The Daily Signal - #542: How the Obama Administration Made the Military More Politically Correct

Episode Date: September 10, 2019

During the Obama administration, political appointees, not military members, drove the agenda. James Hasson, who served in the military during President Barack Obama's presidency, talked to generals and other military leaders to get the inside scoop on what really happened in the military in the Obama era. We also cover these stories: • Border crossings are down, according to new government data. • Almost all U.S. states have joined together to launch an antitrust probe into big tech companies. • Vladimir Putin’s United Russia party suffered a major setback in a city-wide election in Moscow. The Daily Signal podcast is available on Ricochet, iTunes, SoundCloud, Google Play, or Stitcher. All of our podcasts can be found at DailySignal.com/podcasts. If you like what you hear, please leave a review. You can also leave us a message at 202-608-6205 or write us at [e-mail]. Enjoy the show! Release date: 9 September 2019 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is the Daily Signal podcast for Tuesday, September 10th. I'm Kate Trinco. And I'm Daniel Davis. Well, the military is meant to protect the homeland and win wars, but that's not the only goal that's been pushed on the military in recent years. James Hassan, a military vet who's served in Afghanistan, has a new book out detailing the social justice agenda that was pushed on the military by the Obama administration.

The book is based off of exclusive interviews with high-ranking military officials, and today James joins Kate for an exclusive interview. And if you're enjoying this podcast, please be sure to leave a review or a five-star rating on iTunes and encourage others to subscribe. Now on to our top news. There's been a significant decline in border crossers since May. Acting U.S. Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Mark Morgan tweeted Monday. During the month of August, CBP apprehended or deemed inadmissible a total of 64,000 and six people.

For July, that number was 82,055. This represents a decline of approximately 22%. Moreover, the August number reflects the decline of 56% since the May peak, which was a staggering 144,255, end quote. And while Morgan said Mexico needed to do more, he did single out Mexico's cooperation as a factor in the success in a briefing at the White House. Here's what he had to say. The government of Mexico has taken meaningful and unprecedented steps to help curb the flow of the legal immigration to our border.

And let's talk about a couple of numbers. Mexico has apprehended approximately 134,000 people so far this calendar year. Last year, 2018 calendar year, the entire year of 2018, 83,000, that's a substantial increase of apprehension that the government Mexico has executed. In addition, since June, Mexico has deployed thousands of troops. They've created a new National Guard within their country. 10,000 troops to the southern border, 15,000 troops to the northern border with the United States. Again, unprecedented support and cooperation. Well, almost all U.S. states have joined together to launch an antitrust probe into big tech companies, in particular, Google.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton announced on Monday that 48 states, along with the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico, had launched the probe, which will focus on Google's advertising business. Google has faced accusations of censorship as well as manipulating its search engine to direct users to its own products. Here's Paxton on Monday speaking outside the Supreme Court. And what we've all learned is that while many consumers believe that the Internet is free, certainly we know from Google's profits of a 177. $17 billion that the internet is not free. And this is a company that dominates all aspects of advertising on the internet and searching on the internet as they dominate the buyer side, the seller side, the auction side, and even the video side with YouTube.

This investigation is not a lawsuit. It is an investigation to determine the facts. And right now we're looking at advertising, but the facts will be. lead to where the facts lead. Google has said that it will work constructively with state officials. The back and forth over President Trump's remark that Hurricane Dorian at one point threatened Alabama continues. The Associated Press reports that, quote,

National Weather Service Director Louis Uchalini said forecasters in Birmingham did the right thing September 1st when they tried to combat public panic and rumors that Dorian posed a threat to Alabama. They did that with one thing in mind, public safety. said Ushalini, end quote. The National Weather Service of Birmingham tweeted September 1st. Alabama will not see any impacts from Dorian. Re-repeat, no impacts from Hurricane Dorian will be felt across Alabama.

