“I really want to emphasize that men and women have no better opportunity in their lifetime to exhibit courage on the world stage and in their sphere of influence than they have at the moment. I’d like to invite men to step up and be men, and to have courage.”
STARRS Executive Vice President Matt Lohmeier was interviewed on His Glory TV. Starts at the 4:40 mark. Watch:
Transcript
Dave Scarlett, Take Five Host
. . . . All right. Now, Lieutenant Colonel Matthew Lohmeier. Lieutenant Colonel, thank you for joining us.
00:04:43:02 – 00:04:45:00
Matt Lohmeier
Happy to be here. Thanks.
00:04:45:03 – 00:04:59:17
Dave Scarlett, Take Five Host
So, could you give, the his glory, audience and family a background on yourself? I mean, I look at that year to master’s degrees in Space Force and wow, fighter pilot. This is pretty, pretty impressive stuff.
00:04:59:20 – 00:05:25:29
Matt Lohmeier
Yeah. I started my military career at the US Air Force Academy out in Colorado. And, that’s where I decided I wanted to fly after graduating and commissioning. ended up doing that. I was a T-38 instructor pilot for a number of years in Oklahoma. I spent a bit of time, down in Texas. In fact, we have a program called the Introduction to Fighter Fundamentals that we do after someone leaves pilot training.
And in my case, after I left, being an instructor pilot in Oklahoma, I went down to Wichita Falls, Texas, for my first time in Texas. left there, went to, Oregon to learn how to fly the F-15 C and went on from there to Okinawa, Japan, and flew jets, as you’ve indicated before joining the Air Force Space Community, which later became the U.S. Space Force and ultimately finished up my career as a commander in the U.S Space Force and leading, a unit that accomplishes our nation’s space based missile warning program.
00:05:59:26 – 00:06:16:28
Dave Scarlett, Take Five Host
Wow. That’s a that’s amazing. well, we’ll get into that. Also, the day of the military and what’s happening on our military today. Yeah. but fighter pilots are near and dear to my heart. My grandfather was a reason I went in the Marines was because he was a fighter pilot in World War Two, in the Korean War, a marine, lieutenant colonel as well. And, so watch what you guys do as a fighter. Pilots are just absolutely amazing stuff. So can you talk about, the day and state of our military right now? Well, what’s happened to our military?
00:06:31:02 – 00:07:08:27
Matt Lohmeier
Yeah, I do focus personally and professionally on diversity, equity and inclusion. It’s lineage of ideas which stem from Marxist ideology; many people are waking up to that reality. but it is DEI that is not the only the reason our military is currently suffering retention and recruiting issues. It’s not the only reason, our ability to maintain an effective mission ready force is being affected or it’s not the only reason it’s suffering.
However, I do focus quite a bit on that, and it plays a tremendous, role. It is one of the root causes for, many of the problems were suffering. So diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives have been around, of course, in the universities for decades now. And we’ve seen, if we’ve been paying attention, the ways in which ideology can be so utterly divisive, it can wrecked it, can wreck proper thinking as it seeks to attack Western civilization.
Critical theory, specifically, any of its variants, what people are now colloquially referring to as wokeism is precisely what I’m talking about. And that is a kind of religious worldview in and of itself that determines for you who the bad guys are, who the good guys are, and how to line up on on the right side of things, who the oppressor and who the oppressed classes in society are now that’s predominantly race based, although they’ll they’ll grab a hold of any particular subset of society they think they can sufficiently agitate to cause unrest, aggression, hatred and violence.
In my view, the father of lies is the founder of all of this. And it’s not just as old as Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, who happened to put together the Communist Manifesto in 1848 with a similar narrative. It goes back to the very beginning of recorded human history, and, and it wears many masks. It goes by many different names, but its most recent variant, I’ll say, to keep it simple is diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives that pits people against one another.
You can imagine how that might wreak havoc in an institution such as the Department of Defense that requires unity in order to be effective in its mission. Instead of unity, you have division. You have mistrust. For the other, you have a disrespect for leadership and race politics, eventually, or inevitably then, predominates in the culture.
That’s the thing I’ve been trying to speak up about and against for several years now. It’s the reason I was fired from my command back in 2021. And, in fact, the reason I’ve joined a nonprofit organization called STARRS, you can see the sign right over my shoulder that that is a veteran led nonprofit that focuses specifically on eliminating diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives from the United States military and tries to refocus our troops, our senior leaders in the military on, the things that actually unite people, which is their mission, their common mission, their common blood, their common uniform, and a love, for their country and for the Constitution and the ideals that shaped our country.
