Strategic Design: A Fighter Pilot on Military Readiness and Excellence

[00:00:00] Speaker A: Welcome to ID the Future. I'm Andrew McDermott. Today's episode comes to us from our sister podcast, Mind Matters News, a production of the Discovery Institute's Walter Bradley center for Natural and Artificial Intelligence. You can learn more about the show and access other episodes at mindmatters. AI. [00:00:24] Speaker B: Greetings and welcome to Mind Matters News. I'm your high flying host, Robert J. Marks. You know, the movie Top Gun and the movie Maverick piqued public interest in fighter pilots. Tom Cruise pretended he flew fighter planes for the Navy. Our guest today, Major General Bobby Hollingsworth, didn't pretend to fly fighter planes. He actually did it. He flew fighters for the United States Marines. And we're going to chat to him today about all sorts of things. There's lots of things. We want to talk about his work as a fighter pilot. I want to talk to him about his achieving the rank of Major general, his work at the Pentagon, and we're also going to talk about his faith in some of the ideas that he has to whip our youth into shape. Is that a good way to say it? [00:01:08] Speaker A: That's a good way. [00:01:09] Speaker B: That's a good way. So let me give you a short introduction. Major General Hollingsworth's career is really, I find it very inspiring. He's a graduate of Louisiana State University with a degree in electrical engineering. And that's good for me because I'm an electrical engineer, so we're of a common brethren there. He turned his passion for aviation into a distinguished career that spanned 38 years. And during those 38 years, he served as Commanding General of the Marine Corps Reserve Support Command and as the Vice Commander of the Marine Forces in the Pacific after retiring. His dedication to service, it didn't waver even after retirement. He was appointed by President George W. Bush as Executive Director of the National Committee for Employer Support of the Guard and Reserve. And we know that the military loves their acronyms, so that's esgrh, Employer Support of the Guard and Reserve. And we're going to talk about that in depth a little bit later because that's really fascinating stuff. Hollingsworth became a staunch advocate for National Guardsmen and Reservists, ensuring they receive the support and recognition they deserve. He's a decorated officer with honors including a Distinguished Flying Cross and a Navy Distinguished Service Medal. And Major General Hollingsworth is a hero both on and off the battlefield. Major General Hollingsworth, welcome. [00:02:32] Speaker A: Thank you, sir. Appreciate it. It's great to be here. [00:02:34] Speaker B: You're welcome. By the way, I have Major General Hollingsworth permission to call him Bob, and he has my permission to call me Bob. So we're going to sit here and call each other Bob while we're talking. Is that okay? [00:02:46] Speaker A: That's fantastic. [00:02:47] Speaker B: Okay, that's great. You know, we were talking at the time of this recording of the turning over the presidency to Donald Trump in January, and you were lamenting of some of the problems that we're having currently with the military leadership in the United States and how some of those people need to be. Need to be. Need to be changed. I personally worry about the preparedness of the US Military. I heard a comment. Now, this was from a contractor, so, you know, it's not totally unbiased. He says China is Netflix and US is Blockbuster. He said that China is Google Chrome and the US Is Netscape. I don't know if you remember Netscape. That was the first browser. He says China. China is streaming movies and the US Is VHS tapes. So what do you think about, number one, the leadership that we currently have? The terrible withdrawal that we had from Afghanistan, I mean, that was really embarrassing. And also our military preparedness today. Could you speak to that, just in general? [00:03:50] Speaker A: Well, just that little bit that you talked about right there? We could talk the rest of the day about that because there's so many facets to those things. And I was just proud to have the opportunity to represent American and American soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines and Coast Guarders in the things that I've done. And so everything was just like we have today. We just talked about. You just mentioned the fact that we got a change in regime. You remember some stories about George Washington and divine providence. We have Donald J. Trump and we have divine providence. [00:04:21] Speaker B: You think there's divine Providence? [00:04:23] Speaker A: He should not be alive. [00:04:25] Speaker B: That's true. [00:04:26] Speaker A: That would be. He was a quarter of an inch away from death. [00:04:30] Speaker B: Yes, he was. [00:04:31] Speaker A: And I think that personally made a new man out of him. I think he now recognizes his own fallibility. And I think that he's always been for America first. That's been his theme ever since he started running for president. And that's something that's sorely needed here in our country, because suddenly my opinion as a civilian citizen at this point in time is that we don't care about American citizens as much as we do about other people. And I'm not talking about just the illegal immigrants that come into our country, but I'm talking about other people all over the world. We get ourselves involved where we spent cash in our treasury and our blood on battlefields that in my opinion we should have never been involved in. And the reason I say that is because we had no objective for winning. [00:05:26] Speaker B: Exactly. [00:05:27] Speaker A: And so we just kind of muddled through this stuff day by day by day, saying, what can we do next? And every time we did, we stubbed our toe and we did something that was detrimental to peace in the world and detrimental to. [00:05:41] Speaker B: So in a way, we were looking at our toes instead of the end zone. [00:05:45] Speaker A: Yes, exactly. Right. And not seeing your toes. Not seeing the damage that you were doing. [00:05:51] Speaker B: Not even seeing your toes. Okay. [00:05:52] Speaker A: Because we were stubbing our toes on a regular basis. Yeah. [00:05:56] Speaker B: Okay. So that's very. So I think that we've been fighting wars since World War II with pulled punches, and I think that's because of the atomic bomb. And so we started in north and South Korea. In the news today is something about South Korea and their president declaring martial law and stuff like that. But that's really, really fascinating stuff. But you can't win wars by fighting with pulled punches. Rush Limbaugh used to say. I was sharing with you this before we began to talk here. Rush Limbaugh says the purpose of the military is to kill people and break things. And the idea is you kill people and you break things faster than they kill you and break your things. And I think you agree with that, don't you? [00:06:37] Speaker A: Well, let's just go back to what we're about as a nation we represent. Everybody calls it a democracy, but the best democracy, if you want to put that democracy in quotes. But we're a representative republic just to make sure that we got the definition of how our form of government is established. But the thing that we need to remember is, as a nation, that we're here. God has placed us here. He formed us as a Christian nation. He gave the divine guidance to the people that wrote the Constitution and all those other documents that, especially the Constitution and, of course, the Declaration of Independence, those things were inspired by God and they were done for a purpose. It was to lead us to a position where we were people that could rule, not rule the world. That's a wrong statement. Where we could be in the world as a country that brought sanity to an otherwise chaotic world. And I think that that's what God put us here for. And in many cases, we've served that purpose because we've been engaged in some wars that we knew what the objective was. We had strategic plans and objectives as to how to accomplish what we needed to accomplish. And that was, as you said earlier, just kind of reminiscent about. You got to have a better force than anybody else. If you don't, it's going to be just like today. We're kind of wishy washy in the world. And other nations recognize those weaknesses. They're powerful, they're strong, they have their own way of thinking about how government should be ran. It's foreign to us. I don't think any of rational Americans can sit down and justify any socialistic or any communistic way of life that's good for you. Even in some of the Arab states that have Sharia law, I don't think there's not many women in this country that would like living under Sharia law if they really and truly knew what it was. But God put us here as a nation to show people if our government was a form we the people or the government. The government is supposed to do what we say. Now that's become a little bit convoluted, in my opinion nowadays. And they have gotten, they, the politicians have gotten control and so now they think we work for them. And all we're here for is to pay taxes so that they can spend money foolishly. And that occurs on a daily basis. And many examples that everybody in America is aware of that know how foolish some of our money expenditures are. Now I struggle personally with, with how we deal with people that are allegedly coming from another country where they are oppressed coming to America. And then we're taking care of them better than we're taking care of our veterans that have given their life to America. Some of those people are for one reason or another, and I can't explain all of it, but they're homeless. And we're giving people that haven't even paid a penny of taxes in this country. We're putting them up in five star hotels, giving them credit cards, cell phones, on and on and on. It just seems to get more ridiculous as we look each day. So again, that's where I want to go back to President Trump. I think his understanding of America first is going to benefit not just us in America, but the world. Because when we're successful, other people in the world can be successful. And we've seen that before. Because when you're oppressed as a people, you're not happy and you're not able to use your mind in a way that you can when you have freedom of thought. And so that's why the First Amendment is so important to our country, so we can express our opinions. When we think of something, we're not afraid to come out and say what we're doing is wrong. We need to do this, and here's why you need to do this. So that's just a little bit of touch of how important our Constitution is and how God led those men that formed our government to give them the articulated verbiage that gives us where we were able to come as a nation. But underlying all that was we were a Christian nation. And now I think we heard President Obama say, we're no longer a Christian nation. Well, then how about you just packing back up and just going somewhere where you can be whatever you want to be? [00:11:28] Speaker B: Yes. Right. [00:11:29] Speaker A: And then we see the influx of immigrants coming into our country that come from dirtball countries, and now they're trying to turn our country into a dirtball country. And in many areas, they're succeeding. And so that's what we, as citizens, I think, need to be acutely aware of. That's our responsibility, because it's we the people of the governing body. And when we allow government to assert our capability to govern, then it's a horror on us if we get oppressed. [00:12:02] Speaker B: Well, we the people certainly spoke loud in the last election, right? [00:12:05] Speaker A: Praise the Lord. Yes. [00:12:07] Speaker B: That's really good. Yeah. One of the things that Trump wants to do is supposedly to clear the deep state, and that occurs in the