peter Zion here it's Easter Monday you'll see this on Easter Tuesday and today we have to talk about the Department of Defense and in particular ter the Secretary of Defense a guy by the name of Pete Hegsth uh Pete Hegsth is the least qualified most incompetent Secretary of Defense the United States has had and over the couple of months that he has been in the office he has done more to destroy the United States's capacity to fight a current war much less a future war than really anyone in American history and it's worth exploring why
uh the big news that came out over Easter weekend that has prompted me to talk about this topic is that if you remember back a few weeks ago we had this signal gate issue where the secretary of defense set up a chat room with a bunch of other top national security folks as well as the Treasury Secretary and somehow a reporter got invited onto it and on an unsecured platform that the Russians had cracked the security on started discussing active war plans and operational intelligence something that under normal circumstances would have gotten everyone involved fired
uh but this is the Trump administration and decisions are made differently these days anyway turns out that around the same time that he did that Hexath did that Hexath had another signal chat again unsecured but this time with personal friends his personal lawyer his wife uh no one who had a security clearance uh and to be clear this is a felony that would get anyone in the armed forces put away forever and dishonorably discharged in a matter of seconds uh the Trump administration has already said they see nothing wrong with this and Hexath will continue
at his position i think it's worth understanding why the United States military is the most powerful military force in human history and how he is looking to rip that up root and branch uh the first issue is education when you have a force that spans the globe you will need dozens of different skill sets especially in your officer corps so the United States maintains the most advanced staff college system in human history to train up their mid-career officers for any possible outcome as well as to teach them things like history economics trade technology electricity energy
and all the rest one of the things that Hegath has said is that anything that does not directly encourage activities for an active war fighter should be cut that includes all of the staff colleges which is where we get all of our officers basically it's returning or an attempt to return the training system to something that was much more reminiscent of what we had in the Civil War where you just threw bodies at everything gone would be the efforts of leveraging technology or anything else uh the second issue is these educational institutions that we have
keep in mind globe spanning military force so we do two things number one we fly the troops to the educators and we try fly the educators to the troops based on the circumstances in addition there is the little issue of allies because the United States has the best training system in the world we kind of uh lend it out if you will we invite we invite other uh war fighters from other countries that are allied to come to our training institutions to basically get indoctrined in the in the American way of war fighting uh as
well as seal up alliances and potential alliances with countries that are not yet treaty allies well that requires people moving about and one of the things that HGSH has done is a blanket travel ban on all the educators so that they can't travel so if you want a war fighter to get it trained he now absolutely has to come to where the university happens to be whether that's in Annapolis or in Monterey and everyone else is just out of luck so we've seen what is arguably in my opinion the single biggest advantage we have long-term
whittle down to just a weak spot uh then there's technology you may have noticed but since the age of computers the type of hardware that we are using in the world has been evolving especially in the last few years with the Ukraine war so for example the military gets a lot of crap I think fairly or rather rather unfairly for not being um what's the best way to phrase this for being kind of stodgy because the technologies that they have used really haven't evolved or mutated a lot in the last hundred years i mean yeah
yeah yeah we got jets after World War II or the end of World War II we got tanks at the end of World War I we developed missiles during the Cold War but guns artillery missiles jets helicopters ships you know the uh the general playbook hasn't evolved all that much the same the basic platforms haven't evolved we just uh upgrade specific technologies and put them together in different packages and throw them at different problems in different ways but the pieces really haven't changed all that much well starting about 5 10 years ago that really started
to shift because we got breakthroughs in things like information technology and energy transfer and digitization and they're all happening at the same time and they're combining the new weapon systems that we're only now starting to game out and design and the Ukraine war is famous of course for drones and drones are absolutely the leading edge of this revolution but we don't know what this is going to look like in 5 years or 10 years or 15 years or 30 years and keep in mind that we have a lot of weapon platforms that we designed back
in the 50s that we're still using and so you have to have an institution within the military that games out the future and this takes two forms first you get the best and the brightest from the intel systems within the military you put them together in a room and get them to imagine the sort of thing that the president is going to be demanding of the military forces in 10 20 40 80 years and then you need a technical team that can design a weapon system that will not just be useful 10 and 20 years
from now but can be upgraded and still be used a generation or two from now well Hanks is firing all of those people uh the Office of Net Assessment whose job it is to do the first part of that imagine the future has already been disbanded and we're seeing massive cutbacks in excess of 70% for all the offices that do the technical work so basically the United States is taking a giant technological step backward in its war fighting under Hegsth and then the third issue is recruitment remember we don't know what the weapons of the
