STARRS & Stripes Host CDR Al Palmer, USN ret, was joined by the presidents of three veterans organizations who are working towards eliminating CRT/DEI ideology from the military and restoring a focus on high standards and merit.
They include from STARRS Colonel Ron Scott, USAF ret, USAFA ’73; from the MacArthur Society Colonel Bill Prince, USA ret, USMA ’70; and from the Calvert Task Group Captain Tom Burbage, USN ret, USNA ’69.
They begin by discussing what made each of them want to attend the service academies and serve in the military. The conversation then steers towards the present-day challenges of recruiting the next generation of military personnel. Reflecting on the patriotic fervor of the baby boomer generation, influenced by World War II veterans, they explore the waning sense of nationalism among today’s youth.
The panelists provide insights into how societal changes, educational environments, and shifting attitudes are impacting military recruitment, particularly in regions traditionally known for military support. The need for strong leadership development and integrity in young recruits is emphasized as crucial for the future of the armed forces.
The panel also navigates the complexities of military leadership, pressing concerns around recruitment and retention come to the forefront. They tackle the effectiveness of current strategies, including financial incentives and diversity initiatives, and question their impact on military cohesion.
The discussion calls for a reevaluation of policies, stressing the need for mentorship and leadership that truly understands the unique demands of military service.
Concluding with a focus on military academies, they advocate for reducing civilian faculty to strengthen the core values of duty and service, ensuring the next generation of leaders upholds the highest standards of military excellence.
Watch:
Listen:
Find and Listen to “STARRS Podcasts” on your favorite podcast platform, such as:
- Apple Podcasts
- Spotify
- Amazon Music
- Audible
- iHeart
- Podbean
- and more
Transcript
(Automatically transcribed by AI)
Al Palmer
Well, welcome America. This is Alan Palmer, your host for STARRS and Stripes. I’m a retired Navy commander and I’m proud to be a part of an organization that’s wanting to make our military strong again. We’re also intent on making sure that we can educate people on the necessary to do good things with our military in the world. Today we’re going to do a special episode today about wokeness and about things in the military that we think probably can be corrected to keep the warrior ethos strong and to keep our people capable of defending you out there, the general public. So to do that, I’ve got three guests today that each have a very special part in what we’re doing here in STARS and related organizations.
I’m happy to have with us again our chairman I’m sorry our president and CEO, colonel Ron Scott. He’s also a doctor and we rely on him for information and guidance on what we do here at STARRS. Ron is an Air Force Academy graduate. He’s been a fighter pilot, he’s been an OB-10 driver, he’s also flown C-130s and he’s had combat commands in the Middle East. So we’re happy to have Ron with us in the organization, but even more so today, and we also have Bill Prince.
Bill Prince is a West Point graduate and he’s got a fascinating career, having gone into the infantry in the Army, served in Vietnam, been a ranger, been in Special Forces and done things that your average class A citizen wouldn’t even think of doing in combat. He then went into the CIA and did some of the same kind of things all across the world and got a very special award from the CIA for his heroism in doing it. And I’m happy to say that Bill is also involved in a group like STARRS two, the MacArthur Society, and that’s a group of cadets who graduated from West Point and picked up the mantle of Douglas MacArthur and wanting to make sure that people knew what duty, honor and country was about. And, bill, it’s great to have you with us here today, sir.
Also, the other side of the coin for military service, Captain Tom Burbage. Tom was a Naval Academy graduate, became a naval aviator on Airedale and we’re happy to have another one of those in the group here today Went to test pilot school, flew just about everything that the Navy had 38 kinds of aircraft with over 3,000 hours kinds of aircraft with over 3,000 hours. But if that wasn’t enough, then he went into the reserves, but also went to work for Lockheed Martin for 32 years, holding key management positions in Lockheed Martin, including the primary program development manager and vice president, for doing projects like the F-22 Raptor and the latest F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. He’s got more awards and decorations and things on his wall than I think I’d care to think about. And, tom, it’s great, sir, to have you with us here today too. So what an all-grass group of people to have at our roundtable.
And I want to start that out for our audience by saying what we’re going to talk about today centers around why our citizens serve our country, why we have a volunteer force and why it’s so important to keep it that way.
We have to be the shepherds and the stewards to make sure our country is guarded and safe from harm.
