[01:00:00:07 - 01:00:16:28] Speaker 1 Peace through strength is a phrase that everyone says, but no one defines. And it's a phrase that anyone can hijack. Today, we rescue it from only being a bumper sticker. [01:00:16:28 - 01:00:50:10] Speaker 1 Doug, we touched on this in a previous conversation. Peace through strength is, once and for all, a mission of United States foreign policy and national security strategy under the Trump administration. And I think it is an important phrase because of the reality that wars start when an aggressor believes that he can win through the application of state violence. And so a way to deter that is to be so strong that your adversaries don't think that they can win. [01:00:50:10 - 01:00:54:13] Speaker 2 That's right. And the trick is, what's the line in their mind? [01:00:55:19 - 01:01:01:25] Speaker 2 And it's hard to know. And so if you get into the business of inviting [01:01:02:28 - 01:01:10:25] Speaker 2 conjecture around where the line is, and let's just get just strong enough that we're at the line and they don't do anything, [01:01:12:04 - 01:01:53:18] Speaker 2 well, you don't know exactly what's going on their side, too. And suddenly, they get stronger than you realize. And now the line-- they've crossed the line in their mind. They're like, we can do this now. And so we have had peace in a lot of ways through the years. And I think about just growing up Cold War and everything. It's like you just have to have a moment where you say, we're going to get to a place as a country where we have built this up far enough so that we're completely sure. And it goes hand in hand, too, with the fact that when we do go downrange and we have to go fight wars, we don't want them to be close. We want as few of our guys to die and as many as possible on their side until they capitulate. And that's what you want. You don't want to have some kind of [01:01:54:18 - 01:02:21:12] Speaker 2 game that bureaucrats are playing. Now, this gets expensive, but we spend a lot of money on a lot of things. And if we say to ourselves, well, we're just going to keep producing the amount that we spend until we just kind of get this parity and hope that we don't get attacked, that's a dangerous game. You just have to be willing to go to a place of like, this is where our enemies are at, and we have to go to a place beyond them that we know that they're thinking, we're not doing anything. [01:02:21:12 - 01:02:26:21] Speaker 1 Well, and peace and strength are two sides of this coin. [01:02:27:27 - 01:02:58:13] Speaker 1 I grew up in an era where we had a lot of strength, but we did nothing to actually seek peace. And so although we had military overmatch compared to any other power, peer or otherwise, in the world, we weren't able to maintain peace because really we didn't seek it. We sought forever wars in the Middle East, and we were drawn into conflicts where our strength didn't make a difference. It didn't matter that we [01:02:59:29 - 01:03:18:26] Speaker 1 outgunned the Taliban and had more ISR assets than Al-Qaeda. They were fighting war on their terms because we weren't seeking peace through strength. In many ways, America was seeking strength for strength's sake in the use of it just because we had it. And so it is kind of both sides [01:03:20:03 - 01:03:22:28] Speaker 1 to the coin that you have to have. Similarly, I think, [01:03:23:28 - 01:03:24:15] Speaker 1 of course, [01:03:25:17 - 01:04:02:12] Speaker 1 factions on many sides of the conservative movement tried to impose their worldview on President Trump. I think what he seeks with peace through strength in his national security strategy is neither a liberal interventionism, where we seek to use US military power recklessly in achievement of kind of these vague global agendas. And it's also not isolationism, where we retreat behind fortress America and hope for the best. It is making sure that we have a strong military, a strong nation, a strong economy so that no one will mess with us for lack of a better term. [01:04:02:12 - 01:04:38:23] Speaker 2 The point that you're making about the adventurism that we've had to watch, that's the difficult thing of these decades in Afghanistan and every place else over there that we're just like, what are we doing? And why are we doing this? The American people do expect us on our side to have a very clear mission plan strategy of how we're gonna go in, what we need to get done, and how we're gonna get out. Otherwise, you end up in these places where suddenly it does feel like the military industrial complex has taken over. And they're, oh, no, we need to keep going. We need to keep going. And all these guys that keep it going end up on corporate boards and I was hoping for a separate conversation. But if you don't say going in, [01:04:39:24 - 01:04:47:03] Speaker 2 this is where we're gonna go with this, and this is, and then you don't pull it off, right? We're right in the middle of the Iran thing. [01:04:48:10 - 01:04:49:00] Speaker 2 The [01:04:50:12 - 01:05:34:11] Speaker 2 world starts thinking differently about you. Yes. What does degrade you as well. Even though they may look at you and say, well, they got a very strong military and they have a lot of the stuff, maybe they don't have enough of the stuff. Maybe their military's not as strong as we thought. And maybe domestically they're losing willpower because they've got this adventurism going on. So you have to be very careful about this because once you expend the strength like what you're talking about, you've expended something. And so you have to calculate it correctly and get it back to another place. That's what you had previous episodes about talking about. Hey, we have to have enough stuff to fight two major wars at once. Otherwise, you do get engaged over here and you're like, well, let's attack them over here because we can, they're weaker. [01:05:34:11 - 01:06:03:04] Speaker 1 Well, it's not to say that the American military can do everything. That's right. Or can fight everywhere. I think strength requires a prioritization of interests and a prioritization of threats. So the military will look different with China as our pacing threat than it would against Russia. Because confrontation with China, let's just think geographically, [01:06:04:12 - 01:07:03:15] Speaker 1 will require a different array of resources, personnel, an emphasis on the Navy and Air Force as opposed to land war in Eastern Europe. And so I think that's why the synchronization of military readiness, procurement reform, and then strategy is so important because you can't buy all the weapons in the world thinking that we're gonna keep fighting in the Middle East when in reality, the most pressing national security