Robert Greenway on U.S. Military Strength and Readiness | Judicial Watch
Summary
Transcript
Chris I’m Chris Farrell, and this is on Watch. Welcome to on Watch, everybody, the Judicial Watch podcast, where we take a deep dive behind the headlines to cover news and information that the mainstream media really probably doesn’t want you to know about at all. Where we try to uncover lost history and we try to explain the inexplicable. We appreciate you joining us. Whether you’re watching us on the video version of this podcast or listening to us via the audio stream available on Spotify or any of the other platforms out there, we appreciate you taking time to tune in, to listen.
Please communicate with us, infoidicialwatch. org, comma. Tell us what you want us to cover. Be sure to leave us a rating. We care about your interests, and we enjoy reporting to you on stuff that you really don’t get much coverage on anywhere else. Joined by a national security and defense expert par excellence, a guy who has tremendous experience, Rob Greenway, who is the director of the Allison center for National Security at the Heritage Foundation.
Rob, welcome to on Watch. My pleasure. Thanks for having me. Our viewers should know, Rob, that you have a tremendous background. You were a special forces officer in the army, commanding everything from a team to a battalion. And then once you left active duty, you went on to the Defense Intelligence Agency and served as a senior intelligence officer and then transitioned over to the National Security Council under the Trump administration.
And in very large part, what we know as the Abraham Accords was really, your portfolio was a lot of the work that you did at the Trump administration dealing with Middle East, North Africa affairs. But the Abraham Accords are an incredibly important accomplishment. Our viewers and listeners should take into account your extraordinary background and expertise. And we thank you for joining us. My pleasure. Thank you. Rob, one of the things that your organization has put out recently is this 2024 index of us military strength.
And this document is available online at the Heritage foundation. But also you can get hard copies of it as well. It’s a great report. I guess the 10th year heritage has put it out. It’s important because it analyzes and does a breakdown of the DoD and where they are with respect to readiness, their ability to go out and fight and win. Rob, give me the big overall kind of assessment.
What kind of score, what kind of rating are you going to give the US military strength right now? Well, appreciate that. And you’re right. For the last ten years, we’ve looked at four things. We’ve looked at threats to us interests. We looked at the armed forces ability to address them where we’d like. We to do it, the operating environment we function in and then the capabilities of our partners and allies.
And for ten years, we have reported consistently a steady decline. And so this decade of decline, which really began at the conclusion of the cold war in the early nineties, has continued unabated. It has been exacerbated by the decline in the security environment, which I think you and everyone else will appreciate. And so the distance between the threat and our ability to meet them is significantly growing, and it is likely to outpace our capacity in the very near term for the first time in many of our lifetimes.
And this is of deep concern to us, and certainly our efforts are to identify recommendations to fix it. But the story is not a positive one. So if we had to give a grade, if we had to put a hard number or an evaluation on DoD readiness right now, where are we? Are we an a? Are we a d? Where are we on the bracket? How do you grade it? We’d probably come across as a d in our rating scheme as weak from the nuclear strategic deterrent all the way through the conventional, across our armed services.
Unfortunately, the array of threats from the conventional nuclear, the array of threats far exceeds our capacity and capability to address in a near simultaneous function. And so we used to be built to, as you know, confront at least one or more major regional conflict at any given time. We no longer have the capacity to do it. And the problem is, in the place of the Soviet Union, we now have the people’s Republic of China, and they are expanding at a rapid capacity, and the Russians haven’t diminished despite the conflict in Ukraine.
And so the reality is we’re just not up to speed in terms of capability or capacity. And I think your report is great at explaining there’s a lot of dimensions to this. So we’ve been through 20 years of unconventional warfare and in Southwest Asia, and we can debate that and look at how Biden withdrew from Afghanistan and that debacle. But that’s a very different war than projecting power across the Pacific to engage with, let’s say, the Chinese, obviously the chief competitor, chief adversary of ours.
