Judging Freedom - Lt. Col. Matthew Lohmeier: Does US Have a Fighting Force?

Episode Date: January 29, 2024

Join us on a journey of discovery with Lieutenant Colonel Matt Lohmeier, a former Space Force member, as we traverse the intricate pathways from the inception of the United States Air Force Academy to the birth of the Space Force. Our esteemed guest shares his dynamic switch from fighter pilot to a key player in the transformation of the Air Force Space Command, illuminating the specific roles and exceptional responsibilities that distinguish the Space Force from its predecessors. We examine the structural fabric of military leadership in space and consider the implications of having a dedicated military branch to safeguard our extraterrestrial frontiers.The discourse takes a sharp turn as Colonel Lohmeier reveals his experiences with political bias and the stifling of diverse viewpoints within the military culture. As he recounts his perspective on the prevailing political ideologies during the Trump administration and the burgeoning of 'woke', we confront the precarious balance between military discipline and the liberty to scrutinize political narratives. We uncover the subtle infiltration of political correctness within the ranks, raising pivotal questions about the implications for freedom of thought among service members.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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Save $80 with code SPACE80 at Talkspace.com. Thanks for watching! Hi, everyone. Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. Today is Monday, January 29th, 2024. Lieutenant Colonel Matt Lohmeyer is our guest today, formerly of the Space Force of the United States Department of Defense. Colonel Lohmeyer, welcome here. It's a pleasure to have you. You, of course, are well known, A, for speaking your mind, a good thing, B, for being critical of the military when you feel the military needs criticism. And of course, some of that criticism resulted in, I guess we would say, the early termination of your military career, but for reasons that I think the folks watching and listening to us now would agree with you and probably applaud you. But before we get into that, just give us a little bit of your background.

After you graduated from the United States Air Force Academy, what did you do in the Air Force, and how did you get into the Space Force, and what did you end up doing in the Space Force? Happy to be with you today, and happy to talk about these important issues. I left the Air Force Academy and had my eye set on being a fighter pilot, and that's what I did. I left the Academy Force Academy and had my eyes set on being a fighter pilot, and that's what I did. I left the Academy and went to pilot training in Oklahoma, was able to stick around after pilot training and be a T-38 instructor pilot, and so spent several years teaching both United States Air Force pilots, future fighter pilots, as well as our allied partner, future fighter pilots,

how to fly jets. I left there and was an F-15C single seat fighter pilot. And after that, interestingly, had a transition into what was then Air Force Space Command, and later became the United States Space Force under the Trump-Pence administration. So I've had a little bit of a unique career, both in the flying community and in space. And when I came into the space career field, I ended up doing the space-based missile warning mission, which we do in conjunction with a ground-based missile warning mission. All of this developed in the space race during the Cold War. And from there, the Air Force sent me to get a couple of master's degrees,

and later I came back to command our nation's space-based missile warning efforts, which we do out of Colorado. What does the Space Force do, just as a technical matter or as a practical matter, different from what the Air Force does? Do they have different areas of protection? here. December of 2019 is when we wrote into Title 10 of the U.S. Code a new branch of the military that has to be a bipartisan supported vote from the Congress. It's not something that Donald Trump was able to do while he's in office, although he was a champion of the idea. And people have, in fact, derisively referred to the newest branch of the military as Trump's Space Force. I'm sure he likes that and likes getting credit for it, and he deserves credit for that, but also it requires a bipartisan vote of the Congress. They voted it into law. It became a new branch of the military. And at first, at a basic level,

all of the defense-related missions that the Air Force and some of the other branches of the military, like the Navy, were doing in space and using space assets was brought over under the umbrella of the new very small branch of the military that we call the United States Space Force. And at a secondary level, let's put it that way, it's also been after the stand-up of the Space Force that we have created new offices, new so to speak that will be responsible for other national security missions that the american people probably haven't yet heard of and will in the next five years but basic things like the gps signal on your phone that most americans just use kind of obliviously that's been provided to you free of charge by the United States Air Force

previously, and now Space Force, men and women in uniform in a small little office in Colorado Springs, Colorado. We have space-based missile warning, like I mentioned. We do strategic communications and any other number of missions that both directly impact warfighters downrange and support warfighters in various branches of the military who are responsible for conducting conflict abroad. Is the Space Force a combat entity? Does it engage in violence against adversaries? Like all of our branches of the military, the Space Force is responsible for what we call OT&E. It's organizing, training, and equipping Space Forces. We have combatant commanders that are responsible for warfighting.