military, too. Some of the leadership in the military probably has some challenges, would you agree? Some of the leadership, the current leadership. [00:12:22] Speaker A: All of it. [00:12:23] Speaker B: All of it. [00:12:24] Speaker A: I cannot sit in a day that goes by and think of bright spots that are occurring in our military. Wow. Now, all right, so, you know, here I'm. I'm stepping out on a plank here that. [00:12:39] Speaker B: Well, like you said, you had the First Amendment. [00:12:41] Speaker A: That puts me into a position of saying that somebody else is wrong. Well, I'll let you do as a citizen out there that's listening to this, make your own analysis of who's right or who's wrong. But you need to be thinking about this. You need to just look at what is happening, how it's happening, and what has happened to our military. Result of the governance that's going on. I don't want to pick on anybody, but I'll use an example of one service that one of the gentlemen that was in charge of that while he was there, their readiness rate dropped to the lowest it's ever been in the world. And that's because the agenda was not focusing on what the military is supposed to be about. War, fighting. [00:13:35] Speaker B: Right. [00:13:36] Speaker A: Everything that we do as a military, every dime that we spend as American taxpayers should be due to one thing, have a superior military that makes everybody else in the world afraid to deal with us because they know they're going to die if they get out of line. Yep. [00:13:54] Speaker B: Peace through strength. [00:13:55] Speaker A: Right, Peace through strength. And go back to the old thing where, you know, General Curtis LeMay, when he was the head of the Strategic Air Command, you know, his motto is [00:14:05] Speaker B: SAC still going on right now? [00:14:06] Speaker A: Yeah, it's called. It's even bigger than it was when General LeMay was there because now it's Strategic Command. Okay. You know, which is in Omaha, Nebraska, which is where the headquarters of Strategic Air command was when General LeMay was in charge. But now the. It encompasses. It pulls together all of the services capabilities for strategic weapons. And we talk nuclear. That's what the Strategic Air Command was all about, was being able to have a superior nuclear force that would make everybody else scared to do anything. [00:14:45] Speaker B: Well, let's backtrack a little bit. I remember there was a Jimmy Stewart movie where he talked about the Strategic Air Command and their job was to keep aircraft in the air all the time carrying nuclear weapons. Is that right? 24 7. [00:14:57] Speaker A: 24 7. [00:14:58] Speaker B: And is that continuing even today? [00:15:00] Speaker A: Not to the extent that it was because it got so gasly expensive. But ironically, we still got the same airplanes around, you know, years later that are still carrying out that missing. Okay. And you'll occasionally hear about it in a. In a newscast or something where we. We sent B52s halfway around the world and they do it and they keep them airborne all the time and they got command posts that are continually flying and all this stuff. And the reason that they have become less important because manpower is so intensively expensive to operate. We developed the technology for ICBMs, intercontinental ballistic missiles, where we now got. We can deliver the same stuff with a lot fewer people standing watch because now we consolidate it all within a Strategic Air Command, and under them is NORAD and all the other little command elements that control all this stuff. Supposedly, and by law it's all controlled by the President. He is the individual that can authorize the use of nuclear weapons. Him only. [00:16:12] Speaker B: That's why he carries around, what do they call it? [00:16:14] Speaker A: The football. [00:16:14] Speaker B: The football. [00:16:15] Speaker A: That's right. That's right. So what we have had is basically nuclear superiority which threatened everybody else. Now Russia, China, there are seven nations in the world today that have nuclear weapons. [00:16:28] Speaker B: Right. And it looks like there's going to be more, I think. Is Iran going to join that group? North Korea? [00:16:33] Speaker A: Well, if we continue the way we're doing with this current administration that all started back under President Obama, you know, we had Iran sort of bottled up a little bit, you know, because you remember the dealings that President Reagan had with Iran. They understand strength, and we've lost that. In my opinion, President Obama was more of an appeaser than he was an aggressor. [00:17:01] Speaker B: Certainly giving all that money to Iran was not the pounds of dollars, especially [00:17:06] Speaker A: since we had Adam on the mat financially, economically, they were not doing well, and they could not do well. And then suddenly, as you see, they have these little surrogate organizations around the world that continue to poke their fingers in Israel's eye. And so here we are with these people that are just continually creating havoc. But then the whole concept of rhetoric has seemed to have shifted, and I can't figure out why. To support some of these rogue nations and some of their illegal activities that they do. And then when a nation such as Israel gets attacked, they didn't attack anybody, they get attacked. Now they have the idea, a correct idea, about strategic placement of war materials that they need to destroy these people. [00:18:08] Speaker B: I think I know why the idea. I think I know why the other administrations were nice to our enemies. They want to appear as nice guys, and I think that was their motivation. [00:18:19] Speaker A: How about nice guys to Americans? [00:18:21] Speaker B: Yeah, exactly. Well, that means that their priority was shifted. [00:18:25] Speaker A: That's correct. [00:18:26] Speaker B: And I like Donald Trump. There's an old saying, the bigger they are, the harder they fall. I think that Donald Trump is adopting the position, the bigger they are, the harder they hit. So that's the place that he's coming from in the dealing with this. And everybody knows it. The bigger they are, the harder they hit. [00:18:45] Speaker A: Yeah, but the thing that we really need to consider as Americans is to how we need to refocus our strategic thinking is that we want peace throughout the world. Some people don't understand peace except through aggressive behavior. [00:19:05] Speaker B: That's true. Everybody thinks. We think that their culture is the same as ours. We think that their culture is kind of Christian, you know, love and forgive, etc. Etc. That's not always the case. You can't make that equivocation. You're smiling. You like that? [00:19:23] Speaker A: Well, exactly. I think it's correct. But what we as a nation, as citizens need to insist upon as we elect people to go to Washington to represent us in our lawmaking, in our dealings around the world, we need to hold those people accountable that go up there, and then suddenly they do not have the best interest of the citizens of the United States at heart. [00:19:51] Speaker B: Okay? [00:19:52] Speaker A: And it's A complicated, convoluted governmental process. My opinion, we need a battle axe to start chopping governmental agencies that are not indicated, that are required by the Constitution. The biggest thing in the Constitution that says that the government should do is provide for the common peace, the common defense. Common defense. And that's what they're supposed to do. And then everything else has become fluff. That cost us money. That adds no value. [00:20:24] Speaker B: Yeah. The entire idea of the WOKE movement, the idea of this blew my mind. Fighter pilots that were women, they fit them with special suits when they were pregnant. That is so stupid. If you're pregnant, you probably shouldn't even fly in a commercial airplane. And all of a sudden you want to get of these pregnant suits and go on and pilot a fighter plane. It's ridiculous. And it's those side roads that are really destructive, I think. [00:20:54] Speaker A: Well, and again, without trying to be too derogatory about this, but that's the problem that those things lead to is that we have, in order to accommodate some social engineering, we have lowered the standards of the requirements for the war fighter. War is hell. It is hard. It is physically, it is mentally hard. [00:21:21] Speaker B: That's the reason all these people. I have lots of relatives that came back from war after being a war fighter and came back with PTSD. I had an uncle that was a POW in World War II, and he shook that off the rest of his life. The way he dealt with it, eventually, as he became a Christian, came to Christ and that kind of healed him. But his son was in the military in Vietnam, on the front line fighting. Came back with ptsd. I have friends or I have children who have friends that went to places like Afghanistan and saw conflict and came back with ptsd. It is a rough thing to put on young people. It's this confrontive conflict and being on the battlefield and being a real war [00:22:05] Speaker A: fighter at the risk of being labeled a someone that's just against everything. And I'm not. But I'm going to give you my personal opinion about ptsd. War fighting is terrible. We see people in police departments that have PTSD. The reason is because your life is at stake 24 hours a day, mentally, that wears you out because you have to have your head on a swivel constantly. You never know at what second you're going to die. [00:22:39] Speaker B: I never heard that. Have your head on a swivel. That's a great saying. [00:22:44] Speaker A: Okay, go ahead. But I guess the point I'm trying to make is my dad, and perhaps your father and some of your relatives were all In World War II, they saw the same stuff. They came back and there was a thing back in those days, they used to call it war fatigue. Yeah. [00:23:02] Speaker B: But the Thousand Mile Stair is what they called it in warfare. [00:23:05] Speaker A: But they came back and did what? They got over it. [00:23:08] Speaker B: They got over it. They started to work and they lived with it and, you know, life went on. And when my uncles were alive, they did not like to talk about their experiences. They didn't want to bring up those feelings again. And they just lived their life for their families, for God and for country. [00:23:24] Speaker A: Yeah, well, my dad was. He did some pretty unique things back in World War II. He was in the medical corps. And one of his jobs was that they had hospitals, mobile hospitals, that as the front moved, they moved behind them. And the way they got to where they were, sometimes they couldn't go over land because they didn't have the transportation. But they would put these hospital units up in gliders and then they would take them up in C47s, drop them off and let them land. And how did they stop? The pilot would take two trees that were just about outside the fuselage, and he had exchanged all that energy and destroying the wings on that thing to stop those gliders. Wow. That's the way they did it. But my dad did that. And my dad was behind Patton's Third army and he was in the liberation of all those POW camps. The pictures that my father made of the dead bodies that were stacked up like cordwood will astound you. Would that caused anybody to pee at thc? How about these people had to deal with this on a daily basis. They got over it. And that's what. There are people that are professional psychiatrists up there going to tell me that I'm just full of bull that I don't know what I'm talking about. But we have to, at some point in time, as individuals, ask the Lord to come in and help us get over some of those horrific things that we've seen and help us to move on. And he will. But that's where we as a nation, I think in many places, people forget that aspect of it. They give you a handful of pills instead of a handful of the