00:09:56:22 – 00:10:14:19
Dave Scarlett, Take Five Host
Yeah. It’s, it’s, insanity what’s happened to our military is you talking about stars? We’ve had General Bishop on several times. He’s been a huge fighter and proponent to stop this day. I did get a call about a year ago from a Canadian former Canadian general, what they were doing in our academy in the Air Force. I got it to General Bishop, and he was able to change it in the academy. But to for that type of behavior to get that far was extremely concerning. How did how does our military, the generals, allow something like this to happen in our academies?
00:10:32:22 – 00:10:55:18
Matt Lohmeier
Some of them happen to be true believers in these ideas, unfortunately, and many of them are afraid to speak up. And there’s a lack of courage, culturally, we’ve created a climate of fear. There’s a pendulum that swings, of course, back and forth. And, in the aftermath of the last presidential election and the instantiate of a new regime, there was a tremendous fear that people had.
They were afraid of being labeled something like racist. They were afraid to say something that could be perceived as going against a party, an official party line, and as we’ve seen, I think especially in the past year, people starting to regain some courage there. They’re learning enough about these issues that are hurting recruiting and retention, thanks to organizations like STARRS and General Bishop and others to to to make that determination in their mind that enough is enough.
If I don’t speak up, who will? I’m willing to join the ranks of those who are fighting back and speaking up and try and make a difference, even at the local level. The best all of us can really do is to try and become educated ourselves, and then to exhibit the courage to speak up and use our voice freely and respectfully in whatever sphere of influence it is that we happen to occupy.
And that can go much further and make tremendous impact in ways that we can’t foresee always.
00:11:54:07 – 00:12:18:21
Dave Scarlett, Take Five Host
Well, General Bishop, General McInerney, General Valley–General McInerney, and General Valley are on with us every month. So the last jabs that went after, military people in the military that, you know, had lieutenant colonels like yourself in the Marines, there were fighter pilots in Arizona, 18 years experience, if they wouldn’t have taken the jab that they were going to get dishonorably discharged.
What has happened again to our military? And talk about somebody like your level, Lieutenant Colonel, you’re the one of the most seasoned, officers out there, and all the training is taking you to get to that point. How damaging is that to our military and readiness?
00:12:37:13 – 00:13:11:16
Matt Lohmeier
It’s proven to be terribly damaging, not just because we’ve lost over 8000 of our troops because of what I now clearly see was, an unethical and illegal mandate. In some ways and, it seems to have specifically targeted conservative Christian service members who had a spine and, whether or not any individual went about their resistance to that unethical mandate, appropriately, they were all trying to, be true to their own convictions.
Now you’ve got that small percentage of the military that’s effectively been purged during this regime as a consequence of them standing on principle, saying it went against their personal views or convictions or religious ideas or convictions and, what’s more, and what’s equally as concerning to me, it’s not just the injustice of the treatment of some of those who resisted.
It’s the lasting, consequences for those of our service members who are still in uniform, who chose, in many cases, very reluctantly, to go ahead and and take that shot or series of shots. They’ve had terrible health problems. There’s a Lieutenant Colonel Theresa Long in the Army who’s just now retiring after her honorable service, and she’s been a foremost whistleblower, talking about some of the terrible, devastating consequences of, as as a result of this, really quite foolish policy of mandating that your very young, all volunteer, healthy, relatively healthy force, submit themselves to an experimental shot.
You have to begin to question the motives. Of course, as we’ve seen, the difficult, consequences from a health perspective are good. The grounding of pilots and, and people ending up with lifelong, debilitating, sickness, for example, you have to wonder what agenda was at play and who’s behind an agenda, because I don’t think it was an accident that that’s what we saw happen now.
00:14:51:06 – 00:15:09:12
Dave Scarlett, Take Five Host
And it’s very concerning when you hear pilots that just collapse, in the cockpit. Right. And I heard many stories of Marines that way.
Lieutenant Colonel, can you talk about the readiness of our armed forces? We see recruiting numbers are way down. Readiness? Just, potential recruits. I saw something yesterday. Like 70% of American, youth could not pass a physical to get into the military today. so where are we at? A readiness if we had to go to some sort of extended war or, heaven forbid, on 2 or 3 fronts at once.
