Judging Freedom - Matt Hoh : What’s Wrong With the Navy?

Episode Date: August 25, 2026

Matt Hoh : What’s Wrong With the Navy?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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freedom than to live as a slave what if freedom's greatest hour of danger is now Hi, everyone. Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. Today is Tuesday, August 25th, 2006. Matt Ho will be here with us in a minute on what's wrong with the Navy, or is it a bigger problem than that? But first this. Today's headlines aren't just bleak. They're an indictment of a government that has abandoned the Constitution. You are witnessing the direct result of the Federal Reserve's relentless war on the value of your dollar. For centuries, gold and silver have been the ultimate shield against the state's favorite tools. Monetary expansion and runaway inflation. To protect your wealth is to protect your liberty. And you can do that with gold and silver. I own both and

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Matt Howe, welcome here, my dear friend. Before we get into military supply lines and logistics and things like that, has Trump run out of military options in Iran? Is this Secretary Bessent, orchestrated economic D-Day, a recognition of the fact that they have. no military options. There is it a trick? Is it just a delay for the Pentagon to restock? No, Judge. They don't have the option. This is why they tried sanctions for 40, almost 50 years. Didn't work. They went to war. That didn't work. So now they're going to try the economic warfare option again, and the same results will occur. I think it's important, Judge, to note that this is overall not an issue with the Trump administration, but the American Empire in general.

This is not something that's going to resolve anytime soon, the superficiality, the over-extension of the military, the corruption and rot of the military industrial complex. A responsible statecraft judge had an article today. Really terrific article talks about how 31 members of Congress have gone into the military industrial complex in the last 10 years. all these members, all these men and women who have been members of the Congress, have been on the House Armed Services Committee, Senate Armed Services Committee. So those revolving door, right?

This recycling within that ecosystem that is the military industrial complex, that's going to ensure that it's just not Trump. Whoever becomes president in January 29, whether it's Ruby or Vance or Newsom or Whitmer or Ocasio-Cortez or whoever, it's going to be the same superficial, over-extended, corrupted U.S. I'm glad you raised that as angry and disgusted as many of us are with Hegset.

He may be exacerbating it, but he is hardly the cause of it. The cause of this was before he was born. That's exactly right, Judge. That's exactly right, yeah. Wow. Wow. How low are military supplies? I mean, let's say worst-case scenario,

China uses military force on Taiwan and Putin bombs Paris. Worst case scenario. I don't think either of these things are going to happen. Could we fight two wars at the same time? Absolutely not. No way. We couldn't fight the Iranians for more than five weeks before having to sue for a ceasefire. And you just imagine the scale, the scope, the abilities, the capacity of just one of those countries,

Russia or China. Russia might be more limited as it's fighting its war in Ukraine, but certainly a nation like China, its ability to attack throughout the Pacific extend those attacks throughout the American domains, you know, including into the Western Hemisphere. And if you can imagine the U.S. running out of whether it's air defense ministers or land attack missiles so quickly against Iran, just look at the size of China on a map, right? You don't have to be a West Point trained military strategist to understand how if you ran out of weaponry in, okay, we'll count to July two weeks of combat as well.

If you ran out of weaponry in less than six, in less than two months against Iran, how long can you last against China? And it's just not the munitions, Judge, as we know. It's also the fact that the ships are breaking down, the planes are breaking down. If you look, if you were to look at what's called the order of battle, which lists which units for the United States military are in this war.

You looked at, say, like the fighter squadrons that the Air Force has there, most of those are what would be called composite squadrons because there's not any Air Force squadrons in the U.S., and I would say, the same for the Navy and the Marine Corps well, as well, that can deploy with their own organic aircraft. They've got so many aircraft that are brocaded and have made. What does composite mean? Some of them come from the Marines and some of them come from the Navy? Well, what would happen is that your F-15 squadron on your. your air base gets the call to go. And what you have to do is you have to ask, you know, call across the flight line to me

and my F-15 squadron and say, hey, I've got 12 aircraft, only six work on any given day. I need six of yours. And that's why we see this inability of the United States to continue this war, not just because of the lack of munitions, but because they don't have enough ships. They don't have enough planes. And why don't they have enough ships and planes? because, again, now we get back to the military industrial complex, and it's corruption. They produce weapon systems, vehicles, ships, planes, etc., that simply can't work.