And so when any branch of the military, like the Air Force or the Army or the Space Force or the Marine Corps, properly train, organize, and equip their forces to be combat ready, and the Space Force does do that, we then provide control of those forces to the combatant commanders. So one of the things that's most confusing, I'll give you just one example of this, we've got a Space Force general officer who's in charge of the Space Force and responsible for organizing, training, and equipping troops. But we've had, up until very recently, an Army general who's been in charge of the combatant command related to space, and that's General Dickinson. And he is responsible for warfighting using space assets and troops. It's a really interesting dynamic. I am sure, I am sure, since one of my brothers went to the Air Force Academy, when you were there,

they told you the army doesn't know anything about air and space. They're just boots on the ground. They're just, well, the idea was, you know, you get a branch of the military that is solely responsible for some particular domain of war fighting, let's say. And so the Air Force, since 1947, has been almost exclusively focused on the air domain. Of course, it has effects in all of the domains. And the Space Force, one of the strong arguments for the creation of a new branch of the military for space, was that it can be responsible exclusively or almost exclusively for the space domain. And it can have congressionally confirmed and appointed leaders who are responsible

for the budget of that branch of the military instead of always pilfering funds from Air Force programs for space assets. Got it. Is the United States military a combat ready entity today? Generally speaking, all the branches. I'm going to break up your question into a couple of different parts. I'd say first, it depends on the type of combat you're referring to, because there are different types of conflict, different modes of conflict. Whereas we transitioned out of great power competition during the Cold War to more of a desert combat in the deserts that's been very hard on our machines and has deteriorated our troops focus understanding of and ability to wage great power competition and

we've been pivoting away from wars in the desert on a grand strategic level for the past several years and into the mindset of great power competition once again. And so that's one way of answering your question is that we've really, not to say nothing of some of the cultural aspects of the current military structure, which we'll probably get into, just simply from a training perspective and from a mindset, the United States military has really been out of the mindset and training mode of preparing for great power competition, which are on the world stage and in the international space, our greatest competitors, not boots on the ground jihadis in the Middle East, for example. Now, another way to answer that question is by talking about some of the cultural aspects of our current military workplace that have been eroding both morale, unity, readiness, lethality, recruitment, retention over the past several years. And I've been interested and waiting on a new report that the Heritage Foundation puts out annually.

It's an independent assessment of U.S. military strength. Last year, overall, the Defense Department was rated as weak by the Heritage Foundation. And then they rate each branch of the military weak or very weak, or I don't know what the other categories are. They're not rating as strong. And what they mean by that... Go ahead. Let me just say one more thing here for 10 seconds. What they mean by that, and the way they define those terms is, is the United States military capable of waging a major conflict in more than one region of the world? And so, you know, when we look at the Air Force and the Space Force, it's really a good question. Is the United States military capable of waging conflict in the Middle East and in Taiwan at the same time? No, the answer to that is no, unfortunately,

at the moment. You have to question whether or not we're capable of waging serious conflict in any significant regional conflict right now. So are we able to combat China if it decides to invade Taiwan, for example? I'm not sure the answer is yes to that question. I'm not sure we're ready for that kind of conflict. Our troops aren't thinking about it. We've got very specialized teams that focus on that kind of thing, but that's about the extent of it. We don't have a military apparatus with the right leaders, with the right strategic thinking, thinking through those problems. Is there a cultural problem in the military today which you identified, articulated, criticized, and suffered because of that criticism?

There is a cultural problem in the United States military, and I'll sum it up very basically by saying you want your men and women in uniform, generally speaking, to be relatively apolitical. The reason is, as we're all aware, discussing religion and politics at the dinner table can divide families. And if you get your men and women in uniform arguing about political agendas, political ideas, policy decisions, social and cultural issues, wokeism, the LGBTQ agenda, race identity politics in America, then you're going to fracture and divide the force. That's exactly what we're seeing right now, especially in the past several years under the Biden administration.

