in training. As a consequence, we'll need to make more things that'll allow us to innovate on what we make next, to make better things, to make them cheaper and outproduce our adversaries not only in quantity but also in quality.
All Right.
The second takeaway that I want to make sure everyone hears, and they got to really read Mobilized to get the details on this. Again, this is a quote. Founders are outlier talent. They most closely resemble the best artists, creative difficult and capable of prodigious output. Your argument is that the Pentagon needs to go find founders and let them
do their thing. But you point out, and I've got a son and a son in law who are now separated, ones on active duty, and a seal nephew who's on active duty.
This is not how the military works, schum.
You know that they got to check boxes and they got to move through pipelines. How in the world are you going to get the Pentagon to listen to you on this?
Well, I think the president administration really understands this. I think of Trump as a founder figure, you know, that's part of what really makes it all work. And the personnel choices below that at the willingness to put unconventional people in the right roles.
But the most important.
Argument is that this is actually our history. This is not a new prescription or recommendation. You know when I say founder, First of all, as a country, we call them the founding fathers for a reason. We understand that there's something special about founders. Then if you just look at the economics, compare the US to Europe. Europe has created zero companies from scratch in the last fifty years
worth more than one hundred million dollars. America has created all of her trillion dollar companies from scratch in the last fifty years. What's the difference. Their companies are hundreds of years old. We make our companies every day, we get new companies. We have founder figures. But if you look at the history of defense innovation, there too, we have founders, even if they're not literally building the company, they are founding something like Kelly Johnson, the founder of Skunkworks.
He built forty one airframes in his career, including the U two which we still fly in the SR seventy one, which is still has the record the speed record for the fastest manned airframe. You think about Rick in the Nuclear Navy, He's the founder of the Nuclear Navy, Higgins and the Higgins boat. In this case, we are looking at industry there, but you know, it's a maniacal obsession. Like we ninety two percent of all boats in World War Two were Higgins boats, and the Navy didn't want.
It, and the Navy tried to copy it.
Then despite is despite the system, not because of the system, And that takes a certain sort of special character that I think is uniquely prevalent in America, and you're right.
You can't have the whole military be that.
And it's always going to be, you know, prickly and hard to accept, but you need enough of them. And that's really I think the diagnosis of Sorry, go ahead, Hu, I'm.
So glad you brought up Rickover in the book.
I know, and you quote hel mel Zuomwall as saying, the United States Navy has two enemies of Soviet Union and Rickover. But we would be so screwed if it wasn't for him and Rickover em betting the nuclear Navy. We would be absolutely screwed if we did not have the advantage that the nuclear Navy brought us. And that's all because of Rickover. And he was a pain in the neck for every president and everything. Now, but boy, do we need people like him. And we're going to
come to the colonel a little bit. I want to give you a problem, chum, to think in the back of your head. I'm going to bring it back to you as a hypo in our last segment. It's not out of immobilized, it's out of my head. Soon for a moment based on the Iran War, that someone comes in and says to you, we need a really long range stealth drone that can launch from anywhere in the United States north, south, east, West, or Alaska. Has to carry a big payload, and it must be mass produced in
America at many sites. I'd like you to come back and tell me how we would do that and how long it would.
Take us to do that. But let's start with the Palmer Lucky.
I walk by Palmer maybe three times a year when I'm in Orange County, California. I always think he ought to be thrown out of the place what we are because he looks so goofy. But I don't know him. I had no idea what he was doing with Anderroll in Columbus.
Tell that story.
Yeah, you know, we're bringing production back and say we I mean America. But in this case Andrel and Palmer Lucky and the and the founders VANDREL have built a new facility called Arsenal one five thousand, five million square feet in Columbus, Ohio to start mass producing things. And it's a flexible manufacturing configuration, so you can change up
what you're mixing. You have flexible lines. Part of the magic of the facility is that it's software enabled, so you can actually change your work constructions and build better versions of the equipment as the aligned as the assembly line goes on, which is you know, inspired by by modern marbles like Tesla. It's how Tesla produces things. So bringing the very best of American modern manufacturing for scale right here in the heartland and doing it for our national defense.
Now, did the Pentagon say to him go off and do that or is he doing that on his own and hoping that they'll buy his fighter?
The theory very much the latter.