To do that, we do rely on young people to sign on to the service and when they do, like all of us here, we raise our hand, we take an oath to defend the country against all enemies, foreign and domestic, and to make sure that we also honor the Constitution and preserve that.
While we’re doing that, at the same time we’re kind of writing a blank check to the country so that when we sign up, we’re going to do whatever is necessary to make that happen, and I don’t think many of us have thought too far about what we get in return. We know that we’re going to be valued for our service by our people, but we don’t always have a real good picture of where we’re going to go or what we’re going to do. But that’s also the excitement and the joy, if you will. The journey is knowing that we’re going to be doing good things, but not necessarily where we’re going to end up, but not necessarily where we’re going to end up. So with that thought, ron, what are your thoughts on that? How did that inspire you when you signed up to get into the Air Force and go to the Air Force Academy? How did that strike you at the time?
Ron Scott
Al, my journey was kind of unusual. It’s nothing that I would have predicted or designed. We were at the height of the Vietnam War, and so in the summer of 1969, I had to make a choice about being vulnerable for the draft at the time or going to college and hoping for deferment. And so I didn’t even know about the service academies until about a year before, and I went ahead and applied, knowing that it was a full-ride scholarship if you were selected and appointed. And so that was how I ended up at the Air Force Academy in the summer of 1969.
And I have to tell you that experience was just discovery for me, because now, all of a sudden, I’m with and it was all male in those days I am with fellow Americans who were so excited about serving their country, even though we were at war in Vietnam. They wanted to make sure that they were prepared to be a leader and effective in protecting America in that particular interest. So for me it was trying to be worthy of my peers then and to get through that program. Initially I figured five years is worth payback for a great education, and then I can press on to other things. But it was as I mentioned. It was a great discovery for me to learn about these just superb fellow Americans that were willing to give their lives in combat for something greater than themselves, and so I ended up serving 30 years. I mean it was I was a late comer in terms of being passionate about serving, but once I was in it, there was no way they were going to kick me out. So that was my experience.
Al Palmer
And did you think that the other folks that were there, the other cadets that were there with you, shared that all the way through?
Ron Scott
Absolutely, I think and again trying to be worthy of them. I mean, they were pushing to, you know, be the fastest to jump, the highest to get, you know, 4.0 grade point average academically. And so you know I was running hard to keep up with them and I was able to cross the finish line then in 1973. And I was able to cross the finish line then in 1973.
Al Palmer
So, tom, how did that work for you at the Naval Academy? You know similar academies but slightly different focus. How did you feel about being there? Did that experience show you something different than you thought, what you were going to get when you went there?
Tom Burbage
Actually, I went down a little different route. I was about four years ahead of Ron. At the time my father was a career naval aviator. I had been to sea with him as a kid, you know, in his wardroom for a week at sea, with the airplanes and the flight deck. Most of my role models were naval aviators.
At the time it seemed the only natural path for me was to be a naval aviator and in my mind the only way to do that was to go to the Naval Academy. My father was also an Academy graduate, so it was sort of in my DNA and I went. I fully knew what I was getting into Tough first summer and then sort of the band of brothers forms and my closest friends today are still my classmates from the Naval Academy. So it’s a lifelong commitment and a lifelong experience, no matter what path you take after your active duty. I left active duty after about 12 years and continued as a reservist flying A-7s and retired with 25 years as a naval officer. And that 14-year overlap was while I was working in industry. So I was around the military the whole time I was doing that and around flyers, so it just worked out it was a great adventure for me.
Al Palmer
And certainly that helped you in the program part of Lockheed in developing fighter aircraft and all too and working with people who had that same kind of industrial base.
Tom Burbage
Right. Yeah, I would only add that the leadership experience was very transferable to industry and to leading high-performance teams and probably is one of the most beneficial parts of young folks doing a tour in the Navy or the services, no matter how long it is.
Al Palmer
Yeah, it’s a great experience. Is it not Hard to duplicate any place else in the world?
Tom Burbage
Correct yes, sir.
Al Palmer
And so, Bill, you had kind of a similar kind of a route too. You went in and did some arduous work in Vietnam, and then came back out and then went into the CIA. What an amazing journey that one was. But along the way you could have said that’s it, I’ve had enough, I’m out of here. What kept you in?