Lord. [00:25:15] Speaker B: That's true. And again, my Uncle Ray, he was a POW and they sent him to a special concentration camp that was for Jews. Now, he wasn't Jewish, but they had a quota that they had to make in order to populate this. Have you heard of this concentration camp? Okay. So, yeah, he went there and they treated him not as a POW. Because POWs got treated a lot better in World War II than Jews, which isn't to say they were treated well, but they certainly weren't exposed to the extremities that the Jews were. But this Jewish concentration camp didn't have that. He got beat around the back and had physical problems the rest of his life. And, yeah, war is hell. I think Sherman said that. Come see. Sherman said war is hell. [00:26:01] Speaker A: So we got a guy right here [00:26:03] Speaker B: in Waco, Texas, and that's where we're talking from right now. It's Waco, Texas. [00:26:08] Speaker A: Yeah. He turns 100 on the 6th of January. Okay. He was a B17 tail gunner. He was shot down over Budapest, Hungary. [00:26:18] Speaker B: Okay. [00:26:19] Speaker A: He was captured by the Hungarians. The Hungarians treated him very, very bad because they were bombing oil fields around Hungarian airspace. Finally, the Germans came in and captured him. And he was treated much better by the Germans than he was by the Hungarians. And he spent the rest of the war in a POW camp up around the Baltic. Okay. That's an inspiring guy to talk to Him. And he's still doing well. You know, his mind is still working. Mental clarity. He understands why he was there. He understands what he was doing. He went through horrific torture. He went through horrific climatic changes in the wintertime up in the Baltic. And they had no clothes. [00:26:59] Speaker B: They had no clothes. [00:27:01] Speaker A: No winter clothes. [00:27:02] Speaker B: No winter clothes. [00:27:02] Speaker A: Okay. Yeah. No boots. You know, none of this stuff. And they would march them out from. Especially towards the end of the war when the Russians were coming, they had to move the camps and they had to walk 20 or 30 miles a day in just the shoes and stuff. They had tough men, kind of a man. I would like to say that I was that tough, because that is tough. Another friend of mine lives in Lafayette, Louisiana. He's 103 right now. He was captured in the Bataan Death March. He went through all the horrific things of that. His name's James Bullock, and terrific American. James went. They took him from the Philippines. Jungle utilities or uniforms took him to career where there was snow on the ground, no coats, no boots, no nothing. [00:27:54] Speaker B: I tell you what. For our younger viewers or listeners, could you describe the Bataan Death March? I think they might have heard of it, but I think kids are starting to lose some of the history that we're here having. What was the Bataan Death March? [00:28:06] Speaker A: Well, Bataan is a peninsula just west of Manila, downtown Manila. And that was where we were going to make a final stand against the Japanese. And of course, the Japanese came in very quickly, surprised us that's why General MacArthur had to make a sudden exit out of the Philippines. [00:28:23] Speaker B: I will return. His famous exit. [00:28:25] Speaker A: Yeah. But he left General Wainwright as the guy in charge after he. After he left. And General Wainwright was captured as well. And they were building airfields and stuff for defense when the Japanese just overwhelmed them. They just kept putting troops ashore time after time after time. And finally they had more troops, and they just overran the Americans. And then from Bataan, they had to march. And this was another horrific thing where these people, if they did something that was not right, the Japanese would just bayonet them and kill them right there on the spot. No questions asked, no food, no water. Just horrific conditions on the march. They got them up there at Camp McDonald, I think is what they call the camp. And then they transferred them to ships and took them to Korea. And here it was at wintertime in Korea, at this point in time, no clothes. Then they took them from there to Manchuria. And he spent. This one guy that I know, James Bullock, spent three and a half years in a POW camp in Manchuria. And James is as sharp as you've ever seen. [00:29:38] Speaker B: He's the one that's 102. You said 103. 103. [00:29:41] Speaker A: He was 103 last August. [00:29:42] Speaker B: Sorry, I didn't want to short cheat. [00:29:44] Speaker A: Yeah. But I talk to him regularly because he's just a terrific guy, and I'm inspired by him, and I like to. [00:29:52] Speaker B: So he went through the Bataan Death March and survived and is still going on at 103. [00:29:59] Speaker A: Yeah. And he's written a book. And if anybody out there likes to read war books about how men reacted to adversity, you need to read his book. It's called the Soldier's Story. The Bataan Death March. [00:30:14] Speaker B: A Soldier's Story. [00:30:15] Speaker A: A Soldier's Story. The Baton Rock. [00:30:17] Speaker B: We'll try to put that in the podcast notes. [00:30:20] Speaker A: It's by James Bolic. [00:30:21] Speaker B: B O L I C H. A Soldier's what? [00:30:25] Speaker A: A Soldier's Story. [00:30:26] Speaker B: Story. Okay. Yeah. There was another book that you recommended about a guy that did. He was a pilot that you recommended to me that I remember, that I read, I listened to. [00:30:36] Speaker A: Was that about Vietnam? [00:30:38] Speaker B: Yeah, it was about Vietnam. Yeah. [00:30:40] Speaker A: Okay. I can't remember which. [00:30:41] Speaker B: Okay, you can't remember either. Okay, I remember reading it. It was a very fun book. I'll see if I can resurrect that, because that's really good. So let's get back to the present right now. What would be your recommendations for the change that should be made in the military currently, when Donald Trump takes office? [00:30:59] Speaker A: Well, the first thing the commander in chief has got to do, and there's a process to do this because we have highly paid staff people that are supposed to give us advice. First of all, you got the CIA, which is supposed to provide US Intelligence on all the other nations around the world so that we can develop a thinking about how we deal with them, not only in war fighting, but also in peace fighting in peacetime. And so what we need to do is sit down with a rational thought process and look at what the realities are in each of those nations. And there's a thing that's called the center of gravity of each of those nations. And we have to identify the center of gravity of each one of those nations and how we deal with that center of gravity. You know, some of them are more defined than the others. Some of them, you have to. Some of them are involved in religious activities. Some of them are just in dictatorship. Some of them are involved in just trying to get along in the world. [00:32:05] Speaker B: Sure. [00:32:06] Speaker A: And so they're different for every nation. But we need to have a thinking group of people that develops a strategy for each one of those nations, how we deal with them diplomatically. [00:32:21] Speaker B: One of the challenges is that the leadership, many times, is different from the people. Would you say that that's true? [00:32:27] Speaker A: That's true. But we're dealing with the leadership. [00:32:30] Speaker B: So you have to do the center of gravity with the leadership where they're coming from. [00:32:34] Speaker A: The center of gravity is driven by the leaders. And, you know, let's just take our friends to the north. You know, he's the kind of a guy that likes peace. [00:32:47] Speaker B: We won't mention his name, but his initials are Justin Trudeau. Right. [00:32:50] Speaker A: Okay. Yeah, yeah. He was just with the president not long ago. The incoming president. Right. Good guy. Wants peace in the world, but at what cost is he willing to demand that peace? What are they willing to do as a nation to ensure that their influence in the world will bring that peace? And that's true with every nation. Everybody's got their own specific. You know, France, you know, they're having trouble right now with their parliament. You know, it's all divided. Their prime minister, I think, has just resigned. And this. You look around the world, and it's the same everywhere. I mean, it's just chaotic in places. But we have. Going back to the old thing. Peace is our profession. War is the last thing you want to do as a nation. When everything else has failed, then you commit. But when you commit, you're all in. And there should be no secret about this. And I feel for people in a nation that become victims. They're innocent civilians, but they get involved in things that are not to their own will. But guess what? They don't have a constitution that says, we the people rule. And you can look all around the world and see exactly how that plays out. [00:34:13] Speaker B: Yep. I have a friend in Switzerland whose father was in the infantry for the Nazis, and he hated it, but he had no choice. You know, he was under the thumb of the regime. And so that's the sort of thing that you're talking about, right? Okay. [00:34:28] Speaker A: Exactly. And there's some stories about that war. Sometime off the line, we'll talk about some of the things that we had opportunities to develop diplomatically that we never did. And as a result of that, we ended up getting more innocent people killed. You know, it seems like, you know, when we. Poor Harry Truman, when he made the decision to drop the atomic bomb, why did he make that decision? It was going to cost us a lot more Americans death. So it was the choice that he had to make was it was, Japanese people have to suffer or we have to suffer. [00:35:05] Speaker B: There's a distinguished professor here at Baylor, Philip Jenkins, I think is his name, that did a study and saying dropping the atomic bombs saved 11 million lives. Not only. Not only the lives of the Americans who would come in. He said, by the way, when we were planning our equivalent of D day on Japan, there was a big typhoon there that would have kind of really decimated our fleet, but also the people in, you know, in Manchurian, China, and all of these other places where the Japanese soldiers had orders in case of surrender, just to kill all the prisoners and then maybe even kill themselves. It was just a terrible culture that they lived in. So 11 million people and dropping the bomb saved, I think, what, something like a quarter of a million people total between Nagasaki and Hiroshima. [00:35:53] Speaker A: And Hiroshima, yeah. [00:35:54] Speaker B: So roughly. [00:35:55] Speaker A: But again, it's those kind of decisions that you have to make strategically, after a careful analysis of the total, what's going to happen at the end of the day. And so that's what the military is there to do, is work with the diplomatic corps. Because as I said before, and I'll say it again, war is our last alternative. But when we go to war, we're all in. There's no holding punches. You got to go for the juggler and you got to destroy them in such a way that they say, calf rope, we're out of here. We don't want any more of this. [00:36:32] Speaker B: Let me ask you this, though. I think the big deterrent now is this mutually assured destruction. And if we go to war whole hog, we would use nuclear weapons. And of course, that would require a response in nuclear weapons, and everybody wants to avoid that. So I think that that's been the background and the reason why we fight these wars with pole punches, because we don't want to break into a nuclear holocaust. [00:36:56] Speaker A: But let me give you an example. Maybe I'm wrong in my analysis of this. If I am, somebody call me and correct me. But, you know, we're close right now with what's happening in Ukraine and Russia because of we keep poking the bear. You know, they made it very clear they do not