September 4, 2026 • 10 mins
Is the Pentagon suffering a “brain drain,” or is the Trump administration finally forcing the military establishment to change? Buck takes on the growing media narrative surrounding departures, resignations, and blocked promotions inside the Pentagon, including the resignation of Army Secretary Daniel Driscoll. While critics warn of turmoil in the military’s senior ranks, Buck argues the shake-up may be exactly what President Trump and Secretary Pete Hegseth were brought in to do.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Okay, let's talk about all these stories that are coming
out of the fake news media, the swamp inside of D.C.,
about the brain drain they're calling the Pentagon. Oh my gosh,
we have senior officers who are being blocked from promotion.
Oh no, we have people that are being fired or
resigning earlier than expected. A whole range of people. And
(00:23):
I just want to say, this has gotten a lot
louder after the Secretary of the Army, Driscoll, has resigned recently.
Here's the deal, my friends. The military is enormous. I
worked in the CIA, not the military. The CIA was
big enough, enough of a bloated bureaucracy. The military is
absolutely huge. And the notion that the people who have,
(00:47):
especially under, let's say, different administrations, including most recently the
Biden administration, managed to rise up in the bureaucratic ranks
and become senior officers, flag officers, that they're the best
people for the job is based on what? Well, it
would have to be based on, just logically, an assumption
(01:10):
that they were doing what they were supposed to do before,
and that the previous mission set for readiness for the Pentagon,
readiness for our military, was being pursued and, at some measure, achieved. Well,
if you come into the situation and you say that
our military needs quite an overhaul, that we have to
(01:32):
take a somewhat radical approach to things because what has
been in the past cannot be going forward, then guess what?
You find yourself having to shake things up. All of
this kerfuffle right now in the military ranks, not in
the ranks, but about military people of high rank, it
(01:53):
reminds me of Every discussion about Trump in the first
term of the first Trump administration, where he was elected
to be a disruptor, to smash things that were not
working properly or that were upsetting people or even betraying people.
And sure enough, they kept saying, oh, but look what
he's doing to this or that sacred institution. He's upending it. He's,
(02:16):
dare I say, transforming it. That's the point, isn't it?
Isn't that what he is elected to do in that context? Now,
hasn't Secretary of War Hegseth been appointed to change the
military from a lot of what we had seen as
policy for years, whether it's the DEI initiatives, the social
(02:38):
justice stuff? I mean, I remember, I can tell you,
I was never in the military, but as you know,
I was in the CIA and served on some military
bases overseas for periods of time many years ago. And
I remember everywhere I would see this diversity is our
strength stuff. Military, like military, essentially propaganda for the military.
(03:00):
And it was diversity is our strength. I remember being
in Iraq and thinking, no, I'm pretty sure having the
most lethal warfighters possible who can outthink, outmaneuver and outkill
the enemy. That's our strength when you're talking about the military,
not diversity. There has been a ideological creep from the
left throughout our military for a long time. And to
(03:22):
bring that to a conclusion, to finally root that out,
of course, it's going to be somewhat different than what
it had been before. And that means it also has
to have different personnel. There's no way to do this
without at some level, uh, people becoming angry. People are
(03:44):
going to view this as not on mission, not on, uh,
not on the right path. And all I have to
say about this is the realities of this administration so
far have been racking up, I think, a lot of
wins and doing a lot to reform institutions that had
(04:05):
been considered broken for quite some time, or at least
in need of some major fixes. The Trump administration has
been very clear that any shortage, for example, that has
been run from the munition side of things. We're blowing
up a lot of stuff in straight up Hormuz in
Iran and have been doing so for months. And they're saying, well,
(04:27):
we're running low on these munitions. The administration has been
working not only to have ample stockpiles of those, but also,
and this is the critical part, to be in a
better place to ramp up production of them going into
the future. So it's not just a temporary situation. It's
not a one-time thing. It's we have a better military
(04:50):
industrial capacity to be able to meet these threats because
the future is increasingly going to be a future of, uh,
technology and industry deciding battlefield outcomes. That is quite obvious
with the rise of artificial intelligence, uh, low space earth
(05:13):
orbit satellites and communications and robotics and, when you see
AI robotics and low space, low space orbit comms, all
these things coming together, you are going to have a
21st century battlefield that is at some level robotized and
you're going to have autonomous fighter jets and you're going
(05:35):
to have, you already have seen this with, uh, with
Russia removing the human factor from the kill chain with
some of the lethal drones that it's using. So the
drones are trained on AI to look for a certain target.
