The Culturalist: The Praetorian Question

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Hello and welcome to The Culturalist, a part of the Victor Davis Hanson Show.

The Culturalist is dedicated to events and people, past and present, that have influenced the way we live and the things that we value.

And we're very happy to be able to talk to Victor about so many and far-ranging things that we can discuss.

Today we're going to be talking about, since we've had current events in Afghanistan and the disastrous policy that the administration has had and our generals and their what seems to be political posturing, although that they seem to deny that political posturing.

We're going to talk about the historical precedents or historical events and times in which we've seen the politicization of the military today.

So that's our topic.

But first, let's take a break to listen to our sponsors.

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Welcome back.

And I would like to also say that Victor is the Martin and Ellie Anderson Senior Fellow in Military History and Classics at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marsha Busk Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

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How are you doing today, Victor?

I'm doing very well, as much as anybody can be doing well given the chaos in Afghanistan and the lack of transparency about that chaos.

Yeah, and it seems to be a bad event getting worse and worse by the day.

So we're all hoping for the best, but we're also plagued by fears that the best may not come out.

But hopefully, maybe in the future.

But since we do have this disaster going on in Afghanistan right now, we have our chiefs of staff who have not been forthright about things going on and have been very political in their careers.

We would like to discuss with you that politization of the military.

And then also just to look at some of the historical precedents, because I've heard you mentioning some, but we really haven't heard the depths of the similarities with those historical precedents.

So could we first just sort of set the stage with what are the generals doing that is outside of what a traditional military and a strong military should be doing?

Yeah, what are they not doing?

What are they not doing?

So what we need to do is just take a two minute preview of where we are.

I think all of our listeners,

all of our political and military analysts, our pundits, people in and out of the military, agree on one thing,

that there had not been anybody killed in 18 months in Afghanistan.

That although the majority of Americans wanted to get out of Afghanistan after 20 years, and Donald Trump reflected that desire and decreased troop levels from over 10,000 down to 3,000 to 2,500.

He stopped, and he stopped because the Joint Chiefs warned him that to leave Bagram Air Base to pull everybody out would be an ungodly disaster.

I don't need to articulate that ungodly disaster because we've witnessed it the last year.

And then Joe Biden came in

and as long as the Bagman Air Force Base and the prior administration's policies were in effect, we had no problem.

And then

rumors say that he wanted a big September 11th parade.

Maybe he wanted to be the most left-wing politician in the world that ended the Afghan war for good.

We don't know the motivations, but he yanked out everybody and we have the chaos.

The second thing is these critical military decisions that were made.

And there's a lot of anger between privately the military and the Biden administration.

The Biden administration says, we just did what the intelligence agencies and what the military told us to do.

The military and the intelligence agents said we're not that stupid.

So they're going to blame games.

But for now, They're keeping mum about that spat because they've got to get these Americans out.

And they've only got,

you know, we're speaking right on the 28th of August, and they've only got a few days left before they're artificially imposed lines so here what are the issues the issues are bagwom air force base 40 miles from kabul largest air force base in the middle east uh the recipient of maybe three to four hundred million dollars of american investment in infrastructure a prison detention barracks security built by the eisenhower administration you know gosh 70 years ago, and then occupied by the Soviets and then refurbished by us.

Everybody understood that was the linchpin to Afghanistan.

You had air security already coming from Bagram, and they could not get in.

They tried and they tried and they tried over 20 years.

They could not damage that Air Force base.

So everybody assumed if you're going to evacuate, that's the place to evacuate from.

No.

They changed the mission to a very vulnerable airport, very near Kowbuls, five or six, seven, eight miles, couldn't be defended, and they shut down Bagma.

And they didn't shut down Bagma.

They abandoned it in the middle of the night.

And out of that abandonment, we learned that they released four to 5,000 ISIS, Al-Qaeda, Taliban terrorists, one.

Two, they abandoned somewhere between 75 and 85 billion, billion, billion dollars.

As I've said elsewhere, we gave Israel from 1949 to the present about $100 billion in in today's adjusted dollars.

So we're right up to in one night or one day, we gave essentially 80% of the entire military aid to Israel and the history of its existence.

And we went by a snap of the fingers from having the Taliban as one of the more poorly equipped terrorist operations to the best equipped.

