The Daily Signal - Congressman and Former Green Beret: Next Generation Is ‘Condemned’ to Conflict

Episode Date: February 9, 2025

After years of military service, and long before running for Congress, Rep. Pat Harrigan, R-N.C., and his wife started a family and focused on growing their business in North Carolina. The couple had “nothing to do with politics until Afghanistan came crashing down” in 2021.    Watching Afghanistan fall so quickly back into the hands of the terrorists that Harrigan had fought to defeat during his military service was one of the reasons Harrigan says he decided to run for Congress.     “Our politicians failed us,” he said. “Our military leaders failed us. And at some point, you just step back and you realize, if we're structurally so weak that we would lose Afghanistan the way that we lost it, we're just asking our adversaries to attack us.”    “I really do believe that the way that we left Afghanistan condemned the next generation of Americans to conflict,” Harrigan added. “And I want to do everything that I can possibly do here in Washington to deter that next conflict that I think is very likely to happen. And in the event we are not able to deter it, I want to set the conditions to win it because there's no substitute for winning.”    Harrigan’s passion for strengthening the U.S. defense industrial base began to take form during his years of military service, going back to when he was 23 and found himself in Afghanistan overseeing about 350 Americans, Afghans, and expatriates at a small combat outpost.  The position was “very difficult,” Harrigan says, but also a “very rewarding leadership experience that really shaped a lot of who I am today.” Harrigan, a graduate of West Point, returned to Afghanistan in 2015 after becoming a Green Beret.    The congressman joins “The Daily Signal Podcast” just one month into his term to discuss how the Trump administration can restore U.S. military readiness, and decrease wasteful use of military resources that is adding to the U.S. national debt.    Please enjoy my conversation with Rep. Pat Harrigan! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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We'd love to talk, business. From the stories of real Americans to in-depth policy conversations, we are going beyond the headlines to discuss the issues and events that have and are shaping this nation. Welcome to the Daily Signal podcast weekend edition. I'm Virginia Allen, your host today. Thank you so much for joining us. We'll be right back with today's conversation. Hey, it's Rob Bluey from The Daily Signal.

Want to stay ahead of the curve on conservative news and analysis? Subscribe to our free Daily Signal email newsletters. You'll get the latest headlines, detailed policy coverage, and exclusive interviews delivered straight to your inbox. Whether you're interested in our morning update, breaking news alerts, or weekly roundups, we've got you covered. Don't let the liberal media control the narrative. Sign up now at dailysignal.com slash email and join thousands of informed conservatives who rely on the daily signal to cut through the noise and get the truth. Well, I am so honored to for the first time, welcome to the podcast, Congressman Pat Harrigan of North Carolina. Carolina. He serves on the Armed Services Committee as well as being a West Point grad and a former

Green Beret. So thank you so much, Congressman, for taking the time to be with us today. Hey, thanks for having me, Virginia. It's great to be here with you. Well, I was fascinated by your story. You were 23 years old, and you found yourself in Afghanistan. You were overseeing a group of about 350 Americans, Afghans, expats. How did you get there? You know, I drew the short straw, one might say, but I was just selected by my battalion commander to take over a small combat outpost, as you said in the Argonob Valley of Afghanistan up north of Kandahar a little bit in Zobal province and had about 40 Americans there and about 350 various forms of Afghans and, you know, there are different constituencies

underneath my control and nobody on top of me for about 70 miles. And so, yeah, so a young 23-year-old was just thrust into this very difficult, challenging, but very rewarding leadership experience that really shaped a lot of who I am today. And that wasn't your first time that you were in Afghanistan. And after you became a Green Beret, you went back, correct? That's correct, yeah. So I went back for a second trip back in 2015 and 2016 after graduating from the Special Forces qualification course, getting posted at Fort Bragg at Third Special Forces Group. took a team from third special forces back over there during those years. And so that was also a very formative experience.

As many may know from the time frame, that was when there weren't very many people there. There were not very many special forces left. And, you know, things started kind of going downhill in Afghanistan. So it was a very, very kinetic trip. But I learned a lot. And a lot of my current political philosophy, as well as my, I would say, political military, philosophy was learned during that period of time. What were maybe, if you just put it, highlight, like maybe one or two of those kind of big lessons, takeaways?