So land war in an unconventional environment in Southwest Asia versus force projection across the Pacific, I mean, you almost cant get any more diametrically opposed when it comes to what an armed force needs to do to deploy, to fix, to fuel, to feed all those sorts of parts of the mission. Theyre enormously complex. Just give our viewers and listeners a little feel for how that impacts our ability to fight and win.
You’re exactly right. And that for last few decades we’ve been projecting relatively small numbers of forces to various parts of the globe to conduct tactical operations with operational significance. And we’ve done it with, I would argue, some success strategically. Obviously, it’s a little bit of a different story, but you’re exactly right in that what is expected to deter and to confront the threat from the Communist Party of China is radically different.
And the infrastructure required to move significant numbers of men, weapons and equipment from one side of the planet to the other, something we excelled at in the cold war we no longer have the capacity to do even if we had the right number of combatant surface vessels in the navy. And we don’t. We don’t have the ability to project and sustain them abroad on the other side of the Indo Pacific.
And that obviously is a signal sent to China and in many ways it’s an invitation to aggression. So that’s sort of looking at it from a theater perspective or from a big strategic perspective. Let’s just pause for a second, shift gears a little bit. Let’s go. Service by service, where are just, it can be a quick assessment, but army, navy, air force, marines, space force, coast guard, I mean, you don’t have to go into great detail, but where are they right now? The Marines have just gone through a radical sort of doctrinal shift.
Give us your thumbnail sketch on each service. So starting with the army, the army and other services are experiencing the worst recruiting crisis in the history of the all volunteer force. We’re 41,000 short across all services. The army is feeling this most acutely. And unfortunately, the decisions made by the White House and unfortunately in Congress is to solidify those losses and accept that end strength and accept the fact that we don’t have sufficient personnel to man our armed services.
That’s the biggest story among the army because it’s manpower intensive. Second is we haven’t been able to field or develop land combat systems since the seventies or eighties. And so we’re dealing with legacy systems and we don’t have sufficient quantity of it. And then lastly, munitions. We can’t supply sufficient munitions to them to sustain large scale combat operations. And the defense industrial base is not up to the task.
The army then for those reasons comes across ultimately in a weak score. Despite the fact that it’s reporting high readiness, it’s too small and ill equipped to undertake the task. Now to second, let’s go to the air force. The air force, which historically has had tremendous capabilities in cutting edge technology, which is the case, I think, to be sure. The end of the day, though, we’re not fielding sufficient systems.
We’re not developing new systems fast enough. And our pilots, as the ground component or as the most principal important component of the air force are not logging in the training hours required. And so our air force unfortunately is not sufficiently sized nor capable to meet the range of threats. And the Chinese are developing rapid capabilities at faster rate than we are. The navy is suffering from far too small of a fleet and the plans and projected growth is not nearly enough to satisfy that demand.
It also suffers from a deficiency in manpower to man those vessels. The most important weakness, though, maybe the one we mentioned already, is inability to sustain logistically our fleet on the other side of the Indo Pacific to confront China. If you go to the coast guard, I would say, or the Marine Corps, let’s go to next is Marine Corps got the highest rating among the services because in our judgment they’ve adapted to the threat.
They are reconfiguring themselves doctrinally, materially to man and defend the first and second island chains in a scenario to confront China in any aggressive range. And they’re manning their force sufficiently and they’re not yet been able to fail to meet recruiting goals, which is critically important, but they’re the only service to do so. The coast guard, lastly, I would say, is too small in order to protect against the range of threats.
And look, the counter narcotics and immigration threat are a principal concern to all Americans right now, and understandably so. With open borders and the counter narcotics threat and the fentanyl overdose crisis taking 100,000 Americans a year killed, that’s obviously something that the Coast Guard can and should contribute to, but its size right now prevents it from doing so. The last thing I would say is on the strategic nuclear component of this, that all of our designs and our inventory and our infrastructure is really legacy from the fifties, sixties and seventies and is going to have to be replaced to maintain a deterrent.