That was number two.

We had a billion dollars invested in a beefed up embassy.

It was secure.

It was huge.

It was the most expensive in the world, even more expensive than the one in Baghdad and London.

And we just turned it over.

We had 15,000 contractors, our families, military, associated intelligence, people who were living there.

And we didn't get them out in the beginning.

We've only got about four or five thousand out now.

We don't know where they are.

Number five,

four, excuse me.

We gave the Taliban, whom we were negotiating with and who was responsible basically for 9-11 by shielding and hosting and aiding al-Qaeda.

We put them in charge of security at the Karzai airport, at which 13 of our soldiers and Marines and a couple of Navy people were killed.

In other words, we trusted the terrorists that we'd been fighting for 20 years.

And then they somehow, maybe sort of, kind of, somebody went through their quote-unquote ring.

five the military has been telling us that they do not want basically to criticize the taliban general mckenzie said they have the same aims and agendas that we do they want us out on the 31st of august we want them out on the 31st presto we got to work together no general mckensey they want us out with death and destruction and humiliation and we don't want that So there's a little difference.

So if they say, oh, by the way, I have no idea how Al-Qaeda snuck in, but it won't affect anything.

Oh, you lost 13 and you've got all these people wounded we wouldn't want it to happen again that's how we're dealing with the taliban fifth we don't know how many afghans want to get out we have i think we've taken 110,000 as I'm speaking now.

And we should, because a lot of them fought and will be killed.

Okay, but we don't vet them.

And how ironic that every member of the military is going to have to be vaccinated or discharged.

And we're bringing 100,000 people in and we want to virtue signal our tolerance by saying, oh, we don't have to be vaxxed.

You know, hey, we just saw a press conference.

General, do they have to be vaccinated?

Oh, no.

They have culturally sensitive food.

And I'll give you a gender breakdown.

And, you know, the sergeant major of the army just said that today's diversity day, the day that 13 were killed.

So there's something going on either with the incompetence.

I could go on to reason six to 20, but I'll spare the listener.

So what is it?

And I think a lot of it is that there is a culture that has developed in our military that's not conducive to battlefield readiness at the levels that they used to achieve.

And the reason is that there's something about this culture of one, two, three, four star, where people go to Washington, Colonel or one star or even lieutenant, they get attached to the Venman, Colonel, Lieutenant Colonel Venman phenomenon.

They get attached to the National Security Council.

They go into work as an aide in the Pentagon.

They like it.

They testify before Congress.

They get the feel of the congressional landscape.

And when this woke madness hurt started to whirlwind through the entire nation, they made the necessary adjustments.

Or when Donald Trump was on popular, they made the necessary adjustments.

I'll just give you some rapid-fire examples.

So General Milley on June 6th of 2020, when they tried to burn down the St.

John's Episcopal Church across from the White House grounds and almost did, and then stormed parks and got what were on their way to get in there.

And Donald Trump said, Well, you know, we've got to stop this, and I'm going to go look at this church, and I'll have General Milley go with me for a photo op.

That's what presidents do.

That's Rodney King riots.

That's what they did.

Colin Powell said, I got 5,000 Marines.

You got them, George.

That was what they did.

And all of a sudden, General Milley apologizes.

He says, Oh, I did a photo op.

You're not supposed to do that.

No, you're supposed to do that.

That's what every chairman of the Joint Chiefs does.

So why are you apologizing?

And why are you suggesting, as your retired military colleagues did, that Donald Trump gassed a bunch of innocent people?

And you're not going to agree with his militarization

of the law enforcement.

Okay.

So then what happens?

The Inspector General of Homeland Security says, no.

There was no tear gas used.

No, there was no photo op to divert from ordering militarized police or the military to clear the grounds.

That didn't happen.

But we do know what did happen.

And what did happen was the military then, as soon as Trump was out of office after the January 6 riots, they did militarize Washington.

They did.

They put barbed wire.

They put fences.

They put in 20,000 military.

It had been more, you know, they all say, well, this is the most serious threat since Jubal Early's raid.

Well, you reacted, but Jubal Early had an army.

These guys were a bunch of buffoons and idiots in there vandalizing the property, but they're not Jubal Early's Confederate raid, believe me.

What I'm getting at is they have two sets of principles.