And this is what happens. You lose wars this way. Wow. Let me get back to Besson for a minute. Is the United States now about to threaten other countries, including allies that don't go along with these sanctions? I mean, the Chinese banks are not going to go along with the sections. The Russian banks are not. The Indian banks are not. But what about Pakistan? I don't think I was the only person in the world judge who was underwhelmed by this D-Day announcement yesterday.

I mean, if this had been the actual D-Day, they'd be speaking German in Paris still, right? I mean, this was really, it's amazing why they allow them. themselves to do this. They know they don't have anything that's going to awe people, but they make these grandiose statements ahead of time. And it just further erodes any confidence or trust or believability in them. And I think to your question, though, any of these entities that have been sanctioned and in the threats to third countries through the secondary sanctions, the mechanisms are all there already to avoid those sanctions. So, you know, the banks that are created just to deal outside of the dollar system, right,

that would trade only in one or in rupees or in, excuse me, rubles, you know, those already exist. And if those get hit by sanctions, what do they do? They just open up new ones, right? They just open up new front companies, open up new shell companies, open up new banks. And so the mechanisms to defeat this, to go around it, to avoid it, are already there. And they've been around for decades. And we just see the Americans and the Europeans as well, because the Europeans love to use sanctions almost as much as the Americans do. They just keep pitching these new rounds of sanctions that really don't do anything because these are, again, these sanctions are about as, well, I want to say they're superficials to use military, but, you know, because they do cause real harm and they really do contract economies and cause devaluing the currencies and cause suffering for people.

but in terms of achieving the political effects desired, they just don't. So I think this is a lot of noise, typical of this administration, a lot of noise and very little substance. So Chris cut a lot of quotes from Bessent. One is more ridiculous than the next, but here is one of the more ridiculous ones. Cut number five. Today, at President Trump's direction, the United States Treasury has begun Operation economic outcast, an unprecedented campaign against the Islamic Republic of Iran and its

enabors. In the Second World War, D-Day marked the historic beginning of a campaign with our allies to target and drive the enemy from its positions, including those in third countries. Today, in that same spirit, we are launching an economic onslaught against Iran. financial connections around the globe. Our objective is to sever every economic lifeline that sustains this tyrannical regime until Tehran stands alone. Iran's fanatics devote themselves to death to America and seek nuclear weapons to do just that.

They have murdered and maimed more of our citizens and service members than any other terrorist regime on earth. Does he know what he's talking about? No, Judge, that's about the worst description of D-Day I've ever heard in my life. I mean, that was just, right? I mean, where they got that from, you know, and then as someone who, like, a lot of us, you know, my great Uncle Gabby, my Uncle Arthur,

they took part in the D-Day invasion. Uncle Arthur on the first day, Uncle Gabby, on the second day. And, I mean, so I think, for some of us, we take this a little bit personally. I knew those men. I love those men. And you know, now this man, Scott Besson, stands up there and uses their efforts, their sacrifices, what their friends sacrificed that day for his own personal ambitions to sell some, you know,

crackpot scheme to, you know, so the whole thing is just maddening. But I don't think they know what they're talking about. And I think what makes the even worse, Judge, is we just trip past $40 trillion in debt, right? We've got the bond market is on the verge of God knows what. We've got sick, more than 60% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck. I mean, we could just go through the whole list of things that Scott Bassett should be working on. You know, but he's not. He's dealing with this.

And when he does, I mean, to make it clear that I don't think he knows what he's doing at all, you know, because last week when the debt passed $40 trillion, his response is, oh, we'll just grow our way out of it. I mean, so these are people that are half-wits. At best, they're living in fantasy land or their conmen who are taking part in some kind of racket. What happened to the Navy when Iran destroyed its home port in Bahrain? They couldn't get toothpaste. It couldn't get anything. It couldn't get anything, Judge. Everything from toothpaste up to replacing SM3 and SM6 missiles, Tomahawk missiles, etc.

those ships had to go to Dioga Garcia to get those missiles. The American Navy can't replenish the missiles on a destroyer. So when people see the videos of those missiles leading vertically from the war ships, usually they're either Tomahawks or the SM3 or SM6 anti-air craft missiles, the Navy can't replenish those underway. So those ships have to go to port. And the closest port was Dia Garcia, which was more than 2,000 miles away. They couldn't go to Europe because.

just as the Strait of Harmoos was close to U.S. Navy, the Bob Almondeb, and the Red Sea have been closed to this U.S. Navy since the end of 2023. So it's just not this choke point at the Strader Harmuse and the destruction of the 5th Fleet headquarters in Bahrain that really hurt the Navy's ability to replenish itself and to conduct operations. But it was also the fact that the Red Sea has been closed off to the U.S. Navy, more or less, as a transit route. since the end of 2023. So, I mean, you start putting this down on the map and just seeing the failings of the American Navy. And then you tied into this idea that their ships, just like the planes and the Air Force, are breaking down.