want Ukraine as a member of NATO. We wouldn't want somebody in Red China coming over and setting up a Chinese cell in a community in Mexico. [00:37:28] Speaker B: Right, exactly. [00:37:30] Speaker A: So that if you think about it in those terms, this is kind of where I look at it and say, okay, what's Putin thinking? What's he doing now? His raison d' entree for invasion was. That's a whole nother story. Because that had a lot to do with the punishment that was being incurred to the Russians. Russian indigenous people in Eastern Ukraine. They weren't very treated very nicely by the Ukrainian government. Oh, by the way, go read about the corruptness of the Ukrainian government and just see how. [00:38:02] Speaker B: Oh, I was just visited by some missionaries from Poland, and the Polish people are so wonderful. The Ukrainians came over when the war started, and do you know, they didn't have any camps set up, the Ukrainians, because the Polish population were able to absorb all of the immigrants from Poland. That's how open and how. How wonderful, wonderful they were. And it was just wonderful. But he told me kind of under his breath, this missionary from Poland. He says, but we don't like the Ukrainians. He says they are corrupt people. They always have been and they always have been. So that's curious. [00:38:41] Speaker A: There's a story behind that as to why they're so corrupt and who helps them be corrupt. And that's a pretty politically sensitive area that we don't always want to talk about. [00:38:53] Speaker B: Well, let's talk about it. What is it? Why are they so corrupt? [00:38:57] Speaker A: Just go back and look and see who trained them in their corruptness. I don't know. I have no clue. If I did, I would be shouting it from the rooftops. [00:39:09] Speaker B: I would say it would probably be the Communist Russians that probably taught them. Am I right? [00:39:14] Speaker A: You'd be wrong. [00:39:15] Speaker B: I'd be wrong. Really. Okay, okay. Because they used to be part of the Eastern bloc. Yeah. They used to be part of the Soviet Union, which is why Putin wants them back. [00:39:23] Speaker A: Yeah. And here again, I'm probably getting out of my lane a little bit as far as my expertise. I know what I've read and what I've studied and I've drawn my own conclusions and some of the things I'm talking about here. [00:39:37] Speaker B: This is great, Bob, because they call this critical thinking. So this is great because this is something we don't have very much. Go ahead. [00:39:43] Speaker A: But anyway, there's, if you trace back where all the support for their corruption came from, it was from a nation that we all hold near and dear to our hearts. [00:39:55] Speaker B: Okay, I'm waiting for the punchline. [00:39:56] Speaker A: Well, just go back and do some research about how one of our three lettered agencies helped them develop their military. [00:40:07] Speaker B: Oh, the U.S. yes. [00:40:09] Speaker A: Wow. I know that comes as a shock [00:40:11] Speaker B: and nobody was a shock. [00:40:12] Speaker A: It was a myth that we would do anything that would be wrong. But there's a lot of research out there that shows very clearly that I've read that's been documented very clearly. But nobody talks about it because it's not popular to talk about. Because I think, and I'm talking around where I was going to go with this whole thing because we're talking about nuclear deterrence and so forth, and I want to get back to that. But as this whole Ukrainian thing broke out, the reasons for that was caused by the Soviet Union because they invaded when we showed weakness under Obama, they took Crimea back. Yes. [00:40:52] Speaker B: When we're perceived as weak, Russia moves, Iran moves, all of our enemies move. [00:40:56] Speaker A: When Trump was there, there was no issues. As soon as Biden gets elected, Soviet Union sees weakness. They did the invasion. [00:41:04] Speaker B: Yes. [00:41:05] Speaker A: Okay. Now one of the things that I thought was very astute by Putin is we have now we Biden, the administration has authorized them to use the long range strike missiles inside of Russia. [00:41:19] Speaker B: Everybody says it's going to lead to World War Three. [00:41:21] Speaker A: Yeah. And the reason for it is Russia is saying, hey, folks, you know, if we have to go nuclear to save our country, we'll do that. However, before Russia launched a strike back with using medium range ballistic missiles with MIRV warheads on them, he knows very clearly that we monitor every single hole that's got a missile in it in Russia, just like they monitor. [00:41:49] Speaker B: Doesn't surprise me. [00:41:50] Speaker A: Every single hole that we have that's got a missile in it. Okay, what did Putin do? He called 30 minutes before he launched a missile out of one of those silos to tell us he was doing it. So it didn't start World War Three. Oh, wow. Because if our command structure sees a missile coming out of there, you only got about 22 minutes or so to decide where that thing's going to go. And you got to do some real quick activation of things. So. But I thought that was very astute in Putin's part to call us and tell us. And that averted us as we saw that missile come out of that silo that we know about it and we knew where it was going. [00:42:32] Speaker B: And where was it going again? [00:42:33] Speaker A: Well, it went to Ukraine. [00:42:34] Speaker B: To Ukraine. Okay. [00:42:35] Speaker A: And it destroyed a big military complex that Ukraine had. And I can't remember what the complex was. I think it was some kind of manufacturing facility. Okay. And it had multiple warheads, hypersonic stuff, and it was some high tech stuff that they put on them. But he averted World War Three by telling us in advance. [00:42:56] Speaker B: Isn't that interesting? [00:42:57] Speaker A: Okay. [00:42:58] Speaker B: So there's all of these three dimensional chess things you got to do in modern warfare to make sure. So get back to the nuclear deterrence. I think it's real. Mutually Assured Destruction is real. And it's scary. We got to make sure that we don't go that route. And I think that that's the reason since dropping of the bomb in World War II, that the US has fought all of its wars with pulled punches. It doesn't want to go to a nuclear exchange. And that's somewhat against this idea that when you go to war, you should kill people and break things quicker than they kill you and break your things. [00:43:36] Speaker A: But they have to have the perception that we are going to do that. And weakness doesn't give them that perception. And that's what we have to be very aggressive. We have to have an incredible diplomatic corps that can explain things to them in a way that sane people can sit eyeball to eyeball across the table and negotiate. And we seem to have lost that. If I don't show up at church Sunday, they may be coming to get me because they are saying some of these things. But I feel very strongly that we as a nation are given a responsibility by God, a much higher prior than our government, to do things in this world that rises us above this whole mass of chaotic destruction. [00:44:29] Speaker B: Hopefully the negotiations. [00:44:30] Speaker A: Yeah. You knew as well as I do from reading the Bible and reading history that God has used violence to send messages to countries before to Israel, to Persia. I mean, pick one. [00:44:45] Speaker B: You're talking about this Sitting down and negotiating reminds me of patent litigation. I've served as expert witness in some patent litigation. And what the lawyers do on both sides is they sit down and they negotiate, they do depositions, they research the law, then they find out who's going to win. And once they find out who's going to win, they stay away from the court and they say, well, look, you know, you got me on this, I got you on this, let's do this and this. And you're saying the same thing should happen in the negotiations between warring countries. There should be this negotiation so that the side that's going to lose the worst is the one that. Is the one that gives in the most. [00:45:22] Speaker A: Yeah, but just understand clearly these are my ideas about how this show should be. Yeah, okay. Obviously those ideas are not shared by people a lot smarter than I am, but here we are, you know, it's up to us. That old thing, we the people. We need to take that we the people statement serious. We aren't doing it. [00:45:48] Speaker B: Bob, how did you get started down the path of becoming a fighter pilot? I do know that you have an undergraduate degree in electrical engineering. From where is it, the old war school? The old war school? [00:46:02] Speaker A: They can't call it that anymore because that's politically incorrect. Because the name came from where all the people that was going to school joined. One of the fights that occurred and it was the wrong one. [00:46:14] Speaker B: I remember they used to call it the War Department in the United States and now it's the Department of Defense. They had to change it to the police. It sounds a lot better than the Department of War as opposed to the Department of Defense. So you got your degree in electrical engineering. You wanted to be a pilot since you was a little kid, right? [00:46:31] Speaker A: Two years old. [00:46:31] Speaker B: Two years old. You actually remember that? [00:46:34] Speaker A: I remember it like it was yesterday when my uncle, who was an F6F Hellcat pilot in World War II, flew missions all over the Pacific, he came back and I was 2 years old when he came back. He had his Navy uniform on with wings of gold. [00:46:52] Speaker B: Okay. [00:46:53] Speaker A: And I was 2 years old and my folks made a picture of me looking up at him, a little toe headed, blonde headed kid looking up at him and just in amazement. And that day I knew I wanted to be a fighter pilot just like him. [00:47:06] Speaker B: Really? [00:47:07] Speaker A: I knew it from then on. [00:47:08] Speaker B: Now that's interesting. Since you were attracted by the reputation as opposed to the experience. You probably hadn't flown yet, right? [00:47:16] Speaker A: At two years old? No, I hadn't. No, you hadn't. [00:47:18] Speaker B: But it was looking up to somebody as kind of a hero. And I want to be like that. [00:47:23] Speaker A: Sure. [00:47:23] Speaker B: Okay. [00:47:24] Speaker A: You know, and it was just an inspiration to me. It gave me a risen de entree for the rest of my life, the way I planned it. And of course, God opened a lot of doors for me as I went through this thing. But I remember I lived around in the country. My dad, after he came back from World War II, he was a dairy farmer, and we had cows. [00:47:47] Speaker B: That's a hard life, man. [00:47:49] Speaker A: Every morning, you got to get up [00:47:50] Speaker B: at 4:30 every morning, in the morning, go milk the cows. [00:47:53] Speaker A: Those cows have got to be milked [00:47:54] Speaker B: twice a day, otherwise they get sick. Right. They get infections and all sorts of stuff. [00:48:00] Speaker A: But that was also our source of income because we bottled the milk and we delivered it. We had a milk delivery thing. And so that's a whole other story. But we. Because of that, you know, those cows got to be milked twice a day. You know, so you got to be there in the morning, you got to be there in the night, and every day, seven days a week. [00:48:19] Speaker B: No vacations. [00:48:19] Speaker A: No vacations. So anyway, you learn a pretty good worth ethic there. You don't necessarily like what you're doing, because shoving cow poop twice a day is not the most fun thing in the world. [00:48:31] Speaker B: You know, the interesting thing is that the people I work with that have been raised on farms have the most incredible work ethic. My uncles and my father were raised on a farm. Astonishing work ethic. [00:48:43] Speaker A: Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, it's