The Chinese are going to outpace us by 2040 in every critical area unless we radically change now. And that’s our ultimate insurance policy. And I think it’s important for our viewers and listeners to understand in your discussion of army capabilities, you talked about major end items, platforms, weapons systems. When people think army, literally the big green machine, right? So those vehicles and those weapons systems, theyre largely, not completely, but largely relics of the reagan era.
I mean, I was commissioned in 1983 and there hasnt, when it comes to those big things, there hasnt been a lot of big changes or improvements, some, but not many. And if you said, go right now, heres unlimited money. Heres engineers and scientists. Go build the next, whatever, it would still take him ten years before the first one rolled out into the field and you had troops trained, ready to deploy.
I mean, there’s a long tooth to tail process from go to having it be a combat multiplier. On the ground now is a huge length. That’s absolutely right. And look, we didn’t get here overnight. The conclusion of the Cold War. We came to the realization we no longer needed the capacity to confront the threat that had gone away in the Soviet Union. And unfortunately, now a threat is being resurrected.
In a lot of ways. We find ourselves in a situation remarkably like the seventies when coming out of the Vietnam conflict, which was arguably different than what we anticipated to confront the Soviets in Europe. And we were finding ourselves declining, and the Soviets were actually making progress and were on pace to out to perform us in a number of critical areas. And that a realization took place in the seventies.
But it wasn’t until 1980, until President Reagan galvanized national will, even in a weak economic circumstances, and yet at the same time turned the ship around, remarkably, and created a military that prevailed in the Cold War and that we’ve been living on ever since, to your point. And that is likewise true with the strategic nuclear arsenal as well. That triad that, that provides us sort of the fail safe, literally and figuratively, protection.
It’s ancient. I mean, it is. B 52 bombers, the last one off the assembly line roll off the same year I was born, 1961. So that’s. I mean, I know they’ve been upgraded and modified, but the airframe itself, the latest, best one built was 1961. Yeah, same with our missile silos, our command and control systems. All of that has to be relooked and maintained in order to meet the threat.
The Russians have maintained it, and the Chinese are building more missile silos, warheads and weapons designs across the deterrence spectrum. We have no choice but to keep pace with it. And that realization, I’m not sure, is hit entirely. So you’ve operated in that sphere, that very high sphere, at the National Security Council and as a senior intelligence officer at DIA. Youve been in those briefings where you go in and talk to, if not the president, then other very senior officials, secretary of defense, director of national intelligence.
And you go into the boss and you say, were broke. We cannot perform. We can do mission a, but if you ask us to do b and c, we can’t do it. I know you’ve had to tell I mean, whether you were a special forces team leader or at DIA, you’ve had to deliver unpleasant news to your boss at some point, everybody’s had to do it. Is there an appreciation in official Washington that we’re at this state, or is everyone just kind of whistling past the graveyard and pretending that everything’s A okay? Well, so that’s a great question, and I would say, unfortunately, there’s a few that understand our predicament.
But the large majority have grown complacent if they’ve grown up accepting the fact that the US military has complete dominance and that we’ve invested mightily to get there. And I don’t think they appreciate the fact that the world has changed and so have we, and not in the right direction. So our campaign mostly is one of education and pointing out this growing distance between the threat and our capabilities.
But to your point, there’s unfortunately far too few that recognize that it is going to require a wholesale change. And, look, it’s one of our few constitutional requirements is to secure the strong national defense, and it’s got to be revisited. Wait until we bump up against an opponent where we don’t have air supremacy. You want to talk about people’s attention? We ran around southwest Asia for 20 years unopposed.
Air supremacy, where we can pick and choose what we do and how we do it. Wait until somebody flies against us. I mean, talk about a radical shift in the public’s even perception of our ability to conduct operations. I think that’s one of the. As soon as people first started seeing american planes shot down, there’s the shift in the public psyche, I think. I want to ask you a question.