00:17:49:20 – 00:18:15:21
Matt Lohmeier
Yeah. We do have a problem overextending ourselves on the world stage, which is a concern even when you’re in a, a ready to fight fit, state as a military. Of course, there’s been concern for some time that we’re not necessarily in a ready state to to fight a war. I just had an email come in earlier this morning sharing with me from a cadet at West Point that Elon Musk just visited this past week.
I was really interested in finding out what Elon Musk was going. I’m surprised they let him show up at West Point in the first place given the controversy about his stand on free speech and his alignment with conservatism over the past couple of years, and West Point’s been the opposite, in fact, in many respects, but Elon Musk shared with this group of cadets, as a primary concern, the military’s readiness to wage conflict and not just on a multi, regional scale, but in any, serious conflict with a great power competitor.
I think it was unspoken. I don’t have a recording of what he said. I think it’s unwritten. But, he indicated, that he thought our ability to manufacture weapons and military capabilities in this country is far too slow. And I’ll add from a to compete at that level anymore, and that, I’ll add.
Our ability to keep ready aircraft, and mission capable numbers, of both personnel and machinery has suffered for the for the past several years even as we can’t retain the talent that we have, even if certain people are on medical profiles or have become sick as a consequence of this illegal shot mandate. so there’s a very negative trend as far as military readiness, our ability to wage combat.
Heritage Foundation even has conducted annually independent assessments of the US military strength. And I think that the name of their annual report that they put out is an index of U.S. military strength. Overall, in 2023, the report concluded that, the US military was weak, I think is the word that they used as their overall rating. There were multiple levels and some of the branches of the military, including the Air Force and Space Force or one or the other was very weak, and that the way in which they go about making that assessment is not just, a wag.
They have, metrics that they use, like the mission capability of our fighter force, for example, of our Navy ships. So when you see both, word of mouth, feedback coming from our troops about their dissatisfaction about morale in the workplace, on the one hand, you see metrics based, analysis coming out of institutions like the Heritage Foundation who are trying to provide the American people and members of Congress, some awareness of what they ought to be looking into and how to fix some of these problems.
You begin to see a very concerning picture emerge. It’s that there is a consensus from boots on the ground to, to members of Congress, to, the veteran community that we might not necessarily be properly postured to wage a serious conflict, on the world stage, that ought to frighten Americans. If if all of the other concerns and problems that we were having as a country didn’t exist, and there are many of those from border issues to public education issues to you name it, whatever your issue is said.
All of those aside, let’s say they were all cleaned up tomorrow, and the only remaining problem was whether or not you’ve got a lethal, capable, ready, high morale military to protect your nation. That issue alone is is has enough weight to it that, it could protect it could potentially put the United States in jeopardy, of losing its security and not being able to defend itself.
I think we’ve seen a turn in and the tides, so to speak, from the comfortable position we were in post-Cold War where we came out, the kings of the world, so to speak, and, had a relatively, hubristic, proud approach, on the world stage and, the ability to exert power in the Middle East and on multiple fronts to now the, a debacle in the withdrawal from Afghanistan and the lack of credibility and seriousness both with our allies and the enemies on the world stage.
All of that goes a long way when you’re trying to project power or to maintain your security. We’re we’re staring into the abyss at the moment, I think standing on the precipice and the American people have really, you know, I say this is not speaking on behalf of my organization, but just as a personal opinion.
The American people have very serious decisions to make here come election season. If we’d like to plunge into that abyss or if we’d like to try and reverse course and, and we have to choose wisely and hope that our, our votes count. Right. And hope that the system hasn’t been so ultimately compromised that none of that matters anyway, that in fact, it does matter.
And so we speak up. We vote, we vote, and we we try our best to influence a positive outcome because that’s that’s about all you can hope to accomplish as a bystander and as a citizen at this point. You do your part and you pray and hope that, the outcomes can be different for the next administration.
00:23:32:23 – 00:23:50:27
Dave Scarlett, Take Five Host
So how do we how do we do that? How do we get this, get our military back in ready order. And I’ll ask you a second question. The question is, which I ask every lieutenant colonel and every general that comes out his glory. What happened? What’s what’s this disconnect between the lieutenant colonels and a four star generals of today? And why are the four star generals not exercising their constitutional rights in the military to make sure this stuff does not happen on their watch?
00:24:02:01 – 00:24:24:04
Matt Lohmeier
Yeah. You know, Lieutenant colonels, for example, promote through the ranks based on their merit. Largely it should be that way, and accomplishment and talent. You get beyond that to a certain point, people begin retiring, and then you have political appointees that end up being general officers, flag officers. Many of them are good, good men and women, don’t get me wrong. I’m grateful for the good men and women. but there is a political aspect to their ongoing service, as general and flag officers, that they are reluctant, extremely reluctant to compromise, and to, be disloyal to. I think they’re interested in being yes men and yes women.
