[01:00:00:08 - 01:00:17:28] Speaker 1 Half a million dollars is what we as taxpayers spend to produce a single academy graduate. That money, your money, is supposed to buy a war fighter who will protect you and our country. It has been buying bureaucrats instead. [01:00:17:28 - 01:00:57:17] Speaker 1 Doug, the officer formation process is something you and I lived, you at West Point, of course, I was in ROTC. And in many ways, I think you and I would agree that it is the foundational experience of the officer you become. Yes. In the Army. Yeah. And I'll just kinda say personally that the foundational training that I think made me whoever I was, good or bad, happened in ROTC. I know many West Point graduates who would say the same about their formative years as cadets. That's right. And it is not [01:00:58:20 - 01:01:26:06] Speaker 1 something that you can just brush over, hope to fix when they get to the active duty army. The foundational experience of how we select, train, and educate officers, I think has probably been the first thing that you and I have talked about for years now when we started working together. And it's been the impetus of some of our most intensive research and advocacy when it comes to restoring the military to excellence. [01:01:26:06 - 01:03:05:07] Speaker 2 Yeah, that's right. And I was always grateful for the fact that even after I graduated, you went to West Point. There's a mentality in the country about what happens at a service academy. Even ROTC officership and everything that, hey, this person in front of me has a different level of loyalty to the country, preparedness, things like that. And it does go back to what you said, like half a million dollars per grad. It's like, there's, okay, it's an expensive endeavor. But that person should not only have demonstrated patriotism by going there and but they should also be fully, fully prepared. And I remember, I think I was in, I graduated in 92. And so I was in a window of time where I still felt pretty good about everything. But even at times I was like, all right, I don't know, I'm not connecting this thing that I'm doing right now to being a great second lieutenant or a great first lieutenant or going to combat and making sure that all my guys come back with me. And so that drift over time is what you and I have talked about the most. It's like, what's the mentality of the person that's coming out? How are they prepared or unprepared to go? If you said, hey, you're going to war right now, like my senior year was the first Gulf War. And we're just watching it on TV thinking, no, this is going to last a while, then I guess we're going right out of the gate. Didn't happen that way. But you still get that mindset of, okay, get ready, get ready. And this drift that's been going on at the academies and ROTC programs around, [01:03:06:18 - 01:03:48:08] Speaker 2 let's just make sure they're kind of like that Ivy League sophistication about them. They're very well rounded and stuff like that. Well, you can have a rounding, but number one, you better be ready to go to combat and win our wars and have that mentality coming in. And that makes those that stay in, I was in for six years, but a lot of your classmates just stay in and stay in and stay in. You want them to keep on with that mentality. And when they're colonels and generals and they're going down range with everybody, you want them to win the war, not have some negotiation or advise the president all the time. No, this is our team, right? And they got to be ready. And that's the point of what we're talking about here. [01:03:48:08 - 01:03:56:07] Speaker 1 Well, and you're describing a process that is completely unique to the service academies. [01:03:57:09 - 01:04:31:16] Speaker 1 West Point in particular that again, even as a non graduate, I think is the most important institution in American life, because it forms the elite warrior class. I think it is largely and it should be the place where the best of the best of America go, because they are the ones who are going to have the most important job in our future and that's to fight and win our nation's wars. But that is a job that must look completely different. We know it's a job that will look completely different to any other job. And therefore it is [01:04:32:21 - 01:05:06:29] Speaker 1 a training and an education experience that must look completely foreign to any other training and education experience. And that means that you don't go ruck march in the morning and then go to critical race theory class during the day. You don't go to the rifle range on a weekend and then ensure that you meet your race quotas for the Rhodes Scholar class that following week. In every way it has to be foreign from the experience of a civilian. That's right, that's right. [01:05:06:29 - 01:05:49:18] Speaker 2 We've talked about this a lot, that cultural impact that it has to have. And this is where I think a lot of Americans don't think it through. And that's why I value what we're doing here and just saying it out loud. You have to have two different cultures in this country. You have the civilian culture, that's fine, most of us live it. Then there's this completely separate thing called the military culture. And it's got to be completely separate. It can't look like the civilian thing because it has a completely different purpose. And over here we're, oh, prosperity and capitalism and living our lives and stuff like that. Over here it's like we might get attacked, we need you guys to go down range and kill those guys and make sure they don't invade our country. I mean, it's like a whole, back to your point, [01:05:50:25 - 01:06:27:08] Speaker 2 if we're trying to make this like an Ivy League experience, then you are basically just mixing in the civilian culture. You're confusing the people who are going through it and they get in their own head over time. And this is the structural side of it. I feel bad at people, graduates, and they have this mindset of like, oh, no, I'm a diplomat first. Or I'll decide if I want to follow what the president says and all that stuff. That's a whole separate topic. But they have to have a mindset coming out of there. And it's got to be instilled in them while they're there. And that's when we get into all these formation changes and all