Friday morning’s guests on Breitbart News Daily included former Navy SEAL Carl Higbie, author of Battle on the Home Front: A Navy SEAL’s Mission to Save the American Dream, and the new book Enemies, Foreign and Domestic: A SEAL’s Story.
SiriusXM host Stephen K. Bannon asked Higbie if the major problem faced by the American military through the Obama years was a shortage of logistics, weapons, and equipment, or “a problem of will, of taking the fight to the enemy, of having the back of those people, like yourself, who are on the tip of the spear.”
“I think the problem is not the men. The problem is not the budgeting. The problem is the direction and allocation of assets,” Higbie replied.
“I don’t disagree with cutting some of the military personnel, because fifty years ago, it took 30 people to load a single gun on a battleship. Now, one guy pushes a button. Technology has outpaced the need for excessive manning,” he explained.
“That said, we still need a very strong military. The problem is, our allocation of resources and funds to the military is so wasteful,” Higbie continued. “Overseas in Iraq, I’ve seen – we left Humvees behind, and weapons, and tools. Everything you could imagine. We’ve spent money so poorly that if we had somebody come in there with a business background, like Donald Trump, to help reorganize and make sure we’re allocating the right assets to the right things, we could do three times as much with a third of the money.”
Bannon asked for Higbie’s recollections as “a member of the SEAL team that captured the Butcher of Fallujah,” as part of “one of the toughest battles in American military history.”
“It was a little bit crazy how the whole thing went down,” Higbie said. “I was deployed under Bush, and then again under Obama. The stark differences between the rules of engagement, and the tempo, and the general atmosphere of the commanders that were overseeing us was completely night and day.”
“We went out and we caught this bad guy – which, by the way, was almost impossible,” he recalled. “It was a nightmare to get approved, to go get the operation, because what President Obama and the Administration did was, they said, ‘We’re just gonna stop actioning targets. We’re going to stop going to kill and get bad guys, because it’ll make it look like the war’s over, because there’s nothing for our troops to do.”
“But the enemy gets a say in whether the war is over,” Higbie observed. “So we finally got approval to go get this guy. We get him, we bring him back, flawless operation, not a shot fired. The team just did a phenomenal job, everybody on the team. We bring him back, and he bites his lip, he claims we abused him. NCIS clears us, and says the guy’s full of crap.”
This was, unfortunately, not the end of Higbie’s travails. After his trial, he wrote Battle on the Home Front to express his frustration with the prosecution, the death of a friend due to what he described as blind adherence to obsolete procedures, and the overall state of military culture. He contends that he was railroaded out of the SEALs as punishment for writing the book, even though he submitted it to his commanders for review before publication. He was compelled to fight a lengthy legal battle to get his discharge status restored to “honorable.”
“When I hit the Navy with my grievances, and I did so through the proper channels, they didn’t listen to me, so I published my first book, Battle on the Home Front,” he said. “Enemies Foreign and Domestic is about how I went about trying to take on the Administration, the upper echelons of the military, and say, ‘You’re getting people killed. This is what needs to change, and if it doesn’t, we’re gonna lose this war.’ And they didn’t want to hear it.“I ended up having to go through a four-year legal battle with the military, and I came out on top, I won.”
Higbie said we’re now seeing the results of an electorate were “98% of Americans chose not to serve.” While he said there was nothing wrong with the decision to avoid military service, the electorate has been voting for political leaders who “don’t have any experience with war.”
“Forty years ago, we had 80 percent of Congress was veterans. Now we have less than 20 percent,” he pointed out. “I mean, that’s a staggering statistic, and that is why we’re losing the global war on terror right now. It’s because we don’t have people with A, the willpower, or B, the knowledge, to faithfully and properly execute a combat war.”
“To fix this problem, we’re gonna have to throw ‘politically correct’ out the window,” he advised. “We’re gonna have to – God forbid – kill some bad guys. And we’re gonna have to do it now.”
Bannon noted that the American people have recently been surprised to discover a sizable number of American troops have been deployed back into Iraq, quietly reversing President Obama’s much-ballyhooed – and absolutely disastrous – withdrawal of U.S. forces, and effectively beginning a third phase of the Iraq War. Meanwhile, hostilities with the Taliban have resumed in Afghanistan, another conflict Obama ostentatiously declared he had closed the book on.
With the recent death of Navy SEAL Charles Keating IV in combat against the Islamic State in Iraq, and the 2016 presidential election on everyone’s mind, Bannon asked how morale was looking among our deployed troops.
“Forget it, if Hillary Clinton is the Commander-in-Chief, half the military is gonna get out,” Higbie predicted. “The willpower is there. The American soldier is dedicated, willing, and able, and we are the most lethal fighting force the world has ever known. We will execute the mission. You just have to support us, and let us.”
Breitbart News Daily airs on SiriusXM Patriot 125 weekdays from 6:00 a.m. to 9:00 a.m. Eastern.
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