amazing the discipline that you acquire from just having to do things on a routine basis, whether you [00:48:52] Speaker B: like it or not. [00:48:53] Speaker A: That's right. It is what it is. But that's a whole other story about that. But we live way out in the country. We live. I like to say we live so far out in the country, they used to have to pipe sunshine to us. Yeah. [00:49:05] Speaker B: Because I've never heard that. Okay. [00:49:08] Speaker A: We lived on a dirt road. It wasn't a gravel road when I was a kid. It was a dirt road. And then we got gravel on the road, and we thought, whoa, man, we've moved uptown here. And then finally, when I was in about the. When I was about five or six, they put in. Rea. Came in and put in electrical power lines. And we had electrical power because when I was a kid, we had a well that my dad dug. We had no internal plumbing. We had an outhouse. And, you know, we took baths in a number three washtub heated on a wood stove. [00:49:38] Speaker B: Oh, we Did. My grandparents lived in a similar place. And we used to have a tub. And there was this hierarchy. You know, the oldest person bathes first. The second one came in, the water was dirty. After he was done, the third one came in, it was really dirty. And then the young kid came into this tub of mud and had to take a bath. That was similar to what you were [00:49:57] Speaker A: doing, except there's only four of us. [00:49:58] Speaker B: Oh, there were only four. [00:49:59] Speaker A: My dad and my sister and myself. It wasn't that bad. [00:50:04] Speaker B: So did you go through the hierarchy every time? [00:50:07] Speaker A: Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Mom first, dad second, me next, my sister next. Okay. But anyway, when we got electricity, boy, man, what a change in life. And my grandkids don't even. They can't even relate to that. Not having an indoor toilet and all that stuff. [00:50:23] Speaker B: Oh, heck, they can't relate to not having a cell phone. And I tell you, I can't relate to not having gps. I can't relate to not having the Internet. So, yeah, we just get numbed by familiarity. [00:50:34] Speaker A: Yeah, that's a whole other story about our military. We've become so dependent upon electronics that we've lost some of the skills that we need because they aren't going to always be available. [00:50:49] Speaker B: Well, you know, this is something. This is a little side note, but I was talking to a guy that was doing research for the Air Force, and they're worried about loss of GPS while they're flying because what if you lose gps? So they came up with technology I think was rather clever. They have stored in their computer maps, and so they have a camera, and the camera takes a picture of the terrain and does a matching with the maps inside, so they know exactly where they are. So it isn't dependent on gps. So the military, at least I know, in that sense, is aware of the necessity of pushing away from technology and doing other stuff. [00:51:25] Speaker A: But the thing that helped me along from an intellectual perspective is because we live so far in the country, we had a bookmobile. We didn't have a chance to go to the library downtown, so a bookmobile would come by once a week. [00:51:40] Speaker B: Okay, bookmobile, just for those of you. I don't think most of the younger listeners have been in a library in the last five years. I know I haven't been in a library, but you used to have to go to the library to do books. And some of the more remote places, they used to take all of the books and put them on a little kind of a truck and they called it a bookmobile. And they would Go around and they would visit people, and you could come out and you could grab a book. I mean, that concept is so foreign today. You know, it's gone like the buggy whip factory. It just doesn't exist anymore. [00:52:10] Speaker A: But what that did for me, it gave me a whole window to the world that I didn't have available to me. And so I read books about all kinds of things that I'd never even heard of before. And here I was in Louisiana, but I used to read books about hockey because I'd never heard of it. And I said, what is this game? What is it about hockey that's so attractive, buddy? And I read it, and I understood what the game was. But those are the kind of things that the world got open to me a little bit as I was growing up through the bookmobile. And now everybody's got a computer. When I talk to my grandkids. Now, why do you need a book? You can get everything you need on a computer. [00:52:50] Speaker B: Yeah. With Kindle and all this stuff. Sure. [00:52:53] Speaker A: And it's pretty phenomenal how we've come along technologically to do that. But we don't need to lose sight of the basic skills of reading a book and understanding how to use a compass and how to navigate with a compass and a map. Those are still basic skills that you got them on a computer and you don't need them. But it may not always be there. [00:53:18] Speaker B: My wife is concerned about that. I say, it's on the web, it's in the cloud. You're okay, you don't have to worry about it. She says, but what if it goes away? I want a hard copy. So, like our tax returns, I say, I have it on my computer. She said, no, I want a hard copy just in case we lose it. So I think that there's probably some truth about that, but I wonder if it's overkill. I don't know. [00:53:42] Speaker A: Well, neither do I. But it's just something we need to be prepared for. [00:53:45] Speaker B: Sure. [00:53:46] Speaker A: And to understand that the things we have today that are given to us by the good Lord, that make our lives so simple are incredible. And we should be thankful to him every day for those things. But at the same time, the Lord giveth, and if the Lord takes them away, we better be ready to have some kind of a lifestyle based on that. But going back to where, following my career and how I wanted to continue to. To be a pilot, I used to read books all the time about flying and so forth. And, of course, flying back in those days, that was in the early 50s when I was growing up. And it wasn't near as sophisticated as it is today, but at the same time, it always intrigued me. And I remember in the late 50s, when I was in high school and so forth, at Barksdale Air Force base, which is 100 miles west of us, they had. The B36 was the big bomber at that time. It had pusher turbo props behind the wing. There were six engines on it. Oh, okay. And it would shake the earth when [00:54:50] Speaker B: it was behind the wings. [00:54:51] Speaker A: It was behind the wings. [00:54:52] Speaker B: I think I remember pictures of that. That's interesting. What was that called again? [00:54:56] Speaker A: It was a B36. [00:54:57] Speaker B: A B36. [00:54:58] Speaker A: Okay. But I used to watch those things, and I don't know if kids do this anymore, but I used to lay and look at the clouds and picture the formations that the clouds brought. I guess you'd call it dreaming about things that you'd never seen before. [00:55:18] Speaker B: Did you think about the clouds forming shapes that were familiar? [00:55:21] Speaker A: In a sense, yeah. [00:55:23] Speaker B: There's a great line in Hamlet where Hamlet's lying on his back and they're looking at the clouds, and somebody says, it looks like this. And he says, me thinks it. No, me thinks it is like a weasel. [00:55:33] Speaker A: I mean, that's a famous Hamlet quote [00:55:35] Speaker B: where he's looking at the clouds. So you did that. [00:55:37] Speaker A: You looked at the clouds. And then I would look up and see those. You could hear those B36s coming, you know, from 30 miles away, because they start shaking the ground. [00:55:49] Speaker B: Oh, my gosh. [00:55:50] Speaker A: Really? Oh, it was incredible. And I'd watch them come over, you know, and I would just marvel at those big silver. They were like. Looked like a B29 watch. It was a big old silver thing, and it was just beautiful. But anyway, I continued all that dreaming about all this stuff, and then when I was going to high school, the things that interested me most was physics. I never took chemistry, but physics and all the mathematics, trig and solid on all the algebras and all that stuff, [00:56:26] Speaker B: that's good stuff that fascinated me. If you have the blessing of enjoying mathematics, that stuff is incredible. It's so mentally satisfying. [00:56:38] Speaker A: And then I think I told you the story earlier when I went to college, went to lsu, and the first year was you just go through what they call junior division. You just had to take normal subjects. You had to take English, you had to take chemistry, you had to take physics, you had to take history and so forth. But the second year, you had to go tell them what you wanted to do. You'd Talk to a counselor and say, I'd like to, because you had to go choose your school. [00:57:04] Speaker B: That was the way I did, too. [00:57:06] Speaker A: Engineering, my undergraduate program, business, law, whatever you wanted to do, you had to get focused in those areas. And so the counselor asked me, what do you want to do? I said, I want to fly airplanes. Well, we don't teach people how to fly airplanes here. What do you want to do here at lsu? I said, to fly airplanes, I had to have a piece of paper that says I'm a graduate of college. [00:57:28] Speaker B: Oh, was that right? [00:57:30] Speaker A: Yes. [00:57:31] Speaker B: And who did you take that sheet of paper to? Military or. [00:57:34] Speaker A: Well, yeah, you had to have it to the military before they would accept you as a pilot. [00:57:37] Speaker B: Gotcha. [00:57:38] Speaker A: And so I said, all I want is that piece of paper so I can show that, well, what do you want to study while you're here? What do you want that piece of paper to say on there? I said that I graduated. Okay? I mean, that's how naive I was, I guess. But anyway, the guy says, well, what airplanes? You want to fly airplanes? Why don't you go down and talk to those people down to engineering school and see what they recommend for you? So I wandered down there and talked to the counselors in the engineering school, and the guy says, well, what do you want to major in? I said, explain it to him again. I need a piece of paper that says I'm a graduate of college so I can go fly airplanes. Wow. [00:58:16] Speaker B: You had tunnel vision, didn't you? [00:58:17] Speaker A: I did, yeah. I mean, since two years old. Wow. Okay. So anyway, the guy says, oh, man, where do we get these people? [00:58:28] Speaker B: Okay? [00:58:28] Speaker A: He says, well, airplanes have electricity in them. Why don't you go down to the electrical engineering department and tell them you want to be an electrical engineer? [00:58:36] Speaker B: Okay? [00:58:36] Speaker A: So I did. I went down and said, I need a degree. Guy says, it's got electricity on airplanes. I'd like to get a degree. Okay? Because they always got to chuckle out of this. [00:58:46] Speaker B: They also have moving partners, so mechanical [00:58:47] Speaker A: would have worked, too. But as it turns out, all the curricula that I had to take to be an electrical engineer, thermodynamics and vector analysis, all the mathematics and so forth, fit right in with learning how to fly. Because when I got to flight school, I had all this stuff. I mean, I knew exactly all the principles of what made things work. [00:59:13] Speaker B: Because when you fly, you have to. You have to look at the vector of the wind. You have to look at the direction you're going, how you point your plane. Well, you have to do all of those vector calculations? [00:59:23] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. And you got to do it mentally. But I knew how they worked because I studied it in college. Yeah, like when you fly along straight and level in steady state, except you're moving, your thrust is greater than the drag, your movement gives you