the things that we keep talking about, the tactical things that need to change. [01:06:27:08 - 01:07:49:19] Speaker 1 In the first episode we filmed together, I know I brought this example up, but West Point was the institution seen as the linchpin of implementing the Civil Rights Act in 1965 by Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara. He gave a speech shortly after the Civil Rights Act was passed. It said, "The military, starting with West Point, will be the institution that embodies the principles of the Civil Rights Act, those being we should expect proportional representation in subgroups relative to the nation or we can presume injustice." I bring that up again, perhaps too often, because it is important to understand that this is not a kind of culture war feeling. It's not a question of urinized preference of America as traditional Christians, right? But it is a foundational understanding of what the military is. And it's an acknowledgement of the reality that the military has been politicized, that the service academies have been politicized for far too long. That's right. And so to that end, the Restoration America Foundation published a white paper on reform of the service academies this summer and walked through a few important initiatives, largely codifying and making permanent the changes Secretary Hegseth and President Trump have already made. [01:07:51:19 - 01:08:00:29] Speaker 1 Marital in the admissions, no race considerations whatsoever, curriculum more focused on war fighting the military and the military profession, and then [01:08:01:29 - 01:08:27:21] Speaker 1 making the faculty a lot more distinct from civilian college faculty. Doesn't need to be a place where you have tenure, you have a government pension program, for that, right? We don't need DEI offices and we don't need the purposes of the service academies to be oriented towards producing road scholars. We want these service academies to be oriented towards producing war fighters. [01:08:27:21 - 01:09:32:07] Speaker 2 That's right. And I think what's happened too with these groups of people in these academies, they're like building marketing materials so they can go out to the kids out there and be like, "Look how great we are and the road scholars and all these diverse programs that we have and stuff like that." And in reality, what you want to talk about is, "No, if you're going to come here, it's going to be hard and this is why and we got to go win the wars and stuff like that." And then that will attract the people that want that. Because you don't want to have a situation where you're attracting people that want some kind of like an Ivy League experience. And then they're headed towards graduation. It's like, "Hey, well, we might go send you to war right away." It's like, "Well, hold on. I was here for the road scholar stuff." It's like, "No, that's not what this is supposed to be." So you need to have a constant view from the top down of like, "What is the point of all this? Why are we doing this?" And it's got to go all the way down to what you're talking about with the instructors. I was surprised at the Naval Academy how many civilians instructors they had. It's unbelievable. And I value... I had very few civilian instructors at West Point. I really valued my time with the officers, especially those that have been in combat. [01:09:33:12 - 01:09:59:04] Speaker 2 Tell us, we'd have classes the first half would be the academic stuff, but then somebody would get Colonel Toffler talking about his experience in Vietnam. And we're like, "All right, now we're talking." Because we wanted to... We were in our own way respectful of what he had done and respectful of the fact that what we might have to go do. And we have to hear from people. And the civilian... I mean, they're just... They're thinking of, "Oh, this is this [01:10:00:08 - 01:10:08:04] Speaker 2 auspicious university and I'm here and... No, that's not what's going on here. They're getting these people ready to go to war potentially and win." [01:10:08:04 - 01:10:38:06] Speaker 1 Right. And win. I think the country got some great news when there is the reports about the Pentagon's own draft memo regarding service academy reform. Abolishing civilian tenure at the service academies, for one, a line by line course review to ensure alignment with war fighting and military readiness and the expansion of this scrutiny to the service academy curriculum, [01:10:39:11 - 01:11:01:03] Speaker 1 West Point Navy and Air Force that will cover about 10,000 cadets each year. And so there is, I think, a ton of alignment from the administration about this. It's been really heartening to see the team at the Restoration of America Foundation, I think, deserves credit for making sure that this is a public consciousness. [01:11:01:03 - 01:11:01:12] Speaker 2 Yeah, good moment. [01:11:01:12 - 01:11:13:18] Speaker 1 Right. And that the administration knows that there's an organization that'll support them along the way. I find it interesting because you'd hear from some publications like War on the Rocks that there's [01:11:14:22 - 01:11:50:12] Speaker 1 some sort of sacrifice we're making when we... I think they want this soldier-scholar mentality to exist at the same time. And I think it's a different thing on their part because they think we're wanting the cadets to be dumber or to study less or to read less. And that couldn't be further from the truth. That's right. What I think the reforms that the Restoration of America Foundation talked about were focused on ensuring that the education, the reading, the scholarship of officer formation was oriented on your post-graduation mission. [01:11:50:12 - 01:11:54:06] Speaker 2 That's right. Which wasn't always the case. That's right. And I think that you gotta [01:11:55:20 - 01:11:58:29] Speaker 2 is this setup that we've got serving us well currently. [01:12:00:00 - 01:12:51:04] Speaker 2 And those guys over there, I respect them, but no, it's not. We gotta go... If we keep down this path, it's gonna get further and further away from real war fighting. And we're just gonna have a whole bunch of people that are gonna be basically strategically trying to, I don't know, avoid everything and do what the globalists want. And it's like when we're talking about the national