The MacArthur Society of West Point Graduates held its monthly Commanders Call on 30 September 2025 with special guest Lt. General Michael Flynn, USA ret. The call was hosted by MacArthur Society President Maj. General Paul Vallely, USA ret, USMA ’61, and Matthew Newgent, USMA ’96. In addition to Gen. Flynn’s talk and answering questions, the MacArthur Society gave updates on its activities.
Watch:
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Matthew Newgent
For those of you who are here, thank you for showing up a little bit early. My name is Matthew Newgent. I’m the host for this call. I’m from the West Point class of 1996. We are very fortunate to have Lieutenant General Mike Flynn here with us today. I’m going to give a little preface here. We’ll welcome to our VIPs. But we have a disclaimer, we’re a non-partisan group, which means we have people from both parties and different views. For this Commander’s call, we’ll focus on what unites both parties, a strong national defense, specifically what relates to West Point and other service academies. Now, I give you to the MacArthur Society President, Major General Paul Vallely. Sir, you have the floor.
Gen. Paul Vallely
Yeah. Thank you very much, Matt. We’re very happy to welcome General Flynn as our guest speaker today. Well, what I’d like to do to kick this off before General Flynn comes on is a quick moment of silence and prayer for Charlie Kirk, Eric, and his family, and for our country. Just a slight moment of silence, please. Great. Thank you very much. Gen. Flynn, it’s just a privilege and honor to have you on the MacArthur Society. We’re new. Some think we’re trying to fence off against the Association of Graduates. We aren’t. We’re trying to just be a society that represents the graduates, and we have a lot of plans, that’s for sure. Anybody that can join us and help us get along here and make things positive for West Point will be greatly appreciated. But General Flynn, a great American, great Patriot, great warfighter, writer. Been through a lot, that’s for sure. He’s seen it all, what’s happened in Washington over the last several years. He doesn’t need any more than that as an introduction. But General Flynn, thank you so much. We’ll probably take about 15 minutes, Mike, if that’s okay, and then a Q&A after that and stay as long as you’d like, and then we’ll proceed with the rest of our program. It’s a privilege to introduce Lieutenant General Mike Flynn. Mike, it’s all yours.
Gen. Michael Flynn
Glad to be here with everybody, I very much appreciate and I’m honored to be part of this conversation. Frankly, a lot of others that I am blessed to be part of. Just for those that are on here, some I know, many I don’t know, and maybe get a chance to meet one of these days. I am actually in Washington, DC. Just to give you a little bit of context of what I’m doing. I’m in Washington, DC. I have an office in Washington, DC since probably the last four or five months, purposely to be here because of some of the things that I’m involved in. They all have to do with essentially national security. I do meet regularly with Pete Hegseth. I met with him a couple of times, actually. I met with him as recently as about a week and a half ago. It’s one-on-one, and I’ll leave it at that. I meet regularly with Tulsi Gabbard, and I’m in touch with Marco Rubio and people over in the White House. You don’t always have to be inside to be effective. That’s the way I am trying to operate these days. There’s a lot of noise about people in or out or doing this or that.
It’s really about comes down to relationships and leadership. It does come down to what is it that you’re trying to help, in this case, the President in the United States try to achieve. I will tell you that I do not agree with everything that the President is doing. I’ve been very clear about that. I do believe that we’re in the very early stages of World War III. I believe that. Typically, You think about wars that break out that are big, and this has to do with the MacArthur Society. It certainly has to do with leader development and our future, not only as a nation, but those that we are that we’re supposed to help, which is the ones that come behind us. That’s why I’m very honored and privileged to be part of the military academy’s Board of Visitors. It’s an interesting place for me to be these days. But when we look at the world, just in general, Russia and Ukraine, the signs for that particular regional, major regional conflict are not going in the right direction. And make no mistake about it, that there’s been this big, big misnomer that this thing started underneath when Biden came into office.
The initial assault, initial attacks by Russia into Ukraine were on the 28th of February of 2014 during the Obama administration. For those that followed it closely, that was right there on on the heels of the May Don Revolution, which essentially the tactics for the May Don Revolution is essentially what the Obama administration applied here in the United States of America. People can ask me questions about that or anything else. The other thing is the situation in the Middle East is a total mess despite what the President talked about yesterday. Many documents that will be signed. Some of these countries and groups will sign them, and they’ll smile at you, and then they’ll stick a knife right in your forehead. They will not stick a knife in your back. They won’t wait for you to turn around. I’m circumspect, I guess, on the situation in the Middle East and the direction that that’s taking. For those that haven’t been following it closely, Russia just signed a major nuclear energy deal with Iran. China. Don’t kid yourself about how the Russian economy is in the toilet. They just signed another major deal with India, another major deal with China, another major deal with Iran.
