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Amy McGrath (1:00)

Welcome to another edition of Truth in the Barrel Unfiltered. Today I'm alone and unafraid talking to you about Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth's bonkers speech this week to 800 generals and admirals that they summoned from all over the world. And we'll also talk about the real impacts of the government Shutdown. I'm Amy McGrath. Please make sure you're following us on social media, whatever platform you use, friend us, follow us on the places like YouTube and you know, be part of this conversation. So leave us some, some comments, some questions and we'll get to them. All right, let's get started. 24 years in the military, I have never seen or heard of anything like this before. Secretary of War Pete Hegseth summoned all of the one star, two star, three star, four star generals from around the world to Quantico, Virginia for a meeting. At first we never knew what the meeting was even about and even the generals and admirals did not know what the meeting was about, which that in and of itself is bonkers after a while. And there was criticism about this meeting because nobody knew what it was about. Then the President decides he's going to now talk to the generals admirals. Okay. So then they decided to make it live. You know, as, as we do in the Trump era. Everything is on live tv. So the American public got to listen to the Secretary of War, the Secretary of Defense, dressed down the 800 generals and admirals, our top folks in the military, followed by a speech from the President. And I have to just say both of those speeches were super bizarre. This was a show, it was a performance. It had nothing to do with readiness. It didn't make our military more lethal. It didn't make us safer, because none of this was about defense. And the one thing. Well, there's several things that I took away from this speech. The biggest one was that there was no talk of any coherent foreign policy at all during the speech. It was just this rambling message from not only the Secretary of War, but also from the President himself, and especially from the President himself. So there's four things that I really took away. One, tons of lies. The President, as usual, spewed a bunch of lies, and we're going to go through those here at the end of this podcast. The second piece was the blatant politization of the military in ways that I have never seen, certainly not in my lifetime. I don't think, and I'm, I'm a somebody that studies history. I, I can't even think of, of politization of the military like this in the last hundred years, maybe even in American history, when the President gets up there and basically gives a political speech to the military, that is politicizing our troops, that is eroding trust in the institution of our military and its leaders. And I've never seen anything like that than what we saw this week. Plus, the third thing is the craziness of the President's speech. His talk about, oh, your ships in the Navy, you're so ugly. They're so ugly. I mean, it's bizarre. He ranted about the types of paper being used. I guess he's upset about the, the paper being used. The, you know, you get promoted and you get a, a piece of paper that says you're promoted. He had a rant about the Department of War changing the Department of Defense's name to the Department of War, and that that somehow is going to be the answer to winning all the wars of the future. It's laughable and crazy. I mean, anybody that's been in the national security world knows that that kind of stuff is just bizarre. But the scariest piece to me was not all of that. We're so used to Donald Trump's lies by now, we shouldn't be used to him, but we are, unfortunately. We're getting used to the politicization of the Military and the craziness is always around us. But the scariest piece of the speech was Donald Trump's words of using the military to fight this, quote, invasion from within. You hear this on the campaign trail a lot. We've been invaded from within. But to say it to the military, implying that the military then will be used to go after enemies inside our country, meaning Americans using our cities, he said, as training grounds for the military. That, to me, was a WTF moment. That is not what we do in America. That is not what we do with our military. And when I heard that, that was like, okay, this isn't just a crazy, bizarre speech. This is really scary, okay? And now if you take a step back, just bringing all of those 800 generals and admirals to one place was an unnecessary security risk. I've talked about that. It's expensive, it's disruptive. It was a complete waste. Right before a government shutdown, Right before a government shutdown, you would think that the President would be trying to negotiate at that point and not going all the way to Quantico to give this just bizarre speech. Why is it a big operational security risk? You don't bring the top generals and admirals, the leaders of your military, all into one spot. It's like military 101. From a military perspective, it's dumb, right? It's just a security risk. It's an unnecessary security risk. In all of the wars that we've had in the last 24, 30 years, we have instituted secure methods of communicating. We spent a lot of money to have this technology precisely so that we would never have to bring all of these generals and admirals together in one spot precisely so they wouldn't have to travel this way. So if you're going to bring everybody together, you don't tell the world you're doing it. That's also kind of like a red flag. It's also very expensive flying everyone back here when this administration keeps talking about fraud, waste and abuse and wasteful spending and we need to cut spending. This was just the stuff that was said, could have been sent in an email, at least. The speech from the Secretary of Defense and Trump's speech, I mean, could have done it on, on TV and made the top commanders watching. I mean, I don't. I don't know what to tell you. Very expensive and disruptive. When you have the top commanders in places like Korea, Japan, the Middle East, Europe, somewhere on aircraft carriers in the Pacific and you bring them away from their posts, you're bringing them away from exercises, away from their job, away from defending us in places like the Pacific. Those positions are extremely important for deterring our enemies, and bringing them here is just like our enemies are completely laughing at us right now. Beyond that, the actual talk from the Secretary of War, I'll just start with that Is super humiliating to the 800 generals and admirals who are all more experienced at actually being a warrior than P. Tagseth. It is a slap in the face coming from someone who has way less experience than all these guys and women, and coming from a man who I'm pretty sure most of these admirals and generals do not respect. I want to just talk a little bit about the whole standards thing, because Pete Hegseth, our Secretary of War, made a big show in his speech about talking about returning to the, quote, male standard for combat jobs. And all the generals and admirals sat there and listened to him, and the American people got to hear him say this. And it. And it's. We've also heard it in his nomination hearing, and he's talked about it a lot, and there's not enough pushback to it, because what he says and what he implies is just not true. So when Pete Hegseth talks about returning to the male standard for combat jobs, I have to tell you, that actually really gets under my skin, because I know a lot about this subject. I've lived it. And so I'm going to talk to you about what combat standards actually are. And here's the truth. Since combat roles have been opened to women, there have always been only one standard for those jobs. Okay, I'll start with when combat jobs were first open to women, and this was 1993. This directly affected me because prior to 1993, I was in high school. I wanted to fly fighter jets. I couldn't do it because there was a federal law and Department of Defense policy that said women couldn't do these things. Not because we were not qualified, not because the jet would turn pink, but because we're women, and we. We were not allowed to do it. In 1993, we had a new administration, and we had a new Congress, and the Congress rescinded that law, and the new administration came in and changed the policy within the Department of Defense to allow all aircraft. All aircraft. Not just, you know, prior to 1993, women could fly in the military. They just couldn't fly fighter jets. Okay? They could fly cargo. They could fly helicopters. They couldn't fly pretty much anything with a gun that was considered combat. Anything with a gun. So after 1993, the Department of Defense changed that and now all fighter jets were open. Since that point, there were not women's standards and men's standards for fighter jets. It was all one standard. You had to meet the requirements. And this has been true for artillery, for tanks, for submarines as well. So over time, different things opened up. So in 1993, aircraft were opened up, combat surface ships were opened up, but a lot was still closed. Submarines were still closed in the 1990s to women and what is also called the ground combat arms. So that's your artillery, tanks, combat engineers, infantry. That was still closed in 2010. Submarines were then opened up to women and again, no standards were lowered. The standards were the same for submariners. You had to be really smart. You had to meet all kinds of academic requirements to be in subs. And then in, in 2016, the last bastion of the combat arms, the ground combat arms is what we call it, that was opened up. That's artillery, tanks, infantry, that kind of thing. Now in that timeframe, there's a lot of controversy around the ground combat arms being opened up. And so what the services figured out, the army and the Marine Corps particularly figured out, is they didn't really have any standards for those jobs. The only standard was you. You're a man and you.