Leading Republican voices have been sounding the alarm over the potential erosion of the American military should Joe Biden be reelected. We talked with one of those voices, Alaska Senator Dan Sullivan, about the steps needed to build back military might. Get facts first with Morning Wire.
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Peace Through Strength: How to Rebuild U.S. Military Might | RNC Extra
A key focus of the Republican platform is peace through strength. But Donald Trump and other Republican leaders are sounding the alarm over the erosion of American military might under Joe Biden. One of those leading GOP voices warning about the dangerous diminishment of our military capability is Senator and Marine veteran Dan Sullivan of Alaska. In this episode, we sit down with the Senator at our media booth at the RNC to discuss why he believes we're facing a crisis point in our military recruitment and infrastructure and how we might write the ship. I'm Daily Wire Editor-in-Chief John Vickley. It's Tuesday, July 16th and this is an RNC Extra Edition of Morning Wire. College is expensive, but being a man shouldn't be. Score 60% off Jeremy's Razor's one-year bundle and dominate campus life. While others can form, you'll stand out, clean-shaven and unapologetic. Major in masculinity at jeremysraisers.com today. Joining us now is Senator Dan Sullivan of Alaska. Senator, thank you so much for joining us here at the window. It's great. It's the Morning Wire or NC booth and it's fun to be here in person. I wanted to start by asking about the op-ed that you placed in the Wall Street Journal. You titled it, "The U.S. needs to rebuild its military might. We've seen a lot of changes in the military over the past few years. How has the military readiness been affected during this time?" Well, Biden has done what every Democrat administration since Jimmy Carter has done, which is come into office, focus on cutting the military, focus on undermining readiness and that's their playbook. In our playbook and you see it in President Trump's discussions, you see it in the GOP platform is pieced through strength. And so that's a giant contrast between these two candidates and I think the pieced through strength focus, particularly during these dangerous times that we're seeing right now, is what the vast majority of the American people want. But under Biden, I'll just give you an example. His current budget shrinks the Army, shrinks the Navy, shrinks the Marine Corps. We have the worst recruiting crisis we've had in over a half-century. I'm on the Armed Services Committee. I just retired out of the Marine Corps after 30 years, a couple months ago. The Secretary of the Navy, Biden's Secretary of the Navy. I called on him to resign at a recent hearing where he testified in front of the Armed Services Committee. This guy literally focuses more on climate change. I'm not kidding. Then he does on shipbuilding and lethality. So the list is so long. I love our military. Our uniform military members are some of the greatest Americans are are, but the civilian leadership of the Biden administration with regard to our military has been abysmal. And look at the GOP platform. We are focused on peace through strength, rebuilding our defense industrial base. We got a lot of work to do. But if you put that in front of the American people, you get them supporting the Republican Trump platform 100% over what Biden has just done. I want to ask you a bit more about the recruiting crisis that we're facing. Is this a morale thing? Is this a resources issue where we're not actually trying to recruit as hard? What is driving? It's a combo of many things. We've held hearings on it. I'm very focused on it because it's kind of a quiet crisis. But when you have a volunteer military, the Army missed its numbers the last two years by I think 10 to 20,000 recruits. If you have a volunteer military and you can't get people to volunteer, that's an existential crisis to your national security. And that's what we're facing. And I just had breakfast last week with the chairman, the joint chiefs and staff. And I told them, look, in terms of your recruiting approach, you had this group of Biden administration officials who came in and they were doing these ads that were just embarrassing. Right? I don't know. There's this infamous Emma ad that the Army put out. You may have heard about it. You may have seen it. It was a joke. And I told them, what are you doing? You want to recruit people by focusing on their patriotism, by focusing on their service and telling them the truth. You're going to join the most lethal fighting machine in the history of the world. And you might have to go out and kick some ass for your country. I mean, that message actually I think resonates. And one of the reasons I know that is the only service that consistently meets its recruiting targets currently is still meeting them is the Marine Corps. And the Marine Corps stays very focused on a very tough discipline message saying, you know, maybe you can join us. But at some resources, I had an amendment, believe it or not, Bernie Sanders is blocking it. That would make it much more of a federal requirement to have all high schools allow recruiters to come in to high schools. Believe it or not, there are thousands of high schools that make it really hard for recruiters to come on high school campuses. And a lot of those are in the inner city where you want the young men and women in those communities to know what their options are. But there's a lot we need to do, but I think this was another one of the many ways in which Biden has undermined our military and our readiness and our strengths. The argument you hear from the left is that we don't need a large military. We have a very efficient, effective military. There's more technology and that a lot of the threats, the national security threats are overblown. What would you say to that argument? Well, I don't think the national security threats are overblown at all. You have, I mean, pretty much everybody in the uniform military has come before our committee. And again, I still have a lot of trust and faith in the members of our uniform military. I just, like I said, retired out of Marine Corps. My last bill that was out at the Indo-Paycom, the Marine Forces Pacific Command, but, you know, I serve with a bunch of warriors, bunch of killers. And that's what we want. But