I call it the Unholy Alliance. Then, of course, we have all the other likely suspects. We got the situation down in Venezuela, nuclear capable, North Korea. That’s just a… And there’s others. Of course, we did as part of an organization that I am part of, we did write a national security strategy because we haven’t had one since 2017. When I came and took over a group here in Washington, DC, I said the first thing we’re going to do, and the person that helped me write it was a guy who worked in the Pentagon and worked over at the National Security Council who wrote strategies, strategies, plural. We’ve written one. I’ve handed it out to members of Congress. I handed it out over in the White House and gotten it certainly over to the Defense Department and into parts of the State Department and certainly over to the leadership of the I see the intel community. The number one threat that is stated in that particular national security strategy is none of what I just talked about. It is the internal threat by various ISMs that have infiltrated into our country for decades. That was one of the things, one of the reasons why Pete Hegseth pulled everybody in today.
Because we’re not talking about a couple of people at the top or a few civilians in the Office of Policy or something. We’re talking about tens of thousands of uniform military and many military leaders who, I guarantee many in in that room today were squirming in their seats because they know who Pete was talking about. We have a problem. We have a problem. That problem has infiltrated down into our country. My last four years, four and a half years was going around the country in probably almost 150 cities in the United States, mostly mid-size and small towns, trying to change school boards. Because I use this phrase, local action has a national impact. School boards is because of the takeover of the Education Department, which President Trump said he was going to eliminate during the campaign, and they just refunded it again. So the Department of Education needs to be shut down. Linda McMahon is a great person and a great leader, actually. But just funded the Department of Education again. Most people forget that Department of Education was created by Jimmy Carter. The education system is so broken in this country, and I won’t dive into that.
I can answer questions on it and give you some ideas about how challenging it is. But for counties around this country, the lower 3,100 counties, we were only, right now, we’re upwards of about, we were somewhere between 200 and 225 school boards because they’re at the county level that we were able to get inside of and change and overturn to at least become relatively more conservative. Not totally, but relatively more conservative. So at least they would check on the kinds of books that were being given and the kinds of things that were being taught to children in public schools, never mind charter and private. All you got to do is know that and help broken our system is and see the rise of homeschooling nationwide, really. Then the homeschoolers don’t get a real break. I mean, some of them get it, but this is everything about the security of our country. The number one threat that we presented to our government, and we’ll see what plays out because I know our Office of Policy over in the Defense Department has a draft defense policy, a defense strategy that’s coming out. The rest of the government will have bits and pieces of ideas and policies and directions, but there’s no set strategy from the top.
Still hadn’t been crafted yet. I don’t know what they’ll end up doing, but they have one in hand that they can use, that’s for sure. I would just I offer, maybe in a couple of minutes, where I think we’re at. I think where we’re at is I think that we have lost a lot of momentum. I think this administration has lost a lot of momentum And President Trump, I’m one of his biggest fans, but like I said, I don’t agree with him on everything. When President Trump does this, he signs a document and he does this at the Resolute desk and shows everybody some new executive order. And he has his executive order. One of his staff writers there will give an executive summary of what that executive order is about. The problem is, and everybody on here that has served a day in the military knows what gets checked gets done. In a military unit, if the commander is checking on it, periodically, believe me, it’ll get done. The challenge is once one of those executive orders is signed by the President of the United States, he turns it over to whatever, to the secretaries and to the agencies, activities, commissions, and the departments that we have inside of the government, which is large and too large.
It’s like, Okay, execute. As happens in giant bureaucracies, which most of the people that are running them now have no experience running large organizations, never mind large bureaucracies, they don’t execute them. There’s nobody executing those. There are still military organizations as of a couple of months ago that still did not have the chain of command pictures put up. That’s only two months ago. That’s in the military. If you think that the military is going to respond to the commander-in-chief the way that they should, the way that they, in many of the experiences that some of you that are on here have had, that’s not the case. It’s just not the case. You expect in a white shoe bureaucracy where you don’t have a lot of military that you tell somebody something, you tell them, you give them an order, let’s say, you give them a directive, you tell them, Hey, I need you to have this done. You almost expect them to come back with a white paper with 15 reasons why they can’t. But that’s happening across the board right now. When I go into very, very senior people’s offices to conduct some meeting, and I do it when I’m here in Washington, DC, and I am told that they cannot trust anybody outside of their office, I’m like, Well, why don’t you get rid of them?
Just get rid of them. You can’t trust them. Why are they there? Again, I will provide my best advice and assistance and influence that I can, but my last message to you all before I turn it over to some questions, I tell this to every single person that I speak to, and I’ve been speaking to a lot of people around this country at many levels, 10 or 10,000, it doesn’t make any difference, that we are in a place right now where we could lose this country. We’re not one generation away anymore, folks. We’re one presidency away. This presidency has a very short time. Like I said earlier in my comments, I think we’re losing, we’ve lost some momentum. Because of one big thing that does matter is elections. We always say elections have consequences. But actually, if your elections are not fair, if our elections are basically… If inside of our elections, we have foreign interference, which we know now we do because the current director of national intelligence has publicly stated it during a public forum inside of a cabinet meeting, for those that missed that, Tulsi Gabbard specifically said They have discovered foreign interference in our elections.
