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--:-- John Bickley: Former President Trump was heard saying recently to a room of his biggest supporters that whenever he has a question about the military, he calls the same guy, Florida Congressman Mike Waltz. Waltz currently sits on the Foreign Affairs and Intelligence Committees, but before that, he was a member of one of the U.S. Army's most specialized forces, the Green Berets.
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--:-- John Bickley: In this episode, Waltz joins us in our Nashville studios to discuss everything military, from the state of the forces under President Biden, and how they could be deployed to help defeat the Mexican drug cartels. I'm Daily Wire editor-in-chief John Bickley. It's May 26th, and this is a Sunday edition of Morning Wire.
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--:-- John Bickley: The following is an interview between Daily Wire Investigations editor Brent Schur and Congressman Michael Waltz.
--:-- Brent Schur: We're here with Florida Congressman Mike Waltz, who is nice enough to join us in our Nashville studios. Congressman Waltz, thanks for coming in.
--:-- Mike Waltz: Yeah, good to be with you guys. Pretty cool headquarters here. Thank you.
--:-- Brent Schur: So it was reported last week, and I've confirmed it, that Donald Trump told a crowd at Mar-a-Lago that when he wants to know about the military, he calls you. I don't blame him. You're the first Green Beret to be in Congress. I want to know what advice Trump is getting when he calls.
--:-- Mike Waltz: Well, I'll just say up front, it's not as though he needs a ton of advice. However, some of it is kind of what I'm hearing out of the Pentagon, what's this nonsense or that nonsense going on. I've talked to him one time, I recall, about testimony from the Secretary of the Army. This is Biden's Secretary of the Army, who one of her main goals is to make a carbon neutral army, not the most lethal, the most deadly, most feared, but the least carbon emitting army by 2030.
--:-- Mike Waltz: And I was walking him through this and then how she's put money in the budget for electric tanks as part of that, which he just thought was both hilarious and terrifying. So we talked about the, you know, Biden's electric tanks. We've talked about what's going on in Iran and going back to maximum pressure.
--:-- Mike Waltz: If you just drive down the price of oil around the world below $55 a barrel, not only is Iran's economy and their war machine on life support, so is Putin's for that matter. You want to solve both Ukraine and what's going on in Gaza. Unleash American oil and gas drive down the price of oil below a barrel and both of them are done.
--:-- Mike Waltz: Some of the stuff that's going on in the politicized military and how we got to get them back to being lethal back to being feared back to a meritocracy. I don't know, man. The last time we talked actually was about shipbuilding. He loves building things. He loves construction.
--:-- Mike Waltz: We were talking about the fact that, for example, just like manufacturing got gutted out of middle America, shipbuilding has all gone overseas as well. And even if he comes in in November and he said, we need a 500 ship Navy and we need to be back to the being a great maritime power. We don't have the steel, the aluminum, the wrench turners, the shipyards anymore, just by point of comparison.
--:-- Mike Waltz: China last year received orders for 1500 ships. We received orders for five. And these are like tankers, cargo ships, I mean, things you need to make the economy go. So I released a national maritime strategy on how we get back there, take his leadership to do it. But those are the kind of things.
--:-- Brent Schur: Okay. Yeah. Well, I wanted to ask about China. So if China were to make an aggressive move towards Taiwan, with our current state of the military under Biden, could the United States successfully stop China? And if not, what would Trump need to do? What would he need to build to make it so?
--:-- Mike Waltz: I think today, yes. What I worry about is two, three, four years from now with where the trend lines are going, I don't know. For example, China is cranking out ships at a rate of six of theirs to one of ours, and ours are getting old and dilapidated. They're on track to have a 400-ship navy. We're retiring more ships than we're building and heading towards 250.
--:-- Mike Waltz: They can concentrate all of theirs in the Western Pacific. Ours are spread all over the world, right? So those just by sheer mass and force of numbers, we're getting into a really bad spot. They're tripling their nuclear arsenal. They're launching more into space than us and the rest of the world combined.
--:-- Mike Waltz: Everybody joked about Trump's Space Force, you know, with all the space cadet jokes and what have you. It was actually very serious. It was, thank God he did it. I'm convinced that any other president, the Pentagon would still be dragging their feet. Wasn't until Trump fired the Air Force Secretary, who was resistant, and then suddenly overtweet, by the way, and the generals got religion.
--:-- Mike Waltz: And we now have a space force that is actually helping us regain that edge. So I think if we get him back in, then what do we need to do? Well, one, we just need a culture of lethality. Two, our dollars have to go a lot further. Treat the defense budget more like venture capital and private equity where you get results quickly.
--:-- Mike Waltz: And if you don't, you move on. And you have a lot of companies like Palmer Luckey with Anderle and others that are trying to innovate. They just can't break through the Pentagon bureaucracy. But we have to move quickly. The dollar has to go further. And we need to have a culture focused on winning.
--:-- Brent Schur: I just want to ask about a few other places where the military is needed. So moving on to Iran, increasingly hostile in the Middle East, through its proxies, and directly with Israel. Is there a military solution to Iran's nuclear program?
--:-- Mike Waltz: I think it's largely an economic solution. Dry up the cash. They're selling 90% of their oil right now to China. So it's quite ironic. China's getting cheap, illegal Iranian oil and gas. Then Chinese money is going through Tehran buying Russian advanced equipment that the Iranians will then use to defend their nuclear sites.
--:-- Mike Waltz: And then the rest of the money is going out to the various terrorist groups the Houthis Hamas and Hezbollah. So at the end of the day, go back to maximum pressure. Just a few years ago under President Trump, ISIS was largely defeated. Iran was broke and you had the Abraham Accords breaking out and the Iranian economy and regime was in survival mode.