I mean that is Andrel's strategy, which is they are a defense products company, which is to say, they are taking their capital, not tax payer financed R and D. They're taking private capital, building things on their own spec their own belief of what's valuable, and then trying to sell them and then start iterating and iterate with the customer. From there, of course you're gonna keep evolving them. And that's a model that we used to do during World
War Two. The Higgins boat was exactly that. Andrew Higgins built that boat on his own costs, his own expense. It was his own vision, uh, and then he offered it to the Navy instead of the other way around, which is really like, hey, the Navy sits around, or any service sits around for a couple of years, writes the perfect set of requirements that are completely infeasible, have no trade space, and then you go to industry and you say, please build this thing, and of course there's
no given there's no trade space. You kind of come up with the kitchen sync that doesn't float. The modifications to the frigate show exactly that you know, somehow a commercial product from the.
Attoun killing me. The frigate's killing me. Don't go anywhere. Sean Sankar is coming back. His book is Mobilized. I put it on my x feed, go immediately to am is on and order a bunch of them. Or you can listen to it on books on tape over at Audible, as I've been doing.
For the last couple of days. It's very easy. Remember Mobilized, Stay tuned. Welcome back in America.
I'm Hugh Hewittt talking with Sham Sangkar about his brand new book Mobilize, which you wrote with Madeline Art. Mobilize is a three day read, or it's a day read in a day of listening, which is how I did it. And I got to say it left me more hopeful about World War three not happening than I've been in a long time.
And let's go to that.
You say, Sham, that your purpose is to prevent World War three and to win the battle for the twenty first century, and you're optimistic.
And again this is a quote.
The pieces for defense reformation are in place, The capitol class has shown up, the founders are busy building, and the Department of War is ready to innovate. Take your time and explain how in twenty twenty seven China does bade Taiwan, and then they don't do it in twenty twenty eight, and then they don't do it in twenty twenty nine, and.
Then they explain how you rolled out. You persuaded me.
We got to do.
That, Yeah, exactly. So you know, of course, the entire will start at the beginning. The entire point of the Department of War is to deter conflict. You know, to be so strong that piece is the only thing that makes sense, because picking a fight with us means you're going to lose. Now, in order to provide for that sort of defense, we need to change the adversary's calculus at the margin. You know, the question is not to we don't have to make that case for all eternity.
We have to make that case this year, the next year. In the present moment, we face an adversary that has systematically invested in countering American military strength since Goal War One, since nineteen ninety one roughly, and so they've had a long time to go after that. And if you think about the context that we're in, you compare it to World War Two. You know, one of the things that I'm really trying to make the argument in the book is that we need to mobilize just like we mobilized
in World War Two. What happened was not that we flipped a light switch and magically all the automotive factories turned into military facilities or you know, military production facilities. Really what happened is in thirty eight FDR pre mobilized by taking the number two from GM, the person Bill Knutsen, who had perfected mass production, and putting him in charge of war production, and we used len lease as an
opportunity to ramp production. It took us eighteen months to build and retool factories our moment to do that would have been Ukraine. That would have been the ideal time would have been. We could have taken that lesson I just talked about where we realized we're expending much faster than we're producing, and we could have fired up, refired up the arsenal of freedom. The next best moment to do it is now, because if we look at a fight, a high end fight with China, we have maybe eight
days of weapons on hand. That's not a deterrent. We need to have eight hundred days of weapons on hand, and we need to be able to produce these things at a scale that allows us to have economies to
scale and the cost function. We see that with the current interceptors that we're using, and to innovate on the platforms themselves, which is the other lesson of Ukraine, which is that you know, the adversary gets a vote and they keep changing their approaches to counter the quality and capability of your weapons, which means you need to be able to keep changing your weapons so that they're still effective.
You know you have in Lea in the beginning of the book, Ukraine is producing one hundred thousand drones a month. The United States five thousand a month. That is so stunning. How can we not be doing that? Is there some technological difficulty like death isn't at our doorstep?
That doesn't make us do this?
All of this technology in when we invented, whether it's the semiconductor, even the drone. The drone is an American birthright. The Predator was the first operational drone of any significance. We then got in our own way. We said, you know what a drone is a flying missile, so we should itar control it. And then the FAA said no beyond line of sight operations, which killed the commercial market. I will posit to you, and it's one of the chapters in the book on how national security and economic
prosperity are two sides of the same coin. I'll posit you a world where if we didn't have these regulations, maybe General Atomics would have a consumer subsidiary that we would call DJI, that the entire consumer drone industry would exist here in the US, and we wouldn't have seded that to China. Having done that, we need to invest in the scale by buying these things and employing them, which is what we've learned from Ukraine. That number one
hundred thousand is actually data. At this point, they're building about four to five million drones a year, so you can kind of four exit number roughly.
Watching the ir War, I think, would you have changed in this apartment?