Now it’s what does it mean? And then, What do we do about it? There are some people working very hard, we’re trying to work with the administration and with the Department of Justice and others to try to correct some of that because for federal elections, which are every two years, we We can’t have foreign interference in our elections. And yet we still do. We know we do. That’s part of the reason why we have a flotilla off of the coastlines of Venezuela. It’s not just because of the drugs. It’s because of what we know and what has been presented to the President about Venezuela. It’s not just Trenda Alagua or C cartels del sol or cartels being designated foreign terrorist organizations. It’s also now it’s about their influence globally, at least from what I have seen, north of 30 countries that use their capabilities. That means that they can decide the outcome of an election to include the United States of America. We just never… I mean, these are not conspiracy theories. These are that actually there’s hard evidence, there’s factual evidence, there’s people that are working on these problems to try to fix these.
Taking it back down to Earth, to West Point, United States Military Academy, and the great cadets that are there, trying to get the best that we have. I don’t see West Point as a place to… It’s not just to teach a new leader, new things and ideas, and get them ready for war in the immediate. It’s also to create leaders for the future of our country because there are institutions that still matter. The United States Military Academy, Annapolis, Air Force Academy, and there’s others. Mass Maritime Academy. I have great, great legacy there, too. Other academies, Citadel and other places. Texas A&M with its this great ROTC program. There are some places where leaders are still created as long as we make the decision to teach them about leadership and to teach them about the things that matter in life and not matter to one segment of our population. Paul, I’ll stop there and I’ll stay for some questions here for another 10 or 15 minutes. I don’t know how long you guys got there.
Matthew Newgent
That’s great, sir. We’ll take all the time you got. Paul, did you want to ask the first question?
Gen. Paul Vallely
All right, good. Mike, the question goes to the internal threats in America and the reluctance of many of these left-wing governors and mayors to support trying to eliminate the threats in the cities like Portland and so on. In your opinion, are we on the right track there? What do we have to do to make sure that we rid crime within our cities?
Gen. Michael Flynn
I think this is one of the seminal moments in US history that we are facing right now because the media is going to push back and then governors and mayors are going to push back and say, How dare the President of the United States send in forces to quell. We’re not talking about riots. We’re talking about physical abuse and attacking federal law enforcement officials trying to do their jobs. So the President of the United States has a responsibility to not only protect and defend, but also to preserve. He’s the only one that takes that… It uses that word in his oath of office. None of us on this Zoom call had to use that word. Only the President of the United States uses the word preserve. They’re all going to push back. The short answer really is that there is a creeping and infiltration of communism into the United States of America and into the political component of the left. If you don’t know about me, which is insane, that means you haven’t been paying attention. I grew up as a Democrat. I grew up as a Democrat in a Kennedy era of John F.
Kennedy. My mother was a big Democrat person in the Democrat Party. She was head of the pro-life movement for the Democrat Party. At a time when they still believed in life. I don’t want people to talk to me about, I’m this conservative right-wing guy. No, I love this country. What I see is I see exactly what the Chinese and exactly what the Communist Movement of America has done and decided to do years ago, decades ago, is to infiltrate into all aspects of our government. They’re all over the federal government. They’re all over the place. The Democratic Socialist Party of America. God, help Chelsea Gabbard trying to rip out parts of the intel community that is just socialist. They’re just socialist. Caught dead to rights on Zoom calls talking about how they’re going to subvert the United States. I mean, it’s just nuts. We have to have… The President has to be smart. He’s got to be shrewd. He’s got to be constitutional, but he’s got to use the authorities in order to be able to do the things that he needs to do to not only protect and defend, but to preserve.
Matthew Newgent
Thank you, sir. We got another question here. Folks, if you could please send a message to the administrator so I can read your questions. We have a next question from General Rod Bishop. Glad to have a fellow conservative, Rhode Islander on. Given your meetings with Secretary War Hegseth, do you think he or the Department of War really understand that DEI is not dead? We won’t rid our military of an ideology that has been, quote, marching into our institution for decades, unquote, in a few months. It takes follow-up, as you have indicated.
Gen. Michael Flynn
Yeah. I think that he knows it’s going to take quite a while. This is where an organization like you all come in. I’ve always said, it’s like people come to me and go, Can’t Trump do this? Can’t Hegseth do that? Can’t Rubio do that? It’s a leadership lesson I learned a long time ago from a great general by the name of Jim Lindsay, some of you might know. He said to me as a lieutenant, he has a lieutenant. He was a corps commander who grabbed me on the streets of our dens one day, and I was doing something wrong. He just said, What is it that you can control? I said, I don’t know, I can control me in my platoon. He goes, Okay, well, then take control of it. He goes, Don’t worry about what you can’t control. It’s like, so does Pete understand it? Absolutely. That’s why he pulled them all in. Trust me. He pulled them all in because that was not just about a raw, raw speech. That was about culture. He recognizes that the culture has a problem inside of the military. So they needed to hear that from him.
Because all of you have been through chain teaching. I mean, are we going to be able to chain teach our way away from DEI? Because DEI is a form of Marxism, period. Whether you want to believe it or not, Believe me, the math, go study it. We cannot have these kinds of things. But my bigger point is, and as I tell to everybody in the country, that people have got to start realizing that all of us have to serve as citizens. We all have a responsibility to serve. I’m talking to people who have served this country and get that, but not everybody has. That’s what the American people need to start realizing, that the American people need to start serving this country in different ways because otherwise we’re going to lose it. We’re going to lose it quickly. Not one generation, folks. We’re one presidency away. If the if the left gets back in power, if you didn’t hear what Jeffrey said the other day, the ranking member of the Democrat Party in the House of Representatives, didn’t hear what he said the other day. It was basically a threat. I know I’m on that target list.