Yeah. You know, one of the reasons I left the military is because it just got too political. We had generals that were not military generals anymore. They were effectively politicians. And then we had politicians that were making military decisions on the ground, specifically with rules of engagement. the authorities that we had, what we could and couldn't do. Sometimes a lot of that happened on the fly. And, boy, you want to really screw up a war, inject serious politics into it.

And that's what happened. Just didn't want to be a part of it moving forward and decided to get out. My wife and I started a company, and we grew that company, and we had nothing to do with politics until Afghanistan came crashing down. Right? And then I was like, good grief, you know. this thing, we failed. And our politicians failed us.

Our military leaders failed us. And at some point, you just step back and you realize if we're structurally so weak that we would lose Afghanistan, the way that we lost it, we're just asking our adversaries to attack us. And I really do believe that the way that we left Afghanistan condemned the next generation of Americans to conflict. And I want to do everything that I can possibly do here in Washington to deter that next conflict that I think is very likely to happen. And in the event, we are not able to deter it. I want to set the conditions to win it because there's no substitute for winning. That's a powerful statement, condemning the next generation to conflict specifically from the Taliban, from other terrorist groups that we kind of see that weakness and take advantage of it. From China, who are the players that you referring to that?

All of the above. believe that we'll be back in Afghanistan at some point in the future. I also think that you can see the world's been on fire since it happened, right? I firmly believe that if President Trump had been in office, Vladimir Putin would have never thought about going into Ukraine. Hamas never would have thought about attacking Israel. Neither of those things ever would have happened. And China rattling its sabers, increasing its military industrial complex and making great strides in their technological capabilities. I just don't think that that'd be the world that we'd be in today if we had had another four years of President Trump. But the reality is,

is we didn't have that. And we lost a lot of ground. The world is on fire because America failed to lead, period. And I like to say, when America fails to lead, the world burns, and the world's been burning. So those actions, what you saw, the fall of Afghanistan, that was enough to say, okay, I'm going to put my dislike of the political world aside. I'm going to come to Washington, D.C., and try and fix it. Be part of the solution. What are your top priorities when you look at, okay, if we have conflict in our future, how do we get ready for that?

What's top of the list in your mind? Yeah, look, I think first and foremost, we've got to take care of things at home, right? And so there's the immediate actions that need to be taken, which is the things that everybody ran on that we knew we're going wrong in the country, right? We've got a wide open southern border. we've got to close our border, provide for our national security. Second, we've got to get our economy back on track. We've got to get Tax Cut and Jobs Act extended so that our companies, particularly small businesses in the middle class, can leverage those tax advantages and grow,

create businesses, right? Employ people, pay taxes. That is an incredibly generative force for our economy, and we saw that in President Trump's first four years. And, you know, secondarily, we have got to position this country, as I said earlier, to deter the next conflict. We do that through peace through strength. But when it comes to programmatically, how do we accomplish that? We have to first truly re-envision our defense industrial base.

Okay. So let's talk a little bit about that. What would you like to see Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegsseth do specifically in order to build up that defense industrial base? Well, I think we've all heard, Secretary Hegseth has been saying we need to match threats that our enemies pose to us with capabilities that we develop. And what I would tell you is that the lesson of history is that we have been losing the economics of our wars. We have to solve that problem first. And, you know, by extension to losing the economics of our wars, we've been losing our wars for the last 30 years. And just give you an example, our industrial base has become very professional.

efficient in manufacturing the high cost problem to our enemy's low-cost solution. It needs to be the other way around. And an example that I would give you is look at our involvement in Afghanistan in the 1980s, right? Circa $1985, we were buying $8,500 Stinger missiles from Raytheon. And we were allowing the Mujahideen to use those missiles to shoot down Soviet aircraft that cost the Soviets between $2 and $8 million to produce, right? So $8,500 investment, $2 to $8 million return on our investment. That's a worthy investment.

And we made that investment. We made it at scale. And not only did we cause the Soviet Union to lose that conflict, we actually caused them to lose their country over it. Couldn't keep up. They couldn't endure. Fast forward to the global war on terror. You know, I would say now our experience in Afghanistan, but it's not limited to Afghanistan. It's all across the Middle East and Africa.