One, and I don't think it's political,

it's ideological and it's veneer, but it's basically where is the power for promotion?

And after I retire, where do I go?

Do I go to Raytheon, General Dynamics,

Lockheed, Northrop?

Where do I go?

And if I go to these woke corporations, and they are woke, no need to get in that, we've talked about that, then I have to have a particular posture.

And who am I afraid of in Congress?

Is it Tom Cotton?

No.

Lindsey Graham?

No.

Devin Nunes?

No.

It's Elizabeth Warren.

and Bernie Sanders, because they call me a revolving door grifter or lobbyist.

So I will ideologically align in a way that they will not criticize me.

And that's where the ideological cultural power lies.

And that's why we have the schizophrenia that General Miley says, I have to focus.

I don't want to be used.

We're not going to militarize anything.

And then he goes right out and militarizes Washington.

And then we get today

an order from the chief of naval intelligence.

And he says, all naval intelligence officers and all, this is key, retired naval, you've got to remember the Uniform Code of of Military Justice.

It says it is illegal for any of you to criticize the Commander-in-Chief, the Vice President, and the appropriate secretaries, i.e.,

during this fiasco where 13 people were killed, and I think those deaths could have been prevented had we been at Bagram.

You are not going to criticize Joe Biden or Kamala Harris or Lloyd Austin.

If you do, we're going to enforce it.

Okay, well, two things.

We have just come off with, as I said, General McCaffrey saying that Donald Trump, General McCaffrey of First Gulf War fame, was Mussolini.

General Hayden wasn't happy, he wasn't content with just saying that Donald Trump's quote-unquote cages, which Obama created were like Auschwitz.

And even he even photoed Auschwitz-Bergenau to make sure of this point.

But now he says he retweeted a tweet that that said if we have the planes coming into dulles and they're going back well let's put the unvaccinated trump supporters on there now is he saying what now that white unvaccinated people are morons that don't get vaccinated well actually if you look at the people who are not getting vaccinated disproportionately to their percentages in the population it's latinos barely but african americans considerably does he want to tweet that that wouldn't be wise for his career and then we get, we've got all these generals, no need to get into the names, but they,

all of a sudden, a statue falls of Robert E.

Lee.

Oh my God, I didn't know that.

I'd have a picture of Robert E.

Lee, and I just tore it down and I threw it in the dumpster.

Why say that?

Well, he's a corporate lobbyist, a corporate San Lee McChrystal.

So of course he's going to say that.

In other words, think of it, Sammy.

You have, go ahead.

Oh, I was just going to say, can I add and kind of ask something, add some cynicism to your cynicism and make it worse.

Isn't it working for them?

I mean, none of them are going to be asked to step down.

So all of this is.

Well, these are retired, but no, yeah, it has worked because General Milley has so virtue signaled that if anybody, because remember what he did, he got in front of the Congress and said, white rage, white rage.

I'm trying to understand it.

I'm white and we're going to go after it.

And Lloyd Austin said, we're going to go through the entire roster and find out these white supremacists these January 6th sympathizers and everybody had a big smile on their place so they are immune right now and we know that General Milley said this summer when asked that we did not need Bagram Air Force Base he said that and we know that General Austin no matter what he said either told him to say that or agreed with it And they're not, nobody's angry at them except the House Democrats and people like us out in the middle of nowhere that with no power relevance and our conservative listeners probably that are furious.

So he, yes, you're that's a very good point.

He was bonded.

He bought woke insurance and that's why he did it.

And then these retired generals, nobody's criticizing them.

Remember, they loved it.

When Joe Biden said for the former chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, this was Colin Powell and General Myers and General Dempsey.

If Donald Trump doesn't leave, we're going to frog march him out of the Capitol.

Okay, now you've just told me that they agree with your accusation that he has to be forcibly removed.

And I could go on, but I just don't believe that all of a sudden in the summer of 2020, a retired officer who loves Robert E.

Lee his entire life says he threw down the picture and threw it in the dumpster when he has a huge multi-million dollar corporate clientele.

I don't believe that another general whom I like and admire all of a sudden says, oh my God,

I didn't know Fort Bragg.

I knew it was named after Braxton Bag, but I didn't understand this.

Well, you know, why don't you study why those bases were named after Southern generals in the 1910s and after World War I, when we wanted to get defense appropriations?