I think that. Well, let me hit one thing. Ukraine. I know there’s all kinds of people in DC, all over the map on Ukraine. It has an impact on our readiness. You talked about our inability to even maintain stockpiles on munitions. What’s going to happen, and where are we going on your assessment with regard to Ukraine? Well, I think the situation on the ground, everyone recognizes its stalemate.
The only problem is that Russia continues to enjoy economic growth. Last year, they posted 3. 6% GDP growth while they’re engaged in a conflict. You wouldn’t be left with the impression that they’re paying a price for waging illegal conflict in a humanitarian crisis. They should be, but they are not. Correct. And that means they can resurrect the capacity very quickly, far faster than Ukraine can, even with support.
Look, at the end of the day, there’s got to be a clear plan on how this conflict ends and a resource plan to match that currently doesn’t exist. And so until it does, I think the conflict is unfortunately going to continue to exact the toll. But again, one of the points I think I would point out is that these are not two co equal combatants. In a sense, Ukraine’s done incredibly well, but they are starting from a disadvantage materially and demographically.
And over time, in a war of attrition, both of those will matter a great deal. So I think there are some very difficult decisions that are going to have to be made soon. I would also point out that, again, across Europe, there’s a great inconsistency on support. And there’s an expectation in America that Europe do more because of the proximity to the russian threat. It’s in their best interest.
Unfortunately, european member states last year spent $341 billion on climate initiatives and only $246 billion on defense. It’s unsustainable and it’s impractical. And I suspect that if there’s a change in us administrations, that that is likely to change as well. Yeah, I’m very interested in people screaming at Israel to engage in a ceasefire and negotiate when those two topics dont come up whatsoever with respect to Ukraine. And im reminded of our german friends whose initial response to Ukraine was to offer them 5000 helmets.
That was the initial german defense contribution to Ukraine. I personally believe the faster we get to a ceasefire and peace negotiations in Ukraine, the better. Thats the way its going to end anyway. Whether we like it or not. Thats how wars end. So why dont we just get there? Thats my personal view. Listen, the Biden administration has got sort of a schizophrenic approach to Israel. Just in the last few days.
They decided not to. Inaction was their position with regard to a ceasefire vote at the unit. You are extremely well versed on the conditions in Israel and all of its neighbors. What is the Biden approach to Israel? What are they attempting to accomplish? And you are a chief architect of the Abraham Accords. Whats the future of the Abraham Accords, given the Biden administrations approach to our only democratic ally in the Middle east? Right.
So first, the policy contrast couldn’t be more clear. The approach we took was to confront our adversaries, defeat ISIS, confront Iran, and deny them the resources to threaten Israel, our neighbors, and the United States. You can’t see a more complete reversal of those policies than what the Biden administration has attempted to proceed with. And so they are subverting the government in Jerusalem and they are supporting virtually unlimited access to resources of the government, the regime in Tehran.
And as a result, the world’s largest state sponsor of terrorism, is likely to engage in far more terrorism. And that’s exactly what’s happening. And we’re bearing the brunt. And certainly Israel’s born the brunt in the deadliest attack in their history and the deadliest attack on us civilians since 911. We can’t forget that us hostages are still being held and Americans died on October 7 as well. Right. Look, the Biden administration is facing an internal political conflict and trying to thread the needle and appease a demographic component of their party by confronting Israel and supporting the palestinian cause, unfortunately, advocating for policies that Hamas can support.
And so the theater in the UN, and it is theater at the end of the day, but it telegraphs a policy call. And when Hamas and Iran both come forward and publicly state their appreciation for a UN Security council resolution, that tells you all you need to know about it. And so it’s not surprising that the rift is growing. That rift began really in 2015 under the Obama administration, the pursuit of the JCPOA, the belief that you could enable and integrate Iran into the region and that you had to isolate Israel.
And that is a matter of policy. Now we’re seeing the fruit and the results of it. To your last question, look, the conditions that led to the Abraham accords were common interests and economic and security perspectives. A common view of the threat, the threat of Iran. Right. That certainly exists. A reversal in us position, I think will resurrect the accords. And they still function, exception of Sudan, they still function and are perfectly viable.
