October 1, 2024 • 27 mins
How are progressive politics eroding core military values and their readiness to defend our nation? Newt talks with Captain Tom Burbage, a former executive at Lockheed Martin and a U.S. Naval Academy graduate, who co-authored the book "Don't Give Up the Ship." He argues that politicizing the military undermines security, erodes readiness, and risks wartime defeat. Burbage shares his extensive military and aerospace industry experience, highlighting concerns about the current state of military recruitment, retention, and readiness. He emphasizes the importance of maintaining a strong national defense and the detrimental effects of divisive ideologies on military effectiveness. They also discuss the mission of the Calvert Task Group, a collective of former military officers advocating for a return to traditional military values and policies.
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
On this episode of News World, our progressive politics eroding
core Navy values and their readiness to defend our nation.
Seventeen former military officers apply their insights, shaped by combat
command and senior leadership experience, to illuminate the divisive threat
of Wolke politics. In the new book Don't Give Up
(00:27):
the Ship. They argue that the impact of politicizing America's
military and endangered security erodes readiness and risks of wartime defeat.
Here to discuss the new book, I'm really pleased to
welcome my guest, Captain Tom Burbage. He's a former executive
vice president of Lockheed martin Or and Oudics Company, former
(00:48):
general manager of the F thirty five Lightning II Program Integration,
a graduate of the US Naval Academy. He's also one
of the founders of the Calvert Task Group. Tom. Welcome
(01:09):
and thank you for joining me on News World.
Speaker 2 (01:11):
Thank you very much, mister speaker, and I appreciate you
having us on.
Speaker 1 (01:15):
You've had remarkable experience in your life. Can you kind
of walk us through from the Naval Academy to today?
Speaker 2 (01:23):
Yes, Sir, I grew up in a family of naval aviators.
My father was a career naval aviator, and most of
my role models as a young guy were naval aviators,
and it seemed natural that's the path I wanted to follow.
So I applied and got accepted to the Naval Academy,
graduated from there in nineteen sixty nine, and my first
squadron was with the E two Hawkey, which is a
(01:44):
radar plane flies off a carriers and basically is the
air traffic controller for the airplanes that are in the
air wing. Then got the tremendous opportunity to go to
the Navy Test File School. I was the first E
two guy to actually go there and graduated from there.
Was a test pilot for a number of years at
the Tuxon River, and then I went out to the
(02:04):
USS Eisenhower and I was the catapult and arresting gear
officer on a nuclear carrier that was going on. It's
made in deployment. Today that carrier is considered one of
the older ones in the fleet, but at the time
it was brand new. I left active duty in nineteen
eighty and went to work for Lockheed before they were
Lockey Martin out in California in Burbank, and went out
(02:26):
to fly with them as a test pilot, but it
turned out they weren't testing anything new, so I got
into their program management, business development operation, and sort of
went from there. I spent two years in Washington, spent
ten years in the Marietta facility. At the time was
part of your jurisdiction, and I recall vividly you coming
out to the plant and being the guest speaker primary
(02:46):
speaker at the rolled out ceremony of the F twenty
two Raptor airplane in Marietta. Following that, I was the
president of that company for just a short period of
time while they were consolidating companies, and then I went
to Fort Worth to run the F thirty five program.
I've been retired now for ten years. Thought I would
be on the golf course and join the retired life
(03:08):
and chasing grandkids and all those things that we do
when we get to this stage of our life. But
myself and a number of my classmates felt the years
to come off the couch and try to be a
voice in the future of the country which we think
is under threatened. Number Harrius Today.
Speaker 1 (03:22):
I have to say, by the way, because of my
background representing Marietta, you were involved with the C one
thirty J I guess the C one thirty maybe the
most successful airframe ever designed, the C five, the F
twenty two. These were all built in my district. And
then F twenty two is still a remarkable air dominance fighter.
My guess is it still has no peer in the world.
Speaker 2 (03:44):
I believe that. Yes, sir, this is.
Speaker 1 (03:46):
A slight detour, but I can't help myself. Could you
just walk us through the net advantage of the F
thirty five with all of its technology and its interoperability
with each other, It's really very different than any previous airplane,
and I would be honest to tell you I don't
understand it.
Speaker 2 (04:06):
It is a different concept. The US and our allies
fly very similar aircraft. Most of our closest allies fly
US frontline fighters. All of their fleets are aging, some
more rapidly than ours. And we, the United States government
and the military, came to the conclusion that we're not
going to fight any future wars alone. That will be
(04:28):
flying and fighting together as a coalition of operators, and
so they invited the closest allies eight other countries to
join us in the development of the next generation aircraft.
And if you just think of the F twenty two
and the F thirty five, they're actually ten years apart
in terms of technology and design freeze, and the missions
are quite different. F twenty two air combat King Kong
(04:50):
in the air. F thirty five more strategic fly and
multiple airplanes in the same formation, very stealthy, hard to
detect able, to attack heavily defended strategic targets. So the
different missions of drove the airplanes to different kinds of designs.
Speaker 1 (05:07):
You've really flown in something like thirty eight different kinds
of aircraft, which is pretty remarkable. How do you react
to the notion that one of the next phases may
be using very advanced drones and fleets around a plane
so that the plane will be coordinating a whole series
of sort of satellite aircraft.
Speaker 2 (05:28):
Well, I think that's the next step. You know, there's
always the argument of whether we'll ever leave manned aircraft.
I personally think we never will because the human mind,
a human brain is important in any combat scenario where
human life becomes a major criteria. I think you'll see airplanes.
I think it's happening now in the experimental areas where
an airplane like an F thirty five will be controlling
(05:50):
unmanned aircraft on its wing, be able to send that
unmanned aircraft into a thread area to set off the
enemy's systems or whatever they want, to use it strategically
to again attack an ever more heavily defended target.