There was a Southern lockhold of racist Democrats.

Democrats in the House and Senate.

And the deal was if we have to rearm and make a permanent military and have bases, we want them in warm climates that are sparsely populated where land is cheap, i.e., the south.

And if we're going to put them in the south and the southerners are going to approve the appropriations, then they want the names.

Okay, so Afghanistan or the events in Afghanistan have just exposed that they're engaged or interested in the trivial for care,

but and they're missing the essential, yeah.

And I think what were they doing when a retired general who's I like, I know, I have great respect for, but when he says that Donald Trump uses Nazi-like tactics, two things.

There's two key points, and that's what you're getting at.

The first key point is when they were all yelling and they, and our chairman of the Joint Chiefs and the Chief of Naval Operations was testifying on the brilliance of Professor Kendi and his crackpot ideas that you have to be racist to end racism.

Okay, and you're going through all of the roster of white racists and back in your mind, mind, it doesn't appear to you that, as I said, about 75% more or less of the dead in Iraq and Afghanistan have been white males at a record of double their proportion of the population.

And you're not doing what?

You're not doing what?

Well, you're not going over there and thinking, how do we defend this predetermined gradual withdrawal and so that they don't do what they're doing now?

They didn't do anything.

They would have been all fired.

They go back and look at Lloyd Freydenhall.

When he was put in charge of a Corps command in North Africa, the first thing he did was build a big bunker and then scream and yell and have a drink.

And the result was the Kazarene Pass disaster.

They fired him.

And how the military fires people, they praise them to the sky.

They often, if they're three stars, they advance them one rank and they send them home.

Okay.

They don't do that to any of these people.

They're already four stars.

But why don't they fire the person who left in the middle of the night, the general, abandoned Bagram?

Why don't they fire the general that was in charge of security around the Karzai airport?

Why don't they fire General Milley, who told us you didn't need Bagram to have a successful withdrawal?

Why didn't they fire General Austin, who apparently

according to the President of the United States, unless you believe he's a pathological liar, did not object to the quote-unquote Biden plan?

And so there's two issues here.

Why didn't they object?

And was it because of political reasons, number one?

And two, since they're so vocal and they weigh in on everything from political correctness to identity politics to wokeness to race, and the retired military, contrary to the Uniform Code of Military Justice and in violation of it, call the existing elected president of the United States Nazi, Mussolini, Auschwitz, tyrant, or Admiral McRae, better sooner than later, get rid of him.

Okay.

And now, guess what?

They made the rules, and now what's happened?

We get the chief of naval intelligence says, don't criticize Biden.

If you do, you're going to be in violation.

So you're not in violation when you did this for a whole year and a half about Trump.

And this is the point that I'm making.

We have a weaponized, ideological, at least ideological sounding sounding military.

And the results are, if you look at the Soviet military for the first couple of years until Stalin really pulled out the commissars, it was incompetent and 20 million Russians and about 8 million of them army died between 41 and 43.

And then finally they said, you know, Marshal Zhukov, Koniev, just go do it.

We're not going to have a political guy looking over your shoulder.

And the same thing when you look at World War II and you look at Nazi generals versus, I mean, Model was a good general, but Model was a good general because he didn't listen to anything of the Nazi ideologues.

Can I ask you something about that Soviet case?

How did Zhukov end up after that?

I know he took matters into his own hands and performed well.

I believe it was that Stalin crime.

He had enormous prestige for a variety of reasons.

In 1939,

he had defeated the Japanese along the Mongolian border, and he defeated them as such that they were forced to have a non-aggression pact in April of 1941.

And that was absolute key, because when Moscow was besieged on December 7th to 15th, the Japanese did not invade from the east because Zhukov, a year and a half, two years earlier, had decisively defeated and humiliated them.

And so Stalin had signed a non-aggression pact.

So they did not threaten the Soviet Union in the east.

The Soviet Union sent a quarter million people across the Trans-Siberian Trans-Siberian Railroad and they were tough troops, winter troops, and they came just in time.

And so he had enormous prestige.

And when Stalin cracked up

on June 21st and 22nd and 23rd and 24th, when he was shocked after assuring all the Soviet generals that Hitler would never betray him, and they actually shot one of them, who said that he would,

then he was incapacitated and everybody thought Zhukov as the most prestigious general might take things into his own hand.