Bill Prince
I would like to go back just a little bit In this concept of service and military service and service of the country. My dad was in World War II, ended up as an acting battalion commander it was ROTC, but ended the war as an acting on the Thai commander in Germany and my mom came from a big family and she had four brothers. All four brothers served in World War II. So growing up I was essentially surrounded by people who had served and what had a great impact on me and considering that there are three pilots here on this broadcast, I absolutely need to mention that one of my outcasts, who was my idol when I was growing up my son is named after him was a Marine fighter pilot who flew combat missions in World War II, korea and Vietnam. He retired as a full county hostess, having been court-martialed as a major for taking a woman of questioner to reverse you across state lines. Now he was okay.
Growing up, I have to tell you he was larger than life, and but all that to say that growing up as part of the baby boomer generation and being really surrounded by people who had gone to serve in World War II had a great impact on me, and so when I told my dad that I wanted to go into the Army and he said well, you’re gonna go in the Army, you’re probably better off going in as an officer. And he said my experience in World War II was I had great respect for those officers who had graduated from West Point, so why don’t you go to West Point? And so I did. And then first I was there and Vietnam was going on and I thought, well, I’m going to be an infantry officer and I’m going to be in Vietnam. And so I volunteered for Vietnam even before I graduated and ended up with a great good fortune of serving with most Airborne Engineering Staff, of course, in Vietnam.
Al Palmer
Well. So I think we’d all agree that we came from backgrounds which kind of enabled us to get in and be part of the military, probably a little bit easier. I can remember growing up on an Air Force base Langley Air Force Base as a young guy and every afternoon for colors, for the ceremonies, we’d take the flag down, they’d be out there in formation and they’d have a cannon out there they’d shoot off, make sure everybody knew the flag was coming down and then play the national anthem. And that still exists today on most military installations. But you still get that feeling of being part of that even growing up, and so some of that stays in your DNA. I guess, as you go through it Well on to a little different view of this.
So military service, being what it is, is almost an obligation, but unspoken in our society. We still have to go out and convince people to join, and we’ve done that in a number of ways. We used to rely on militias to supply the forces we needed to defend the country in the early days. That continued for a long time until we got into world wars. We had to conscript people also, in addition to having volunteer forces, but then, when we became an all-volunteer force after Vietnam. Then we started to rely on getting people to be able to join and keeping them and making sure that the forces could still do the job that they needed to do.
That turns out to have been kind of a tough call, because in recent years it seems like maybe that’s slipping a little bit and we’re maybe not as able to hold on to people or to recruit them as much as we used to. Those numbers exist, but beyond the numbers there’s still the issue of hearts and minds, I think of young people wanting to go serve their country, wanting to do extraordinary things and being overjoyed to do it. How do we get that back into the military? Do you think Anybody want to take a shot at that one?
Tom Burbage
I’ll open up if you want. I think there’s a lot of factors that lead into the situation we have today, Alan, and not the least of which is the way kids are brought up, whether it’s the family situation, whether it’s the K-12 teaching situation. I mean, if you talk about the cannon, at sunset, when you lower the flag, it’s very rare you see an American flag even in a classroom these days, let alone a Pledge of Allegiance, which we said every day before class started.
So the sense of patriotism that’s sort of baked into kids of our generation is missing in many ways, and I think what you saw during the COVID time, when parents were actually able to look over their child’s shoulder and see what they were being taught, created a bit of a rebellion against that whole environment. So it starts there and then it gets into. How do you train someone to come out of that environment and become ready to go into four years later into a leadership situation as a young leader, perhaps going to even going into combat? That’s the transition that the service academies have to make, and that’s gotten a lot tougher these days.
Al Palmer
Well, it’s exactly right, as Ron was saying earlier, you’re faced with that when you get in. It’s exactly right, as Ron was saying earlier, you’re faced with that when you get in and, for maybe the first time, you realize how serious that is in leadership development and integrity and what your role will be later as being a leader and officer. Yeah, that’s a critical item. Bill, what’s your thought on that?
Bill Prince
I ended up after about four years doing this with 11 deployments between Iraq and Afghanistan, and so I saw firsthand in both of those what these young men and women were doing and accomplishing, and under very, very difficult circumstances. But I have to say that I feel strongly that we are alienating the most productive demographic, the young men and women who have traditionally been in the forefront of offering their service to our nation and defend our nation, of offering a service to our nation to defend our nation. We are alienating, I think, a great many of those young men and women and I’m overgeneralizing here.