Speaker 1 (06:04):
The race for survival is not going to slow down,
it seems to me. But that's precisely what leads us
to what makes it interesting about what you've done, Because
you and a group of fellow Naval Academy graduates created
the Calvert Task Group. What led to that and why
did you pick that title?
Speaker 2 (06:22):
Well, as I said, most of us are Naval Academy graduates,
not all of us. Most of us are from an
age when patriotism and love of country were primary in
our lives, and we've seen some erosion of that in
the lives of today's youth. We were playing golf on
occasions and having difficult of remembering everybody's email address, so
(06:44):
we put ourselves under a blank email that we called
the Calvert Group, and that's really how it started. It
was a social club more than anything else. It's named
after Admiral James Calvert, who was the superintendent at the
Academy when most of us were there, and a very
famous naval leader of first submarine to use as nautilist
the surface at the North Pole and had a very
(07:04):
distinguished Navy career. We contacted his family and once we
kind of came off the couch, we contacted his family
to see if they had any concerns about us actually
continuing to use the name as we moved into a
more public view, and they didn't. They were glad that
he was remembered the way we remembered him. But we
came off the couch and we decided to get engaged.
And it started with an incident at the Naval Academy,
(07:27):
which is most of our alma maters, and it was
very concerning to us. It was about twenty nineteen. It
was when the very early stages of COVID were starting.
It was when the Black Lives Matter and the Summer
of Love quote unquote peaceful demonstrations were starting to occur,
and there was a very much of a fracture between
(07:48):
police generation and the Rioters. And one of the midshipment
at the Naval Academy had parents were both Los Angeles
police department policeman and police woman, and he was up
in an internal squabble over whether he should be commissioned
or not based on him taking some anonymous positions that
were in favor of the police. Long story short, that
(08:10):
got us engaged in the Naval Academy. We were concerned
with some things we saw. We went to the Naval Academy,
met with the current superintendent, asked them a bunch of questions,
didn't get a lot of good answers, and that sort
of grew to a bigger concern that most of that
level in the service were being heavily influenced by policy
policies that many of us were unaware of, or at
(08:33):
least hadn't woken up to because we'd been kind of
out of the mainstream. I think the same thing could
be said of the school system, the K through twelve
school systems, where most of the parents weren't really aware
of what was being taught in schools until children were
forced to stay home and parents were able to look
over the shoulder and see what they were being taught,
and it generated a reaction among parents, and it generated
(08:55):
a reaction among us that we've lost something in the
society today in the way that things are being done
from a policy standpoint, so we elevated our scope a
little bit from the Naval Academy to the Navy and
defense in general. There's so many areas that could be
challenged today, and you can't boil the ocean, so we
try to stay limited in the way that we were focused.
(09:18):
But that led to the Calvert Task Group, sort of
a play on words. We were just a Calvert group,
but then Calvert Task Group sounds a little bit more
like the Navy. So we wanted to be a force
for good. Although we were viewed, certainly in the early
days and somewhat today as an outside group that was
contradicting or countering the policies that were in place, and
that's exactly what we were.
Speaker 1 (09:54):
Why should the average citizen be worried about the kind
of changes? And we understand culturally us older guys may
wonder about the next general I think that's been true forever.
But from a national security, national survival standpoint, why should
Americans be worried about the evolution of the Defense Department
in general and the Navy in particular.
Speaker 2 (10:15):
I look at it as there's a number of pillars
that are fundamental to a constitutional republic. And the more
I hear the word democracy is a threat and more
it makes you feel that people don't really understand what
a democracy is and what a constitutional republic is. But
a constitution starts with the oath that has some fundamental pillars,
(10:36):
free and fair elections, various things, and then finally a
strong national defense, peace through strength. And when you see
that divisive ideology taking place in the training that leads
up to becoming a leader in the military. Inside the military,
you would expect to see a natural regression in both
recruiting and retention, and for it all volunteer force we
(11:00):
have today, Recruiting and retention is fundamental to maintaining that
force and the end the ultimate metric is readiness. And
if you read the news today, you can see lots
of examples where readiness is not at his best right now.
In fact, I've just read an artcold last week that
seventeen Navy support ships were being tied up because they
(11:21):
don't have the cruise to man them. So the three
things sort of run together, recruiting, retention and readiness, and
they're not doing so well right now.
Speaker 1 (11:29):
Do you think part of that is a rejection of
the emerging culture of the military that it's not attracting
the kind of people they used to think they wanted
to be in the military.
Speaker 2 (11:40):
Yeah, sir, I think that's a big part of it.
I think the part and soul of the military recruiting
population in the past has been sort of Middle America,
center right, military background in the family, Christian background. Those
things have all sort of withered under this Dei ideology,
which pits aggressors against the aggress I think from a
(12:04):
recruiting standpoint, the candidate pool has become a lot weaker,
and when it becomes a lot weaker, then standards get lowered,
and that has an ultimate secondary effect on the military
when you look at retention. I think most of the
folks that are in the military want to be in
the military for a reason, and that's to defend the
country and be involved in keeping the country where it
(12:25):
needs to be on the world stage. And I think
that requires a certain amount of bandwidth to stay focused
on that mission. And then when that bandwidth gets used
up by ideology, training things that are not fundamental to
unity in the military, I think there's a natural repelling
of that for those that are spending their time in
(12:47):
the military. So again results on retention challenges.
Speaker 1 (12:52):
Somebody told me the other day that the problem of
retention is as great as the problem of recruitment.