He did not.

He remained very loyal.

So once they freed Zhukov and he freed these other brilliant commanders, they did pretty well, but it took, you know, 8 million lives to get there.

And then after the war, of course, he became the military supreme leader of the Warsaw Pact.

He was very prestige.

And then he got, as everybody does, too big for his britches in Stalin's eyes, and he was quietly put into an honorific retirement.

But the point I'm making is

whether we look at the Soviet army or we look at the German army, eventually even these crazy bloodthirsty ideologues understand that ideology and military logic does not mix.

The reason that Rommel was so great in North Africa was that he just ignored all the Nazi crap.

Not that he was an anti-Nazi.

Everybody says he was, but I mean, he was at one point assigned to Hitler's security detail.

He later was perhaps involved in this conspiracy to kill Hitler, and he had to pay for it with his life.

But nevertheless, when he was on the battlefield, his logic was, how do I defeat the enemy according to my training and my education and intelligence?

And then he did it.

And if he can do it, with a nut like Hitler, then I'm sure that, you know, when you cross him, you can die.

Then I I think that Millie and Austin and all the rest of them could at least speak out vehemently because somebody did to Donald Trump.

You're trying to tell me Donald Trump is a noodle?

Because Donald Trump said he wanted to get out.

That's what the people wanted.

He was going to, he called it endless war, even though nobody had died for a year.

But he didn't.

He didn't.

That's what's the flaw of Biden's accusation.

Well, I inherited.

I had to do this, besides the fact that he overturned everything Trump did in the Middle East and energy and the border and all that.

But why didn't anybody die?

Because he didn't pull out a bagroom and he didn't take everybody out.

And we continue to provide support for the Afghan army and they had confidence.

And so nobody, I guess nobody got sacked, but I guess it was the General Milley, because he was chairman of the Joint Chiefs.

He went to Trump and he said, do not pull out a Bagram.

And Trump said, okay.

And I guess he went to Biden and what?

Did he say, do not pull out a Bagram?

And according to Biden, he didn't say that.

He said, pull out a Bagma.

So something's going on and they're weaponized and that's partly their careerist worries about ending up well in retirement.

Partly they're afraid of the ideological left in Congress that gives them a pass now if they support things like transgender surgeries and gay marriage and women in combat.

frontline combat units and sophisticated pregnant flight suits and all that stuff.

Can I take us back in history one more time?

How long is it until they become like the Praetorian Guard determining the political leadership of the Roman Empire?

Or is there any similarity between that and what happened to Rome?

That's what it's headed for, right?

What happened to Rome was that after creating the legion system and the reforms of Marius, and they had honed this into a killing machine that swept the Mediterranean.

And they had three generals, Crassus, Pompey, and Caesar in the first triumvirate.

Crassus was killed fullheartedly at Carai,

but they became political armies.

In other words, Caesar's power rested with the legions in Gaul.

When he crossed the Rubicon, he broke the law because he brought an army as a military leader into the Republic, and he wasn't supposed to do that.

But if he hadn't have done that, he probably would have been arrested and killed.

And then Pompey fled.

But by that point, the armies were ideologically allied to particular leaders.

Augustus sort of stopped that during the Principate.

So after Actium, for the first shaky years, by the time he died in 14 AD, they had an area militate, a fund that was non-partisan, and the armies did very well.

I mean, the Tutenberg Wall was a disaster.

But nevertheless, after he died, we started to see the rise of what they called the Praetorian Guard, the Praetor.

That was the old guard that that Praetors had.

And it became,

just like Washington, it became centralized in Rome, where this head of the octopus was.

And they became very political.

And we really see it with the thuggish leader Sejanus that was attached to Tiberius.

You know, that juveniles got a great satire about taking him by the hook and dragging him to the Tiber.

But everybody hated him.

But for the next 200 years, if you wanted to be emperor of Rome, you had to do two things.

If you were in Rome, you needed a sort of Gestapo security force SWAT team, and that was the Praetorian Guard.

If you were a

praefit or a consular official outside in the province and you had ambitions, then you took a consular army and you marched into Rome.