I recognize that, but I remember I was not only in the recruiting command myself and I had friends who were assigned to Army Recruiting.
If you were assigned in the southeastern part of the United States, you were golden, you were going to meet your quotas and they had wonderful accretions to your quotas. If you were assigned as an Army Recruiter in some place like Boston, then you were probably not going to meet your quotas with just demographics. And I fear now that we are alienating those young men and women, primarily coming out of strong families with military traditions, especially from the Southeast United States, and instead we have been, especially over the last four years, probably trying to appeal to a demographic in the Northeast and the Pacific Coast which has never really been particularly supportive of military service, and I think we are paying a heavy price for that. I just saw some statistics I didn’t mention them all ago that my dad served in World War II and all four of my uncles served in World War II, and I saw some statistics that parents now with military experience are not recommending that their kids serve in the military. That’s tragic in my view.
Al Palmer
Yes, indeed. Well, and that leads just to the question why is that happening? Why is it that people are being alienated? What’s going on? Is there something that’s changed in the last couple of years? Is it people just not seeing the value, or somebody actually talking to them and teaching them that? Is that an issue?
Ron Scott
Yeah, absolutely. That’s the reason why STARRS formed. We discovered that there’s an ideology that is infiltrating our institutions, and for us it was at the Air Force Academy. So it was a little disturbing, disappointing, to see the Air Force Academy football coaches chant Black Lives Matter seven times and mention examples of racial discrimination, racial injustice, that were just patently false. If you looked at the data, we don’t have Jim Crow laws anymore. Mass incarcerations are easily explained. Redlining used to exist in America in the early 1900s, but we stopped doing that. But it’s this critical race theory and diversity, equity and inclusion which is a praxis method of instituting, instilling this critical race theory ideology, where you have oppressor and oppressed groups.
And I have to tell you, al, if you look at pictures of World War II cemeteries, you’re going to see from front to back, side to side, the Judeo-Christian symbols, mostly Christian occasional stars of David.
The America that went to war against tyranny in the 1940s was a Judeo-Christian grounded nation, and so they had a lot to fight for Life after death, being accountable in terms of how we live our lives now, the choices we make to defeat evil, which was manifested in fascism and then later in the Cold War, communism.
You know these were ideologies that denied people their freedoms to worship, to speak, and so we are seeing a lot of evidence now that that form of tyranny is creeping into our society. Censorship, the COVID-19 vaccination that was experimental, forced upon our military members over 8,000, forced out because they chose not to take the vaccine that they were legally entitled not to take and so we’re seeing a lot more now being published that what happened in America during that pandemic and the COVID-19 vaccination were essentially forms of tyranny. And so that’s what we’re up against now, and I think members that have served in our military, who came in for the purpose of fighting tyranny, is one force to be reckoned with, and we’ve got to get more of our military folks and veterans on board speaking out against these developments in our country.
Al Palmer
Well, and the idea of alienating people. I mean that’s not a good thing to do. If you’re talking about volunteers, you know you ask people to give of their time, their effort and, in the military, signing a check that may include their lives you know you can’t afford to be continually alienating them. They’re going to leave, and I think that’s some of what we’re seeing, don’t you think so, Tom?
Tom Burbage
I think there’s two parts to your answer there, al. I think the first one is yes, you don’t want to alienate viable bodies of candidates that could come in and strengthen the military. The second piece is once you’re in a military unit, there’s nothing more valuable than unity as opposed to division. And when you’re raised in a world of division and oppressors and oppressed, as Ron said, you have that filter into the military leadership challenge of how do you now bring that back into one unified command, the military? They wear a uniform and it’s because they’re uniform, they have constant. It’s one unified body. It’s not a bunch of different groups that are you know either oppressed with each other or feel like they’re oppressors.
You have to build that unity back in. So it’s a double-edged sword. It sort of amplifies itself as it goes.
Al Palmer
So there’s always, of course, a lot of talk in the civilian outside world about people getting together and solving their differences, and can’t we all just get along?