Speaker 2 (12:58):
I've heard that, and I've heard that on retention you
can be incentivized to be retained through financial benefits, and
in recruiting you can expand your recruiting population by lowering standards,
whether they're academic, whether they're physical, wherever they are. And
if you look at the societal changes that have happened
(13:19):
in the last ten to fifteen years, fatherless homes, lack
of role models in the family, in the general population
that comes in through the enlisted rights, it's almost like
a Ruby's cube. You know, there's so many different dimensions
of this problem, so many different colors on the cube.
It's hard to figure out how do you get all
these things back in sync.
Speaker 1 (13:40):
So what led you as a group to decide to
write a book.
Speaker 2 (13:44):
Well, that's another interesting point. We're all kind of closet,
sayss And we would spend time at home at night,
you know, writing, putting your thoughts on papers, saying why
in the world is this happening? Why aren't more people
speaking out. Why isn't this a bigger issue? Have we
had individual We had a fairly large number of articles
published in various newspapers and magazines and things like that,
(14:07):
But a published article has a shelf life of about
forty eight hours and then people move on to the
next subject. So we thought we would put these into
a book and maybe the book would open up a
new avenue, and it has. It's opened up the podcast genre,
and it allows us to talk to people like you
and others and try to get our message out through
a broader audience. Our whole objective has been to try
(14:30):
to just be a voice, try to reason with folks,
try to make people understand that policies are much more
important than personalities when you're making a big decision that
could affect the course of the country. And so the
podcast genre and certainly speaking to you, you're at the
top of our list for great people to speak to,
and that's opened up that worldforce. So we're now seeing much,
(14:51):
i think, broader recognition of the issues that we're talking about.
And that's all we want to do is get the
issues out there.
Speaker 1 (14:57):
Let me go to the basics. Where does the don't
give up the ship come from.
Speaker 2 (15:02):
It's a famous naval saying. And if you walk into
Memorial Hall and the Naval Academy, there's a huge blue
flags is don't give up the ship. It started with
a navy officer Navy ship that was in combat and
the USS Chesapeake, and it was a saying that the
captain and the ship would yell over his bullhorn, don't
give up the ship. It was later memorialized by Oliver
(15:24):
hazard Perry when he came back into another fight in
the same conflict, and it became kind of a rallying
cry for the Navy and for the Naval Academy. We
use it as an analogy. We think to a sailor,
the ship is home, the ship is his world. You're
at sea. If the ship goes down, you go down,
and the ship from an analogous perspective to us as America,
(15:48):
and if we don't worry about the holes in the
hull or the battles that we're in and that ship
goes down, we pretty much go down with it as
a nation and the things that we represent.
Speaker 1 (15:59):
Some of the stuff you all have brought to light
that all male units in terms of ground combat, all
male units outperformed co ed units and seventy percent of
combat tasks, and the recommendation to retain all male units
because of combat effectiveness was just overruled. Doesn't that mean
(16:19):
we're actually setting up people to get killed?
Speaker 2 (16:23):
If you trace back the history of the introduction of
this socialist tending ideology into our government institutions, it's not
an overnight sensation and started back in the twenty ten
twenty eleven timeframe when ideologies were embedded in a number
of the institutions, including the service academies, and it was
more or less a fringe, not necessarily dominant way of
(16:46):
thinking at the time. And it's expanded dramatically over the
last ten years, and for a number of reasons, in
my opinion, one of which is has become very heavily
incentivized financially. The DEI industry, diversity equity inclusion industry today
is about a fifteen point five billion dollar industry. And
when you have that kind of money promoting the business
(17:08):
of selling that ideology, whether it's to corporations or whether
it's to the military, it's hard to deflect that it's
a life of its own. In the military it's divisive.
It's divisive along racial lines, it's divisive along almost any
line you can think of. And when you're in a unit,
particularly a combat unit, where life and death is the
risk factor, you're not worried about whether your a cup
(17:30):
of coffee at Starbucks is the right color or not.
You're worried about whether your unit is going to survive.
You can't tolerate division amongst the troops. You need to
have unity, and that ideology is based on the opposite.
So that was a major concern. I think anybody that
understands combat understands that the female and the male bodies
are different biologically. And there's been a number of directions
(17:53):
to insert women into the rangers or insert women into seals,
and you can't do that effectively when the risk is
at a life and death level and when it's very
much dependent on physical strength. So there are plenty of
roles for every race and gender in the military. Combat
is its own special thing, and basically it's because of
(18:16):
the risk of life and death that's at stake you
want to have the best. Jim Webb was a Senator
of Virginia, a Naval Academy graduate, former sector of the
Navy had an interesting comment one time when we were
still living with a draft. He said, your leaders in
combat are highly trained individuals, but the people that actually
fight the war are civilians. So when your children and
(18:38):
your grandchildren go into a military situation, you want the
best leader they can have because it's a life and
death situation for them in some scenarios.
Speaker 1 (18:49):
And if you talk about ships in combat, it seems
to me that you have moments when you've got to
be able to repair. For example, if you get hit
by a missole or hit bio, you hit a mind,
You've got to have people capable of doing the work.
Speaker 2 (19:05):
You do. If you put technology between the individual and
the combat, it's a whole different scenario. Two. For example,
flying an airplane flying and F thirty five flying and
F twenty two. There's no significant difference between the male
and the female capability to do that when you're operating
a system. It's when you get into the real hand
(19:25):
to hand or person to person type combat scenarios that
it makes such a big difference.
Speaker 1 (19:44):
Are you seeing any changes in attitudes or under what
circumstance can we get back to a defense focused military.
Speaker 2 (19:54):
That is the question but that is a tough question.
What's the path to recovery. I think it's policy based.