And usually you went from areas that were on the front lines, i.e.,

maybe from North Africa or from Asia or the Dalmatia that had battlefield experience because the armies that were in European Gaul or even Spain or Italy or Greece were not, you know, they were not fighting constantly, but it was a politicized military.

When we look at these other historians that nobody reads anymore, Herodian or the so-called scriptoris historiae Augustae, the writers of the history of the Augustan Empire, and these are talking about late third century, excepting.

We don't know who they are in some cases.

It's kind of like a sale, a bidding sale, where each would-be emperor

tries to bid highest for the wage of the Praetorian Guard.

We see that in the so-called year of the four

emperors, where you have Nero and Galba and Otho and Vespasian.

And the one that bids the highest ends up emperor.

This is very dangerous because our whole constitution is based on the idea that we have a civilian oversight of the military and the military is not going to interfere.

Now, where did the Uniform Code of Military Justice come from and why does it have a sizable series of clauses about what not just acting officers, but officers that have retired and have either a pension or they're subject to active service recall in times of national emergency.

And that came, it was discussed in 1949, 1950, but it got very heated during November to December 1950.

And that's when Douglas MacArthur, who had gone up to the Yalu River in October of 1950 and gone all the way up there and with a brilliant military command, had almost ended the Korean War.

And they had warned him that when you go north, Korea, the peninsula widens, i.e., more territory, fewer troops.

It's very cold in October, November.

You don't have winter gear, and you're getting closer and closer and closer to Yalu and Chinese 1 million manned bases where they have air support.

And believe it or not, you may consider their backward Chinese, but they have Russian pilots in MiG-15s.

And he didn't listen.

And he said, we'll be home for Christmas.

And you know what happened in late November?

A million so-called Chinese regulars, plus they had re-equipped the defeated North Korean army.

And what ensued in December and January, all the way into February, was the longest retreat in military history.

And after that, and what did MacArthur do?

He blamed Harry Truman.

I could have gone there if they would give me nuclear weapons.

I would have taken nuclear waste and seated across the Yalu border.

I would have unleashed the B-29s and they would have bombed the industrial sites.

I would have napalmed.

All that was sound military strategy, and it may have worked, but the point was that was not the policy of Harry Truman.

And, you know, he put up and he put up with it and he put up with it.

And MacArthur kept giving interviews.

And finally, people said, wow, MacArthur was far more popular than was Truman.

Truman was, at that point, was hated.

And guess what?

Truman said, I should have fired the son of a bitch a long time ago.

He talked to the joint chief.

Omar Bradley agreed, and they fired him.

They fired the greatest hero of the Pacific Theater, four-star general.

And Matthew Ridgway took over and did a beautiful job, and he reorganized the Army.

He brought them back below the 38th parallel.

He retook all the ground that had been lost before.

And

Seoul was back in American hands by, I think, April.

And then he stopped.

He said, I'm not going to go up there again because I know what's going to happen.

And so out of that anger came the Uniform code of military justice.

They didn't want another MacArthur again.

They did not want Curtis LeMay again.

Curtis LeMay was doing things that he was a wonderful general.

He was brilliant.

He was the architect of the B-29 campaign in the Pacific that probably did more than anything, even more than the atomic bombs to defeat Japan.

But he was doing things that were pretty scary.

He was having some quasi-unauthorized flights into Soviet territory.

He was saying things that were not consistent with the administration of JFK.

And then, of course, he ran after he retired as George Wallace's running mate, I think in 68.

And then there was Edward Walker, a general.

So there were people always on the right that were saying in the Cold War, we're selling out to the communists and the Al Juhirists.

Okay, so they put this code.

And now that army is not right wing.

It's left wing at its top echelon.

And the people who put in that code, the descendants of those people, are violating it because now they find a woke, weaponized military useful for their ideological and political purposes.

And so they're much more outspoken.

Let's get this straight.

What Hayden said or McRaven said or McCaffrey said or Mattis said is much more outspoken in the criticism of the commander-in-chief than MacArthur said.

MacArthur never said

that Truman was Nazi-like.

He never said that he was emulating the tactics of the death camp.

He never said that he was Mussolini.

Get that straight.

Yet they got a complete pass.

And now everybody is mad at who?

Joe Biden.

And they are quiet and they're not saying a word.

And now there's even being, the military, as I just quoted, they're issuing warnings.