We are rolling million-dollar exquisite vehicles over the ground that each and every day in multiple theaters are getting defeated by $20 worth of farm supplies. And when you think of that, over time and at scale, we lost those conflicts. Do we need to make our equipment more cheaply, just to kind of be on par and save the expensive stuff for the big players? I mean, is that a small, just simple tweak to make? That's not a simple tweak to make. And I think that we've seen that we have, in large part, divested from the inexpensive

capabilities that we can truly produce in bulk and volume and moved towards highly exquisite, extremely expensive, you know, multi-billion dollar end items and contracts that don't necessarily set the conditions for us to win the next conflict. And that's been shown very openly in Ukraine, right, where we can't, we don't have enough artillery. We don't have enough guns and bullets. Gunpowder. Basic explosive, Stinger missiles. We still have a lot of. We still have a not delivered a new stinger to that theater since this war began. Everything has been new old stock. And though I'm not a fan of doing that, I'm just saying it lays bare the concern that we should have for the basic building blocks of conflict that we've allowed to atrophy in this

country in favor of higher dollar exquisite end items. And I think the prevailing theory that needs to, that we need to operate with moving forward across the Department of Defense is we have got to understand that if the capabilities that we are developing, if it costs us more to produce those capabilities, then it costs for our enemies to produce those threats, we should not acquire the capability. That needs to be the guiding factor moving forward because we have enough exquisite capability at this point. We're $36.2 trillion in debt as of today.

We are running on a $1.8 trillion a year deficit adding to that debt. That is the greatest national security threat that this country has ever seen in the history of the United States of America, even more dangerous than China. And so we have to figure out how to meet the threats that we have with the right capabilities, but it's got to be guided by the right thought process and principle in order to actually not set this country up to spend itself into the oblivion of the Soviet Union. Yeah. Wow.

Pete Hanks has his work cut out for him, no doubt. We're all there to help him now. Yeah, which is powerful. On that subject of spending money, we have reconciliation going on in Congress. I'm really curious for you as a freshman lawmaker kind of did to be thrust into what is the weediest part in many ways of Congress of these big spending bills and what's in it and what's not. As you have jumped into this process of reconciliation, what has been your experience so far? No comment. I'm just kidding.

You know, look, there are very complex problems that we have that we've got to solve in this country. President Trump has laid out a very bold agenda. We absolutely must accomplish that agenda. Simultaneously, we also have to watch our debt. And so as we maneuver our revenues and our expenditures, we have to do that in a principled way that doesn't just continue kicking the can down the road. And I think that there is broad consensus about that concept. think that there is maybe less consensus upon exactly how to execute the solutions to the problem. And so Republicans are still working that out. It has been somewhat of a friendly process.

I don't know that it will always stay that way. But I'm positive and I'm confident that with President Trump's leadership will get through it. Yeah. Well, and obviously one of the issues that Trump has really prioritized and that you mentioned earlier was troops at, well, using troops at the border and securing the border, specifically what you mentioned, would love to get your reaction to that, of the role of the military at the southern border, what we're seeing if you think that that's a good use of military resources. It's a great move. It's a great move.

And look, I think that if the president looks at the Constitution, his solemn duty is to protect the citizens of the United States of America. And I think that's exactly what President Trump said he was going to do. And I think that's exactly what President Trump has done as he's taken office and issued hundreds of executive orders in the first three weeks. And so I'm excited to see that type of movement. I think it's bold. I think it's necessary.

I think that it is still difficult for a lot of folks that don't live in a border state to understand that we're all now border states, right? That the problem is so pervasive, that it is so insidious to the state of our law and order in this country, that it is just exacerbating terrible crime in our inner cities, that we've got 300 people a day dying from fentanyl overdoses. I mean, I just spoke two months ago at a veteran's treatment court in our district and one of the graduates who, you know, as some people might not know, this is a special program for veterans that have committed crimes. And in respect of their service to our country, it puts them through a very rigorous program that effectively works to keep them out of jail. And so a veteran completed this very rigorous process, graduated, and just two weeks.

