Retired Army Colonel Douglas Macgregor joined “Tucker Carlson Tonight” on Monday to discuss whether the Pentagon is lowering military standards in the name of diversity.
MACGREGOR: I think in the past twenty years have had a profound and negative impact on the American armed forces, particularly on the combat forces that have had to go through these long occupations, long deployments, without clear missions and achievable objectives. We also fought a very weak enemy, an enemy without air forces, air defenses, without armies, and people came to erroneous conclusions about the nature of combat in these circumstances. I think to a certain extent this is what is happening now. I think these policies are harmful in most cases and are likely to cause division.
None of our potential opponents – whether they are in the Middle East, Northeast Asia, Eastern Europe, it makes no difference – none of them would even think of adopting any of these positions and policies under any circumstances. They are training for the Super Bowl. I think it’s important for us to understand. We have fought, or played, against pickups. We are not training, organizing, [a] fighting power to deal with the Super Bowl. They are. I think we will have a real surprise. Many of the assumptions we make about what will work and what will not, will be destroyed.
The Pentagon talks about China all the time because they link their budgets and basic structures to this huge Chinese threat that they publicize. I think it is exaggerated. It would make a lot more sense for us to speak to the Chinese, since we are the ones who lead up-and-down aircraft carrier battle groups across the Taiwan Strait. We are the ones who challenge the Chinese in the South China Sea. I think we can find out that the Chinese are willing to talk to us and we can avoid collisions that way.
Until you fight a really capable enemy, you can make a lot of assumptions about strength that are wrong. I think that’s where we are. We assume that certain things will work because they worked in Iraq or Afghanistan. They have no chance of working against the Chinese, the Russians, the Turks, any number of people. We need to come to terms with this and move away from some of the policies that I don’t think were carefully considered in that context.
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