In the military, your incentives are a promotion and the
civilian world, your incentives are financial normally, and in the military,
since most military people retire at a relatively early age,
there's a financial incentive beyond that to get promoted to
(20:15):
your top rank. So when you look at incentives, and
a lot of this is based on how things are incentivized,
they're not incentivized to put things back on the right track.
How do you change that? And it gets down to
understanding what a constitutional republic is in my mind, understanding
that a strong defense is one of the fundamental pillars
of that, and then a policy that allows the senior
(20:39):
military leaders to be aggressive and manage that route back
to success. One of the most disappointing things that we've
had is the number of flag and general officers that
are willing to speak out. There are some, but I
often wonder why there aren't more. And part of that
is because it's not incentivized in the promotion criteria that
(21:01):
go into achieving more senior ranks. I think that's a
good part of it.
Speaker 1 (21:05):
It seems to me that beginning with Obama, there was
a certain amount of political shift in the Pentagon that
was pretty aggressive, and you can see the impact in
terms of who's gotten promoted and what they're willing to do,
and the degree to which they sort of use ideological
language to replace reality. If we can win the Diversity
(21:26):
Award while we're getting annihilated, at least we'll have the diversity.
Speaker 2 (21:30):
Award, I think, taken to the extreme, that's exactly the
question that's in a lot of our minds. The establishment
of diversity offices in some of the institutions has been
interesting to watch too. And there's another factor underneath all this,
which is that words matter, words like diversity and equity
and inclusion. Nobody can argue with diversity being a good thing.
(21:50):
Nobody can argue with inclusion of being a good thing.
Equity where equal outcomes are assured as opposed to equal opportunities,
is another story. I think the words often disguise the agenda,
and should you attack an agenda with a certain set
of words, is not uncommon to see the words change,
but the agenda stay.
Speaker 1 (22:11):
Well. I noticed that you all came up with three
alternative words merit, excellence, and intelligence.
Speaker 2 (22:17):
Actually that came from Alexander Wang, who is a CEO
of a tech startup related to artificial intelligence. Very smart guy.
He said, we're not going to do DEI, We're going
to do MAI. And we've always felt that if you
really understand the words, the MEI is merit, excellence, and intelligence.
(22:38):
I think we're the three words. If you really understand
what those three words mean, they mean something that almost
pushes you to be excellent, you know, as opposed to
allowing folks to have outcomes that are not based on
getting the best person into the best job. And I
think he's carried that out. One other quick comment on
(22:59):
the industry side, there have been twenty five major corporations
now that have backed off of the DEI. Part of
that was written into the regulatory agencies that you know,
inspect annual reports from industry and things like that, and
it was almost like the military. There was a certain
set of criteria companies were supposed to meet. Sometimes it
(23:19):
was called a different three letter acronym, but it was
the same thing. But the companies are backing away from it,
and the reason is their shareholders don't see value in it.
It doesn't add value to the bottom line and it
consumes resources. Well, there's no reason why that same thing
doesn't apply to the military.
Speaker 1 (23:36):
I think the combination of things like the Afghanistan withdraw,
the failure to win after twenty two years of war,
all of that, plus this emphasis on social goals that
are non military. You know, trust and confidence in the
American military has dropped from seventy percent in twenty eighteen
to just forty six percent last year. And that's a
(23:58):
twenty four percent And it's no wonder if that's what's
happening that you have a harder time with recruitment and
retention exactly.
Speaker 2 (24:07):
And I think what kids that are taught coming up
through the public school system, particularly private schools, is a
little bit different by the public school system. I mean,
when's the last time you heard an elementary school class
through the pledge of allegiance, Or when's the last time
you saw an American flag in a classroom. There's other
flags in the classroom, but there's not American flags, at
least not very often. Young kids are not in viewed
(24:28):
with the patriotic flavor that most of us had in
our generation.
Speaker 1 (24:34):
I was struck though, well, the army and the Navy
and the Air Force are having a challenge meeting their
recruiting goals. The Space Corps and the Marine Corps are not.
I kind of understand the Space Corps because it's small
and it has the adventure of going into space. But
in your own mind, since the Marines are a part
of the Navy and a lot of Marine officers came
(24:56):
through Annapolis, why do you think the Marines are having
more more success of recruitment than the bigger services.
Speaker 2 (25:04):
I think the Marines, and I know a lot of them,
and there are a lot of them in our program
of thirty five program and others that I got to
work with had the privilege of working with. I think
they have retained the warrior spirit. They've managed to somehow
keep that culture of the Marine Corps, and I think
people are attracted to join something that's a genuine team
(25:25):
and it's really the team aspect that's unique about the
Marine Corps or in some cases the special elite groups
like the Seals or people like that, the band of
brothers kind of concept, and they've been able to retain that.
And I think their pride in the country, their pride
in their uniform, the pride in what they do as
a mission attracts people. There's still great people out there
that want to come in. It's just getting the numbers
(25:47):
that you need to man the force that's such a
challenge right now.
Speaker 1 (25:50):
I want to thank you for joining me. Your new
book with the Calvert Task Group is Don't Give Up
the Ship. Woke politics are endangering our military and our nation.
It's an interesting read and available now on Amazon. Our
listeners can learn more about the Calvert Task Group at
Calverttaskgroup dot org. And I really appreciate Tom you taking
(26:10):
the time to share with us.
Speaker 2 (26:12):
Yes, sir, I appreciate you having us on and it's
great to see you again, and I wish you all
the best and hopefully we'll come through with changing direction
on the coorsinations on.
Speaker 1 (26:24):
Thank you to my guest Captain Tom Burbage. You can
get a link to buy his new book, Don't Give
Up the Ship on our show page at Newtsworld dot com.
Newsworld is produced by GINGRIDH three sixty and iHeartMedia. Our
executive producer is Guarnsey Sloan. Our researcher is Rachel Peterson.