We have a fractured force. Is the United States military political? And if it is, what are the origins of that? You're going to hate this. I keep answering in two different ways. Quite a right. Nuance matters, I suppose. The United States military, as you asked it, Is political in that policymakers and the political apparatus in a state determine policy aims, and it's the military's job to establish military objectives that will help accomplish or achieve certain policy aims, as you're well aware. So in that sense, and in that sense alone, the military writ large should be political.

But that's the job of senior leaders in their pursuit of policy aims on the world stage. Now, more to the heart of the matter and related to what we've been talking about, the origins of a politicized military workplace and a politicized military culture, even though the impulse or the trends have been working against all of us and against the federal agencies and against the military for decades, it's really not until in my own experience and in my estimation until George Floyd's death, when we saw a communist or Marxist cult-like spiritual impulse sweep across the country that, you know, the seeds had been planted for many years in the universities and elsewhere, of course. But we saw in the military in 2020 moving forward, that was while Trump was in office, President Trump was in office, by the way.

But we saw senior leader activists, very small portion of your military and young airmen and troops, soldiers, activists, use that moment in time to wield a kind of bully pulpit and to use rhetoric to politicize the workplace. And it almost, it was really startling how quickly people realized that if you want to tow a leftist party line, you're welcome to say whatever you'd like in the military workplace. If you'd like to disagree with a leftist talking point, an anti-American talking point, an anti-Marxist talking point, if you want to agree with anything that seemed to be pro-America, pro-1776, you'd be labeled something like racist, mega-Republican, alt-right conspiracy theorist, whether or not those things really characterized who you were as an individual or not. And so people started

to keep their mouth shut while left-wing bullies began steamrolling the military workplace. And people like me who tried to identify that overt politicization of the military workplace were pushed to the side. I was fired from my command and found my way to the civilian world. Why were you fired from your command? Not why does the government say you were fired from your command. Why do you believe you were fired from your command? We had created for ourselves in the military a climate of fear, and it was largely around race identity politics. The idea that the black man is oppressed by the white senior military leaders in many instances. And to call that narrative out as Marxist and to try to describe the Marxist ideological roots of the present, the visit moment we're experiencing in this country that is highly political, was to strike fear into the hearts of our senior military leaders.

And those who might not have even disagreed with me were afraid that if they didn't hold me accountable and fire me at once for speaking up about those things, and of course there's a big long story there, but we may or may not get into that. They were afraid if they did not fire me quickly and indicate to the Secretary of Defense and to the Biden administration that they were serious about holding conservatives accountable for the radicalism, which I'm not, by the way, then, I mean, not radical, that is, then their heads might roll. They might be scrutinized. They might be labeled racist. And I think we've been trained in the military to be yes men, and in many cases, for good reason.

We've been trained to be loyal to our leadership, and for the most part, for good reason. But when it came to a confrontation between a young lieutenant colonel, commander in the Space Force who was saying, I don't buy the politics that we're being fed constantly in the military workplace, and being supportive of Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin's woke agenda and pushing politics down the throats of service members, they had a choice to make. And they made a very swift decision. And it was to cut me off and to stay friends with their chain of command and their leaders. And so I understand it. I just disagree with their decisions.

When you were a cadet at the Air Force Academy, was there this level of politicization of the Air Force that you were able to perceive from your perch as a student and as a cadet in Colorado Springs? It's a good question I try to reflect on, honestly. I don't recollect that overt politicization. I'm sure that if there were more politically astute, socially astute faculty at the academy, they would have said, hey, we're starting to see some things out of the Clinton administration, for example, like political correctness that is starting to tamper with the fidelity of the military institution. But I didn't notice that as a young cadet, and it wasn't for a number of years after

that that I began paying close attention. When you characterized the explosion of nihilism after the George Floyd death, you referred to seeds having been planted. Nobody could really disagree with that. Did you detect this wokeism or political left-wing orthodoxy in the military during President Trump's administration or only during President Biden's administration? I detected it during President Trump's administration, but not as a result of the politics of the Trump administration. It was a wave of cultural energy that happened to seize upon the federal agencies and the military while Trump was in his last year in office leading up to a presidential election. I shared feedback personally about the race identity politics that were aggressively overcoming the military workplace with a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He had been formerly my boss, and he him my concern that all of the claims of white