the lift that overcomes gravity. And if you want to change any of those things, if you increase your angle of bank, you reduce that vector that causes you to balance gravity. [00:59:53] Speaker B: Oh, so you're looking at the force vectors on your plane is one of the things you're looking at? [00:59:57] Speaker A: Yeah. I mean, this is what helped me understand flying better than anything else, especially when it got into air combat maneuvering and so forth and doing well, even in bombing area to ground bombing. It made me understand all this stuff, and most people probably never even thought about it. But when you're flying formation, if you have to make a correction, you have to make three corrections. Let's say you're in formation and your airplane starts to accelerate beyond the speed of that other one. You got to pull the power back. [01:00:31] Speaker B: Okay, formation. You mean you're flying next, like the Blue Angels, in a way. [01:00:35] Speaker A: You pull the power back because you've already started accelerating beyond faster than this guy. So you got to stop the acceleration, and then you got to back it off to move back into formation, and then you got to add power again to stabilize it. And that occurs with every movement of the airplane. There's three corrections that you always have to make. And you always have to just continually think about all these things, and pretty soon, you don't have to think. You program. Your brain is. You just recognize this and just do it. Your motor skills are developed so that you don't have to think, okay, I got to do this, I got to do that. It just happens. [01:01:11] Speaker B: It's got to be almost like a [01:01:13] Speaker A: muscle memory, in a way, or brain memory. [01:01:15] Speaker B: Brain memory. [01:01:17] Speaker A: And at the same time, you got to have your eyeballs constantly moving because you always got to watch this guy. You got to watch your navigation. You got to be reading your knee board and where all your maps and stuff are, and you got to be getting your weapon systems all ready to. And if it's weather, there's a little thing called vertigo. As soon as you get into weather, if you don't concentrate 100% on your instruments, your brain just flips and says, I don't know which way's up. [01:01:48] Speaker B: That's the reason pilots have different levels of skill. You have visual flight rules, and then you have instrument flight rules, and the instrument flight rules are the ones that let you overcome the vertigo and trust your instruments, not your sensory. [01:02:01] Speaker A: And it's just a whole nother skill set. But that's the wonder of flight school. I mean, they have systematically, you know, they learned it the hard way as to how to teach people this stuff. We had bad accidents, but now they had developed. By the time I was coming along, they had developed the skill sets for instructors that could articulate what you needed to do and what you need to be thinking about. And since you're going to, you know, 360, 400 miles an hour, you got to be thinking four to five minutes ahead of what's happening right now, because that's where you're going to be. And so you got to always be anticipating. It's a wonderful exercise for the brain. [01:02:41] Speaker B: Well, I had an uncle that wanted to go. Wanted to be a pilot. And this was back before the Air Force. I think they called it the Army Air Corps or something like that. And they didn't let him in because his eyeballs weren't good enough. [01:02:52] Speaker A: Right. [01:02:53] Speaker B: You have to have an incredible sense of sight. You also have to have an incredible ability of reaction. In fact, you have very good sight. And I also know another person that has good sight, and that was Chuck Yeager. I have my heritage in West Virginia. And there they have Chuck Yeager airfield. [01:03:11] Speaker A: Absolutely. [01:03:12] Speaker B: And it's really funny, because they took a mountain. There's no flat places in West Virginia. They took a mountain and they kind of made it flat on top. And boy, when you land in Chuck Yeager airport, you hit the brakes quick, because if you don't hit the brakes quick enough, you go off the other side of the mountain. But Chuck Yeager was supposed to have these incredible eyeballs. [01:03:33] Speaker A: He did, and he was. [01:03:35] Speaker B: You were also blessed with good eyeballs. In fact, if you look at the movies, Top Gun and Maverick. Maverick and Iceman, I think, played by Val Kilmer, Right. They both had these extraordinary visions. Your name was Hawk. Just like a hawk can see for miles and see a speck on an egg, you know, a thousand miles below. And so what's your eyesight? [01:04:02] Speaker A: Well, what's your eyesight and your vision? 2020 is a normal, perfect vision. Yeah. And mine would run 2010, so I could see just a little bit better than the average person. [01:04:15] Speaker B: Okay. [01:04:17] Speaker A: And that plays. That's really key because there's a couple of things that you. Again, in flying, you learn these things, but you got to program your brain, because sometimes if you're looking in the cockpit. Some people will look out of the cockpit and their eyes don't refocus on infinity because that's what you got to look at out there, because what you're trying to do is detect any motion of anything out there. [01:04:42] Speaker B: Right, right. [01:04:42] Speaker A: But drives had to be focused on infinity to really be able to have the best accommodation of those things. And so it was a skill set that you had to learn of looking in the cockpit, looking out of the cockpit, and you had to make that transition very quickly. And you had to, at the time, especially when you're in weather, your eyes are constantly moving on all the other instruments, cross checking everything. And again, I just can't say enough about the flight training that I received in the Navy. One of the things that they used to emphasize time and time and time again, we'd have what they'd put you under a bag so it was no visual reference to anything. And they would start killing instruments, especially your attitude gyro. That gave you your primary focus. And so you had to go needle, ball, and airspeed. So you just had three little things. [01:05:31] Speaker B: Okay, needle, let's go through one at a time. [01:05:34] Speaker A: Needle is indicator in there. That gives you your angle of bank. [01:05:39] Speaker B: Okay. [01:05:40] Speaker A: Okay. The ball is just a ball like a level in the airplane. That gives you your slip or your yaw in the airplane. Gotcha. Right. Okay. And then, of course, your airspeed and altitude. I didn't say altitude, but you got to look at constant look at your altitude, because if it's perceptually starts to move, you're already too late. You got to anticipate those moves. And the way you anticipate that move is there's another instrument we call a vertical speed indicator, and it's a real sensitive instrument. As soon as your vertical speed starts to deviate, it starts to move. And so you got to look at that and you got to go back up and cross check everything else and make sure that every movement that you make, all coordinates together to do what you got to do. Don't forget the three. Three movements. Everything you have to do once, you got to do two more times to get it back on. Because if you're. Let's say you're starting to sink now, you got to move the nose back up. You got to move the nose back up to stop the sink, and then to get back to where it was. And then when you get back to where it was, you got to have the nose movement to put it back to where it's level. [01:06:51] Speaker B: Gotcha. So you had to do all of this just with those three pieces of instrument. [01:06:55] Speaker A: That's right. And that's why the Navy and the Air Force are so good in teaching. And simulators have really come a long way to be able to teach you this stuff in a simulator because it's less expensive than taking an airplane out and it's not near as dangerous. [01:07:13] Speaker B: Yeah. This is interesting. I used to work with a guy at University of Washington and his name was Tom Furness. They called him the grandfather of virtual reality. But there's so much great technology that the DoD starts. They started self driving cars when they had their unmanned races across the U.S. i don't know exactly the course they did. They were the ones that started gps. They started the Internet. And another thing they started was virtual reality. And the purpose of that was for pilots so that they would have heads up display so that you could actually. When I used to smoke, I used to put my cigarettes on the dashboard and at night I could see the reflection of it in the window. And that's kind of like heads up display. You see the reflection of all the instruments in the window. And that was a really big thing. And anyway, he was the one that started virtual reality. And also in terms of the training of the pilot, they put you in this little booth and it simulates you actually flying. Like you were saying, it saves a lot of money, right? Oh, yeah. [01:08:17] Speaker A: Well, and not only that, they became so sophisticated that not only are you doing what you're doing in relationship to the world, but they got so sophisticated with the computer programs that they could program another fighter or a ship that was moving in the water and you could go land on the ship and so forth. And so you do that stuff before you went out and did it. And so when you got there, it was a piece of cake. Okay, well, not a piece of cake, but you were somewhat familiar with it. [01:08:47] Speaker B: Yeah, colloquialism. I had a Korean student, he came with me with a problem. I said, that's a piece of cake. He says, that is not a piece of cake. So we have to be careful with our colloquialisms there. Yeah, that's kind of funny. So you started flying the fighter planes. I think you mentioned to me that there was a difference between Army, Navy and Marine pilots, that they're different breeds. Is that true? [01:09:16] Speaker A: Well, yeah, because the different cultures of all the services, each of us bring our own methods of war fighting to the program. The Air Force is very. And this has changed several times over the years, but the Air Force Used to be big, blue sky stuff, high, go down, shoot down airplanes. And then the primary focus of the Marines and the way we used airplanes was to provide what we call heavier artillery, movable artillery, because it allowed us to locate where the fight was and put bombs on the bad guys really close to where the good guys were. [01:10:03] Speaker B: Oh, okay, so this is like, for example, D Day, when the two forces were meeting each other. You had to drop bombs on the Nazis and not kill the invaders. [01:10:13] Speaker A: Well, that's where there's three operational terminology that you. Strategic bombing, operational bombing, Strategic operational bombing, and tactical bombing. Okay. Tactical bombing is happening right now. I see. Operational bombing is what you want. Had to happen two or three days from now. And strategic bombing is where you're reaching way out behind the lines and destroying logistical capabilities for the bad guys. Okay. Okay. So the tactical portion is right up close, right next to the troops. [01:10:44] Speaker B: It's right now. [01:10:45] Speaker A: Right now. And where you got troops that are in combat and you want to put steel on the enemy and destroy them. Okay. The Marines, we focused on that entirely. That was our whole reason geometry. Every Marine's a rifleman, and everything that we did as pilots was to support that guy with that rifle. That was our whole mental thought. Anything else we did was fluff. [01:11:13] Speaker B: Okay, so you were a major general in the Marines? [01:11:16] Speaker A: Yes, sir. [01:11:16] Speaker B: Were you an expert with the rifle? All Marines. [01:11:19] Speaker A: I'm going to tell you this, and this is a confession. [01:11:21] Speaker B: Okay, confession. I should put up a barrier and offer you absolution. [01:11:26] Speaker A: I did not go to the basic school, which is where we developed all of our skills and where we got all of our qualifications. That we said, okay, you're an expert rifleman, you're a sharpshooter or you're a marksman. That was the three categories. The need when I got out of flight school was for jet pilots to be in Vietnam. And so basic school is at Quantico, Virginia. That's where all the officers go through to. To get their six months training of how to be a ground officer. I skipped all that because they needed pilots and they sent us to Vietnam pretty quick. [01:12:03] Speaker B: I see. Okay. [01:12:04] Speaker A: And so I didn't go through all that ground training that some of the other people did. Was I a good shot? Yeah, I was a pretty good shot. But I was never, ever one of those guys that practiced a lot. When I was a kid, I used to shoot squirrels in the eye. Yeah. My dad, if I. [01:12:22] Speaker B: That's because of your good eyeballs, right? [01:12:24] Speaker A: Yeah. And it's a whole trigger pull thing. The squeeze. [01:12:29] Speaker B: You know, I never thought there is a correlation between being able to shoot a squirrel in the eye and being a good pilot. You have to have the motor control for your arms and you have to have the eyes in order to do the shot. [01:12:42] Speaker A: My dad used to really fuss at me if I didn't hit him in the eye. [01:12:45] Speaker B: Are you serious? [01:12:46] Speaker A: Serious as a heart attack. [01:12:47] Speaker B: Oh, my gosh. And what kind of rifle did you use? [01:12:50] Speaker A: I had a little J.C. higgins. 