The artwork for the show was created by Steve Penley.
(26:46):
Special thanks to the team at gingwidh three sixty. If
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Right now, listeners of Newtsworld consign up for my three
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(27:07):
I'm Nute Gingrich. This is Nutsworld.
On this episode of News World, our progressive politics eroding
core Navy values and their readiness to defend our nation.
Seventeen former military officers apply their insights, shaped by combat
command and senior leadership experience, to illuminate the divisive threat
of Wolke politics. In the new book Don't Give Up
(00:27):
the Ship. They argue that the impact of politicizing America's
military and endangered security erodes readiness and risks of wartime defeat.
Here to discuss the new book, I'm really pleased to
welcome my guest, Captain Tom Burbage. He's a former executive
vice president of Lockheed martin Or and Oudics Company, former
(00:48):
general manager of the F thirty five Lightning II Program Integration,
a graduate of the US Naval Academy. He's also one
of the founders of the Calvert Task Group. Tom. Welcome
(01:09):
and thank you for joining me on News World.
Speaker 2 (01:11):
Thank you very much, mister speaker, and I appreciate you
having us on.
Speaker 1 (01:15):
You've had remarkable experience in your life. Can you kind
of walk us through from the Naval Academy to today?
Speaker 2 (01:23):
Yes, Sir, I grew up in a family of naval aviators.
My father was a career naval aviator, and most of
my role models as a young guy were naval aviators,
and it seemed natural that's the path I wanted to follow.
So I applied and got accepted to the Naval Academy,
graduated from there in nineteen sixty nine, and my first
squadron was with the E two Hawkey, which is a
(01:44):
radar plane flies off a carriers and basically is the
air traffic controller for the airplanes that are in the
air wing. Then got the tremendous opportunity to go to
the Navy Test File School. I was the first E
two guy to actually go there and graduated from there.
Was a test pilot for a number of years at
the Tuxon River, and then I went out to the
(02:04):
USS Eisenhower and I was the catapult and arresting gear
officer on a nuclear carrier that was going on. It's
made in deployment. Today that carrier is considered one of
the older ones in the fleet, but at the time
it was brand new. I left active duty in nineteen
eighty and went to work for Lockheed before they were
Lockey Martin out in California in Burbank, and went out
(02:26):
to fly with them as a test pilot, but it
turned out they weren't testing anything new, so I got
into their program management, business development operation, and sort of
went from there. I spent two years in Washington, spent
ten years in the Marietta facility. At the time was
part of your jurisdiction, and I recall vividly you coming
out to the plant and being the guest speaker primary
(02:46):
speaker at the rolled out ceremony of the F twenty
two Raptor airplane in Marietta. Following that, I was the
president of that company for just a short period of
time while they were consolidating companies, and then I went
to Fort Worth to run the F thirty five program.
I've been retired now for ten years. Thought I would
be on the golf course and join the retired life
(03:08):
and chasing grandkids and all those things that we do
when we get to this stage of our life. But
myself and a number of my classmates felt the years
to come off the couch and try to be a
voice in the future of the country which we think
is under threatened. Number Harrius Today.
Speaker 1 (03:22):
I have to say, by the way, because of my
background representing Marietta, you were involved with the C one
thirty J I guess the C one thirty maybe the
most successful airframe ever designed, the C five, the F
twenty two. These were all built in my district. And
then F twenty two is still a remarkable air dominance fighter.
My guess is it still has no peer in the world.
Speaker 2 (03:44):
I believe that. Yes, sir, this is.
Speaker 1 (03:46):
A slight detour, but I can't help myself. Could you
just walk us through the net advantage of the F
thirty five with all of its technology and its interoperability
with each other, It's really very different than any previous airplane,
and I would be honest to tell you I don't
understand it.
Speaker 2 (04:06):
It is a different concept. The US and our allies
fly very similar aircraft. Most of our closest allies fly
US frontline fighters. All of their fleets are aging, some
more rapidly than ours. And we, the United States government
and the military, came to the conclusion that we're not
going to fight any future wars alone. That will be
(04:28):
flying and fighting together as a coalition of operators, and
so they invited the closest allies eight other countries to
join us in the development of the next generation aircraft.
And if you just think of the F twenty two
and the F thirty five, they're actually ten years apart
in terms of technology and design freeze, and the missions
are quite different. F twenty two air combat King Kong
(04:50):
in the air. F thirty five more strategic fly and
multiple airplanes in the same formation, very stealthy, hard to
detect able, to attack heavily defended strategic targets. So the
different missions of drove the airplanes to different kinds of designs.
Speaker 1 (05:07):
You've really flown in something like thirty eight different kinds
of aircraft, which is pretty remarkable. How do you react
to the notion that one of the next phases may
be using very advanced drones and fleets around a plane
so that the plane will be coordinating a whole series
of sort of satellite aircraft.
Speaker 2 (05:28):
Well, I think that's the next step. You know, there's
always the argument of whether we'll ever leave manned aircraft.
I personally think we never will because the human mind,
a human brain is important in any combat scenario where
human life becomes a major criteria. I think you'll see airplanes.
I think it's happening now in the experimental areas where
an airplane like an F thirty five will be controlling
(05:50):
unmanned aircraft on its wing, be able to send that
unmanned aircraft into a thread area to set off the
enemy's systems or whatever they want, to use it strategically
to again attack an ever more heavily defended target.
Speaker 1 (06:04):
The race for survival is not going to slow down,
it seems to me. But that's precisely what leads us
to what makes it interesting about what you've done, Because
you and a group of fellow Naval Academy graduates created
the Calvert Task Group. What led to that and why
did you pick that title?