The system will remain too far east. Vladimir Putin's United Russia Party suffered a major setback on Monday in a citywide election in Moscow. United Russia won 25 out of the city's 45 seats. That's still a majority, but it's way. down from 40 seats out of 45, which the party had previously held. That vote comes after a summer of controversy in Moscow, in which some of Putin's strongest critics were banned from the ballot. According to Politico, Vitaly Shklyarov, a political analyst who advised a small liberal party in the election, called it a massive achievement, adding that it's the first time that genuine opposition candidates

had been elected to the city council since the early 1990s. Next up, we'll feature our interview with James Hassan, a military vet who discusses how we saw during the Obama years social engineering going on in the military. So have you ever flipped on the TV and heard talking heads drop in terms like gross GDP or nuclear deterrence or single payer health care? And your head is just spinning and in a total muddle. Yeah, I am also there quite often, which is why I listen to Heritage Explains. It's a weekly podcast that explains all of the policy issues that we hear about in the news at a 101 level. The two hosts, Michelle and Tim, unpack the big policy issues in a conversation, and they bring in Heritage Policy Experts for insight. They ask questions like, what's going on over in Ukraine?

Why do we need something like a Space Force? Will we actually get those Social Security benefits that we're all signed up for? Heritage Explains gives you a 10 to 15 minute explainer that brings you up to speed with the biggest policy debates. and gives you laughs along the way. You can find Heritage Explains on Apple Podcasts, Google Play, or anywhere else you get your daily listens. And we put the full episodes on YouTube, if you're a YouTuber, so you can stream on your computer.

So go and check out Heritage Explains and get on top of the issues. So joining us today is James Hassan, a military veteran and author of the new book, Stand Down, how social justice warriors are sabotaging America's military. James, thanks for joining us. Hey, thanks so much for having me. Okay, so first off, you're a veteran yourself. When did you join? Why did you decide to join? What branch?

So I was an Army officer, and I did ROTC through Notre Dame, the University of Notre Dame. So I commissioned as a second lieutenant in the Army in 2011, and then kind of rode that out through almost the end of Obama's second term. And I come from a family with military background. My grandfather was a Marine Corps, Lieutenant Colonel, and I have five or six cousins right now on active duty. across all four branches. So it's, and all of my mom's brothers all serve. So it was kind of a tradition, at least in the last few generations. And I just wanted to get back and serve and kind of be the type of person that I saw

my grandfather be. And were you deployed during those years? Yeah, I went to Afghanistan, eastern Afghanistan, so it was Coast Province and Nangar province. So they're kind of both in the Aftak border area. They're very friendly over there. Not at all. But it was good.

And, you know, I learned a lot. But one of the things that also hit me was while we were preparing to deploy, and, you know, during my time just across the military in general is that we spent so much time doing things that had nothing to do with our actual job, whether it's your equal opportunity training or PowerPoint training on all kinds of different things. and, you know, now they had implicit bias training. And, you know, the first thing that you think about, if you're a military leader, kind of whether in the Army or anywhere else, when you step off the plane and your boots at the ground for the first time,

you think, all right, are you ready for this? Did we do enough to prepare? And you as a leader especially feel that way. You think, did I do enough to make sure that my soldiers are ready for what we're doing? and time isn't fungible. So when you're spending all this time focusing on, you know, these social justice demands, that's time that you can't even use doing what you really need to do. So I decided to write the book in part because the army that I joined during Obama's first term

was nothing like the army that I left towards the end of the second. And I think the military in general is such an opaque institution from the outside sometimes that I think the American people are kind of in the same. dark a little bit about what all of these policy changes and cultural changes implemented by the progressive activists in the Obama administration are really doing. Yeah, and I think that's one thing that I found really interesting about your book. I mean, you have a number of, you know, on background interviews where you talk to military members and you say like they're not comfortable talking to the media, which, you know, the daily signal

we found that they're not supposed to. They don't want to dishonor the institution. Totally makes sense. Yeah. But, you know, I think for people like me who don't have a connection to the media. military, it's often like, well, what are they really thinking? And I want to get to the meat of the book, but I'm curious, like when you were doing stuff like this implicit bias training and all this other, we're soldiers sort of kvetching about this behind the scenes with leadership? Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.