If you do say a word, you're going to be subject to recall.

We had a lieutenant, a Marine Lieutenant Colonel who did a video, very good, spirited vertical.

It violated the chain of command.

He didn't get it cleared.

And guess what?

He was canned.

So I hope that the military code will, in the future, not be so politically used because it seems like what you're telling me is it's selectively used.

But if I could, since you were talking about Ridgway and you showed us how he had done things to correct the situation in Korea, I was wondering, just as a last thing, and I don't know if this will get us into way too much time here, but what do you think should be happening here in afghanistan right now

well i mean as bad as it is in afghanistan it was worse in korea because they were talking about after the brilliant enchon campaign the brilliant campaign we lost 10 000 casualties in one day at the retreat we had the marines almost you know trapped at the chosan reservoir they fought brilliantly but matthew ridgway saved

a disaster that in its proportions made what's going on in afghanistan look pretty pretty tame because we lost 38,000 dead.

So what did he do?

He just started from scratch

and he didn't pay any attention to.

MacArthur was relieved of battlefield commander and sent home, but he was also the czar and you know the pro-consul in Japan and he's sent home.

But Ridgway did not attack MacArthur.

He just said, I got to be out in the front.

I'm going to have a grenade on one side and a medical kit on the other.

They called him old iron tits.

He was wounded slightly.

He went out in the front row.

He got warm food.

He went everywhere.

MacArthur was an old man.

He was in the 70s, I think, 71.

So what we would need right now is we need a

Lightning Joe Collins,

a General Gallin.

We need a Mattin Eddy.

We need a Lucian Truscott.

We need a George Patton.

We need somebody like that that would take over right now in Afghanistan.

And you wouldn't see him with a bunch of medals on his breast from Washington.

He wouldn't have any medals.

He would look like Ulysses S.

Grant or maybe Uncle Billy Sherman, and he'd look like a peasant, but he'd have a dirty uniform on, and he would be out there stalking the battlefield like a classical Greek general, a Paminondas.

And he would take risk.

And he would say, damn it, we're not going to lose this.

And he would be outspoken.

And he would save the situation.

He would save it because we have the best fighting men in the world.

The American Marine and Army soldier are the best in the world.

The corporals, I've met them, the sergeants, the captains, the majors, lieutenant colonels, and the colonels are wonderful.

Once you get above that, then we start getting into this gray area that we've talked about before and something happens.

And that's what I'm really worried about.

It becomes part of the academic world, part of the corporate world, part of the Washington, New York Nexus, the part of the political world.

But the fundamentals and the foundation of the American military are excellent.

What I'm saying, Sammy, is to finish, let's say things, I don't know how they're going to go this week.

If you want to take Bagwam Air Force Base, we could wake up one morning and they could come in at night with Apaches.

They could have an airborne division and we could have Bagwam clean it up, get it back running and say, you know what, we're going to stay here for a while and we're going to give air support.

If we wanted to, I don't know what the people want.

I don't know what the minister, if you wanted to do that, you could.

If you wanted to tell the Taliban, we don't know what you claim your relationship is with Al-Qaeda or ISIS, but until it's clarified, we assume you're all rivals and you hate each other, but you hate us more than you do them.

And so you're all in league together.

Now, the next time an American gets killed, we're taking out your entire command.

We just want to tell you that.

And then we could say, you know what we're also going to do?

We're going to take all that equipment and we're either going to blow it up or we're going to get back and we're going to give it to the Northern Alliance and we're going to really start an uprising.

And we could do that.

Now, would it be messy?

Yeah, but it's pretty messy and humiliating now.

Yeah.

So, but you need to do that, you need a different type of general than General Milley, and you need a different type of chief of naval operations, and you need a different Secretary of Defense, and you need people who say, I'm not talking about diversity, I'm talking about victory.

I don't care if my army is all black.

I don't care if it's all Latino.

I don't care if it's all white.

I want the best people.

And when people get blown up, I'm not going to go through and look at the dead and see how many are black, if it's 12%.

I'm not going to see if, you know, it's 70% of them are white.

I'm not going to see if 12% are Hispanic.

I'm not going to do that.

But that's where we're going if they continue this.

And so we could win and we could restore our reputation.

A final note that we should stop is that, I mean, I'm not a big Europhil, but the Europeans came here because we asked them 20 years ago.