But it’ll take a change in administration and a change of policy in Washington to reinforce it. They can’t be more pro Israel than the US is. That has to happen. Yeah, I think that’s really, I mean, and to your personal and professional credit, one of the most underestimated, underrated and evaluated successes writ large in the Trump administration was the Abraham Accords. Game changer, regional game changer with benefits not just to Israel, but to converting former adversaries or at best, sort of uncooperative regional actors, getting everybody on board, everybody benefits.
Shared responsibility, shared prosperity, shared security. It changed the whole fabric and weve destroyed it. And we need to get back to it again. Another editorial on my part. So it’s my contention that the DoD now and every service is a little bit different, but there’s been an enormous injection of cultural Marxism, whether it’s critical race theory, DEi, all the Alphabet soup of it’s Marxism, it just is. I mean, you can break it down any number of ways, but cultural Marxism has been injected into the military.
It’s deliberate. I mean, it’s very thoughtful. Traditionally, our military was always viewed as sort of like, well, however crazy the rest of the government is, or Congress or president, whatever, everybody always kind of relied on, well, our military is squared away. They’ve got their head screwed on straight. We could always count on them. And that isnt so anymore. I think the american public is questioning. I think thats why you see enlistments tailing off so drastically.
The left has gone after and attempted to twist what had been the last bastion of good old red blooded Americanism and didnt give a damn about your race, color, creed, religion, or anything else. It was a meritocracy. It’s been twisted. Talk to us about what’s going on in the DOD and how we get back to what we used to be. Yeah, look, I think we’re all seeing the signs of it.
And we talked about the recruiting crisis. This again is an extension of the historic low popular support and opinion for the department, because the military was at the exclusion of the rest of the government, always seen as trustworthy, being able to accomplish its assigned task. What kept the military honest was you had to accomplish a goal. At the end of the day, the mission had to be accomplished and the environment would keep you honest.
You couldn’t entertain these ideas in combat because you didn’t have the luxury of it. And I think the department in many ways is unrecognizable to those of us that served a lifetime in it. And it is exactly your point was departing from the principle of a meritocracy. The only two arbiters for retention, recruiting and selection and promotion should be, must be, merit and character. And those two alone.
It’s what has made the department colorblind. It is what has made it a bastion of progress in so many ways, and it’s made it effective. And when that’s departed from, and we’re seeing that now, criteria other than merit, not the best qualified, but a fully qualified candidate occupying senior positions. And the results speak for themselves, we’re having difficulty in the field. We’re having difficulty with allocating and apportioning our budget, procuring weapons systems, and ultimately prevailing on the battlefield in some cases.
Not because our soldiers and our equipment are substandard. The opposite. It’s because the management has been infiltrated by ideas other than merit. And that is a dangerous thing anywhere in the government, but it is deadly in defense. The old school definition or mission statement was identify close with and destroy the enemy, period. And you are either contributing to that and increasing combat power or you are a distraction and you were shifting resources, time, money, people, commanders intent and ability to focus.
So you’re either on one side of the scale or the other. Now people are going to say, oh, that’s shockingly black and white. That’s where the rubber met the road. And I think there’s a lot of distractors that are preventing commanders from being able to put their forces into action. I don’t care if you’re in some administrative support role or whether you’re an actual trigger puller or where you fit on the scale.
You’re either getting the job done or you’re not. And there’s a lot of weird craziness. Matt Lohmeier, who was the air Force officer, swung over to Space Force. I interviewed him a few weeks, I guess a couple of months back, and he talked about all the craziness he was dealing with as a hes a battalion commander, a squadron commander. And its just unheard of, its craziness, real craziness.
One last kind of closing point, and that is weve seen the likes of General Milley, who I thought operated way outside the scope of his authority as the chairman of the JCS, calling up his chinese counterpart and making statements to Nancy Pelosi and others on the record where hes been quoted. And he affirmed things that he said and did. Hes cooperated with reporters writing books, giving them access to documents.