Oh, yeah. Absolutely. And it's, yeah, it's a morale killer in some ways, too, because you sign up to do a job and you know that you have a mission. And if you're going to go overseas, then, you know, you have a deadly serious mission. But then basically all of these other things, you know, Kavetching is probably a good term. It just shows that the political appointees that are in charge of you don't take the mission as seriously as you do, or at the very least, have a different idea what that mission is. Okay. So let's talk about the book. Sounds good. So you get into the political correctness that's infecting the military. And one of the examples that you put in stand down is generals told you the Obama administration was focus on identity politics. What did you mean by that?

Well, they were focused more on accomplishing stated social goals versus simply focusing on the military sole job, which is to fight and win wars. So I interviewed scores of sources for the book. And a number of them were people like two or three star generals who were in the room when these decisions were being made. And what they would tell me is that we never got, you know, coming from the White House, the administration, we were never getting guidance about, you know, hey, we want to have this. many brigades ready or like tell us to your, the status of the troops. It was all simply focused on basically things like the transgender policy or integrating, creating gender neutral infantry units over the objections of the commandant of the Marine Corps and the chairman of the joint chiefs. So basically, you know, to pull one quote, someone said, you know, we got a lot of direction

about, you know, it got a lot of direction from the White House, but none of it had anything to do with war fighting. I think that kind of sums it up. Seems slightly problematic. Right. So you also talk in the book about how military academies are changing. Yeah. What's going on there? Well, so it's kind of a two-prong problem, and they feed into each other. So one is we generally or have a, you know, you have a progressive administration, and that can force changes.

And second, the academies now are increasingly run by civilian professors rather than military instructors. And that started during the Clinton administration, but it kind of really expanded during the Obama administration. And I don't know. get to why that's problematic and how that plays out in a minute. But just as an example, the West Point was 2 to 3% civilian professor in the early 90s. And now it's 25. And now one out of every three instructors of the Air Force Academy are civilian instructors.

And that plays out in really detrimental ways coming from all the interviews that I've spoken with. A lot of them were academy grads. And like I said, I wasn't, but I'm channeling their thoughts. Because the professors don't have the same background, and they don't, by and large, a lot of them view it only as if, you know, students are students, as if they're teaching at any other university. So to give an example from the Naval Academy, and I think this kind of feeds maybe away from the civilian professor thing and more into those cultural changes. but one of the things that I published in the book was a number of pictures of safe space signs outside instructors' doors at the Naval Academy, both military and civilian. And it's not all, but it's a decent number. And among other things, they say that the instructors have taken a course called Trans 101, which is a sensitivity course put on by contractors from Google.

But that played out across all the academies. So West Point, for example, now has a diversity and inclusion studies. minor, and it's chaired by three civilian professors who have stated that the goal of that minor is to be like the diversity and inclusion studies minors at their peer universities like Ivy Leaks. And one of the co-chairs, as a West Point professor, of that minor, conducted focus groups of West Point cadets about the Obama administration's transgender policy. And when a number of cadets, in particular a number of large amount of female cadets,

raised issues regarding privacy because open-bay showers or the implications of evaluating a biological male according to physical readiness standards for biological females, basically all of kind of the main reasons why this is an issue. The professor just concluded more education is needed for cisgender cadets to be more quote, gender, cosmopolitan. And, you know, you don't send people to West Point to become more gender or cosmopolitan. You send them to West Point so they can prepare to lead soldiers. And you also mentioned the book, and I thought this was really fascinating because we're having

such a huge fight over American history culturally right now, that even the history classes were affected. Is that right? Yeah. So, you know, I spoke with Professor, Lieutenant Colonel Robert Heffington, and he had written a kind of a scathing, open letter. He was graduated West Point, and then he taught there for a professor. while and then he left. And he talked about how even kind of the history classes had been, you know, revamped.

So there was a greater focus on, you know, divisions between Americans, everything through the lens of gender and class and everything else. And you mentioned history. And one of the history professors at West Point was a man named Rashid Hussin, who served as a mentor to, you. And you mentioned history. to Spencer Rapone, who's the infamous commie cadet. And I was able to get the backstory on all of how a guy who served in the 75th Range Regiment goes to West Point and eventually leaves West Point and avowed Marxist. How does that happen? Yeah, that doesn't seem like what you're going. Right, right.