threat is China. China might be more than happy that we have a million drones that can fly 30 kilometers because guess what? Those are useless in the Pacific. We need missiles that can fly a thousand nautical miles or more. That's right. That's right. And so it's, again, the Trump administration, I think, has been the first administration to kind of call that out to say that there is a need to pretty ruthlessly prioritize resourcing so we can make the decisions that put us in the best position to be strong. [01:07:03:15 - 01:07:57:07] Speaker 2 That's right. It goes back to the national security strategy that we had in a previous episode. You call these things out, well, can you deliver? That's what this is all about. And if you're gonna call them out and you can deliver, then there's nothing. It's just an empty threat. And if you're gonna project strength, you've gotta say these are our strategic interests. This is how we view them and this is what we're willing to do about them. And oh, by the way, we can back it up in a real sense, not just theoretical and, you know, well, diplomatically, we'll keep everything under control. Yeah, we want that. We want the peace. But without the stuff in the background, it's not gonna get done. People aren't, they're not gonna believe you and it's a dangerous world. And the Chinese in particular, like we've said, they're trying to take us down. Okay, what are we doing about it? We have to be, at the very least, we have to address it here internally and then be prepared to fight them, like what you're talking about. [01:07:57:07 - 01:08:13:27] Speaker 1 When we fought World War II, few realize that America was the supplier of the entire allied military system to include Russia. Yeah, look up the Lend-Lease Act, even as early as 1941, 1942. [01:08:15:14 - 01:09:10:00] Speaker 1 The Russian military, the planes, the trucks, the tanks even to some degree were US made, US components at the very least. And it's because we had a strong, vibrant manufacturing base back home that was unmatched throughout the world. And so, you know, to say peace through strength, yes, it is about having military power. It's about being able to project power around the world. But what is as important is making sure that we're a vertically integrated country in the sense that we don't have reliance on countries who hate us for the systems, the components, the resources that undergird our national security ecosystem, which is something we might not even be able to say that now. It's certainly something that we haven't been able to say until 2025. That's right. [01:09:10:00 - 01:09:15:09] Speaker 2 So we talk about all the equipment and all the money and everything. There's also the staffing side, which is where this all began. [01:09:15:09 - 01:09:17:00] Speaker 1 Right, exactly. [01:09:17:00 - 01:09:19:12] Speaker 2 We had one episode where we're talking about women in combat. [01:09:20:13 - 01:09:39:26] Speaker 2 And then, you know, the meritocracy of what are we doing with all this DEI stuff? We're just the Chinese and the Russians, they're not doing all that. They're looking at us going, you guys, that's good. Do you keep doing all that? They want that to keep going because over time, it makes the entire structure, your staffing structure, your entire military weaker. [01:09:39:26 - 01:10:10:06] Speaker 1 I'll call out one, you know, just as we bring to a close, one policy document of the Biden administration, you know, I think we mentioned it before, it was the Strategic Management Plan of 2022 to 2026. In essence, it was the document from the Biden Pentagon that articulated the policies that would get the military in the short term, the short term for the military being four years, to get to where it needed to be in order to accomplish the president's national security [01:10:11:23 - 01:10:34:27] Speaker 1 objectives. In that Strategic Management Plan, pages and pages, not of missile allocation, you know, not of forced posture, but of quotas for each cross section of race and sex for every conceivable uniformed service member and government civilian position. [01:10:36:12 - 01:10:49:05] Speaker 1 Again, I think we should often listen to the left when they do these kinds of policies and take them at their word. They think these are important to the nature and the makeup of the military. And so we should treat them as such, not just political cultural issues. [01:10:49:05 - 01:10:52:01] Speaker 2 That's right, yeah, it's helpful when they can go and say it out loud. [01:10:52:01 - 01:10:52:11] Speaker 1 Right. [01:10:52:11 - 01:11:13:04] Speaker 2 Because then it lets us all play it out. Like you say, okay, well, what happens when that, how does it change everything? And then it's easy to do the analysis and like, well, we'd be quite a bit weaker if we went down this path, simply because we are saying, no, we're gonna lower the standards, lower the standards, lower the standards, and then the time comes to deliver and your standard got so low that you just can't deliver. [01:11:13:04 - 01:11:29:26] Speaker 1 And it's not to say that these kinds of policies weren't the only reason we lost strength, I think, during the Biden administration and the preceding administrations. But it is to say that I think if countries like Russia can look at the United States military and understand that they are as interested in [01:11:30:26 - 01:11:37:16] Speaker 1 race quotas and affirmative action as they are military readiness with key weapon systems, then that's the time to invade Ukraine. [01:11:37:16 - 01:11:38:01] Speaker 3 That's right. [01:11:38:01 - 01:11:50:24] Speaker 1 And I imagine China's making a similar analysis with respect to Taiwan. That's right. And so it is about us being a serious institution that can project power and has the makeup, the composition to do so. [01:11:50:24 - 01:12:30:25] Speaker 2 Yeah, that's right. And you think about the Ukraine incursion, Biden one day, ah, if they just crossed a little bit, that'd be fine. So not only are they looking at us going, I don't think they're gonna do anything, and then he says that, and then they're thinking long-term, well, even if they did do something against us, they're weaker than they've ever been. And the president doesn't seem to have a grasp on anything here, so in they go. So the importance of having a strong president with a strong national security strategy, with a strong military, it leads to a strong economy, good country going forward. I mean, so much is tied to the strength of our military that in certain instances, it just can't be understated. [01:12:30:25 - 01:12:32:12] Speaker 1 That's so true. [01:12:32:12 - 01:12:35:15] Speaker 1 Peace through strength is a [01:12:35:15 - 01:13:08:20]