Speaker 2 (06:22):
Well, as I said, most of us are Naval Academy graduates,
not all of us. Most of us are from an
age when patriotism and love of country were primary in
our lives, and we've seen some erosion of that in
the lives of today's youth. We were playing golf on
occasions and having difficult of remembering everybody's email address, so
(06:44):
we put ourselves under a blank email that we called
the Calvert Group, and that's really how it started. It
was a social club more than anything else. It's named
after Admiral James Calvert, who was the superintendent at the
Academy when most of us were there, and a very
famous naval leader of first submarine to use as nautilist
the surface at the North Pole and had a very
(07:04):
distinguished Navy career. We contacted his family and once we
kind of came off the couch, we contacted his family
to see if they had any concerns about us actually
continuing to use the name as we moved into a
more public view, and they didn't. They were glad that
he was remembered the way we remembered him. But we
came off the couch and we decided to get engaged.
And it started with an incident at the Naval Academy,
(07:27):
which is most of our alma maters, and it was
very concerning to us. It was about twenty nineteen. It
was when the very early stages of COVID were starting.
It was when the Black Lives Matter and the Summer
of Love quote unquote peaceful demonstrations were starting to occur,
and there was a very much of a fracture between
(07:48):
police generation and the Rioters. And one of the midshipment
at the Naval Academy had parents were both Los Angeles
police department policeman and police woman, and he was up
in an internal squabble over whether he should be commissioned
or not based on him taking some anonymous positions that
were in favor of the police. Long story short, that
(08:10):
got us engaged in the Naval Academy. We were concerned
with some things we saw. We went to the Naval Academy,
met with the current superintendent, asked them a bunch of questions,
didn't get a lot of good answers, and that sort
of grew to a bigger concern that most of that
level in the service were being heavily influenced by policy
policies that many of us were unaware of, or at
(08:33):
least hadn't woken up to because we'd been kind of
out of the mainstream. I think the same thing could
be said of the school system, the K through twelve
school systems, where most of the parents weren't really aware
of what was being taught in schools until children were
forced to stay home and parents were able to look
over the shoulder and see what they were being taught,
and it generated a reaction among parents, and it generated
(08:55):
a reaction among us that we've lost something in the
society today in the way that things are being done
from a policy standpoint, so we elevated our scope a
little bit from the Naval Academy to the Navy and
defense in general. There's so many areas that could be
challenged today, and you can't boil the ocean, so we
try to stay limited in the way that we were focused.
(09:18):
But that led to the Calvert Task Group, sort of
a play on words. We were just a Calvert group,
but then Calvert Task Group sounds a little bit more
like the Navy. So we wanted to be a force
for good. Although we were viewed, certainly in the early
days and somewhat today as an outside group that was
contradicting or countering the policies that were in place, and
that's exactly what we were.
Speaker 1 (09:54):
Why should the average citizen be worried about the kind
of changes? And we understand culturally us older guys may
wonder about the next general I think that's been true forever.
But from a national security, national survival standpoint, why should
Americans be worried about the evolution of the Defense Department
in general and the Navy in particular.
Speaker 2 (10:15):
I look at it as there's a number of pillars
that are fundamental to a constitutional republic. And the more
I hear the word democracy is a threat and more
it makes you feel that people don't really understand what
a democracy is and what a constitutional republic is. But
a constitution starts with the oath that has some fundamental pillars,
(10:36):
free and fair elections, various things, and then finally a
strong national defense, peace through strength. And when you see
that divisive ideology taking place in the training that leads
up to becoming a leader in the military. Inside the military,
you would expect to see a natural regression in both
recruiting and retention, and for it all volunteer force we
(11:00):
have today, Recruiting and retention is fundamental to maintaining that
force and the end the ultimate metric is readiness. And
if you read the news today, you can see lots
of examples where readiness is not at his best right now.
In fact, I've just read an artcold last week that
seventeen Navy support ships were being tied up because they
(11:21):
don't have the cruise to man them. So the three
things sort of run together, recruiting, retention and readiness, and
they're not doing so well right now.
Speaker 1 (11:29):
Do you think part of that is a rejection of
the emerging culture of the military that it's not attracting
the kind of people they used to think they wanted
to be in the military.
Speaker 2 (11:40):
Yeah, sir, I think that's a big part of it.
I think the part and soul of the military recruiting
population in the past has been sort of Middle America,
center right, military background in the family, Christian background. Those
things have all sort of withered under this Dei ideology,
which pits aggressors against the aggress I think from a
(12:04):
recruiting standpoint, the candidate pool has become a lot weaker,
and when it becomes a lot weaker, then standards get lowered,
and that has an ultimate secondary effect on the military
when you look at retention. I think most of the
folks that are in the military want to be in
the military for a reason, and that's to defend the
country and be involved in keeping the country where it
(12:25):
needs to be on the world stage. And I think
that requires a certain amount of bandwidth to stay focused
on that mission. And then when that bandwidth gets used
up by ideology, training things that are not fundamental to
unity in the military, I think there's a natural repelling
of that for those that are spending their time in
(12:47):
the military. So again results on retention challenges.
Speaker 1 (12:52):
Somebody told me the other day that the problem of
retention is as great as the problem of recruitment.
Speaker 2 (12:58):
I've heard that, and I've heard that on retention you
can be incentivized to be retained through financial benefits, and
in recruiting you can expand your recruiting population by lowering standards,
whether they're academic, whether they're physical, wherever they are. And
if you look at the societal changes that have happened
(13:19):
in the last ten to fifteen years, fatherless homes, lack
of role models in the family, in the general population
that comes in through the enlisted rights, it's almost like
a Ruby's cube. You know, there's so many different dimensions
of this problem, so many different colors on the cube.
It's hard to figure out how do you get all
these things back in sync.