It's not what we're shooting for. And basically, Hussin was his academic advisor. and he would say, well, my job is to kind of help him along his intellectual journey. So at one point he bragged to Rapone's military advisor that, you know, Spencer is experimenting with Marxism, as if this was a great thing. And the military instructor reported it kind of up the chain, but got crickets in return. But that's, you know, when you have instructors who are, you know, to give you one more example, just because it's my favorite,

One, another West Point, civilian professor, compared West Point to Hogwarts in this long, the Harry Potter, you know, and said, well, students are students. They're not carrying wands. They carry, you know, guns, but it's pretty much the same thing. And it talked about learning about the cadets experience from them, which is really you're there to teach cadets. So that's probably a long rambling answer of, you know, cultural issues that have seeped in the academies, and it's a big deal. Yeah, I would think it's a big deal because, I mean, again, not having any personal experience with those. But, I mean, if you're potentially putting your life at risk for your country, not that America's always been perfect.

But it seems like you might want to know about some of the good things America has done and why it's worth fighting for. Yeah, absolutely. And you're not helping anybody by creating safe space. You know, there are no safe spaces in Afghanistan. All right. So to switch gears a little bit. So the Obama administration, and you alluded to this, they made a huge change in the military by allowing transgender troops to serve openly. How did this come about and did the military get an actual chance to weigh in before this change came about?

So this was absolutely a push for the Obama administration and particularly for some of the political appointees in their Department of Defense. So Eric Fanning was the Secretary of the Army and Deborah James is the Secretary of the Air Force. And both of them long before the Pentagon supposedly completed a study showing, hey, this is really not going to have a big or a fact. They were already pushing for that change. So it was on their outside activist groups pushing for it. So it was definitely activist driven. The Obama administration then created this working group to study the issue and they commissioned to study through RAND. But if you actually go and look at the RAND study that said, oh, this is only going to have a minimal impact on readiness,

which is problematic in its own because we shouldn't do anything that has any bad impact on readiness. But they concluded, oh, it's only a minimal impact. The study was actually just conducted by, again, activists who already knew the conclusion that they wanted, including one of the members was somebody from the Obama National Security Council who left the Obama administration to then go to Rand conduct a study telling the Obama administration that they can do what they wanted to do. So that was a significant thing. Right? I know, right? But there are two main problems. And the first one is simply just a readiness issue. according under the Obama administration's policy, you could serve according to the physical fitness and body composition standards designed not for your biological sex, but of the gender that you identify with.

So the military has very specific physical fitness standards for males and females just based on biological differences. So if you're an 18-year-old male soldier with 21% body fitness standards. fat, you're considered a liability and you're non-deployable. If you're an 18-year-old female soldier with 21% body fat, you're fit for duty. But under the Obama administration's policy, you could be an 18-year-old soldier who is biologically male and has 21% body fat, but identifies as female and is then considered fit for duty when that soldier wouldn't be otherwise. So already you have this, you know, for the same reason that we don't have, you know, biological males competing in women's weightlifting. I know heritage has been on kind of feeding that

Trump quite a bit and for good reason. And then, you know, obviously the second issue is that, you know, there are all of the privacy issues that are implicated. And to pick a good example of kind of summarize those, when the Obama administration was explaining this policy after they announced it. So they held a meeting with a lot of chaplains at the Pentagon and the senior chaplains and, you know, briefed them on a policy and afterwards a Navy chaplain who, was one of the most senior chaplains to the Marine Corps at the time, who was serving in the Marine Corps Commandants Office, approached the deputy assistant secretary of defense,

Anthony Curta at the time, and said, you know, basically expressed concerns. And Curta replied, look, there will be mixed janitalia in our bathrooms, in our birthing units, in our showers, and it's good for America. And, you know, this chaplain for the Marine Corps said, well, sir, do you really think? think it's going to make us better at fighting wars.

And Carter just said, well, that's the way it is. And, you know, the Trump administration, to its credit, I actually found a good compromise in terms of you can be open about, you know, how you identify, you could be open about how, you know, who you are and live however you want when you're not on duty. But when you're on duty, when you're in uniform, you have to comply and meet the standards designed for your biological sex. And you got into this a little bit in the book, and I just found it really interesting.