And everybody ought to be able to have a shot at doing something. But that doesn’t work in the military, does it? Because we’re different responsibilities that are much better not better, but more resourceful in terms of having to have people be in parts of teams that perform so that lives are saved and that people can do important work to save the country. You can’t just take anybody and put them into a job and hope that you can train them and make them work. We have to filter that out kind of in advance, which means that the military ends up being a little bit exclusive, not inclusive, because we’re wanting to take people who have specific skill sets, the right attitude, the right physical characteristics that can do the work. So we can’t just take anybody physical characteristics that can do the work.
So we can’t just take anybody. And you guys want to comment on that one, because I know we catch a little flack sometimes in the public for not being able to say we’re just going to take anybody and we’ll train them and everybody can do this work. That’s not always the case and when it’s happened in the military, sometimes we try to turn that around and say, all right, to make that better, we’ll just move the goalposts, we’ll take standards away, we’ll make qualifications different so that we can make everybody acceptable, and that, in my mind, is a recipe for disaster.
Ron Scott
It’s a huge disaster. I’ll tell you. We see pictures now of people in uniform. They’re grossly out of weight, they’re wearing tattoos now they’ve got beards and those are the role models now. And I have to tell you, I’m an Air Force guy but, one of my all-time favorite movies is Top Gun and that was such a motivational movie and I’ve heard that recruiting went up big time after that movie.
Al Palmer
Oh well, it did, and one of the podcasts that we’ve done was with a gent, Dave Baranek, who was an instructor at Top Gun and did the flying in Top Gun, and he said exactly the same thing. They had people lining up for half a mile trying to get enlisted and as officer candidates. After the movie came out, it was a huge hit and a big spike occurred in recruiting, not just for the Navy but for all the services recruiting not just for the Navy but for all the services.
Yeah, so as I said, as I said, I think, earlier in, our discussion, you know where?
Ron Scott
Where is John Wayne and Tom Cruise when you really need them, or or Russell Crowe?
You know, and we’d pick the kids up at the airport, we’d bring them home, take them to dinner and before I tuck them into bed bed I say I’m going to show a clip from a movie and then an entire movie, and that’s to get you motivated for tomorrow when I drop you off at Tulu Hall. And you start to get sworn in. So the clip was from gladiator with Russell Crowe, and the scene was when they were coming up out of the coliseum and Russell Crowe was telling these guys they’re standing there with their spears, whatever he goes. Hey, has anybody been in the military, in the army? And a couple of them said, yeah, well, the only way we’re going to survive is if we stick together. We have to do this as a team.
And he kept emphasizing that. And then once they kind of defeated all the bad guys and he jumps on that white stallion, he’s got that spear and he’s jumping around like that. That was incredibly motivational because he was there to command, he was there to fight for what was right. And so then, after we showed that, I said so, are you motivated enough? Okay, now I’m going to bring in Top Gun. Good night, see you guys in the morning.
Al Palmer
Well, and that brings us right back to okay. So did Russell want to just take anybody out of the crowd and have them out there fighting the lions? No, you need to have the right kind of skill sets and the right kind of people. Well, so you know, and that again is something that we can do better at right away, you know, and there’s all kinds of examples and we have them in our groups of calvert society, macarthur and stars there are people who have done amazing things and and doing exactly that kind of work and performing that way, whether it’s in war or peace, and we need to start putting examples out so young people can see that, say, say, I like to be like that. Hey, that guy sounds like he’s pretty cool and you’re right, that’s the Tom Cruise approach at a Top Gun.
So let me ask you, but let me ask you this so, okay, if you’re leadership in the Pentagon and you look around and you say recruiting is down, retention kind of sucks, and I’m having trouble keeping the real people that we need here today, how are we going to solve that problem? And the answer in the past usually has been pay them more money. You know, that’s what they need. They’re going to get out and go out in the civilian world, so just pay them more, give them bonuses and they’ll stick around. That doesn’t always work, does it guys?
I don’t think any of us actually Go ahead Bill.
Bill Prince
Al. I saw it just within the last couple of weeks again. It was a quote from a retired Sergeant Major of the Army whose, whose name escaped me now, kind of Robertson may do something like that. Anyway, quote from him. This is a senior enlisted non-commissioned officer in the United States Army.