Speaker 1 (13:40):
So what led you as a group to decide to
write a book.
Speaker 2 (13:44):
Well, that's another interesting point. We're all kind of closet,
sayss And we would spend time at home at night,
you know, writing, putting your thoughts on papers, saying why
in the world is this happening? Why aren't more people
speaking out. Why isn't this a bigger issue? Have we
had individual We had a fairly large number of articles
published in various newspapers and magazines and things like that,
(14:07):
But a published article has a shelf life of about
forty eight hours and then people move on to the
next subject. So we thought we would put these into
a book and maybe the book would open up a
new avenue, and it has. It's opened up the podcast genre,
and it allows us to talk to people like you
and others and try to get our message out through
a broader audience. Our whole objective has been to try
(14:30):
to just be a voice, try to reason with folks,
try to make people understand that policies are much more
important than personalities when you're making a big decision that
could affect the course of the country. And so the
podcast genre and certainly speaking to you, you're at the
top of our list for great people to speak to,
and that's opened up that worldforce. So we're now seeing much,
(14:51):
i think, broader recognition of the issues that we're talking about.
And that's all we want to do is get the
issues out there.
Speaker 1 (14:57):
Let me go to the basics. Where does the don't
give up the ship come from.
Speaker 2 (15:02):
It's a famous naval saying. And if you walk into
Memorial Hall and the Naval Academy, there's a huge blue
flags is don't give up the ship. It started with
a navy officer Navy ship that was in combat and
the USS Chesapeake, and it was a saying that the
captain and the ship would yell over his bullhorn, don't
give up the ship. It was later memorialized by Oliver
(15:24):
hazard Perry when he came back into another fight in
the same conflict, and it became kind of a rallying
cry for the Navy and for the Naval Academy. We
use it as an analogy. We think to a sailor,
the ship is home, the ship is his world. You're
at sea. If the ship goes down, you go down,
and the ship from an analogous perspective to us as America,
(15:48):
and if we don't worry about the holes in the
hull or the battles that we're in and that ship
goes down, we pretty much go down with it as
a nation and the things that we represent.
Speaker 1 (15:59):
Some of the stuff you all have brought to light
that all male units in terms of ground combat, all
male units outperformed co ed units and seventy percent of
combat tasks, and the recommendation to retain all male units
because of combat effectiveness was just overruled. Doesn't that mean
(16:19):
we're actually setting up people to get killed?
Speaker 2 (16:23):
If you trace back the history of the introduction of
this socialist tending ideology into our government institutions, it's not
an overnight sensation and started back in the twenty ten
twenty eleven timeframe when ideologies were embedded in a number
of the institutions, including the service academies, and it was
more or less a fringe, not necessarily dominant way of
(16:46):
thinking at the time. And it's expanded dramatically over the
last ten years, and for a number of reasons, in
my opinion, one of which is has become very heavily
incentivized financially. The DEI industry, diversity equity inclusion industry today
is about a fifteen point five billion dollar industry. And
when you have that kind of money promoting the business
(17:08):
of selling that ideology, whether it's to corporations or whether
it's to the military, it's hard to deflect that it's
a life of its own. In the military it's divisive.
It's divisive along racial lines, it's divisive along almost any
line you can think of. And when you're in a unit,
particularly a combat unit, where life and death is the
risk factor, you're not worried about whether your a cup
(17:30):
of coffee at Starbucks is the right color or not.
You're worried about whether your unit is going to survive.
You can't tolerate division amongst the troops. You need to
have unity, and that ideology is based on the opposite.
So that was a major concern. I think anybody that
understands combat understands that the female and the male bodies
are different biologically. And there's been a number of directions
(17:53):
to insert women into the rangers or insert women into seals,
and you can't do that effectively when the risk is
at a life and death level and when it's very
much dependent on physical strength. So there are plenty of
roles for every race and gender in the military. Combat
is its own special thing, and basically it's because of
(18:16):
the risk of life and death that's at stake you
want to have the best. Jim Webb was a Senator
of Virginia, a Naval Academy graduate, former sector of the
Navy had an interesting comment one time when we were
still living with a draft. He said, your leaders in
combat are highly trained individuals, but the people that actually
fight the war are civilians. So when your children and
(18:38):
your grandchildren go into a military situation, you want the
best leader they can have because it's a life and
death situation for them in some scenarios.
Speaker 1 (18:49):
And if you talk about ships in combat, it seems
to me that you have moments when you've got to
be able to repair. For example, if you get hit
by a missole or hit bio, you hit a mind,
You've got to have people capable of doing the work.
Speaker 2 (19:05):
You do. If you put technology between the individual and
the combat, it's a whole different scenario. Two. For example,
flying an airplane flying and F thirty five flying and
F twenty two. There's no significant difference between the male
and the female capability to do that when you're operating
a system. It's when you get into the real hand
(19:25):
to hand or person to person type combat scenarios that
it makes such a big difference.
Speaker 1 (19:44):
Are you seeing any changes in attitudes or under what
circumstance can we get back to a defense focused military.
Speaker 2 (19:54):
That is the question but that is a tough question.
What's the path to recovery. I think it's policy based.
In the military, your incentives are a promotion and the
civilian world, your incentives are financial normally, and in the military,
since most military people retire at a relatively early age,
there's a financial incentive beyond that to get promoted to
(20:15):
your top rank. So when you look at incentives, and
a lot of this is based on how things are incentivized,
they're not incentivized to put things back on the right track.
How do you change that? And it gets down to
understanding what a constitutional republic is in my mind, understanding
that a strong defense is one of the fundamental pillars
of that, and then a policy that allows the senior
(20:39):
military leaders to be aggressive and manage that route back
to success. One of the most disappointing things that we've
had is the number of flag and general officers that
are willing to speak out. There are some, but I
often wonder why there aren't more. And part of that
is because it's not incentivized in the promotion criteria that
(21:01):
go into achieving more senior ranks. I think that's a
good part of it.