I think with these transgender issues, one of the things we see discussed the most is, like, how much privacy are we talking? You know, obviously different bathrooms and different dressing rooms have different, you know, door formations. But you were saying in the military, we're talking extremely close quarters, right? Oh, yeah. Absolutely, yeah. And it really depends on the facility. But you have some modern ones that you'll have maybe a little more privacy, but it depends on the facility. but I mean, a lot of times an open-based shower will resemble like a prison cell with six showerheads.

I mean, you're crammed in together pretty closely. No, no, no, no. Okay. So when you talk about, you know, having mixed genitalia and different showers, like you're not talking about somebody using a stall and then walking away and, you know, somebody else coming in after them, you're talking about, like, very close and personal all the times. You also got into the Obama administration allowing women to fight in combat, which was in 2015. And one of the things that I found was interesting that you got into was there was this marine study that indicated putting women in combat was not quite the rosy reality that the Obama administration was saying it would be. What did that marine study show and how did the Obama administration just ignore it or what happened there? Sure. Well, at the outset, I think that the term itself, even women in combat, becomes as well well-in phrasing.

because women have been fighting in war since Molly Pitcher. And so I don't think anyone is, it was framed as if you had half of, you know, most of the military thought that women were somehow constitutionally incapable of being in combat, which just isn't the case. I mean, I will say Molly Pitzer had a dress as a guy. Okay. No, no, but that's my whole point. Is that like there are female Apache pilots who kill jihadis with 50 millimeter guns linked to their helmets.

So really the question is about, there's 3% of the military in their infantry units that have to put up to 100 pounds in their back and walk 12 miles at a time. And then maybe you get in a firefight when you get there. And so when the Obama administration announced that it was going to change a policy, the Marines said, hey, just give us a year. Let us do a study. Let us figure out whether this makes us more effective. If it does, we'll do it. If it doesn't, we don't want to do it because making us less effective. puts our Marines in greater danger.

So they went out to 29 poems in California, and they evaluated all-male infantry squads versus mixed-gender infantry squads on an entire whole host of different metrics and, you know, types of drills, everything. And everyone had heart rate monitors, and they had outside, like, data geeks. They called them the geek squad,

just sat there and crunched all the data. And so what they found is that the all-male squads outperformed, the integrated, you know, the gender-neutral squads, you know, by a factor of at least 80% or 80% of time. And one of the examples that I pulled from my books, they found that it took the gender-neutral squads at times up to 180, 178% longer to pull an incapacitated marine from a vehicle. And if that vehicle is on fire, you know, then seconds mean the different. between life and death, so minutes, extra minutes can be deadly. So they finished that and they presented it. And Obama's Secretary of the Navy at the time, Ray Mabas, just refused to even read it. And then told the Marines that they had simply chosen substandard female Marines to cook the books in their experiment,

which is a slap in the face of the female Marines who participate in the study. Yeah, they were thrilled about that. Yeah, and I talked to a few of them. They're not that thrilled. But another thing that they found also was that the injury rates were astronomically higher. Again, because you're carrying so much weight. So things like pelvic stress fractures were, you know, on order of like 700% greater risk. And so the other thing Marines said is, hey, you're basically, if you do this,

like you're going to deprive us of our best female Marines because there's not to be a substantial number won't serve full to many years because the injury rate is just that much higher. But the Obama administration didn't listen and overruled the Marine Corps. And it was telling that usually when you have a monumental policy change like that, you'll have the Secretary of Defense announcing the policy and it'll appear with the chairman of the Joint Chiefs or all of the Joint Chiefs. And none of them went out with Secretary Ash Carter when he made the announcement, which is a pretty clear sign that they were not on board. And in fact, they weren't.

So. Okay. So they won't speak to the media, but if you don't see them at these PR junk, that's the sign. It's a little bit subtle Pentagon messaging at times. Just like it when people are blunt. Okay. No, no. So climate change.