The quote was the diversity is our great strength and I think, in my conservative opinion, that’s a terrible message for senior leadership to be promoting. First of all, there’s absolutely no empirical evidence to support that. And to follow on with what you and the others have said, diversity is not our greatest thing. Uh, the teamwork, uh the unit being, uh in a chain of command and taking responsibility. And if we’re pushing this thing that we’re dividing people, uh, dividing them by claimed identities, uh were, were destroying the, the fabric upon which, uh, we rely. And, having been in several different hostile environments over 40 years of service, um, no one, no one ever worried about pronouns in any of the hospital areas in which I still live. Yet we have senior leadership in the military concerned about white rage and appropriate hormones. I mean, this is this sounds like a harsh word, but it’s a cancer. I believe that it’s eating out the fabric of our military and we will pay in blood for these social experiments for these social experiments.
Al Palmer
Well. And the military? This is not new, right? Military has been used as a test bed for social science in the past. You know we’ve tried those things and found that they don’t work very well. And yet here we are again. It seems wanting to do that with the DEI business. We already know the answer, I think, to the question. The question is whether we’re willing to do something about it.
Tom Burbage
Perhaps I think it gets down to promote Incentives are a big deal If you think about the way industry tends to be walking back a lot of their commitments. It’s financially driven and they’re seeing the consumption of resources without the payback. If you look at the military, it’s promotion incentives. We have promotions now tied to supporting policies that promote the kind of things we’re talking about. So until we can get into changing incentives, people will respond to what’s inspected, not what’s expected. As soon as we can get into challenging policies and getting the right incentives in place in the right places, it’s not gonna change much.
It’s also spurred, brought on an industry. So you now have a whole industry surrounding DEI, which today is estimated at about $15 billion. Well, with that many people involved in that industry to promote these concepts as contractors, hiring into both the military and the industry, it’s hard to stamp it out. So it’s got to come from the top down. It’s too entrenched right now, I think, to have it done from the bottom up. So that’s a concern. I think we all three of us in our organizations all share a vision that says we’ve got to somehow increase awareness that these kind of things need to be in the hearts and minds of all Americans if you want an America like we do like we do.
Al Palmer
So, Ron, here’s a thought, too, that Tom’s comment just brought up. You’ve got people who have influence because of their seniority where they happen to be in the DOD, inside the five-sided puzzle palace, and they’re pushing the DEI stuff, but they’re folks that, for the most part, have not been in the military before, not even probably in association with anybody in the military, and yet they’re the ones that are writing the rules, if you will, for what’s going to happen. And worse, as you guys know from the times that you were in the academies, there’s a larger percentage of the professors, instructors, who are now coming from private universities, who have not been in the military. So my thought on that is how can you teach somebody about the finer, granular things that go with leadership and integrity and responsibility if you’ve not done it yourself?
Ron Scott
That’s a huge problem. It’s kind of like the military-industrial complex which needs to be cleaned up. But when you look at the Pentagon and you look at all of the SESs and political appointees, you know they’re kind of an anchor there. They carry out their agendas and if generals and admirals agree, great. If they don’t, they just kind of write out their time until they move on and they keep working their agenda.
That needs to be fixed because even though the military-civilian relationship is very important, the military serves the civilian power. It doesn’t have to be where, even at the military level, that they’re constrained and influenced and managed by a larger civilian force. And so I’m not sure how we’re going to fix that. That fix is going to come from Congress in terms of the laws that manage the civil service and political appointees and that sort of thing. But Congress can fix it, they can find out, and I’m thinking the equivalent of a UCMJ for civilians. Why should civilians get away with criminal activity because they’re a civil servant, or insubordination or mutinous behavior, that sort of thing, or insubordination or mutinous behavior, that sort of thing. And so that sounds pretty brash, pretty radical. But I think we need to look into how we hold the civilian element within the Pentagon accountable.
Al Palmer
Yeah Well, you know, the other part of that is the amount of accountability, even on the military side, has been kind of sparse lately, and I think we need to look at that a little bit harder too. I mean, it’s true that in a big organization, large bureaucracies, a lot of people make mistakes, and then who do you hold responsible for that? But if nobody’s held responsible, then that gets back down to the issue we were talking about earlier. How does the new airmen who just signed up to go into the Air Force have confidence that they’re going to be treated well or that their environment is going to be right, if the leadership can’t be held accountable or they can’t do the things that need to be done?