22 bolt action. [01:12:53] Speaker B: 22. [01:12:54] Speaker A: Wow. [01:12:55] Speaker B: Okay, Bob, I'm really impressed. [01:12:58] Speaker A: Don't be impressed because that was so many years ago. I wish I could replicate that now, but I can't. But that's what happens when we grow older. You know, we have to choose our things that we can do better. [01:13:12] Speaker B: Right? Yeah, exactly. [01:13:13] Speaker A: They don't require so many motor skills. [01:13:15] Speaker B: Exactly. [01:13:16] Speaker A: Wow. [01:13:16] Speaker B: Okay, interesting. [01:13:18] Speaker A: But anyway, the whole concept of this thing about the difference between the pilots, Navy guys, their biggest thinking is to protect the fleet. Okay, Right. So they have interceptors. Oh, I see. And then they use their airplanes to go out and bomb other ships that are threats to the fleet. Okay. But that's where their concentration is, where ours is on that individual Marine. The Navy is on protecting the fleet. Now the Air Force is. They're strategic. You know, that's where the whole concept [01:13:50] Speaker B: of soften them up behind the lines, [01:13:52] Speaker A: destroy their logistics capabilities. Gotcha. And do that. Now, let's just take an example. I have some really good friends that are Air Force guys that were A10 drivers. Now the A10 mission. [01:14:09] Speaker B: What is an A10? [01:14:10] Speaker A: It's a Warthog. They call it the Warthog. And it's got a 30 millimeter cannon in the front of it. It's a Gatling gun that shoots about 2,000 rounds a minute. A 30 millimeter. [01:14:22] Speaker B: This is on an aircraft? [01:14:23] Speaker A: It's on an aircraft. The gun itself is about this big, around about two and a half foot in diameter. And it's right in the front of the airplane. And it is a tank killer. And it carries lots of bombs. It's a straight wing airplane. So it's slow. And one of the things that we always talk about in flying fighters is speed. Speed is your friend because when you got speed, you can exchange that energy there for other things. Turning, yanking, banking, moving, trying to outmaneuver somebody that shoots in Earth. [01:15:00] Speaker B: Speed is your friend. [01:15:01] Speaker A: Okay. Yeah. Well, we always said speed is Life. Whereas the A10, it's an airplane. It's a slower airplane, but carries lots of bombs. And it's an ideal close air support airplane. And it's terrific. It's a tank killing this machine on earth today. And the Air Force has been trying to get rid of it because they don't like that mission. But they saw how good and effective it was for the army, especially in the Iraq war. I mean, that airplane was phenomenal for close air support. And it still is. And you see that they keep trying to get rid of it. Fairchild built the airplane and they kept trying to get rid of it, and they're still trying to get rid of it. That's because their focus is different. Their focus is not primarily now. They're good at it and they do it, but they do it mostly with the A10. Does the F16 have the capability? Yeah. Does the F15 have the capability? Yeah, but that's not where their focus is. Their focus is at high altitude stuff, killing bad guys or dropping interdiction bombs behind them. You remember in Vietnam, the big thing was the 105. They call it the Thud. [01:16:17] Speaker B: The Thud. [01:16:17] Speaker A: The Thud, Yeah. It was a Thunderchief was the name, but it was called what the Thud was its little nickname for it. But it was a Mach 2 Plus airplane. And it was designed to build a nuclear. To carry a nuclear weapon, to deliver a nuclear weapon behind enemy lines. But when Vietnam started out, we had a lot of thuds. We had tons of them. So the Air Force used it for strategic bombing up north. And remember, there's a. A place called Thud Ridge up in North Vietnam that was up in Route Package 6. And the Air Force would come in there and get a lot of Thud shot down because it was not designed for that mission. Because they started hanging racks of bombs on the outside of the airplane, which slowed it down and gave it a less maneuverable capability. And so it was more susceptible to sam's Surface to Air missiles coming up and. And hitting it. You couldn't dodge them as good as you need to. And you couldn't also dog fight as good as you need to. [01:17:20] Speaker B: I was asking you about that. Are there still dogfights? [01:17:24] Speaker A: Well, you know, that's a whole nother concept that was probably more fun than anything else that you ever did. Oh, you. [01:17:30] Speaker B: Because center dog fights, fun. [01:17:33] Speaker A: Oh, it's the most exhilarating thing. Well, you watch, you talked about the movies. Maverick, Top Gun. [01:17:39] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:17:40] Speaker A: You know, you saw the A4s in there. You saw the F14s. I used to fly those A4s at Top Gun all the time. We'd go down and support Top Guns graduation because we'd provide them dissimilar Air. The A4 Skyhawk was very similar in maneuverability to the MiG21, except we had a better roll rate, but ours was 720 degrees per second. You can do two aileron rolls in a second. [01:18:06] Speaker B: What's a full run roll? [01:18:08] Speaker A: Well, just flip it over twice. Oh, okay. And just go full rudder, I mean, full stick. And you go. You'd go. You'd turn 360 degrees twice in one second. [01:18:18] Speaker B: Okay. While you were moving forward. [01:18:20] Speaker A: Yeah, right. But the MiG. And that's how we could do better in a lot of the dog fights than the MiG, because the MiG was slow as well. If a MiG got behind you for some reason, we could turn and yank. And the MiG could not turn quick enough to keep in phase with us. And as he starts coming around again, you whip and go back this way, and he's here, and pretty soon you're back behind him in about two or three turns. [01:18:50] Speaker B: So you're using the capabilities of your enemy. The lack of capability. [01:18:54] Speaker A: The lack of capability in order. And that's what dogfight is all about. But let me say this. Today, mostly it's all beyond visual range. Our missile technology has increased so much that you don't find that the engagements are like the old time dogfights in World War I and World War II and in Korea and in Vietnam. Because now our missile capability is so far advanced that you can have a guy behind you, you can pick him up on your radar, you can launch a missile. That muscle will leave, go forward and [01:19:29] Speaker B: go back, go right over your head. [01:19:30] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:19:31] Speaker B: It'll go forward and kill him, get him behind you. [01:19:34] Speaker A: Yeah. We didn't have that capabilities with muscles before. Yeah. But. And now, you know, the old. [01:19:40] Speaker B: They have that capability also, don't they? [01:19:42] Speaker A: Yes, yes. I don't think theirs is quite as good as ours. Okay. But they're developing it pretty rapidly. Some of their. And again, a whole other technology development that's changed the face of war fighting, especially in aviation, is the stealth. Because now it's harder for the bad guys to pick up you all the stealth technology, because the radar hasn't caught up with the capability of you to be stealthful. That's a design issue. It's a skin issue. How they. [01:20:18] Speaker B: I actually did research on that, by the way. Yeah. The stealth bombers, first of all, they have flat. They have flat sides. And the reason for that is because the reflection is more like a mirror as opposed to a scattering, which goes in all directions. The other thing was the Absorption. And this is what we worked on. We used artificial intelligence, was actually designing the dielectric coating of the wings so that there was more absorption than there was reflection, I think. And this was really interesting technology. So that's. [01:20:50] Speaker A: And they had some issues with it. You remember the B2, Whiteman Air Force Base, when they would get in the rain, it would kind of degrade the capability of the skin to disperse. [01:21:01] Speaker B: Oh, I never thought of that. That's right. Because the water got on, it screwed up the dielectric, and it didn't operate [01:21:08] Speaker A: the design because that was a real weakness to start with. But. But I think they've gone a long way because, you know, we got, you know, the F35s are that way. The F22s have got all this sophisticated stuff. Their design is such that they're just really, really difficult to pick up by radar. But again, their radar is getting better and better and better, as is ours. But then as soon as you have to launch a weapon, whether it's opening the bomb bay doors to drop a bomb out of it or to open up a compartment to let a muscle go out of it, you know, you're exposing more of a radar signature. And so that's why now they do it very quickly. That thing goes out of there quicker than you can bet down. It closes it back up. So if they get you with one sweep, you know, then you close back up and you disappeared again. [01:22:01] Speaker B: That's fascinating. [01:22:02] Speaker A: I mean, it is fascinating, but right now, from a. From a perspective on the fifth generation airplanes that are out there now, dog fighting is sort of secondary. It's something that you nice to know how to do. [01:22:15] Speaker B: Technology is so important, but you pray [01:22:16] Speaker A: that you never have to do it because you don't want it. You have the capability to reach out and touch them before you ever see them. [01:22:24] Speaker B: Let me ask you this. It's kind of a new topic, but Elon Musk, who is a genius entrepreneur, incredible. A friend of IO's, Discovery Institute, George Gilder, said he's a great entrepreneur, but he's a retarded thinker. He thinks, for example, that we are simulations. At least this was a previous understanding of what we are. We're simulations, much like a computer simulation of a human being. And there's other sort of strange things. But I think he has some great ideas. I don't know if we're ever going to make it to Mars. That's going to be really great if we are able to do that. But if you look at his accomplishments with Tesla and SpaceX and X. Now the platform and one