It was no secret. The Obama administration was very into being green. And you write that that affected the military. How so? Yeah. So there are two ways. So one, again, time, resources, not always fungible. and it's not just the idea of, hey, climate change exists,

or it was the idea that the military should be kind of harnessed to fight climate change, rather than, say, fighting ISIS. And one interesting, mentioning those two factors, Ben Rhodes, who is in Obama's administration at one point in 2015, refused to say that ISIS was a greater threat to Americans than climate change. And that was December 28th. 2015. And December 29th, 2015, the San Bernardino ISIS shooting happened.

It's just interesting juxtaposition of... But the weird thing is, in retrospect, Rhodes almost sounds reasonable that he wasn't comparing it to World War II. Right, I know. We're all going to go in 12 years. Right, exactly. It wasn't... Anyway.

Right? And it's how far the 2020 windows shifted for sure. But yeah, so the Navy started at something called Task Force climate change. And that was... So Ray Mabas, who was the Secretary of the Navy. for all eight years during the Obama administration was an environmental activist before he became Secretary of the Navy. So we kind of just imported that mindset in there.

So they were trying to run ships on biofuels made from chicken, grease, and algae, and they called the Great Green Fleet. And they invested this whole host of money into basically trying to make green, or converting battleships to run on green fuel. While the ships themselves are falling into disrepair. So I spoke to a three-star Admiral who was actually forced out for disagreeing with Mabas towards the end of Obama's second term. And, you know, he said, you know, he's so worried about green fuel.

But meanwhile, the ships are supposed to be running them are falling apart at the pier. This, you know, this makes no sense. And the other book's kind of littered with small examples of the prioritization of that versus the things that the military should be doing, which is simply preparing to fight and win wars against the nation's adversaries. Right. And also, I mean, I know the Heritage Index of Military Strength shows that it's not like we're in such a great position that we have time and money to spend on climate change. I mean, that would be a different argument. Right, exactly. And so I cited the Heritage Report in my book because we're at the smallest level since World War I and in some parts of the force.

and yet we're spending billions and billions of dollars on these, you know, green initiatives that in the grand scheme of things, even if your goal is to reduce carbon emissions are not even a drop in the ocean. You think China and, you know, Russia and all these other countries are focusing their defense dollars on, you know, buying carbon credits. That would be awesome if they did. I wish they would. So you've mentioned this several times, and it sort of, you've mentioned this several times, and it sort of, have ran throughout the book, Stand Down, the tension between the political appointees and the military.

And I mean, I know you only served during the Obama administration, but I'm wondering, do you have a historical perspective? Because I would assume that generally there's some tension. Right. But was it sort of at an unprecedented level? So that's something that I tried to go out of my way to find, because I think there always will be some disagreement about some things. You know, every human beings always disagree.

and sometimes political motives can be different than, you know, military motives. So when I spoke to a lot of those generals and admirals, that was a question I asked. I said, you know, how did things shift from 2008 to the 2009 to 2017 era? And they said the difference was that they just simply weren't listened to. And basically the Obama administration's political ideologues knew what they wanted to achieve and they weren't really interested in hearing the military.

I mean, you could push back, but only to a point. And that's what they said. So I asked, I asked an admiral whether or not Ray Mabas, who had been,

Secretary of the Navy, had been receptive to his and his peers professional judgment. And he said, he just laughed. And he said, no.

He had no use for us unless we said, yes, sir, yes, sir, three bags full. And that kind of sums it up. Okay, so we're not the only nation

where political correctness and the military are intersecting. You talk about Australia, the UK, I think some others. What's going on in other countries? And is there stuff that we should sort of see as a warning sign? I'm glad you raised that point because I pointed to specific examples in the UK and Australia to kind of just say like, hey, this is where this leads. And in a lot of ways, the PC culture that you see in Europe and in the UK, especially in Australia is 10 years ahead of us, just culturally speaking in general. So the UK has removed man from all of their titles because, so they don't longer have infantrymen, they have

infanteers. And they spent all this time updating all of their manuals, removing the term man from all of them and revamping all of their, you know, revamping their buildings. Wow. And then, you know, they have instructions on, you can get trouble for improper pronoun use and, you know, not being sensitive to people's pronouns. And so. And does that go? Do they have people who are identifying as like non-binary in the military in these countries?