I’ve already been through that, Ringer. But this is what we’re up against. This is not like a Democrat and a Republican Party, and the Democrats have better ideas or the Republicans have better ideas. We’re well past that. We’re well past that. Ronald Reagan warned us about that, and here we are.
Matthew Newgent
We believe you, sir. And given what you said, well, all that you said, how do you feel the duty Honor Country Commission plays into this? And how does the Secretary of War feel it would be part his strategy to reform the Service Academies?
Gen. Michael Flynn
Yeah, well, I mean, it always starts with leadership, right? It always starts with a good vision and clear objectives. I will tell you, for this group because I’ve met with Tony Tata a couple of times now, actually. Tony’s an old friend. He and I served as battalion commanders in the 82nd a long time ago. I handed him the duty honor country commission report, went through it with him, and as well as some other things. He did the same. In general, I was much more wavetop with P. Hegseth, but I know he received it. It’s not just what we’re doing about West Point. I know that that’s the topic of a group like this, but it’s about the whole thing. It’s about everything that we do. I think that the right people have it. I will tell To say that in the conversation I had with Tony and Secretary Hegseth at the same time together, Tony Tata’s early research of the office that he has now responsible for, which is personnel and readiness for the department, he couldn’t find back 25 years. He went back 25 years and couldn’t find 25 years worth of anything that dealt with the kinds of that are addressed in the duty on our country commission report.
That means that USDP&R has basically stayed out of the things that they are responsible for, which is personnel readiness, health readiness, Logistics readiness, readiness. Then you have other components within the department that you go and grab. But that’s the person, that’s the office that’s supposed to be responsible for personnel and readiness. For 25 years, it’s been, frankly, not doing its job. Good enough for Tony for recognizing that, stating it. I do believe he’s going to get after it. His eyes have been opened up, I know in the last couple of months, on things that aren’t happening. I think the driving force has been groups like this because it’s like, Don’t be shy. We cannot be shy. It’s like the squeaky wheel or whatever. So don’t be shy. We not only seize the objective, you then got to fight through the objective. You can’t just say, like I said earlier, Here you go, everybody. Here’s a newly assigned executive order. Well, what gets What gets done, what gets checked gets done. Now, Trump needs to go out there. Pete needs to go out there. Believe me, he’s not going to just state something today. I know that he is going to go check. There has to be some changes. There has to be some changes. We cannot keep going the way we’re going right now with the leadership.
Matthew Newgent
As many times as I’ve heard you say, Get out there, get it, we still need to hear that. We, the MacArthur Society, have had an impact at West Point, and our sister Service Academy alumni, STARRS and the Calvert Task Group. We’re all doing great. We have so many questions coming in, sir, and we have limited time with you. And thank you for your encouraging us.
Gen. Michael Flynn
We really- I’ll try to be shorter than that.
Matthew Newgent
I do appreciate that. How do How do you feel about… This is from Kevin Peterson, USMA class of 80, retired DEA. How do you feel about Komi being finally indicted after he set you up? This coming from a 27-year retired DEA special agent and USMA 80 grand.
Gen. Michael Flynn
For all of us, it should be heartbreaking. Not that he got indicted, but heartbreaking for where our country is at. This, to me, is heartbreaking. I The United States of America is supposed to be this beacon of light. God, if you just think about… But there are people in our country, and there are definitely people in our government that don’t see… They think that our Constitution is just an old piece of paper, and it needs to be changed. I’m serious. I’ve had these conversations with very senior people in our government while I was still in service, which is over 10 years ago now. It It is absolutely heartbreaking that a guy of his stature who was the Deputy Attorney General for the United States of America, never mind the director of the FBI, and he served in other capacities in government, and he’s going to probably go to jail. I mean, sadly, they’ll fight it and all that, but we’ll see what happens. But the evidence, having gone through that process and seeing no evidence, and making the decisions that I made based on the protection of my family, but now knowing the evidence that has been presented, this is a terrible place for our country to be.
You’re going to have a lot of people on the left that are going to say, Oh, this is just Trump’s retribution. We’ve got to hold people accountable for the damages that they’re doing to our country. Like I said, it is absolutely It’s been heartbreaking to me that we are in this place right now. I wish we weren’t, but we are.
Matthew Newgent
Sir, I’ll get a couple more questions if I can. This is from Vicky Manning, Restoration of America. Do you think the USMA Board of Visitors, which you are one of them, sir, is making an impact on making sure DEI curriculum and staff are limited to USME? Before you answer, sir, for anyone here, if you have not read the article that we published about General Flynn’s first visit, the Board of Visitors, it was amazing. So if you haven’t read that, please read that article. But, sir, what type of impact do you think the new board members are making?