ago, unfortunately, he relapsed and he passed away from a fentanyl overdose, right 20 minutes from my house. And I think people are not realizing this is hitting everyday ordinary American families. This is absolutely something that is intentionally being done by the Chinese Communist Party through the cartels that exist in Mexico. And I think that we should exert the full force of the United States government and the full force the United States military to enforce the sovereignty of our borders to solve these problems. Yeah, so critical. I wanted to ask you about another bill, one that you actually have introduced

that relates to an executive order that Trump put out as far as restoring and reinstating men and women of the military who left were asked to leave because they wouldn't get the COVID-19 vaccine. Right. That is a really significant move, obviously one that's a priority for the president. Why did you decide to make that the first piece of legislation that you brought to the table? I thought that that was the action to expel 8,400 servicemen and women from our military for their principled refusal to take the COVID vaccine, I think was one of the worst errors that our military leadership and civilian leadership have made in our military in a long, long time. I won't say ever, but I would say it was egregiously political. And when you think about what it takes to join the military, to volunteer, to sacrifice, some of these folks had spent a career. They were deprived of their retirement.

All of them were deprived of their health care benefits from the VA. They were deprived of their GI educational benefits that they had earned through good service. And simply because they decided to stand on their principled morals and say, despite the weight that's coming after, for me, I'm not going to bend, I'm not going to break. And they were kicked out of the military for that. They were given other than honorable or general discharges. I mean, try to go get a job in corporate America with anything other than an honorable discharge. That stripped them of all their benefits.

We had to fix that problem. And so I was incredibly honored and thrilled that President Trump ran with that idea. Senator Cruz introduced the bill in the Senate. I introduced it in the House. and he effectively accomplished everything that we laid out in the bill. And the only thing that Senator Cruz and I cared about was the end state that it happened. There's one part of the legislation that's very important that we get through Congress. And that is that part of the legislation took away the authority from the president and from the Secretary of Defense to unilaterally determine what the vaccination schedule should be for our servicemen.

and women in the Department of Defense. And it puts that in the hands of Congress. And what that does in the event of a future vaccine mandate is it will slow that process down. And it will require broad consensus of Congress, right? Republicans and Democrats, regardless of administration, to get it right and make sure that we're being intentional about what we're putting in to our service members veins, that it's tried, tested, fully proven. and that most importantly, we will never see another weaponization of a vaccine mandate used against our troops again. Because I'll tell you, one of the most interesting things about doing the research for this bill is that back in the late 70s, there was a swine flu vaccine that thousands of troops refused to get. It was a super nasty vaccine, had a lot of side effects to it.

And what was interesting about this is the military leadership actually contemplated what should we do with these people. they're violating a direct order. And the consensus that they came to at the time was they just told the service member, if you refuse to get this vaccine and you get the swine flu, we are not going to pay to treat you. There was never any talk of throwing these people out of the military, stripping them of their benefits, and making it impossible for them to find significantly valuable employment after their departure. This truly was a radical weaponization of a vaccine mandate for political purposes by the bioccurys. administration, and we owed it to those 8,400 servicemen and women to fix that.

Well, and I think it's interesting to watch what is maybe the trickle-down effect, that in January we saw that the recruitment numbers in the Army were reached an all-time high for 15 years, 15-year high. That's just incredible. But, Congressman, as you think about your legacy and, you know, you're just at the start of a two-year term, I won't press you to ask you if you plan to run again. But what at the end of these two years would you like to say, you accomplished and got done here in Washington, D.C.

You know, this job, this role, it actually takes, it's a lot of sacrifice. My wife and I, we decided not to have kids when I was in the Special Forces. And you're either deployed or you are preparing to deploy. That means you're training. You're not home. It's just a crazy tempo. And so we decided not to have kids until I could be present as a father. And so we didn't have kids until after I left the military.

This is old hat from my wife. coming up here and I get to come home on the weekends. This is like a deployment where I, you know, she sees me every week. This is nothing to her. And she knows you're safe. But it is something different to my children. They've never had to experience this before. And so I want to make sure that the time that I spend up here is worth the time that I'm away from them.

And I have a heart of service. I want this country to be in a better spot. And if I could say, hey, after a couple years up here, Pat, what would make that time away from my daughter's worth it? It would be don't fight wars. We shouldn't fight. Deter the next conflict. And if we can't do that, absolutely set the conditions for our troops to win the next conflict. If I can accomplish those two things, it will all be worth it.

Congressman, thank you for your time. We appreciate it. Hey, thanks so much, Virginia. It's great being on the show with y'all. We're going to leave it there for today. Don't forget to hit that subscribe button. Do you never miss out on new shows from the Daily Signal podcast. Every weekday, catch top news in 10.

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