racism in the military were wrecking morale. I shared with him a bunch of feedback. He was in close conversation at the time with President Trump about the standup of the Space Force and in the aftermath of the standup of the Space Force. Interestingly, I can't say for sure whether they're related. I watched President Trump a month and a half later issue an executive order, it was in September of 2020, banning the use of critical race theory trainings in the United States military and uniformed services and in all federal agencies, banning the use of anti-American sex and race-based scapegoating. And we had a breath of relief for a few months because of that executive order, by and large, throughout the military. But that came back with a bang on January 20th of 2021, when by executive

fiat, the Biden administration reversed Trump's previous executive order from September of 2020 and put in place a new executive order that was, you know, I can't remember the title, but it was something like advancing equity and diversity and so on and so forth. You know, you get the picture. And at once with a bang and on steroids, all of these critical race theory rooted trainings came back into the military and began dividing the military workplace, almost as if it was like, we're really glad to be back in power. We need to push the agenda. And that's at least the way it's perceived by many members of the military. If you define a racist as a person who takes race into account as a dominant factor in making decisions, is the Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin a racist?

It's my view that he's racist, even if he can be friendly and personal with people. Because one of the things he said in his confirmation hearing was that we've got a white supremacist problem in the military and that we're going to root out radicals from the military. And based on all of the statements he made, he was talking about white conservative Trump-supporting Americans who served in uniform. That's the bottom line. There's no questioning that. As soon as he took office as the Secretary of Defense,

he put out a memorandum demanding, ordering all of the troops in the military to have a stand-down day to address radicalism. And the playbook that was given to every branch of the troops in the military to have a stand down day to address radicalism. And the playbook that was given to every branch of the military had a bunch of examples of white supremacy in it. I had troops coming to me. Oh, you didn't ask this. Let me just say I had a lot of unsolicited feedback coming in from my troops. People were discouraged by what they were seeing that was overtly political out of Lloyd Austin and what they didn't say at the time, but what's easy to recognize now is racism. It was an anti-white, it was just racism flat out. And we had people buying into that. I had very direct conversations with members of my base who bought into Lloyd Austin's thought. And they said that they've

come to learn that all whites are racist. And I said, well, that kind of thinking isn't acceptable in my presence or in my unit. And you're not welcome to share that with the troops in my unit. Well, for that, you get in trouble. How deleterious is it for military preparedness is this type of racial attitude, either so thin-skinned that you can't speak your mind or so biased that you think all whites are white supremacists? Let me pick two ways to answer your question. Again, let me speak first off to recruitment and retention of our troops alone, just the numbers of personnel we've got coming into the

services. Whether you are black or white or something else, whether you are Democrat or Republican or nothing, you can either buy into the trainings on the one hand and say, I hate my country. It's out to get me. The white man is out to get me. We've got a systemically racist country. I don't think it's worth defending. defending and frankly i'm not willing to lay my neck on the line to support it on the one hand and on the other hand you've got people who adamantly oppose those ideas who say i love my country i want to serve my country i've always wanted to serve my country and i hate that the military is pushing this political ideology down my throat i'm not sure i want to serve in the military i'd rather be free of that and be free to speak freely and i'd love to defend my country someday when people who love the country are in

charge of it so my point is that on either side of the political aisle doesn't matter your race people are discouraged by critical race theory teachings they're discouraged and disincentivized from serving their country uh because of these these DEI trainings and all of the political conversations. So that's one way of addressing it. And very briefly, the second way of addressing it is that it's a distraction and it's not a unifying distraction. So if you need to be good at driving tanks or you need to be good at maintaining aircraft or you need to be good at servicing our ground stations that receive signals from our satellites or from the world of cyberspace. You don't have time in your work week to be worried about or focused on race trainings.

And I'll tell you what, the last thing our troops who get deployed to the Middle East or get deployed downrange to Eastern Europe are thinking when they're lacing up their boots one last day to get on the rotator and go downrange is, geez, I wish I had another diversity, equity, and inclusion training. You know, they're thinking, how can I take care of my family at home while I'm gone? And how can I be as effective and lethal as possible when I'm down range so I can come home alive? Did the Joint Chiefs of Staff under General Milley have any influence on this, or did this just come down from Secretary Austin, no matter Armed Services Committee, oversight committees, you know, there were members of Congress who were obviously concerned about what appeared to be the overt politicization of the military workplace. And so they'd ask questions of General Milley, like, is there CRT being taught at our military service academies,