Gen. Michael Flynn
A positive impact. I’m not appointed by the Secretary of the Army or the Secretary of Defense. I’m appointed by the President. And I talk to him specifically about it because he asked me a couple of different times. The first time, I said, No, I’m not interested. But the second time, he asked me, I said, Okay, but I’m not going to be a wallflower. I’m It’s not. It’s not my style. Anybody that’s ever known me or worked around me knows that I’m not going to stand there and listen to stuff that I believe is not to standard. Like I said, there’s a standard for tying your shoes, tying your boots, for wearing your headgear in the military. There’s a standard for everything, and DEI does not meet that standard or these woke policies. What is it? 26 degrees in West Point, if you can get. Like I said in my time there, go to the University of Rhode Island if you want to get a degree in basket weaving. You go to West Point or you go to Annapolis or you go to these military academies to learn about warfare. I would prefer that you take a Sam’s curriculum that I went through, and you put a lot of that right into West Point.
I mean, teach these young minds how to be warfighters, because believe me, if you learn about war, you’re going to learn about leadership.
Matthew Newgent
You talked about warfighters. The United States is unmatched at killing the bad guys. But when it comes to killing bad ideas, we’ve been swamped. Our enemy is, we don’t know how to kill bad ideas. We haven’t trained our troops and our leaders how to kill bad ideas. What are your thoughts on what we can do to train our troops and leaders, especially, how to recognize Marxist ideas, subversive ideas, and then kill those bad ideas?
Gen. Michael Flynn
Donald Rumsfeld came out and visited us in Iraq. It was a very small group, three of us. I was the J2 at the time, J3 and the commander, and Rumsfeld and a couple of his unions, We told him, we had seen his agenda and everybody was showing him gazillion slides. We showed him one slide. We basically told him that, essentially, the conversation that we had, he was really pissed. He was really pissed about it initially until he calmed down. We told him that, If you told us to come to this war and you were not coming home until you won, we would have fought it differently. We would have prepared differently. We would have resourced differently. If we weren’t going to come home until we won, we wouldn’t be here now. That was, I don’t know, however many years after the wars, three or four years after the war. That’s the way we fought wars that we actually won. And that would have been back in World War II against Nazism and imperialism. We have not done a good job of, and I’m talking about military officers. So if we just continue to accept that we’re going to go on these deployments, like we go to JRTC, we go to war like we go to JRTC.
I heard a Force Com commander stated like that. And I about went through the roof. I was a colonel, and I had spent two years at JRTC as an OC, and I spoke up during that meeting. I was a Force Com commander, and that was at Fort Bragg. I was so upset, and I said, Sir, I’ll do respect. You got to be kidding me. We’ve got people that are dying. We had Marine forces had already been killed. We had some soldiers had already been killed. I just couldn’t understand why somebody that… But when we talked to Rumsfeld about that, he got all upset because he was making these decisions. Then he calmed down. He I understand what you’re talking about. But that’s not how we fought. Therefore, we ended up retreating from Afghanistan. Never mind going back in history to Vietnam and other wars. But we retreated in Afghanistan, and the election that’s about to come up in Iraq will go to Iran. The guy that’s running for President in Iraq, it’s already owned by the Iranians, but it will be solely owned by the Iranians after this next election in Iraq. You say to yourself, What are we doing here?
What are we doing here? So as a military leader, this is what I brought out in that, and I’m going on here, and I know that. So I’ll hang with you guys for a bit here. But This is what I was bringing out to those cadets during the meeting at West Point. I said, You have an obligation to speak your mind. If you don’t feel like you can speak your mind when you’re asked by some commander that goes, Is there anything else anybody’s got to say? If you don’t feel strong enough to speak your mind about something that you feel that is wrong or you don’t clearly understand. My objective is just to go out there for six months and do what I can do and then come home. I thought our objective was winning.
Matthew Newgent
On that line of thinking, sir, here’s a great question from Air Force Brigadier General retired Chris “Mookie” Walker. Secretary of the War, you asked the general officers, field officers today. The speech reminded me of Paton’s address to the Third Army in World War Two. Secretary of War invited the senior leaders who are disturbed by what he said to do the honorable thing and resign. I think some may resign, but also I think some will remain to slow roll or thwart the wishes of the National Commander Authority. What are your thoughts on that, sir?
Gen. Michael Flynn
I totally agree. I think most of them are going to sit there and go, and they’re going to quietly go, That’s not me. That’s not me. That’s not me. That’s bullshit. It’s all of them. It’s all of them who accepted it. So let’s not kid ourselves here. I actually This is a group that has enough, probably a network of some of these people that are still there and tell them, Look, if it’s time to go, go. When somebody says, Well, I can do more if I stay in and I can fight the system. I can fix the system from within. It ain’t going to work. It doesn’t work that way. That means that you’re not… Actually, you have just given up some of your own personal standards. We have all been taught about standards. My father was a sergeant in World War II in Korea. Before I went off to my first assignment, he grabbed me and he goes, You’re going to run into people that are going to say, Well, this is the way we do it here. Because my father was an old mass sergeant. He goes, When somebody tells you that, somebody tells you that, they are people.
He basically said, If they tell you that, if they say, This is the way we do it here, your first question should Well, what’s the standard? Tell me what the standard is and show it to me. Show it to me in writing. I learned that from him because the people that come to you and say, Well, this is the way we do it here, they’re the ones that you need to get rid of or you need to be very careful of because those are the ones that are slacking or not doing the things right. We have flag officers, generals and admirals. I mean, let’s face it, folks, the number two of the Air Force is going to go to prison, whatever, for 25 years, some number of years for bribery. I know we’re talking mostly army here, but it’s across the board. It’s across the board.