There’s been a time and place for that, and it’s been necessary for a functioning military. There’s civilian control of the military, but we’ve now got, a position where we’ve got more and more political ideologues who are rising to power because of their political worldview.
If they don’t share in the same political worldview or seem to be contrary in any way, then they they find that they’re somehow disqualified for continued progress through the ranks, and that there’s been a subtle shift over time. But it’s apparent now, now that it’s kind of taken root. There was a purge of general officers under the Obama regime, and you ended up with, certain political leaning after that phase.
There’s been a purge that’s been deliberate during this administration. People find themselves disgusted if they maybe share our worldview or some semblance of our worldview. So they choose to retire, they choose to get out of that arena and to go into a more private life at the very moment when they should, in fact, be speaking up.
So that’s why I think there’s a disconnect between maybe the lieutenant colonel and the general officer ranks. But back to your first question. How do you solve this problem? The military up front. We need a different administration. You’re not going to solve these problems with the current administration or a 2.0 of this administration after election season, and you need new senior leaders.
We need we need to hold senior leaders accountable. We need to hold the lowest level of our military accountable for political activism in any form. They’re welcome to their political worldview, but they need to be laser focused on the mission that they do and becoming lethal ready warriors. They need to have instilled in them the kind of respect for the warrior ethos from senior leaders that we’ve had for so many decades that we’ve now lost.
I just reviewed some training from the Air Force Academy, in fact, that I got yesterday in an email and was a bit I was embarrassed to read the language that our new cadets that are coming into the Air Force Academy are getting from their senior leaders. It doesn’t engender respect. It’s not impressive. It looks like it was written by people who are somewhat uneducated, but who have a political ax to grind.
I thought, yeah, these young men and women are going to show up and what they thought they were signing up for. It is not what they’re meeting with and their experience there and some of them are going to be discouraged by that, and some of them might not choose to stay in and commission. Some of them have expressed I’ve heard anecdotally that they hope things will be different when they commission and get out into the real Air Force.
They might be unfortunately surprised, too. So we need an overhaul of the leadership in the military. You can’t do that under the current administration. I think, speaking of accountability. Some people need to be recalled and tried for illegal activity. That’s the that’s the bottom line. You can’t let people get away with criminal conduct, illegal discrimination, unethical behavior and go off quietly into the night and and enjoy a comfortable retirement.
I’m not calling for anything radical. I’m saying you need to instill accountability in this country. Otherwise you lose it forever. You have an unjust state. When you have an unjust state, things will devolve all the more rapidly into something I warned about in the book that I wrote, which is civil conflict.
So to say nothing of all of our great competitors on the world stage, the rest of Russia’s and the Chinas of the world, and maintaining the respect of our alliances in the on the world stage, you’ve got a domestic problem, that’s been fueled by illegal immigration, but it’s also fueled by the terrible partisan divide that we’ve got at the moment where people actually hate the other, and that’s grown so aggressive that there are people now of the view.
I’m not advocating for this, but they’re now of the view that there’s only one solution to the problem we face. It’s to kill. When you get to a point like that in a country, any number of matches, so to speak, could be lit. That could ignite the whole thing. You can’t predict how that might play out.
So I really hope and pray that we have more time to solve some of these problems, reverse course, repent as a country, and to start to heal some of the fractious divide that we’re seeing, lest we end up on that path.
00:29:07:18 – 00:29:25:05
Dave Scarlett, Take Five Host
Yeah. Absolutely. Right. When we sign up for the military, we’re signed to the Constitution, lawful orders. I like what you said. We have to follow these generals need to follow lawful orders. Me as a private I have to follow lawful orders. I’ll let you have the last 30s. Lieutenant Colonel.
00:29:25:08 – 00:29:43:11
Matt Lohmeier
Well, I really want to emphasize that men and women have no better opportunity in their lifetime to exhibit courage on the world stage and in their sphere of influence than they have at the moment. I’d like to invite men to step up and be men, and to have courage.
00:29:43:13 – 00:30:01:10
Dave Scarlett, Take Five Host
Thank you so much, Lieutenant. The lieutenant Colonel, thank you for serving this great country. God’s not done with us, Eagle Nation. Thank you so much. That is today’s take five going is.
Leave a Comment