which he and Lloyd Austin denied at first? Why are we having drag shows at bases? What's with this anti-white rhetoric? And you'll recall, and a lot of American people saw this, General Milley say, I want to understand white rage, and I'm white. I mean, our troops hear that instantly. You've lost hundreds of thousands of your troops who think you're a total joke, right? And so now he's not in, his job is to advise the President of the United States as the chairman of the Joint Chiefs. And what is the man and woman in uniform see the chairman of the Joint Chiefs doing? Well, leaking stories to journalists and working book deals so that he can tell about what he's saying behind President Trump, the commander in chief behind closed doors and closed doors, and how little respect he has for the commander-in-chief.

That's the kind of thing that wrecks morale and unity in the workplace. It wrecks good order and discipline. It's a terrible example for the troops, and he lost the respect of a lot of people, whatever the good parts of his military career were for many decades. You do things like that publicly, and you now lose respect. Does the United States military need and is it capable of maintaining 900 foreign military bases around the world? You know, what's helpful in answering a question like that is having some context that's rooted in maybe international relations that's that's like meersheimer talk here here's here's a uh let me share with you would say the answer to that is no no that's right yeah the the the false dream of liberal hegemony and and we've had we've had a um oh we've had a geo-rategic advantage in the history of this country that's been really any king's or

president's dream. And I think it was Mearsheimer that said it. He says, look, you're surrounded, your land is surrounded by geostrategic advantage. Let's put it that way, geopolitical advantage. You've got Mexicans to the south, you've got Canadians to the north, and you've got fish on the east and west. Now, I know we live in a very different age in the 21st century with intercontinental ballistic missiles, hypersonic missiles. We've got cyber security concerns and an information war. And so we're not as isolated as maybe some people would hope we would be but the bottom line is a lot of the presence that we have overseas whether it's in europe or in east and southeast asia has been remnants of various conflicts we

we fought during the cold war in the immediate aftermath of world war ii for example in the aftermath of the korean and vietnam wars We've closed some of those bases over time. But I think I'll say it this way, honestly, because this is honestly my view. There are good cases to be made for both keeping our presence overseas and for withdrawing our troops from certain areas of the world. And that they're complex conversations that are based in strategy, if you have strategists having those conversations. and there are good arguments to be made on both sides The bot but the the terrible thing is when you've got bad leaders in place when you've got this administration in place or a

Deep state swamp that's very interested in keeping the war machine going Then it almost doesn't matter where you've got your troops and how many or how few you've got in place. You're going to be mobilizing the American military apparatus constantly, nonstop, ad infinitum to pursue some aim abroad. And so these are policy issues. And the military man in me that was trained to be relatively political would say, well, that's up to the politicians to decide those kinds of things, and not for me in uniform to decide. If a country asks us to leave, under international law, we're supposed to leave, even though, of course, we don't. What is the strongest, what country has the strongest military in the world right now?

There's an argument to be made that the United States has the strongest military in the world, whether or not it's employed with strength, whether or not we safeguard our economy to be, you know, Mearsheimer will tell you the measures of power in any state from a realist perspective is the strength of its economy and the might of its military, period. I mean, at a high level, those things are measures of real power. Now, we're wrecking both of those things at a rapid pace in this country. And I'll tell you from a grand strategy perspective, I'm very concerned about a combined might against the United States of Russia and China. Because individually, I don't think they, despite our weakness presently, would in their right mind want a conventional conflict with the United States. They're happy to watch us destroy

ourselves from within. But as we continue to weaken ourselves economically and militarily, which they're happy to watch, I'd be very concerned from an international or interstate conflict perspective of the combined might of Russia and China. And of course, there's any number of flavors to that. But I can tell you from a space perspective, too, Russia and China have a unique advantage over the United States in that domain. Colonel, fascinating. We'll have to resume this conversation at another time. I can tell from the comments that you're quickly a fan favorite, and I appreciate all your time and all your thoughts and all you did in your career. We'll have you back again soon. Thank you. Of course.

All the best. Wow, what an interesting and fascinating young man and fascinating conversation. More to come at 3 o'clock this afternoon. Kevin DeMeritt, how can you prepare for what's coming economically? And at 4.30, Colonel Douglas McGregor. Is World War III right around the corner? Judge Napolitano for Judging Freedom. Thank you.