Matthew Newgent
Here’s a question in a different frame is from Mike Edelson, what’s keeping us from having a national security strategy? How much difference is there between your NSS draft and what the administration is developing, sir?
Gen. Michael Flynn
Well, there’s nothing keeping us from having it except somebody’s got to think and then they got to write, and then they’ve got to then take it and implement. I don’t know what they’re going to end up with. I I can tell you I can’t put a finger on anybody that’s actually sitting down and writing one right now. I do know that Pete Hegseth has directed his policy team to come up with a defense strategy, and it’s over in one of the FFRDAs, I guess they call them one of the think tanks over that. Honestly, some of what I’ve seen in it is not… I wouldn’t recommend it. Some of it’s okay, some of it I wouldn’t recommend. But you got to have a strategy. You got to have a vision, and the President’s got to implement it, and then he’s got to direct it to make sure that people execute it. We do have all these documents because those documents do matter. They do matter in time because it provides direction for a government that has been a bit directionless. I’m not just talking about the Trump administration. I’m talking about our directionless government. The last one that we’ve seen is 2017.
When I saw that, I was like, Well, let’s write one. I can give you a website, I think. I’ll get you a website where you can find- We love that, sir.
Matthew Newgent
Thank you for doing that. I mean, it’s the things that a lot of us don’t think about. This is from Scott Field, West Point, Class of 73. You touched on maintaining momentum and accountability. A pragmatic question here. Has anyone looked at the NSC as the whip crackers in holding cabinet-level agencies accountable? Eisenhower’s NSC was somewhat like a plans up, shop. He issued plans and then held periodic meetings to do the finger-pointing drill and get status reports.
Gen. Michael Flynn
Yeah. So yes, I think that that’s why that element around the president was created. Reagan had one, too. He had a second shadow cabinet, actually. They were like his eyes and ears that would go out and do things. But again, since 9/11, I can tell our government has multiplied by a minimum on average, on average, five by times five. Our government has since the 10th Of September of 2001 until now, all government agencies, activities, commissions, departments, multiply by five this size. So that just gives you something. In the Department of Defense, for example, at the height of the at the end of the Cold War, in late 1980s, where we had our largest military since World War II. We had 500,000 combat forces over in Europe as an example. So in 1990, the Undersecretary of Defense for Policy, which is really the Chief Operating Officer for the Department of Defense, had four Assistant Secretaries of Defense. Four, okay? Gigantic military. We had 20 aircraft carriers, half a million troops over in Europe. We had a lot of large bodies of troops out in the Pacific. We had four Assistant Secretaries. Today, we have 24, and we have our smallest military since.
Twenty-four Assistant Secretaries of Defense getting budgets. When I was Lieutenant Colonel, this was a while back, but it was still growing then. I had a guy who was an assistant secretary in sneakers. He puts his feet up on my boss’s desk in his office, and I’m sitting in there, and my boss was a Vietnam Silver Star recipient at that time, and I was about to kill the guy because it showed zero respect. Because that’s what you get here when you put some of these people there. Now, it doesn’t mean that… Obviously, we follow our civilian masters, our political masters. I got that. But get people in there that have some respect for not only the uniform and the sacrifice, but also for the Constitution and the process and how we do things. There’s a lot to unpackage in that answer.
Matthew Newgent
Sorry, I’ve got another question here. Do we have time for one more?
Gen. Michael Flynn
Yeah, I got time. I’ll stay until the top of the hour. I mean, I’m taking up your guy’s time.
Matthew Newgent
Oh, this is great, sir. This is one that’s an uncomfortable question from K. Lewis, but a real one. So Ms. K. Lewis, I have a plea and a prepster. My husband and I are also both grads. Is anyone looking into the curriculum at the prep school? My son shares his English assignments with me, and they are filled with woke propaganda. He had to analyze an essay. It is tough to read this, sir. About two gay guys where the affluent gay guy is envious of his partner’s hard childhood in a foreign country and therefore pretends his partner’s childhood is in town. How does that prepare young adults to be lieutenants?
Gen. Michael Flynn
First of all, I want you to copy and paste that question. You can leave out the name. Copy and Please raise that question and send it to me, please.
Matthew Newgent
Thank you.
Gen. Michael Flynn
I want that. I want that question, and please send that to me. This is what we love about you, sir. This is insane. I mean, this is insane. I So the prep school, okay? And a sessions command. So one of the things I talked to both Tata and Pete about was about a sessions command, right? A sessions command is a command inside the US Army, but we have it in all the services because I’m one of these guys. I spent, I don’t know, 12 years or maybe 13 years, 12 years as a flag officer. I only spent eight months in the army. So my time as a flag officer was joint or combined. When I look at things, I look at the whole of our military because if we’re going to win, we’re going to win together and we’re going to win with partners and strong allies. But this ridiculousness, right? This is a symptom of a much broader problem. That’s why the Secretary of Defense had to call in 800 admirals and generals, basically, to school them that we got problems, folks. These prep schools, oh, my God. I mean, I feel so bad.