Ron Scott
That’s a challenge. You know, when Matt Lohmeier was working his concerns up the chain of command, he was basically told by all of his superiors that their hands were tied. You know this is above me, which begs the question. That’s an easy answer my hands are tied, but you didn’t answer. The real question is what I’m describing to you wrong or not? Is it moral or immoral? And if they choose not to answer that question and they’re doing it because they want to preserve their position or their rank, that gets into a fundamental philosophical question about for whom do you serve and when? You swore to support and defend that Constitution and bearing true faith and allegiance to it. That doesn’t mean you take a pass and say my hands are tied.
I know that’s awfully philosophical and it’s hard to get people to recognize that. That’s the choice they’re making and they can get away with it, but at some point they’ll be held accountable for it. And this oath really means a lot and I really think in the commissioning programs a sufficient amount of time should be spent describing what that oath says. You know, for instance, supporting and defending the constitution. It doesn’t say America, it doesn’t say the department of defense, uh, and enemies, foreign and domestic. And in an earlier conversation with tom you know he says for the military people, you know, most of our focus on the foreign element represent about 5% of our population and if you add the veterans that have served and whatever, that might add another 4%. So 9% have been focused on that part of the oath that focuses on the foreign threat.
But how about the domestic? As Tom pointed out, 95% of our society should be focused on the domestic threat and what we’re looking at today with the ideological infiltration of our institutions, with the CRT DEI stuff, that’s 100%. I mean it affects those that serve in the military, the 5%, but also the other 95% in terms of how we are going to prosper as a nation. But the other part, bear true faith and allegiance to the same. You know, we have to be truthful and honest and we can’t just say, okay, well, I can take a pass on this, because it would be too inconvenient to do anything else, and I take this obligation freely. What Nobody’s forcing me to do this, or any mental reservation, because you’re a volunteer.
This is the authenticity part you have to be true to yourself and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties. The duties, wow. Here’s this, this concept called a duty, a moral obligation of the office upon which I’m about to enter, and we close it off. We used to do this, so help me, god. I mean, that’s the ultimate uh power that we’re accountable to. But, uh, you, you know this sense of duty, wow. And for officers, notice, there’s no obey word in there, like in the enlisted oath, where they obeyed the orders of the president and the officers appointed over them, and the expectation is that those orders that they’re being given are moral, ethical and legal. And that COVID-19 vaccination issue really destroyed and cut into the trust that we normally had among our military members. We lost that.
There’s a lot of power in these oaths and what they say, what they imply and what they’re explicit about, and so I think we need to get back to understanding this more clearly and have the courage to do what it says and means.
Al Palmer
And our viewers who are watching this will note that there’s no expiration date on that oath
Exactly.
Tom Burbage
I am still bound by that oath. One of the reasons why we’re all in this endgame that we’re playing right now is that none of our oaths have expired.
Al Palmer
So we are still concerned.
Tom Burbage
There’s one other point that I’d like to make and that’s the sense of a generational responsibility. I brought this up earlier. Today. We enjoy the freedoms we have and live in the America we live in because our parents and grandparents are willing to take generational responsibility for those of us who are coming behind, and it’s too rare these days that that’s being done by our generation. I think we’re starting to look introspectively now and say, how did this happen? Almost like it was an overnight sensation, but as we all know, overnight sensations take years in the making.
How do we get to this situation? Why are we suddenly confronted as a nation with domestic enemies? You know we’re the strongest nation in the world against foreign enemies. It’s a domestic enemy, is hard to define, and it’s hard to define is the American patriot. You know the military that should be more focused on defending against the domestic enemy than the rest of you know, than just the military.
So we sort of operate in a small circle and if there is some way to increase awareness across the general population, particularly the voting population, that this is an extremely critical time for this country and there is a domestic enemy at work and it takes in many shapes and many forms and it permeates much of our society, not the least of which is the border situation, which is distorting all kinds of things.
You know. At the bottom line, it can bankrupt all of our social systems and it’s starting to do that in some of the cities that we read about. It affects gerrymandering, it affects voting districts and it opens the door for potential higher levels of fraud in voting. Those are fundamental to a constitutional republic, for potential higher levels of fraud in voting. Those are fundamental to a constitutional republic. A constitutional republic doesn’t have too many things that it has to have One. It has to have equal justice under the law, it has to have free and fair elections, it has to have three equal branches of government, and those guardrails around those three equal branches are also getting very fuzzy, you know how can you challenge the Supreme Court?
if you’re in the administration group, you know. It’s just all these things are sort of happening around us and that in its summary, in my view, is the domestic enemy doesn’t wear a uniform.