Speaker 1 (21:05):
It seems to me that beginning with Obama, there was
a certain amount of political shift in the Pentagon that
was pretty aggressive, and you can see the impact in
terms of who's gotten promoted and what they're willing to do,
and the degree to which they sort of use ideological
language to replace reality. If we can win the Diversity
(21:26):
Award while we're getting annihilated, at least we'll have the diversity.
Speaker 2 (21:30):
Award, I think, taken to the extreme, that's exactly the
question that's in a lot of our minds. The establishment
of diversity offices in some of the institutions has been
interesting to watch too. And there's another factor underneath all this,
which is that words matter, words like diversity and equity
and inclusion. Nobody can argue with diversity being a good thing.
(21:50):
Nobody can argue with inclusion of being a good thing.
Equity where equal outcomes are assured as opposed to equal opportunities,
is another story. I think the words often disguise the agenda,
and should you attack an agenda with a certain set
of words, is not uncommon to see the words change,
but the agenda stay.
Speaker 1 (22:11):
Well. I noticed that you all came up with three
alternative words merit, excellence, and intelligence.
Speaker 2 (22:17):
Actually that came from Alexander Wang, who is a CEO
of a tech startup related to artificial intelligence. Very smart guy.
He said, we're not going to do DEI, We're going
to do MAI. And we've always felt that if you
really understand the words, the MEI is merit, excellence, and intelligence.
(22:38):
I think we're the three words. If you really understand
what those three words mean, they mean something that almost
pushes you to be excellent, you know, as opposed to
allowing folks to have outcomes that are not based on
getting the best person into the best job. And I
think he's carried that out. One other quick comment on
(22:59):
the industry side, there have been twenty five major corporations
now that have backed off of the DEI. Part of
that was written into the regulatory agencies that you know,
inspect annual reports from industry and things like that, and
it was almost like the military. There was a certain
set of criteria companies were supposed to meet. Sometimes it
(23:19):
was called a different three letter acronym, but it was
the same thing. But the companies are backing away from it,
and the reason is their shareholders don't see value in it.
It doesn't add value to the bottom line and it
consumes resources. Well, there's no reason why that same thing
doesn't apply to the military.
Speaker 1 (23:36):
I think the combination of things like the Afghanistan withdraw,
the failure to win after twenty two years of war,
all of that, plus this emphasis on social goals that
are non military. You know, trust and confidence in the
American military has dropped from seventy percent in twenty eighteen
to just forty six percent last year. And that's a
(23:58):
twenty four percent And it's no wonder if that's what's
happening that you have a harder time with recruitment and
retention exactly.
Speaker 2 (24:07):
And I think what kids that are taught coming up
through the public school system, particularly private schools, is a
little bit different by the public school system. I mean,
when's the last time you heard an elementary school class
through the pledge of allegiance, Or when's the last time
you saw an American flag in a classroom. There's other
flags in the classroom, but there's not American flags, at
least not very often. Young kids are not in viewed
(24:28):
with the patriotic flavor that most of us had in
our generation.
Speaker 1 (24:34):
I was struck though, well, the army and the Navy
and the Air Force are having a challenge meeting their
recruiting goals. The Space Corps and the Marine Corps are not.
I kind of understand the Space Corps because it's small
and it has the adventure of going into space. But
in your own mind, since the Marines are a part
of the Navy and a lot of Marine officers came
(24:56):
through Annapolis, why do you think the Marines are having
more more success of recruitment than the bigger services.
Speaker 2 (25:04):
I think the Marines, and I know a lot of them,
and there are a lot of them in our program
of thirty five program and others that I got to
work with had the privilege of working with. I think
they have retained the warrior spirit. They've managed to somehow
keep that culture of the Marine Corps, and I think
people are attracted to join something that's a genuine team
(25:25):
and it's really the team aspect that's unique about the
Marine Corps or in some cases the special elite groups
like the Seals or people like that, the band of
brothers kind of concept, and they've been able to retain that.
And I think their pride in the country, their pride
in their uniform, the pride in what they do as
a mission attracts people. There's still great people out there
that want to come in. It's just getting the numbers
(25:47):
that you need to man the force that's such a
challenge right now.
Speaker 1 (25:50):
I want to thank you for joining me. Your new
book with the Calvert Task Group is Don't Give Up
the Ship. Woke politics are endangering our military and our nation.
It's an interesting read and available now on Amazon. Our
listeners can learn more about the Calvert Task Group at
Calverttaskgroup dot org. And I really appreciate Tom you taking
(26:10):
the time to share with us.
Speaker 2 (26:12):
Yes, sir, I appreciate you having us on and it's
great to see you again, and I wish you all
the best and hopefully we'll come through with changing direction
on the coorsinations on.
Speaker 1 (26:24):
Thank you to my guest Captain Tom Burbage. You can
get a link to buy his new book, Don't Give
Up the Ship on our show page at Newtsworld dot com.
Newsworld is produced by GINGRIDH three sixty and iHeartMedia. Our
executive producer is Guarnsey Sloan. Our researcher is Rachel Peterson.
The artwork for the show was created by Steve Penley.
(26:46):
Special thanks to the team at gingwidh three sixty. If
you've been enjoying Newtsworld, I hope you'll go to Apple
Podcast and both rate us with five stars and give
us a review so others can learn what it's all about.
Right now, listeners of Newtsworld consign up for my three
free weekly columns at gingrichtree sixty dot com slash newsletter.
(27:07):
I'm Nute Gingrich. This is Nutsworld.
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