They find the target and they then go dive bomb
and explode into that target. That's already happening. So our
(05:56):
ability to make these things and to make them rapidly
and also to innovate on them, that's what puts us
in a better place to fight the wars of the future.
It's not, do we have enough Hellfire missiles and Tomahawk
missiles today? Yeah, of course, in an immediate sense, if
you're going to continue to fight against an adversary or
where you need those munitions, fine, but we also have
(06:18):
a lot of other munitions that are far less sophisticated
and expensive that would get the job done too. There's,
I think, a growing, there should be a growing awareness
that this Secretary of War and his top team are
trying to get us into a position where as a country,
as a nation, our military is prepared for the next war.
(06:39):
We can put an end to the preparing to fight
the last war maxim that has been a truism of
American military preparedness for a long time. We are not
looking to prepare for long-term contingency, counterinsurgency operations in some
third world hellhole and build the military just for that.
(07:01):
We are understanding now that Russia, China, nation-state level threats
are once again the primary adversary. And those are countries
with sophisticated, highly sophisticated military technology and and the ability
to inflict major battlefield casualties on us without even risking
(07:22):
any of their own people. That's not something that we
came up against, really, with ISIS and Boko Haram and
Al Qaeda and all these different jihadist terrorist groups out there. Sure,
they would deploy suicide bombers, but they had to usually
send force against us. Hezbollah started experimenting with drones quite
a while back, but now we've seen the threat level, uh,
(07:46):
escalate for drones, for robotics, and for the ability of
foreign adversaries to use them very effectively. So yes, there's
going to be some, uh, now I'm going to use another, uh,
another cliche, right? The cliche about preparing for the last war.
They're trying to avoid that. And maybe to do that,
we're going to, to make an omelet, you got to
(08:06):
break a few eggs. Well, some of these eggs are
being broken in, the name, if you will, of certain
individuals who aren't on board and are moving aside. In
this case, this guy Driscoll, I don't know him, I
don't really know that much about him other than what
I've read, but he decided to resign. Okay, well, resigning
because you think your boss is bad at his job
(08:29):
is your right, but it doesn't mean you're right. It
doesn't mean that what he's saying is correct or true,
and I have far more faith in Secretary Hegseth and
his top people than in those who, it seems to me,
are running a campaign of leaks and all kinds of
nonsense aimed at personal score settling and vendettas. So that's
(08:52):
what I see going on here right now. That is
my takeaway from all of these concerns, all this conversation
that is currently being had about how it is that
we can fix the Pentagon, how we can make these
issues better. Now, let me tell you about something else.
(09:12):
Our sponsor here is Incogni. And you know this, they're
data brokers. They can buy so much of your information online.
And then they use that information in all these different
ways to try not only to harass you, but to
scam you. And it can be even worse than that.
(09:33):
When police searched the car of a man who assassinated
a Minnesota lawmaker and her husband in their own home,
they found a notebook. And inside was handwritten a list
of 11 websites. Not weapon sites, data brokers. People search
sites that sell your home address for a couple of dollars.
Type your name into one right now. There you are,
your address, your phone, your family's name, a photo of
(09:54):
your front door. Anyone can look you up in seconds
and you'll never know who did. That's why I use Incogni.
It forces data brokers and people search sites to delete you,
then keeps checking because deleted data creeps back. Incogni has
scrubbed my info from over 223 sites while I did
exactly nothing. You lock your doors every night. Tonight, lock
down your personal info online. Go to incogni.com slash buck
(10:17):
for 60% off. That's I-N-C-O-G-N-I dot com slash buck. Use
my first name, Buck, as your promo code to ensure
you get that 60% savings. Incogni dot com slash buck.