There has their head on straight around this. They are going to They have a great plan to scale up the production and consumption of drones.
Tie that into forced generation.
And how we're going to consume these drones and training exercises which will create a consistent demands. That's going to help us materialize the supply base that we need to produce exactly that quantity or more in the US.
Have you spending time at Admiral Mark Montgomery. He's a guest on the show often because he thinks the way to deter China is to make sure that they realize the Taiwan Strait's going to have a million drones in it, and World War three on the other side of Taiwan out east of Taiwan, they don't want to mess with our Virginia class submarines and our surface ships.
Have you had a chance to sit down with him and talk about this stuff.
I have not sat down with him, but I think there'd be a lot of agreement in the broad strokes of aproproach. I mean I do take a lot, you know, I always heed John Boyd's advice that you need the high low mix, and you know, the sort of flip and answer that all you need are drones. I don't think is right, but you absolutely do need drones.
Oh yeah, Now, I like the fact you bring in John Boyd and the udul loup. Let me also give you a hat tip for taking the time to confirm for the smart reader of Mobilized Alger Hiss was indeed a Soviet spy. You would know this, shim, but I've been asking first time guests forever. Was algabizo Soviet spy? Has a test about whether or not they know anything about history. Most people don't even know who he is. But I'm glad he's in here. I didn't know he
worked for that committee. Let me go now to the Colonel. Because Colonel Drew Cooker. Am I saying his name right?
Coocker kukor yeah, cuckor he's.
An amazing guy.
Tell people about him and Maven because he should get an American Medal of Freedom.
I call these founder figures heretics and heroes, because usually they have some sort of heresy that you know, the bureaucracy doesn't like and tries to kill them over, whether it's Rickover or even Billy Mitchell, the founder of the Air Force. And then later we realized that they really were national treasures, they were heroes. And Colonel Drew Kukor
is exactly that we have a marine colonel. You know, he grew up a single mother, grew up pretty poor in southern California, and a Mormon household.
His only path to college was Rotzi.
After college, he joined as a man intel officer, served for a long time in a lot of places, but he had a seminal experience trying to evacuate the Izadi off of Mount Sinjar as Isis was closing in on them, and you know, there was a human error made along the way where a young marine thought they saw an RPG and waved off the helicopters from landing and ex filling these people, and as a consequence, about a thousand people were enslaved, raped and tortured over the ensuing number of years here.
And he always felt there ought to have been a.
Way for technology to provide overwatch and support and make this possible. Some number of years later, he was given the opportunity to go deep in the bowels of the basement of the Pentagon and start Project Mademan and Project Maven was the third offset, a kind of crash crash effort to bring AI to the Department of Defense, and he succeeded wildly, and because of his success, the bureaucracy.
Came after him.
The services wanted you know, they had their own AI projects. They didn't like that this was being done at.
The OSW level.
His success threatened other folks' equities along the way, But he was so good at controlling.
How do I deal with acquisition? How do I deal with technology?
He went to Silken Valley, he proselytized, he got a lot of American technologists involved in the fight here, and how do I deal with all of the bureaucracy that's coming after him? This poor man that they waged lawfare against him. IG investigation after ig investigation. I mean, maybe some of the most salacious details is he was accused of housing illegal immigrants in his basement and having bags of money that were given to him by contractors, and driving really fancy cars.
These chargers doesn't break, So seriously, we're going to continue this after the break kukh Or. Colonel kuk Or deserved complete egeneration on the radio if anyone didn't know, he's already exonerated.
Stay tuned.
I'll be right back. The book is Mobilized. Mobilize yourself and go get mobilized. Welcome back, America. I'm Hugh Hewitt. Seam has done a pretty good job of explaining Colonel Kukor's personality to you. You're going to have to read Mobilize to figure out how Maven should not have happened. Not in the military bureaucracy we have. But I came away. It eventually got to be a program of record over
at NGA, the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency. But seem tell me if you agree with me, I think the ig O to be abolished at the Pentagon. I'd rather have fraud, a little bit of fraud, than a lot of abuse of the ig process. And it seems to me it is abused at the Pentagon more than it's used.
What do you think about that?
You know it's a contrarian position, but I think you're more right than most people want to admit, you know, we every decision has an opportunity cost, and the opportunity costs of this sort of lawfair internally is you slow everything down, and anyone who takes even an iota of risk in the national interest ends up sacrificed their career.
So what you get is a system that at best is locked into mediocrity and doesn't reward anyone who tries to stick their neck out to do the right thing for their fellow uniform service members.