I feel terrible. But believe me, You get me that? Those are the kinds of things that I can control. So when it gets back to that lesson that I tried to teach you all earlier, I can control that. You give me that information, I can control what I’m going to do with that information. In the first place, as I typically do, is I may call up. I probably will call up the head of the prep school before I ream them from the top. I will try. It’s like talking to a soldier before I talk to a superior, right? Go call the kid to the side and you tell them, Hey, man, you got a problem here. You need to fix it. Then you watch them, and if they don’t fix it, then you go elsewhere and you fix it. We always try to fix the problem at the lowest level before we take it to the next level. But sometimes We’re past that right now. I mean, for them to be teaching that right now under the leadership of this President and this Secretary of War is insane. That means that they are giving the big middle finger to the leadership and to the chain of command.
That’s what that means to me. Well said, sir. That’s almost verbatim what I will tell the Secretary. I’m done with the… I say I’m beyond the nonsense stage of my life here, folks.
Matthew Newgent
This is along the same line from Paul Ettinger, USMA class of 1980. As a former Inspector General, should or can the IG’s office now be tasked with the trust but verifies by the 10 Secretary of Wars initiatives put out today at all unit levels?
Gen. Michael Flynn
Yeah, I think that’s a great idea. I do think that you also have to examine who are your appointed inspectors general. I don’t know how many of you are following the problems that we’re having inside of the Jag Corps of the United States Army. I don’t know if we have any Jags on here, but inside the Jag Corps, there’s some really severe problems right now. I mean, serious cultural problems inside the Jag Corps. You say to yourself, Well, look at what’s happening in our judiciary. Look at what’s happening in our legal profession, the law fair. Why shouldn’t the Jags be anything other than what we’re seeing in the rest of society? The IGs are going to have to be checked as well. I hate to say it like that. If I’m in with somebody and they’re telling me that I can’t trust anybody outside of my office, and I’m sitting there going, Well, then… And I don’t sit there and think about it. I tell them, Fire them and bring in the next, the one man down or the one woman down. Bring the next one in and figure it out if they can do the job.
Matthew Newgent
Sir, you’re clearly a warfighter, and you have been in combat for five years. Every time I think about that, it’s amazing. So that’s kinetic warfare. There’s an article I’m going to send you about we’re good at killing the bad guy, but we’re not really good at killing bad ideas. So I think that your generation lived in the Cold War. But after that, we just let our foot off the gas and recognizing non-kinetic warfare and bad ideas. In your opinion, what are some things that we could do to teach our leaders, get them realigned with what the US Constitution is about, and tell them and teach them about the threats of ideology and how to kill bad ideas?
Gen. Michael Flynn
Yeah. I think that, Matt, is for all of you. That’s the big question of the day, right? How do we take a TikTok, right? I mean, TikTok is a social media platform by the Chinese. Trump’s trying to figure something out. You’re He says he’s going to turn a portion over to some American CEOs, and you got to wonder, Okay, who are those guys? I think that the infiltration of the mind is a very, very serious application of warfare, and it has been going on for a long time in our country. The Education Department is part and parcel to it. The Communist agenda over time, it’s the old adage of Give me a child for so many years, and I’ll shape them for an entire lifetime. How do we get inside of this? I do think that One of the books I wrote was on Fifth Generation Warfare. That is the way that the Chinese have decided. So anybody that’s read their book on irregular warfare, I actually met the two Chinese colonels that wrote that. I met them when I was at the- This is the book right here, folks. Yeah, both those colonels right there.
I met them when I was at the Navy War College because Zembrowski, Vice Admiral Zembrowski, was a great leader. He was thinking outside the box and he goes, We need to bring these guys there, and he figured out a way to do it. And so I had an opportunity to listen to them and speak with them briefly. And the whole adage is about fighting without firing a shot. I mean, it’s It’s simple, right? It’s a Sun Tzu way of war thing.
Matthew Newgent
I’m sure if I could add, we’re studying this, especially with the DHCC, duty on a country commission. We used to meet weekly about this, is that the 45 communists goals are all non-kinetic warfare. Like you said, sir, it’s preparing the battlefield, and most of the work they do is non-kinetic to subvert an institution or a country.
Gen. Michael Flynn
Yeah. I could go into all kinds of issues right now on different things. I mean, how companies, corporations are subverting us, the whole adage of, I mean, can we actually build a ship anymore? I mean, this thing about artillery down at the 101st, okay? Have you heard this? Artillery down at the 101st. The Secretary of the Army, Dan Driscoll was just on a talk show. Frankly, I was a little surprised that he said it because to me, that would be classified. It should be classified because it demonstrates a lack of readiness. But he said in a talk show, I think in the last 72 hours, that the artillery at Fort Campbell in the 101st is- Missing a piece. It’s only 20% ready.
Matthew Newgent
Okay.