And they're not really comfortable with frontline fighting anymore, even though they birthed the Western military tradition.

And there were 8,000 of them there.

We only had 2,500 to 3,000.

And they stayed there.

And then without even consulting them, we yanked them out.

And then we said, well, they're sovereign nations.

They can do what they want.

But they were there because we were there.

And this is the guy that better than ever, bring, you know, build back better and all that crap, the internationalists, the Eurof, the pro-European EU NATO guy.

And so the media and the whole left-wing apparatus is very quiet about this, but he has done more damage to NATO than any other president.

If you think that NATO is going to enlist in the Great Crusade to deter China, no way.

If you think China, Europe is going to enlist in the crusade to stop Putin from bullying Eastern European countries that are in NATO or former Soviet republics, no way.

If you think they're going to close rank to contain Iran, no way.

Not now.

Yes, I've been reading that some people are saying the Pax Americana is over.

Yeah.

That we're no longer trustworthy.

But I think if the military found the man and the method that you're suggesting, if I were the Taliban, I would be very frightened of that man, that's for sure.

But we need to have the will to find that guy.

So very sad, I think.

We're going to lose a lot of lives for not having.

Yeah, one thing we didn't say is that we're talking in the abstract in a very immoral sense, but we're talking about people dying that don't have to die.

I don't want to blame anybody, but when I looked at the names and pictures of all those wonderful Marines, I thought, oh my God, they were in the United States and they were so eager to go over there and help people.

And they did.

And I watched every night the videos.

They were helping people and all of a sudden, and then some psychopath strapped with, you know, C4 blows them up.

And I'm thinking, as I watched, I thought, wow, how could you be in it?

It's like the Alamo or Rourke's Drift during the Zulu wars.

They're surrounded.

There's no way of telling anybody.

They're in the most vulnerable position, this rickety old airport.

There's no ramparts of any magnitude.

Why are they in there?

Who put them there?

What were they supposed to be doing?

20 years old, blown to pieces.

This makes me vomit.

I thought, and then just 40 miles away, you've got, you know, you've got something like a huge rampart, and it was defensible.

Not that I can't guarantee we wouldn't have people killed, but we put them in the worst possible place, and then we lied about it and said, oh, we weren't told not to do that.

So General Milly, my God, I went back and looked at his testimony when he said that Bagram was not as good for the purposes of evacuation as Karzai Airport.

Why he's still there, I do not know.

I'll say something else.

You know, I criticized him vehemently during the photo op controversy.

And I got a private, I don't know how anybody got my private cell, but I got a phone call from one of his aides.

He said, we would like to discuss this.

We're just, you know, we're just, I said, oh, so when anybody criticizes the chairman of the joint chief, you call him up personally?

It was Major so-and-so.

I said, that doesn't look very good.

So I think I would just cool it.

And so these people are very, I don't know,

I don't want to say anything else because as somebody who's a traditionalist and a conservative

and whose father, you know, flew 40 missions over Tokyo in a B-29 and whose grandfather was gassed at the Ardennes in World War I and whose namesake was killed in the 6th Marine Division in Okinawa.

I grew up with a rule from my father and that is you never criticize the American military.

And I don't like to do that.

But I get angry when people are disparaging the reputation of the military.

And that's what gets me so angry.

Yeah, justly.

Well, Victor, we'll have to call it quits here.

Thanks so much for all of that analysis of Afghanistan and the historical precedence to this military.

I keep wanting to call it a failure.

I'm sorry about that.

We don't know yet.

We can only

never give up hope.

Somewhere as we're speaking, there's some three-star general somewhere who's thinking, you put me in command and we're going to win.

You know, Lincoln, just to finish, Lincoln went through McClellan and Burnside and Hooker and Pope

and Halleck.

And then he got two people.

He got Grant and he got Sherman.

And then you can say Sheridan and Thomas.

And with those four, he was home free.

but it took a lot of dead and a lot of time to get to them.

Yeah and so Americans should know that we have a lot of good guys in our military so hopefully they'll come to the right one and we'll leave this show with that.

Thank you Victor for your discussion today.

We absolutely love your wisdom especially on military affairs.

Thank you.

All right this is Sammy Wink and Victor Davis Hansen and we're signing off.

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