They can't keep them at sea. You understand why the United States has so little military options here, if any, military options at all. How do they refuel? How does an aircraft carrier refuel? Well, the carriers are nuclear powered, so they don't have to refuel. They have to go every, I don't know how often it is, 10, 15 years, whatever the number is to go in to get their reactors refueled. But when they're underway, they don't need to refuel in that sense. But they do need to replenish or top off, essentially, their aviation fuels, right? So an aircraft carrier has approximately 75 aircraft. They are launching dozens and dozens of sorties a day. You can imagine how quickly they go through fuel. So that, That need for the tankers to constantly be there with the fleet to ensure that the carriers can conduct their air operations. Those tankers can also fuel the destroyers that are the escorts to the carriers while they're underway. And then there's also an ability to replenish things like toothpaste and soap and chow, you know, food, you know, through ship-to-ship transfer.

but the reality is is that since those logistic ships are going from rather than a few hundred miles away from port to who they have to service they're going a couple thousand miles away and then a round trip is more than almost four, it's almost 5,000 miles

actually, the time involved and the Navy because of a whole host of things including privatization has a lot less logistics ships than they're supposed to and the idea of then using a contract service to provide for the shortfall you have in your own logistics ships, all of a sudden

doesn't make a lot of sense to the contractors when it's wartime, you know, particularly this idea that they may get hit by an Iranian drone or a missile or a Huthi drone or missile. Why didn't the Pentagon planners and Hegseth's staff plan for, hey, what happens if the Iranians bomb Bahrain? Where are we going to get toothpaste? It's a, I'm just using toothpaste as an example. Yeah, yeah, no, but it's true. product we all use every day. Yeah, because this is the Navy, Judge.

They're supposed to be able to operate in wartime. This is their whole purpose. This is why we have them, and they can't do it. And it's got to do with the corruption, the greed of the military industrial complex, the lack of oversight by Congress. But I will put much of this, if not almost all of it, on the generals and the admirals. Over the decades, who have known this as a problem, have seen this as an issue, knew if you did any type of realistic planning or war gaming would have.

these these these issues come up and they did nothing about it and why didn't they do anything about it? Well, one, because we have a political leadership in the U.S. military amongst its general and flag officers that are craven, that understand the best way to advance to be promoted is to salute and go along with what the boss or the White House has to say. They learn that, these generals and admirals judges we have now. What did they come up through? Where did they, where did they spend most of their careers during Iraq and Afghan wars. And who did they see get promoted? All the generals and admirals who said, aye, I, sir, we can do Iraq, we can do Afghanistan, we can win here. And so they understand that the way to get promoted is to be a yes man. And then the other side of it is,

is just as we were talking before about members of Congress going to the military industrial complex. We know that about three quarters of retired generals go to the weapons companies when they retire. So that revolving door is there as well. So who are you? You're going to be the skunk at the picnic. This, you know, this trillion dollar budget within the Pentagon. You're going to be the one admiral, one general who says, hey, American taxpayers, you're getting ripped off and sacrifice your chance of getting a job at Raytheon or Lockheed or Boeing. You know, I mean, so this is how we get to the point. We have a Navy that can't conduct operations, an Air Force that can't do it. Again, a American military that after five weeks of combat has to say, we need a ceasefire.

Wall Street Journal has a piece out this afternoon. No, I haven't seen it. Chris just told me about it. The warnings that came before a war, now reaching the six-month mark after military and diplomatic efforts, President Trump pins his hopes on economic warfare. As you point out, the economic warfare has failed over 47. 48, 49 years. Are we even having negotiations?