--:-- Mike Waltz: And the thing they care about the most is their money and the regime staying in power. And as more you have them looking inwards and trying to survive economically, literally the less money they have to sow mayhem around the Middle East, much less finance their nuclear program. So we got to cut off the cash and it worked. It was working.
--:-- Mike Waltz: I think we should be doing a lot more of it, disrupting the supply chain. They're buying things illegally and illicitly all over the world. All of the components to make a nuclear program, where are they getting that cash? Right. And then even if they do, say they test a bomb, then they have to miniaturize it, get it on top of a warhead, and then start producing them at scale.
--:-- Mike Waltz: So there's still a lot we could do to shut them down economically and make sure they literally can't afford a program.
--:-- Brent Schur: Last year, you proposed authorizing military force against the Mexican cartels. What would be the goal and what would it actually look like?
--:-- Mike Waltz: It's not actually the troops marching across the border. You know, especially during the primary debates when President Trump has been saying it for a while, but then Governor DeSantis threw it out during the debates. It was actually a bill that Representative Crenshaw and I both introduced.
--:-- Mike Waltz: And look, we've done this before. We did this in Colombia. The media spun the whole thing as Republicans want to send the Marines into Mexico. No. What we're talking about is military resources, military support to law enforcement, customs and border patrol, federal agents.
--:-- Mike Waltz: They don't have spy satellites. They don't have drones. They don't have offensive cyber. So what would it look like? It would look largely like what we did down in Colombia when we took down the Medellin cartel, helping the Colombians.
--:-- Mike Waltz: We can also do that with the Mexicans. We can start disrupting their communications. We can start hacking into their systems. We can start disrupting their cash flow. We can intercept precursors. We can put secondary sanctions on Chinese firms that are knowingly providing the precursors to the cartels, knowing that they're going to kill 100,000 Americans.
--:-- Mike Waltz: And you know what? If maybe a missile flies through a window in the middle of the night, I don't know. But we want the cartels running scared. And right now, just so people know, they are fighting the Mexican army. This isn't like the mafia. This is like ISIS. They're a paramilitary force. They are heavily armed. They're shooting down aircraft.
--:-- Mike Waltz: They control about 30 percent of Mexico at this point. And they're fighting the Mexican army to a standstill, shooting up their vehicle, shooting up their helicopters. This is a paramilitary organization with billions at their disposal. And if you changed it from Jalisco and Sinaloa to ISIS and Al Qaeda, it wouldn't even be a debate.
--:-- Brent Schur: In terms of cartels running scared, I want to ask you about DEI and military because we've talked before about how it's hurt morale and it's hurt recruiting. Do you think it hurt our image globally? Do you think you know when Daily Wire reports on some nonsensical DEI program at the Pentagon do you think our enemies are reading it and laughing at us and less scared of the United States?
--:-- Mike Waltz: Well, look, I think first and foremost, militaries still respect our military capability, but they do not respect the current commander in chief. And you can have the most technologically superior military in the world. But if your enemies and adversaries do not respect and fear the person leading it and the political will to use it in the right way, then you see what we see right now, which is deterrence crumbling all over the world and our adversaries on the march all over the world.
--:-- Mike Waltz: And then you layer on top of that. I think that's not a nice to have, but a sad to have on top of when you see the current leadership talking about a carbon neutral military more focused on renaming bases and putting Chinese-made solar panels on them and then rolling out plans for electric tanks on top of it.
--:-- Mike Waltz: The no charging stations in Ukraine or Africa, last I checked. I think that adds insult to injury, frankly. And again, it's the trend lines of where is that taking us? It's having very real effects. We have the worst recruiting crisis right now than we've had since Vietnam. The Army missed by 45,000 soldiers the last two years.
--:-- Mike Waltz: That's multiple divisions worth. The Navy, if this continues, they're not going to be able to man ships. So, I mean, when they miss by 6,000, as they will this year, an aircraft carrier's crew is 5,000. So just to put it kind of in perspective, it's incredibly serious.
--:-- Mike Waltz: I am more worried about those men and women who want to jump out of planes and kick in doors, and yet they tend to come from military families. And when polling shows 65% of military families would not recommend their son or daughter join under this administration, that's going to have an effect that's going to take many years to dig out of.
--:-- Brent Schur: Do you think it's reversible though?
--:-- Mike Waltz: I do think it's reversible, but it's going to take a change in leadership. Polling shows that a lot of military families point to Afghanistan and that disgraceful, despicable withdrawal point to real lack of focus and purpose.
--:-- Mike Waltz: You know, young men and women don't need inclusion. They need purpose and they need mission and they need to have confidence that they're going to be ably led. And then also, you know, we just passed two measures. One, banning CRT, critical race theory in our military. Now we've just got to enforce it.
--:-- Mike Waltz: And then two, we're going to expand junior ROTC in high schools. And when you have young kids that are learning leadership, discipline, followership, teamwork, mission, purpose, right place, right time, right uniform, positive role models, they respond.
--:-- Mike Waltz: But we have to have a leadership that reflects that. And what we currently have is one that believes America is more a problem around the world and is that inherently racist and inherently misogynistic and colonialist reflecting the progressive left, then we have one that says, you know what?
--:-- Mike Waltz: You wanna kick ass and jump out of planes and kick indoors for the greatest nation, not perfect, but the greatest nation that's ever existed on earth, then come join this military. That's the message. I think when they hear it again, hopefully this November, then we'll reverse the trend.
--:-- Brent Schur: All right, awesome. Well, thank you so much for coming in, Congressman Waltz. We hope to have you back.
--:-- Mike Waltz: All right, great. Thanks.
--:-- Brent Schur: That was Daily Wire Investigations editor Brent Schur speaking with Congressman Mike Waltz. And this has been a Sunday edition of Morning Wire.
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