the idea that it's not a threatening time is just, I think, completely incorrect. You have dictators on the march, Xi Jinping in particular of China, Putin, the Ayatollahs in Iran, Kim Jong Un in North Korea. And here's think, John, they are all working together. They're all working very closely together. And that's a big challenge. And they've shown no hesitation to one of invade their neighbors, whether it's Putin with Ukraine, the Ayatollahs certainly gave the green light to Hamas to invade Israel. And I was just in Taiwan. Xi Jinping is showing incredible aggressiveness not only towards Taiwan, but to the Philippines, which is a treaty ally of ours. So there's no doubt it's a dangerous time. And the message that Biden has been sending to shrink the military and not focus on lethality. I'll just give you one example in the Navy. We are shrinking the Navy dramatically while the Chinese has the largest Navy in the world. And by 2027 Xi Jinping has said he wants to have his military ready to invade Taiwan. The differential between the size of the U.S. Navy, which has been shrinking dramatically under Biden and the PLA, the Chinese Communist Navy will be about 140 to 150 ships differential. Now look, we have better ships. But at a certain point, particularly in the Navy, quantity becomes its own quality. And I got, again, testimony from the Congressional Research Service. These guys are the professionals who focus particularly on this shipbuilding issue. They say we are in the biggest design, building and manning crisis the U.S. Navy has seen in over 40 years. When the sector of the Navy focuses on climate change as opposed to building ships, you know, you got a problem. How hard is it to turn this kind of thing around? I mean, if you're talking about recruiting, that's one thing. You're talking about infrastructure, the capacity to build military equipment to do sort of the really intensive technological developments that we need that are outsourced right now. How hard is that to actually turn? You can't turn it on a dime. Although again, in this book, we almost did turn it on a dime during World War II. Now that, of course, was during World War II, it was a very different situation. But I will say there's some bright spots. And one really important bright spot that I've been very focused on. We just marked up what's called the National Defense Authorization Act. And one of the areas that I focus on was to enable the Pentagon to recognize a new lethal attribute that America has. And that's a lot of our tech companies who, 10 years ago, weren't at all interested in working with the Pentagon. You may remember Google had actually disavowed that, you know, when I met with those guys, I'm like, hey, that's, you know, this is a free country, you can do whatever the hell you want. But they were also going to do and work with the Chinese Communist Party and the PLA. That's when the senators on both sides, we're saying, you got to be kidding me, right? You don't want to work for the Pentagon? You're going to help the Chinese military. Like, what the hell? So that's all changing. We have some of the most innovative tech companies across the country, but in Silicon Valley and other places that are bringing technology that is very lethal, very innovative, which is what we need that you can make and manufacture quickly. Think like, for example, undersea drones. So essentially, undersea submarines, they need some images and they're straight out of sci-fi. But we have companies that are doing this, right, for real. The key there is to get the Pentagon's culture and kind of acquisition programs to not look at everything like, hey, this is Raytheon, it's going to take seven years. We know, no, we need to move quickly and we need to work with these companies because a lot of these companies come to me and say, hey, we have this great innovative weapons system. But the Pentagon has said, hey, we'll get to you in like three to four years. And these guys are like, my funding runs out in six months. But this is a great strategic comparative advantage we have over other countries, China, Russia, Iran, for sure, we just got to seize it. And sometimes the Pentagon bureaucracy is way too kind of a bound in red tape to know how to do that. So we're helping them. Big government tends to be. Final question. Yes. We just heard that. Yes. 80 Vance is the vice presidential nominee from what is your response in terms of his, how effective you think he will be on these particular issues? Is this a good choice? Yeah. It's a great choice. And I did a little research, you know, J.D. and I share a really important bond. We're both United States Marines. And I'm pretty darn sure he there's never been a Marine Corps vet who's been president or vice president. So in terms of just, there's been a lot of Navy, Army, Air Force, never, never Marine. You know, we have Marines, we're proud group. We've been around since 1775. So J.D., great job on that one. Look, he's got a great background in terms of growing up in a working class, saw the struggles of middle America, the devastations of opioids and wrote all about that in his Hillbilly LG book, which I read and was really good. But I think on the defense industrial base, I think he's going to be really strong. As a matter of fact, I was just out in Ohio at a company that builds a lot of components for nuclear subs and aircraft carriers. I mean, right there. So these are his constituents, I think in terms of, you know, one other element of our strong national security that Biden has completely surrendered, that President Trump, I know, is going to be focused on is that's American energy, right? That's another huge component of our national security. J.D. Vance has been fantastic on that. A lot of people forget, but Ohio has now become a really big energy state, it's like Alaska. And so that is a giant element of our power and influence in the world. He's been fantastic on that and really, really good on veteran's issues, which I admire a lot from him and I have worked on those as well. So I think it's great and I think he's, you know, a new generation of elected leaders too. And that's always important. Yeah, new energy in the party in that way. Senator, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you. Great to be here. It was Senator Dan Sullivan of Alaska, and this has been an extra edition of Morning Wire. [MUSIC PLAYING] (bell dings)