Al Palmer
Well, and the domestic part of that is maybe countered by being able to talk about civics and history and traditions. But that gets us back to this other thing that’s kind of floating around. You know, duty, honor and country. You know Douglas MacArthur was famous for saying that in the 60s when he was speaking to the cadets at West Point. It couldn’t be more true today. But that encapsulated that unspoken part of the citizen’s obligation to be able to help with the country. And I think you’re right, tom, that needs to come back into not just the military but into society as well.
Bill Prince
And we’re pushing that, I know, and Bill, you can talk about that with MacArthur Society pushing that I know and, Bill, you can talk about that with MacArthur Society, One of the programs that we have within the MacArthur Society. One of the things that we’re very concerned about and I think it applies to all the service academies is the number of the increased number of civilian professors at West Point. Circling back to this concept of duty and preparing, in our case, service academy graduates with a concept of duty, I felt when I was a cadet that we benefited greatly from having serving military officers as our professors and instructors. I think in my time we had got 4% of the instructors 4%, I think, were with civilians and those were only in areas where we really couldn’t get military officers to do that. Teaching that’s one language is one that I remember. We’re now up to, I think, about 30% civilian instructors.
And here’s a problem, several problems with that One serving officers, by definition, not just to teach you thermodynamics, but they’re mentors and their mentors were the best of interest in you graduating and perhaps serving under them. I went almost right to Vietnam and I ran into no less than six former instructors from West Point in Vietnam. My tactical officer. I literally bumped into him one night on a fire base in Northern I-Corps literally bumped into him coming around a quarter of a bunker. So these were mentors, but knew that there was a good chance that you, Cadet Schmedlaff, were going to be Second Lieutenant Schmedlaff and you were going to be in Vietnam as a platoon leader, but working for the latest guy. Caution on. And my, my master’s degree is from Harvard and people have told me I should add that to my list of hostile areas I took out of. I don’t want to find that, can you get a refund, not not my politics there, but the uh, a civilian.
A civilian professor coming out of a prestigious university likely has zero coming to West Point, has zero military experience and does not have a vested interest in Cadet Schmidlaff being a thoroughly professional officer.
Because they’re up at West Point and they’re gonna serve 20 years or however long they’re gonna be a professor teaching medieval French literature, whatever they’re teaching up there. And so what we’re losing by having all of these civilian professors, who probably don’t have the same concept of duty to the country, duty to service, that are serving military officers that. So a part of what we’re doing with the duty on a country of commitment is to take a very hard look at dramatically reducing the number of civilian professors, and at US one. And I think that would be a great step in the right direction for many number of reasons, and I’ll end this with we have I’m absolutely convinced because I’d seen some solid evidence we have some professors at West Point, three professors who are not just new to me, but they are working rather hard, in my view, to undermine that concept of duty in their future of the death. So I think there are some that represent a cancer of the military academy and they definitely need to be fired.
Al Palmer
Well, Ron, doesn’t that kind of bring us kind of full circle. Then back to leadership, and particularly with places like the academies. And I remember when my whole friend, robin Olds, was the commandant of cadets there or the superintendent, you know, he brought in with him that credential of being a real warrior and somebody who was not just like anybody cut out of a cookie cutter. And maybe that’s what we need, is we need some good examples, as Bill says, back in the back in the academies, instead of bringing in these guys from the East Coast someplace who are, I’m sure, marvelous, marvelous professors in their own right, but you can find somebody to teach physics other places, but you can’t teach them how to lead when they get out into the service.
Well guys, we’ve run through a lot of territory here and I hate to have to close off on this, but we’re just about probably at the point where we need to go out and find a happy hour. But I want to thank all of you for being with me today and going through some of this. This is just scratching the surface, with each of our organizations you know STARS, the Calvert Group, macarthur Society all engaged in trying to find solutions, not dwell on problems. But we need to find a way to get the war fighting ethos back in to the military and keep it strong. Thanks for being here and I’ll mention to anybody that wants to see this podcast, as well as others just go to starsus. You can also find out more about the Calvert Group and MacArthur Society there as well. So to our viewers, thanks for tuning in and come back and see us next week. I can’t wait for your specials coming along next time around. Thanks for watching us. Good night.
Leave a Comment