security strategy, you have to have a tip of the spear on this thing. And you can't... There are people in the State Department that will handle certain parts of this. And that's how this is supposed to work. And yeah, if you're a four-star general, yeah, I'm sure you're... Or one-star general, yeah, you're really well-read. There's no doubt about that. No matter what happened at West Point is you went along, right? You're getting more and more well-rounded, but the foundation of what you do and what all the people underneath you are supposed to do is war fighting. [01:12:51:04 - 01:13:25:24] Speaker 1 Yes. Yep. Plain and simple. Well, and that's the point is that the military doesn't set policy, right? The military doesn't build strategy. They deliver military options to fulfill the president's strategy. But if we inculcate kind of the notion that military officers must be policy experts or strategists who shape the orientation of a nation, then, you know, candidly, you get the future Mark Millies. You get the future David Petraeus's who see their job as much as defining the course of [01:13:27:00 - 01:13:34:07] Speaker 1 what a country should do in a given part of the world versus how to execute the president's orders or the foreign policy vision of the United States. [01:13:34:07 - 01:14:28:18] Speaker 2 That's right. And then that whole thing that we've talked about before with Millie and the back channels to the Chinese, you start to... And it happened even down. I mean, we've talked about this. I mean, I've got, you know, I won't get into it, but so Naval War College instructor instructing their students while you're saying, well, we got there's going to be a moment where the junior officers are going to have to decide whether they're going to do what the commander wants. So, you know, you have too much of this mentality of like, oh, well, we're really smart. And, you know, yeah, president and all that stuff and elections and constitution. Yeah, that's one thing, but we know what's best. And therefore, you decide you cannot get anywhere near that because once you've got that going on, you've got just fraying across the board and the intent of the commander in chief is just going to get lost. And, you know, that's the great thing about our country. You don't like the commander in chief. Well, he or she's up for election. [01:14:28:18 - 01:14:29:06] Speaker 1 Right. [01:14:29:06 - 01:14:37:09] Speaker 2 Right. That's how this works. And then you bring somebody new in. And so we just can't have the military just deciding unilaterally. Now, here's, we've decided something different. [01:14:38:11 - 01:15:50:22] Speaker 1 We get a lot of questions about what happens in a new what happens after Secretary Hecce leaves office or President Trump leaves office. Each service academy have has a board of visitors, half of whom are appointed by the president, half of whom are more permanent members from Congress. You know, we're kind of on the cusp of releasing some reforms that could make those boards of visitors, I think, more effective. You know, they really don't have any statutory authority. They can't make change at the service academies. But I think their best kind of the best vision is to is for these boards of visitors to serve as watchdogs that keep the orientation of these service academies true and aligned. And so, you know, we're considering things like a report card, you know, for boards of visitors. Again, not to create more bureaucracy. I don't want that. But I think there should be more than theater. And especially because these boards of visitors have a lot of graduates of the academies, a lot of veterans on them. They should be, I think, these bodies of people who've lived the experience that you've had who can keep this as myth, you know, pointed north. [01:15:50:22 - 01:16:12:02] Speaker 2 That's right. The transparency around it with this report card piece that we're coming up with. And for a long time, I thought, Oh, well, the board of visitors, they're really, you know, making they're looking at everything and they've got the power to do things and they don't. It's like you said, it's just, but that's okay. I mean, we sought to have, you know, the secretary of defense or the war secretary, [01:16:13:06 - 01:16:22:16] Speaker 2 you know, has to be able to make the changes that need to be made. But if he does not know what they need, what they are, that's a problem. And I think that for a long time, this was just like a [01:16:23:24 - 01:16:58:20] Speaker 2 resume builder that people got on this deal, and they would go and, you know, have the lunch and then they'd have the briefings and then they go to dinner and they thought, that was great. And then a lot of the politicians wouldn't even show up. Right. And so it's like, well, what's going on? And so the, the point of these, these entities is to bring transparency and hold them accountable to what they said they were going to do and keep them progressing towards the intent of what our country wants, what the war department wants going forward so that these become the war fighters we're talking about. So it's all connected. [01:16:58:20 - 01:16:59:03] Speaker 1 Right. [01:16:59:03 - 01:17:27:23] Speaker 2 And then, and then this card is going to be really, that's going to be interesting. There's going to be some, some, some dynamics at work there. When we bring them out in the public, I think a lot of people, especially the subscribers that watch this, this podcast, they're going to say, well, that's, that's fascinating about what they do and don't do and who doesn't show up and all those things. And so there'll be some good room for them to, to call into their senators and their, their congressmen and say, Hey, what's going on? You know, why are you doing this or not doing this? [01:17:27:23 - 01:17:38:17] Speaker 1 Yeah, there's a lot to come for us from the restoration of America foundation. When it comes to the service academies and it's because we know how critical these institutions are to the military and to our nation. That's [01:17:38:17 - 01:17:54:26] Speaker 1 Officers in the United States military are worth the significant investment to form and train them appropriately. But for too long, the process of officer formation has succumbed to [01:17:54:26 - 01:18:15:04]