And you get fragging.
I can tell you stories of four star superb general officers who got fragged by an IG complaint to which there was nothing, but they get knocked off their path, and because of the pyramid, they never get back on their path.
Not like industry.
Somebody files a bogus charge against you at Pallenteer, you'll fight it through and you'll still be running the CTO at Pallenteer. It's not how the military works. You're up or you're out. And so it made me angry. I want to go over to Andy Grove. I had no idea of his backstory, thank you for including it. In fact, I didn't know about David Packard. I knew about McNamara.
Everybody knows about McNamara. I knew about Forrestall because I read World War Two, but I didn't know about David Packard at DEPSEK, and I didn't know about Andy Grove. Did you intend when you started this to kind of give people a history of the military industrial complex and how it began to break?
Yeah, I did.
I wanted to remind certainly my fellow technologists that the history of technology in this country starts with the military. The largest employer in the fifties in Silicon Valley was Lockheed Martin. You know, we built the Krona satellites there, and that people like David Packard, who is a co founder of Hewlett Packard, served as depth SEC def and that there's actually a long history of connection. Of course, he was followed later on by Bill Perry, which a
lot of people don't know. He founded the first digital sigan company called Electronic Systems Laboratory in Silicon Valley before he ever came to government.
I did not know that there's an opportunity.
All I know about him is the Last Supper, And you kind of redeemed his reputation for me, because you know, if you're not really a geek, a military geek. You don't understand that there's a lot of stuff that came before the Last Supper with William Perry. But you lay it out so you're not on a vendetta with anybody. But you do give us the whole history of where the Pentagon began to break in sixty one up to now. Do you think it is healing itself right now?
I do.
I've never been more optimistic. I mean, more has changed in the Pentagon the last year than the prior nineteen years that I've been doing this.
Wow.
Wow, has the Iran War shown you anything that we were not ready for? Are you impressed by anything that you hadn't seen before?
Well, it's hard not to be impressed by the performance of our uniform service members here. You know, they really are better than we deserve. I think it only underscores a lot of the points both that I've made in the book and that I think the Pentagon is already aware of of the need to move very quickly on mobilizing, in particular to recognize that our industrial capacity is going to be determinative of whether the twenty first century is another American century.
This is also Jeremiah against overregulation.
I did not know that Peter Tiel had said that the bite and the atom were there was a dumble standards. Bytes were unregulated and atoms were regulated. But he's right. I was the land News lawyer before I got into the broadcast BIS for thirty years. And you know, sean regulation kills building, so it must kill defense building. And we've got to stop that if we're going to catch up.
Absolutely, and you it's compounded.
It's not just the commercial regulations that any normal company would deal with. You have the unique regulations the MONOPSI comes up with, whether it's it's cost plus contracting, and how they're going to audit you, all the compliance standards that are kind of byzantine and give you no leverage. We basically asked our defense industrial companies to become compliance companies that happened to make weapons occasionally.
And you also make an argument that the requirement sheet should come at the end and be reverse engineered from the product that made so much sense to me.
Is it being at all.
Received by the acquisition managers whose careers are built on requirements over at the pentagon.
Of the cases?
So yes, in broad strokes, which is to say that this team at the Pentagon has implemented a change in how we think about acquisition. We're moving to portfolios as opposed to programs, and in that portfolio you have a lot of autonomy and discretion of how you're going to accomplish the end goal that you signed up for, versus being constrained in the specific systems you happen to be, happened to have picked, or originally were funded. So that's
that's a great decision. It's going to increase discretion.
I'm coming back for one more segment with Sean Sankar. His book is Mobilized. Mobilize yourself and go get mobilized and you will thank.
Him for it. Can also order it from audible if you want to listen to it. Very well read. Stay tuned in America. I'm Hugh Hewitt. Welcome back to America. I'm Hugh Hewett.
I've fairly scratched the surface of Mobilize. I've got five pages of notes and I'm not even close to being done with it, So get mobilized for yourself. Sean, thanks for finishing with wild Bill Donovan. I was reminded of Winston Churchill and Professor Linderman when you did that. But I want to finish with Kevin Zenger because I've never heard of him before. Cleveland from warn Ohile, he went to Yale, did law finance, failed a couple of time,
and now he's got Divergent Technologies in El Segundo. First of all, why is he out of his mind in building anything in California? And then secondly, tell people about Divergent.