Is there any communication between the United States and Iran through Oman or Qatar or Pakistan? Or are the Iranians running so totally fed up with Trump that they don't see any value in negotiating? I would imagine there are communications going back and forth, all indirect, all handled, as you said, judge through the Omanis or the Qataris or the Pakistanis. I would imagine, though, when the Iranians, you know, they see an email coming from the Pakistanis or Omanis, you know, the subject line is, you know, new American proposal. They don't race to open it, though. You know, I think they have that confidence that they are in control, that this war is going their way, that they do

have time on their side. I would caution them not to be overconfident or to be proudful. Certainly war is uncertain. In a year from now, we could be talking about this in an entirely a different way. But at this moment in time, the Iranians are in control this war and can dictate terms as they feel they need to. So I think you also see the other thing you see, Judge, is you see the Iranians conducting a heck of a lot of regional diplomacy. And you don't see the Americans doing that. So you see the Iranians either having people visit Tehran from the region or they themselves go into Iraq, Qatar, Pakistan, wherever. And having these meetings conducting diplomacy, and you don't see the Americans do that. And I certainly have the

understanding and the feeling that there is no efforts below the principal levels by the Americans. So whereas you may have had in other administrations ambassadors who were charged or capable of at least talking to the Iranians in an indirect manner, I don't believe you have that. Now I think everything that the United States says and does comes from that very tight circle at the top. And so you have an entire, you have no ability of the Americans to conduct any degree of diplomacy, except for what the White House authorizes. And I think that's entirely, you know, that puts you in this position. Well, how do you ever get anywhere?

You know, put yourself back into the mentality of the troops. Can these guys on the Abraham Lincoln or whatever ship it is, that don't have toothpaste that are eating meat out of a can. Can they complain? I mean, can you get in trouble for complaining when the complaint is legitimate and valid? We're not talking about complaining about a war.

That's Trump's decision. But can they complain that they can't live a life that is necessary of a human being by brushing teeth and eating adequate food? Well, they're not supposed to disturb good order and discipline, particularly while underway on a ship. And then in terms of voicing their complaints publicly, they can do so. But they have to do it in a certain prescribed manner. And we've certainly had that in the past. We had in Vietnam. We had in Iraq, Afghanistan, uniformed

army officers who expressed their discontent and their dissent against the war. And they always kept it on a policy level, as opposed to saying attacking Bush or Obama or LBJ personally. But it's a fine line they walk, but they do have the ability to do that. Just because you are in uniform, you do not sacrifice your entire right to free speech, as many people think that is not the case. The issue comes down, of course, is who your bosses are immediately above you. You know, those chiefs aboard the ship, the skipper and the XO over the ship, how they feel about you mouthing off, that's going to have a very direct and real

impact on you as it is upon them. I say this, Judge, I don't think there's going to be anyone getting in trouble at all. There'll be no repercussions, no consequences, nothing done to prevent another incident like happening on the linking in the future where these troops, where these sailors and Marines aren't get what they need to conduct their mission. But I'm guarantee there will be repercussions, consequences. There are discussions about how to prevent such information ever getting out again. And I think that is just not common to this Pentagon. That's common to, you know, all previous pentagons. But, but certainly, you know, what they're going through on that ship, it is onerous, it is stressful. There's a reason why the Navy does not keep their ships out that

long because the ships breaks and the crews become exhausted. And so these people who are out there running their mouths about how they, the sailors and Marines should shut up and just, you know, or we had it worse in Afghanistan or we had it worse in Vietnam. They simply don't know what they're talking about. other navies of other countries, sizable navies, go through this? Or do they not have to deal with the military industrial complex which wastes billions

and even trillions? I'm sure navies do around the world, but I think the idea being is that there's a commitment within the naval service to, you know, sailor and marine welfare. That is historical. There's a reason why, Show on the ships is supposed to be good because there's very little else.

And it's tough, hard work. You are basically at a prison at sea. You know, the idea that it is just like a, like, because you went on a Caribbean cruise, you might have an understanding of this. I've done both. I can tell you there's no similarity whatsoever. I mean, so, you know, I think most competent professional navies understand you cannot keep your ships and your crew at sea for that long autonomy.

and they try to ensure that doesn't happen. But I'm sure there are there's corruption. There's got to be corruption and all the other navies just like ours, Judge. Well, Matt, thank you. Thanks for the conversation and for your depth of knowledge about what these folks go through. It's an all-volunteer military. And there's a contract that the government makes with people and the government's not complying with that side of the contract. That's exactly.

Judge, I think that's the best way to put it, really. I do. Thank you, Matt. All the best. We'll see you next week. Thank you. Thanks, Judge. Sure. If you're watching us live in 34 minutes, Colonel Karen Koukowski, ready for this? How expensive is genocide? She did the math. How expensive is genocide? Colonel Karen Koukowski at 3 o'clock. Judge Nipal Tano for judging freedom.