And that's the podcast for today, my friends. Shields high.
Okay, let's talk about all these stories that are coming
out of the fake news media, the swamp inside of D.C.,
about the brain drain they're calling the Pentagon. Oh my gosh,
we have senior officers who are being blocked from promotion.
Oh no, we have people that are being fired or
resigning earlier than expected. A whole range of people. And
(00:23):
I just want to say, this has gotten a lot
louder after the Secretary of the Army, Driscoll, has resigned recently.
Here's the deal, my friends. The military is enormous. I
worked in the CIA, not the military. The CIA was
big enough, enough of a bloated bureaucracy. The military is
absolutely huge. And the notion that the people who have,
(00:47):
especially under, let's say, different administrations, including most recently the
Biden administration, managed to rise up in the bureaucratic ranks
and become senior officers, flag officers, that they're the best
people for the job is based on what? Well, it
would have to be based on, just logically, an assumption
(01:10):
that they were doing what they were supposed to do before,
and that the previous mission set for readiness for the Pentagon,
readiness for our military, was being pursued and, at some measure, achieved. Well,
if you come into the situation and you say that
our military needs quite an overhaul, that we have to
(01:32):
take a somewhat radical approach to things because what has
been in the past cannot be going forward, then guess what?
You find yourself having to shake things up. All of
this kerfuffle right now in the military ranks, not in
the ranks, but about military people of high rank, it
(01:53):
reminds me of Every discussion about Trump in the first
term of the first Trump administration, where he was elected
to be a disruptor, to smash things that were not
working properly or that were upsetting people or even betraying people.
And sure enough, they kept saying, oh, but look what
he's doing to this or that sacred institution. He's upending it. He's,
(02:16):
dare I say, transforming it. That's the point, isn't it?
Isn't that what he is elected to do in that context? Now,
hasn't Secretary of War Hegseth been appointed to change the
military from a lot of what we had seen as
policy for years, whether it's the DEI initiatives, the social
(02:38):
justice stuff? I mean, I remember, I can tell you,
I was never in the military, but as you know,
I was in the CIA and served on some military
bases overseas for periods of time many years ago. And
I remember everywhere I would see this diversity is our
strength stuff. Military, like military, essentially propaganda for the military.
(03:00):
And it was diversity is our strength. I remember being
in Iraq and thinking, no, I'm pretty sure having the
most lethal warfighters possible who can outthink, outmaneuver and outkill
the enemy. That's our strength when you're talking about the military,
not diversity. There has been a ideological creep from the
left throughout our military for a long time. And to
(03:22):
bring that to a conclusion, to finally root that out,
of course, it's going to be somewhat different than what
it had been before. And that means it also has
to have different personnel. There's no way to do this
without at some level, uh, people becoming angry. People are
(03:44):
going to view this as not on mission, not on, uh,
not on the right path. And all I have to
say about this is the realities of this administration so
far have been racking up, I think, a lot of
wins and doing a lot to reform institutions that had
(04:05):
been considered broken for quite some time, or at least
in need of some major fixes. The Trump administration has
been very clear that any shortage, for example, that has
been run from the munition side of things. We're blowing
up a lot of stuff in straight up Hormuz in
Iran and have been doing so for months. And they're saying, well,
(04:27):
we're running low on these munitions. The administration has been
working not only to have ample stockpiles of those, but also,
and this is the critical part, to be in a
better place to ramp up production of them going into
the future. So it's not just a temporary situation. It's
not a one-time thing. It's we have a better military
(04:50):
industrial capacity to be able to meet these threats because
the future is increasingly going to be a future of, uh,
technology and industry deciding battlefield outcomes. That is quite obvious
with the rise of artificial intelligence, uh, low space earth
(05:13):
orbit satellites and communications and robotics and, when you see
AI robotics and low space, low space orbit comms, all
these things coming together, you are going to have a
21st century battlefield that is at some level robotized and
you're going to have autonomous fighter jets and you're going
(05:35):
to have, you already have seen this with, uh, with
Russia removing the human factor from the kill chain with
some of the lethal drones that it's using. So the
drones are trained on AI to look for a certain target.