or are we just talking he and she? We're talking, you know, kind of across the whole. Okay, because I know there's like Z. Yeah, there are an ever increasing number of pronouns these days. Is there anything besides the pronouns we're seeing? Yeah, I mean, there's that cultural, you know, those cultural issues, but, or, yeah, but then they also have adopted kind of the same policies. And it really, at a time when they're, you know, the militaries are also falling into some of the disrepair and the states.

that ours is. And so you look at kind of the major powers of the Western world, and what are we focusing on? We're making sure that we're sensitive about pronoun use. We're making sure that we remove the word man. We're making sure that we're not too gendered, apparently. And meanwhile, China's not doing that. There was a study out the other last week about how China now is the most dominant power in the Pacific.

And if we got in a war with China, they would have a decisive advantage, at least in the Pacific in the near term. And what were we doing while they, we lost that advantage over the last eight years? Well, you know, take a look at the Obama years. That's what they're focused on. They weren't focused on doing what they needed to do to make sure that we keep the mission safe. A lot of these changes occur during the Obama administration, as you've stated. Has the Trump administration been rolling some of them back, any of them back? And is, okay, if it's just some of them, is there more room for improvement or? Yeah. Yeah. So I think, and the last chapter.

my book sets out a bunch of things that they can do to improve. And, you know, ranging from small things like, well, not small things, but things like bringing the VA Accountability Act to the Pentagon. So the VA Accountability Act allowed the Veterans Administration to fire basic low-performing workers, essentially, like, you know, people working in the VA who just bureaucrats were failing. The Pentagon needs that in part because there is a very, very strong and strong. trench bureaucracy in the Pentagon, and a lot of them are on board with some of these social

justice changes. And they're not shy about, you know, pushing back on things. So for a three-star told me an example of how a civilian bureaucrat literally told him that he, no, I'm not going to do what you said to do. And he said, because I'm going to be here in two years and you won't. And so we need to be able to get rid of kind of those toxic types. So that's one. The other, The second thing I would do is return instruction at the military academies to military instructors. And I think that prevents just the seep of what you see in the intellectual academic culture from just all of kind of the progressive craziness that you can see at major universities from just seeping right into the military academies the way they have. So that would be the second. And then the third thing is I would follow the Marine Corps study on infantry units.

but to give the Trump administration credit for one thing that they did do well, and they took a lot of flack for it, but was the transgender policy. And it was portrayed as if Trump one day just woke up and tweeted about it, and that was, and everyone was caught off guard. I mean, the timing, I think they were definitely caught off guard and the method, but the actual policy that they enacted began as part of a review ordered by General Mattis when he first became Secretary of Defense. and he said, you basically talked to the members of the Joint Chiefs,

and they asked him for a two-year delay in the Obama administration's policy. And he said, well, you know, why do you need a delay? Weren't you consulted when this was first passed? And they said, no. And so then he created a working group to kind of, or a review group, to see what kind of changes needed to be made. So Trump's announcement was portrayed as if the military was just totally disagreeing with Trump on this. But in reality, he may have jumped the gun in terms of announcement,

but it was actually a Pentagon issued review. And the policy that they settled on allows people to open about who they are, but requires them to serve according to their biological sex. Is there anything else you wished I had asked you about? Well, where to find the book? It's a, you find it on Amazon or Barnes & Noble or anywhere else that you normally find books. And the book is called Stand Down. Okay.

All right. Well, thanks so much for joining us, James. Thank you very much for having me. I appreciate it. Well, we will leave it there for today. Thanks for listening to The Daily Signal podcast, brought to you from the Robert H. Bruce Radio Studio at the Heritage Foundation. Please be sure to subscribe on iTunes, Google Play, or SoundCloud, and please leave us a review or a rating on iTunes to give us feedback. We will see you again tomorrow.

The Daily Signal podcast is executive produced by Kate Trinko and Daniel Davis. Sound design by Lauren Evans and Thelia Ramprasad. For more information, visit DailySignal.com.