Yeah, Diversion is an entirely new additive manufacturer. So they actually have come up with these autonomous pods that take the design of what you're trying to do, compute entirely new geometries. It's quite elegant and beautiful, almost almost like alien when you look at it, which allows you to save a lot of weight and then prints these things. So now you can build the bodies of cruise missiles at a pace and scale with many fewer parts than you could anywhere.
And you can take these systems.
And distribute them, so you now have a distributed production capability that's much more resilient to attack. Now he started doing this for high end exquisite automotive, where the original market was, but in the present moment, in the context of mobilizing. This is the way to radically accelerate technologies like this, to radically accelerate how we produce it munitions, and to radically reduce the cost and time of producing them.
So what he's making is everything. Did I come away?
I came away with the impression that he can pretty much make anything with his DAPs model.
Just tell him what to build. Am I right about that?
That's right?
Yeah, parts for cars, airframes, you know, drone bodies, and they're much simpler. You know that they're made to assemble. They're designed for manufacturer ability. You can plug in component to put in the explosive, put in the engine, and you're ready to go.
Why is he in cal I'm very serious about this. I teach in California every other year for a semester, but I live in Virginia. I got driven out of California after twenty five years because it was so crazy.
Why did he start it in California?
We'd have to ask him.
I have no idea, all right, Next question, China has zero globally competitive enter prize companies.
Should we take great comfort in that.
Enterprise software companies?
And I think we should because you know, in the present moment, for some people, it's fashionable to be kind of down on America, to think, you know, our best years are behind us, or that everyone else is out competing us in I think nothing could.
Be further from the truth.
In particular, when you think about software, it's easy to think about software as a technical skill, but I don't think that's what makes software work.
It's a cultural skill because if it was a.
Technical skill China, India, they would have enterprise software companies that are successful in the world stage.
Isn't it strange that they don't?
And my argument to you would be this cultural skill is uniquely American. It actually doesn't come from Silicon Valley.
It comes from Iowa.
It comes from Bob Neys, a great Iowan who is the co inventor of the transistor. He was a co founder of Intel. And it comes from this culture rooted in a Midwestern sensibility, a willingness to play positive some games, an ability to collaborate over long periods of time on really hard work. He brought that to Silicon Valley. He invented the term open door policy. So many things we take for granted today culturally are actually deeply rooted in the American spirit from the Midwest.
That is a very inspiring story. Now I want to finish with the hypo that I gave you. We need a long range stealth drone that can carry a big payload. It's got to be able to launch from Florida and Texas and California and Alaska and New York.
We got to be able to move it around. It's got to be mass produced in America from many sites. Can we do that? And how long would it take us to do it?
Well? I'm confident we could do it.
I don't have the answer on Napkin math in the context of this interview yet, but what I would tell you is the way I would bet on doing it is how we did it in the past, which is to have five or six competing efforts to take the very best mavericks and innovators from both American industry and inside the government, the heretics who are latent waiting for an opportunity to do something great, and.
Let them compete on different ideas.
This is how we built the submarine launch ballistic missile think of it as Polaris today. But Admiral Raybourne had four competing efforts going concurrently, and he protected those efforts that the engineers could do the messy, chaotic work that is required for innovation to deliver for the nation.
Now, last question, it's kind of odd.
This week Sixty Minutes ran its story on the fact that American shipbuilding is a disaster, and we have gone over to han Laan, South Korea and ask them to buy the Philly shipyard and they're going to teach us how to make ships again. Then your book arrives mobilized last week.
Do you think.
Everyone has kind of recognized the problem and is singing from the same hymnal now on fixing it?
We're much We're certainly much closer to it, and I love to see that story. Sixty Minutes. They were also covering empty material and rare earth. So we seem to all be converging on the same set of fundamental truths and the realization that it's going to take motivated founder like figures to solve these problems.
All right, And this is a quiz, it's not really a fair question. You mentioned Leonidas in the book. You don't tell me what Leonidas is. What is Leonidas?
A cool name?
Best name in the book is it's a it's a system made by Epirus that is a counter drone system that is a non kinetic effect, so it basically pushes out an enormous amount of microwave energy that is like an electronic attack on the circuits of these drones that are coming at you. So it doesn't actually matter if it's one drone or one thousand drones. It'll make them just fall out.
Of the sky.
Sean, that's amazing.
How long did it take you to write Mobilize, because it's I know you had the deck and I talked to with you about the deck.
How long did it take to.
Do this better part of a year.
Well, congratulations, it's done very well in the best sellers list. That's going to continue to rise. Mobilize How to wet Reboot the American Industrial Base and Stop World War Three by Sean Sankar and Madeen Hart Scham. Thank you so much for joining me on the hu Huit Show.