Gen. Michael Flynn
So 80% of the artillery in one of our elite, quote, unquote, our elite high-end army units, 80% of the artillery is not ready. So my thing is, okay, and I may send them a note here today because I just saw it only a couple of hours ago that this just says, Everybody from the Chief of Staff of the Army all the way down to the battery commanders, and including the support command down at Campbell, needs to be relieved immediately Immediately, immediately. If that’s true, we have 80% of one of our best army units. Artillery is incapable, not mission ready. That is so outrageous to me. Now, I just saw that this morning. That’s another one of these things that I’m going to dig into because I can. That’s a piece of information that… That’s something that, frankly, if the Secretary of the Army said it. He said it on a large social media platform, publicly. So that’s number one. That would be some guidance to him to say, Hey, we got to be careful what we talk about. But the fact that you said it, there’s a bigger issue in play. It’s not about buying a $2 piece of equipment to fix a $2,000 piece of equipment.
It’s about the lack of leadership, responsibility, From the very top. Because you all know those USR reports, they come up. Yes. And that’s how you go in and you argue. All of them go into the G3 of the army, and all of them go over to the chief of staff, and chief of staff reviews everybody that’s C4. I know this for a fact. If you’re C4 down to battalion level, chief of staff of the army should know it. If he doesn’t know it, then that’s unsaid. If you’re C3 or higher, that’s a G3 responsibility. There’s so much that is at stake here, folks.
Gen. Paul Vallely
Exactly, Mike.
Matthew Newgent
We have time for one or two more questions. But before we do, I’m going to share screen a little bit here. Well, let’s see here. As a way of showing As a small token of appreciation, sir, we, the MacArthur Society, would like to… We’re going to send you this gift. It’s a MacArthur Society swag with your name, embroidered on it and from our partner at Authentically there. It’s not a big deal, but it is to us. When you do finish with us, we hope that you will wear this with pride and honor because we are so grateful for your service to our country. You’re partnering with, not necessarily the MacArthur Society, but in upholding the virtues of duty on our country. For any of you who want a shirt like this, you can get it, but without the Lieutenant General, Mike Flynn on it. We just launched a flash store. You can pre-order. These are quality items. They are pricey and that benefits the MacArthur Society directly. If you order, you can get it by Christmas. It’s in your email. So, sir, it means a lot to us that you’re here. And thank you so much. It’s a small token of appreciation. And we’re very grateful for you, sir. And there are a lot of questions. There must be 30 questions here. I did not get to all of them. I will ask this. Sir, what do you think about the change in leadership at West Point, if at all?
Gen. Michael Flynn
I do believe that there should be some consideration for the superintendent to be from another accession, like ROTC, and maybe you have your commandant as a West pointer, that thing. So you mix it up a bit because we are You guys don’t know the stats like I do right now in terms of how, particularly for commissioning sources, and how far you get to where your lieutenant colonel, colonel, and then all of a sudden There’s that good old boy network. But it also brings in a different philosophy, too. You’ll find a connection to the rest of America. Anyway, Let me just finish. Let me just leave you guys with this. What I wrote down here while you were talking, Matt, is where do wars start? Where do wars start? They always start from the most unlikely of places. Everybody’s looking at Ukraine and the Middle East. Wars always begin in the most unlikely places, and they start with a spark. Sometimes regional, sometimes it’s a mistake. Somebody makes a mistake. I know for a the fact that the Chinese leadership, if a Chinese vessel collides with a US vessel at sea, that doesn’t mean that that was directed from China, that it was directed from the head of the CCP.
Sometimes mistakes are made. And what they’ll do is they’ll deal with that naval officer the way the Chinese deal with mistakes. There’s a reporting now of a Russian submarine that might be down in the Mediterranean. I’m still checking on that. It always happens, it’s a nuclear sub. Still trying to confirm some of this information. Where do wars begin? This is what we have to… We have to teach the intellectual components of that, the philosophical components of warfare, but also the idea about how do we win. That was The secretary’s big thing is winning. We will not be able to continue as a nation for another 250 years by participating in wars. Those days are over. If we don’t start winning wars, then we will not write the history. I don’t care how strong our financial institutions are, because our financial institutions, they don’t care about the Constitution. They care about their institution, their ability to to be able to continue, and they’re operating globally. I think if our allegiance to our country, and I believe it is with groups like this, is unshakable, then we need to act that way and we need to put demands on our leaders.
So whether it’s the MacArthur Society or whatever group that you’re part of, we’ve got to place greater demands on those that we put into office to lead this country. I wish I could sprinkle fairy dust and change it overnight. But I’m going to tell you, these next couple of months, never mind these next few years, these next couple of months are going to be… They’re It’s going to be interesting. My thing is, tighten your bootstraps up there because get ready. We always say, the enemy has a vote. When the enemy is inside of your tent, they’re not outside of the wire. They’re inside of our tent. They’re sitting there drinking our coffee right now.
Matthew Newgent
So I’m going to hand it over to General Vallely, sir.
Gen. Paul Vallely
General Flynn, Mike. We’ve been friends for quite a few years now, and I, for one, really thank you for your time today and your insightful analysis of what’s happening in America and offering solutions. I’d love to have you back on again when we can schedule it. We wish you well. Again, many thanks from the MacArthur Society.
Gen. Michael Flynn
Any time, and God bless, everybody. Thank you. See you. Thank you, sir. God bless you. Bye-bye.
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