They find the target and they then go dive bomb
and explode into that target. That's already happening. So our
(05:56):
ability to make these things and to make them rapidly
and also to innovate on them, that's what puts us
in a better place to fight the wars of the future.
It's not, do we have enough Hellfire missiles and Tomahawk
missiles today? Yeah, of course, in an immediate sense, if
you're going to continue to fight against an adversary or
where you need those munitions, fine, but we also have
(06:18):
a lot of other munitions that are far less sophisticated
and expensive that would get the job done too. There's,
I think, a growing, there should be a growing awareness
that this Secretary of War and his top team are
trying to get us into a position where as a country,
as a nation, our military is prepared for the next war.
(06:39):
We can put an end to the preparing to fight
the last war maxim that has been a truism of
American military preparedness for a long time. We are not
looking to prepare for long-term contingency, counterinsurgency operations in some
third world hellhole and build the military just for that.
(07:01):
We are understanding now that Russia, China, nation-state level threats
are once again the primary adversary. And those are countries
with sophisticated, highly sophisticated military technology and and the ability
to inflict major battlefield casualties on us without even risking
(07:22):
any of their own people. That's not something that we
came up against, really, with ISIS and Boko Haram and
Al Qaeda and all these different jihadist terrorist groups out there. Sure,
they would deploy suicide bombers, but they had to usually
send force against us. Hezbollah started experimenting with drones quite
a while back, but now we've seen the threat level, uh,
(07:46):
escalate for drones, for robotics, and for the ability of
foreign adversaries to use them very effectively. So yes, there's
going to be some, uh, now I'm going to use another, uh,
another cliche, right? The cliche about preparing for the last war.
They're trying to avoid that. And maybe to do that,
we're going to, to make an omelet, you got to
(08:06):
break a few eggs. Well, some of these eggs are
being broken in, the name, if you will, of certain
individuals who aren't on board and are moving aside. In
this case, this guy Driscoll, I don't know him, I
don't really know that much about him other than what
I've read, but he decided to resign. Okay, well, resigning
because you think your boss is bad at his job
(08:29):
is your right, but it doesn't mean you're right. It
doesn't mean that what he's saying is correct or true,
and I have far more faith in Secretary Hegseth and
his top people than in those who, it seems to me,
are running a campaign of leaks and all kinds of
nonsense aimed at personal score settling and vendettas. So that's
(08:52):
what I see going on here right now. That is
my takeaway from all of these concerns, all this conversation
that is currently being had about how it is that
we can fix the Pentagon, how we can make these
issues better. Now, let me tell you about something else.
(09:12):
Our sponsor here is Incogni. And you know this, they're
data brokers. They can buy so much of your information online.
And then they use that information in all these different
ways to try not only to harass you, but to
scam you. And it can be even worse than that.
(09:33):
When police searched the car of a man who assassinated
a Minnesota lawmaker and her husband in their own home,
they found a notebook. And inside was handwritten a list
of 11 websites. Not weapon sites, data brokers. People search
sites that sell your home address for a couple of dollars.
Type your name into one right now. There you are,
your address, your phone, your family's name, a photo of
(09:54):
your front door. Anyone can look you up in seconds
and you'll never know who did. That's why I use Incogni.
It forces data brokers and people search sites to delete you,
then keeps checking because deleted data creeps back. Incogni has
scrubbed my info from over 223 sites while I did
exactly nothing. You lock your doors every night. Tonight, lock
down your personal info online. Go to incogni.com slash buck
(10:17):
for 60% off. That's I-N-C-O-G-N-I dot com slash buck. Use
my first name, Buck, as your promo code to ensure
you get that 60% savings. Incogni dot com slash buck.
And that's the podcast for today, my friends. Shields high.
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Buck Sexton
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