He gave one set of authors his draft resignation letter that he never actually gave to Trump, but that he felt comfortable giving to people to do a smear job on the former president. Milleys a disgrace in my opinion. And, in fact, in an article I published advocated for his court martial. But, you know, I dont see, I see Mark Milleys and I see CQ Browns and I see Lloyd Austin, that sort of brand or that mentality of leadership.
But I dont see anybody from the other side of the spectrum saying enoughs enough. I use the expression wheres todays Billy Mitchell? Wheres somebody whos going to make a point from the other side and say enoughs enough. Were not going to do this. Im concerned about careerism in the military. I’m concerned about people that are more willing, they got to hit the 20 mark or the 30 mark.
They got to get their retirement. They got to get their board appointment at some insurance company or whatever. And I don’t see somebody saying enough is there a lack of moral courage? Is there careerism and sort of opportunism? Where is the backbone in the officer corps? Yeah, so it’s a great question. And ultimately, the services to a greater, lesser extent struggled with this a number of different times after the most recent, I think time was in the nineties and then before that, in the seventies, after the Vietnam War, and there was a great deal of dissatisfaction for a number of reasons.
I think it starts with your point, the lack of accountability. Like ultimately you either do the job or you don’t. And when there is no accountability, then you can allow all kinds of aberrant behavior, including the politicization of the uniformed services and senior officers in particular. And we’ve seen strikingly little or no accountability in all too many cases. And look, the reality is a lot of the things that have done by the chairman in his own admission, or the secretary of defense in his own admission, would not be tolerated by junior officers.
If you or I had done the same things of not reporting to our boss, not having accurate status of our disposition, having a chain of command, make decisions when you’re supposed to be inserted and no one knows where you are or when you’re contacting a counterpart without permission of the White House, all of these things would get a subordinate fire and do. And ultimately, now what we’re seeing is senior officers having a different standard of conduct, and they well know it.
They wouldn’t tolerate it in their subordinates, but suddenly they’re allowed to exercise it because of the level in which they’re working. And that ultimately is a recipe for disaster. And I think your point is exactly right, that until accountability is restored, until we demand accountability in our uniformed services, then we’re going to see this type of careerism creep in and the consequences of it are grave, and we’re witnessing it now in real time.
And that is an incredibly horrible place to be. And it also has a deadly impact on those that serve. And it’s why many are reluctant to serve or recommend service to another under these conditions. And until we reverse it, it is going to be a very painful road. I think that there are ideologues on the political left. I mean, the real hardcore left that actually likes that they encourage, and they believe that.
I mean, if you go back to the First World War, the Bolshevik revolution in Russia, there was revolutionary defeatism. There were people that reveled in and encouraged weakness, confusion, division. And I don’t say this without some real consideration. I believe that there are those on the ideological left who actually would like to see that sort of corrosive condition in our military. And they have no problem with it whatsoever.
And it’s sort of a revolutionary ideology that they adopted and that they’re trying to impose. I think it’s very dangerous. Rob Greenway, let me tell you, folks, whether you’re watching or listening to us, this man knows what he’s talking about. He had 30 years service as an army special forces officer at Green Beret, commanding everything from team through battalion, then left active duty at the end of that time and went over to the Defense Intelligence Agency, was a senior intelligence officer.
That alone, what a tremendous career. But then he goes on to the National Security Council and serves a key role in the policy and overview of the Middle east and North Africa, but is also an architect of the Abraham Accords. What youve just heard, what youve seen in this interview, take to heart. Rob Greenway knows what hes talking about, and thats the reason why he is the director of the Allison center for National Security at the Heritage foundation.
And we deeply appreciate your time and your insights. Thank you again, Rob, for joining us. My great pleasure. Thanks for having me on. I’m Chris Farrell on Watch. .
See more of Judicial Watch on their Public Channel and the MPN Judicial Watch channel.