future are going to be so why in the world would you put any restrictions on how someone might choose to serve their country we need everyone of every background and if you look back at the history of the US military going all the way back to before the Civil War it's not just that the military has always been a social ladder for underprivileged groups to sustain status within within uh society it's a way they can attain leadership they can get the skills that they need to remake their own futures and from the American point of
view from the military point of view from the tactical point of view from the war fighter point of view we need everyone we can get you know news flash folks straight white dudes are less than onethird of the population and if you put restrictions on how the other twothirds of the population can choose to serve their country you will never meet your recruitment goals so in the last two months we've seen a series of things go down uh most notably Hexath recently changed the physical requirements for what you have to match in order to serve
in the military a gold or phraseiology uh a policy that almost seems like it was custom designed to kick all women out of the US military and then of course recruitment for any place that is not totally stocked with white dudes has basically been cut to zero even black engineering universities are no longer being visited and I know I know some people are going to say "Well if you've got a standard and everyone can't meet it doesn't work." No no no no no no no no the Israelis broke the seal on women in the military
over 50 years ago and today every first world military has a substantial proportion of women in the field so if you can't adjust for that you're going back to the 1840s moreover there are some jobs like say fighter pilots where women are better because they can handle the G-forces better so is he going to change the policy that only chicks are fighting in the jets i don't think so what we're seeing is it's all adding up to the greatest degradation of American warf fighting potential that we have ever seen and this is only two months
in i also don't think this is the end of it yes Heg Seth has now committed multiple felonies yes Heg Seth is an unmititigated disaster in his leadership and yes his entire inner office has now been fired oh this is rich so he fired everybody in his office saying that they were all leaking information i have no idea if that is true but Hexath has a history especially in the Signalgate stuff of saying something that is just a bald-faced lie knowing that the information is out there to prove him wrong and it's usually released in
the next couple of days so by the time you see this video we will probably have multiple lawsuits against HEGs personally for people firing uh quitting for wrong words so by the time you see this video it's entirely possible that the office that was fired they will have all issued wrongful termination lawsuits and providing the information that will prove that this guy is just an absolute okay do I think he's going to go no remember the Trump administration did not build his cabinet because he thought these people were capable or change agents he chose them
because they were incompetent the first time around when Donald Trump became president he really didn't expect it he thought he was going to lose to Hillary Clinton and so he didn't have a cadre of people around him because he had never been in government well he reached into the Republican party pulled their policy experts and especially on security affairs relied very heavily on generals and admirals to kind of fill out the bullets well what he discovered in that sort of environment is when you have generals and admirals who have been through the staff training program
and they know how the world works uh intimately they have opinions about how things should be done and they can point out consequences if you do things the wrong way well whenever that happened Trump fired them and so he went through more cabinet members than any American president in history and just a huge number of generals rotated through the a huge number of generals rotated through the White House in positions like say secretary of defense or CIA director anywh who you fast forward that to this most recent race trump had decided while he was out
of power that rather than build a team of competent people who could push an agenda through he wanted to make sure that there was never anyone in the room who would tell him no so he reached out and hired people like Pete Hegth who I would argue 3 months before he became Secretary of Defense had no idea that that was in his future well because Trump values incompetence near him there is no reason to expect Hegath to be dismissed i mean of course he should be dismissed but of course in a normal administration he would
have never been nominated much less confirmed and that brings us to the next problem hegs and people who are at his level of general incompetence that includes the director of national intelligence who is Tulsi Gabbard or Health and Human Services Secretary who is Robert Kennedy Jr uh all of these people should not be in their spots but they're going to stay because Trump values their lack of expertise he values their yesmen uh mentality he values the fact that they're not keeping him informed because it allows him to live in his hermetically sealed Obama-esque bubble the
only way that these people can go away is if they are impeached and since the Trump team has basically gutted the Senate of anyone who is willing to stand out that's a really tall order uh as Senator Macowski of Alaska pointed out retaliation against Trump is real and so she's considering leaving the party and being an independent in her home state of Alaska that would still leave us with 52 Republican senators who were either unwilling or unable to stand against the president on issues of national security and if you're going to impeach someone you have
to get twothirds of both houses of Congress so now you're talking about roughly 20 uh Republican senators have to flip in this political environment and I just don't see that as feasible so we are looking to the long painful drawn out crash of the United States to be able to manage its national security concerns under a leadership that is thin that is broken that is incompetent and unfortunately that we are stuck with for the foreseeable future