of the greatest names for a company, the Boring Company, which is the ones that make tunnels. What a great name for a company, the Boring Company. But anyway, he came out and this was recently. [01:23:21] Speaker A: Hasn't been too successful, by the way. [01:23:23] Speaker B: Oh, it hasn't been successful, no. [01:23:25] Speaker A: Because see, they were doing that. They were going to put that all underground from that, that high speed train from Los Angeles to San Francisco. [01:23:33] Speaker B: Right, right. [01:23:34] Speaker A: And they've spent billions of dollars on that. And it's still. [01:23:38] Speaker B: It still ain't working. [01:23:38] Speaker A: They didn't even have the box yet. [01:23:40] Speaker B: Okay, well, we'll see what happens to the Boring Company. But one of the things that Musk said is that the current fighter planes he was talking about, I think the F35s, they cost about $100 million each. That's the current price of them. And he said, you know, really, with the advent of drone technology that maybe we should be spending our money on drones instead of fighter planes. Do you have any opinions about that? [01:24:08] Speaker A: I have opinions about it, but I don't have the technical expertise to explain to you exactly what my thinking is versus what reality is. Because what we as human beings always think about is we feel like we're infallible and we're necessary as part of any machine to make it work to its peak. But when you start thinking about the human resource requirements in an airplane, the weight it costs, the space that it costs, can you exchange that for some other technology that would make the plane better? Now, the thing that we always think about, and I think about this all the time, is from a pilot perspective, I always think that I've got to be in control. Now when you put drones in control, somewhere somebody's controlling something. [01:25:07] Speaker B: I think the drones are still under manual control. It's just that they're. [01:25:11] Speaker A: But they're. [01:25:11] Speaker B: You saved all that weight playing a video game. [01:25:14] Speaker A: Yeah. You've saved all that weight in the airplane. You've saved all that space in the airplane. You don't have to build a cockpit that can look out. It can be a. [01:25:24] Speaker B: You don't have to worry about g forces. [01:25:25] Speaker A: That's right. [01:25:26] Speaker B: Which was a big thing in the movie Maverick that I took issue with. [01:25:29] Speaker A: Yeah, well, and it's still a big deal on the F16 was such a capable airplane, you could out g your body very quickly. [01:25:39] Speaker B: Did you ever feel the effects of that while you were flying? Oh, yes. [01:25:42] Speaker A: I mean, but the thing is, the airplanes that I flew, they never had those kind of capabilities of Over G in your airplane, what the airframe itself would reach limits before your human body did. But then the more sophisticated that they got and the speed increased with the F16s and, and the F15s and so forth, the airframe would outperform what the body could take. [01:26:11] Speaker B: Gotcha. Interesting. So one of the things that's always worried me about drones, I used to worry that if you had a thousand drones coming at you, what could you do? You would have to come up with some autonomous cannon to shoot them. Bang, bang, bang, bang. Then somebody pointed out that if there was an EMP from a nuclear explosion, that fries all the electronics. So if you're being on everything and everything but the military now Russia and China and the United States have what I would call an EMP cannon, which is an EMP focus that can actually be focused on a swarm of drones. And it strikes me that this is just like bug spray that you would shoot and all of those drones would fall out of the sky because they would all be fried. Now the people that are in favor of the drones come along and they say, well, we can harden them, but if they harden them, that's going to take, that's going to be more weight. And so there's going to be a. [01:27:13] Speaker A: There's trade offs in everything you do. [01:27:14] Speaker B: Yeah, there's trade offs and there's always this. [01:27:18] Speaker A: But we're getting into an area that's pretty classified at this point. [01:27:21] Speaker B: Oh, you think so? Yeah, I imagine that's true. You're a United States Marine. It's very common to say semper fi, always faithful. But there's a deeper meaning to that, I assume. Right. What is the deeper meaning to always faithful? What does that mean when you say semper Fi to another Marine? [01:27:45] Speaker A: Well, actually, in reality it means the same thing as that. You're faithful to God. You're faithful to whatever occupation you have, no matter what you're doing. You're faithful to your wife, you're faithful to your kids. It's the same thing. It's just that Marines understand that we've got each other's back. As I told you in other discussions, our job, every Marine is a rifleman. And every other Marine's focus is on protecting that rifleman, making his job easier, keeping him alive. Because he is appointed into the spear. He is the person that occupies the territory that closes with the enemy and kills him. [01:28:25] Speaker B: Okay. [01:28:26] Speaker A: And so if he knows that all this, we call it a tooth to tail ratio, all this tail portion of the other parts of the Marine Corps, aviation, artillery, medical, engineering, all this stuff is to support that Marine when he knows that he has confidence that if he needs something, that you're going to get it to him. And one of my. I was a commander of what we call. Used to call. They've changed the name of it now, but it used to be called the fourth Service Support Group. [01:28:58] Speaker B: Okay. [01:28:59] Speaker A: And we have infantry, we have artillery, we have aviation, and we have the logistics. And the Force Service Support Group was always the logistics portion of the Marine Corps that supplied everything. My challenge to all of my people in the fourth FSSG was to be so in tune with the war fight that what's going on up front, on the front lines that when the commander turns around and says, I need, he bumps into it. Regardless of whether it's ammo, food, water, whatever. [01:29:40] Speaker B: That sounds like the Boy Scout model. Be prepared. [01:29:43] Speaker A: Well, it's more than being prepared. It's being prepared to support that Marine. [01:29:47] Speaker B: Gotcha. [01:29:48] Speaker A: That's the most important part of the Marine Corps. That guy with the M1, actually M4, now rifle. There's some controversy about that, of course, in the Corps about killing power. And just a quick little review about that. I may have the numbers, exactly, not exactly correct, but In World War II, when they had the old M1, the kill to bullet ratio was about one to seven. You shot seven bullets and one enemy died. [01:30:19] Speaker B: Okay. [01:30:20] Speaker A: When it got to Korea, it went to about one, to about. And don't hold me at these numbers, but 35 or 40. [01:30:29] Speaker B: Okay. Was that because the North Koreans were on dope or tied up or something? [01:30:34] Speaker A: It has to do with the skills and capabilities of weapons. [01:30:39] Speaker B: Oh, of the weapon. [01:30:40] Speaker A: Yeah. And the skill set. You know, when you're. First of all, it has to do with the caliber of the weapon. When you shoot a guy with a 7.62, he's probably going to be out of the fight. When you shoot him with a 2, 2, 3, he may not be out of the fight. [01:30:57] Speaker B: I see. Is wounded. [01:31:00] Speaker A: That's right. Wounded rather than killed. [01:31:02] Speaker B: Right. [01:31:03] Speaker A: And in Vietnam, it was. This is astounding. About one to 200,000 for every round that we shot. Only about one person got killed on the bad guy side. [01:31:16] Speaker B: Okay. [01:31:16] Speaker A: And that's because you had weapons, one that were not as powerful, with enough kill power, and then you had automatic weapons. And, boy, does that increase your logistics requirements. [01:31:30] Speaker B: I bet it does. [01:31:31] Speaker A: And it also has to do with discipline, you know, and you see film clips sometimes of guys shooting over berms, holding the rifle up above the Head without aiming. [01:31:45] Speaker B: It's like the gangbangers that come up and they turn their firearm 90 degrees. Just stupid. [01:31:50] Speaker A: Well, that's all about discipline. And Marines, you know, very. I don't think. I've very rarely seen that happen with Marines because we don't teach our kids to do that. [01:32:01] Speaker B: Okay. [01:32:01] Speaker A: We teach our kids that when you put a round downrange, you better have somebody in your target that's going to die. That's the importance of all this stuff. That's what war is about. And that's one of the things that we need to refocus on, is teaching American citizens what war is all about. Winning and winning decisively and protecting our troops as much as you can so that we don't lose many of our troops. [01:32:32] Speaker B: That's right. You know, and one of the things that we do in order to make sure that we have enough war fighters is have the Reserve. Now, after you retired from the Marines, you went to work at the Pentagon, I believe, is that right? [01:32:43] Speaker A: That's correct. [01:32:44] Speaker B: And you went to the work at the Pentagon and you were the advocate for reservists. Tell us what you did there. [01:32:51] Speaker A: I think that's the employer support of the Garden reserve. It's a DoD function that falls under the manpower section of the Pentagon. That our job is twofold, actually. One, it's to enforce or inform and educate the Garden Reservists about the Uniformed Services Employment and Re. Employment Rights Act. [01:33:17] Speaker B: Okay. [01:33:17] Speaker A: Commonly known as usera. [01:33:19] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:33:20] Speaker A: If you're going to almost any business in the country, you go look on their bulletin board wall, and there's going to be a copy of USERA on the wall because it's applicable to employers. Because employers must treat those troops like they never left. You know, they can't. [01:33:35] Speaker B: So if I'm called, if I have a job and I'm caught up for the Reserves, if I'm an employer, it means I have to take that reserve back reservist back when he's done. Is that right? [01:33:44] Speaker A: And nobody can be promoted over him or anything. He has to come back in equal or better than. And that's United States law. That's usera. [01:33:53] Speaker B: Userra. Okay. What was the acronym? What was the acronym for Uniformed Services [01:33:58] Speaker A: Employment and Reemployment Rights Act. [01:34:01] Speaker B: Okay. So I'm an employer. I'm thinking, oh, my gosh, you're putting a bump in the road for my business. I'm really not going to do well because I really need this guy. But he's going into the Reserve to serve his country. But that doesn't help me at all. But the law says that you have to take him back, right? [01:34:16] Speaker A: That's correct. [01:34:17] Speaker B: And I imagine there's a lot of headaches about this, but I think your job was mitigating this right to make [01:34:26] Speaker A: it as least harmful to both sides as we possibly could. And so it was an educational process. First we had to make sure that the employers knew about you, Sarah. And then we had to convince employers how important it was for them to hire garden reservists because of what they brought to their skill sets. Military people bring discipline, their own time. When they come to work, they learn, they know how to improve themselves, they're motivated. That's what the military does for the mindset. And so we convinced the employers just how important it is for them to have garden reservists on their staff because they're going to have a better product as an employer employee. Okay. So now vice versa. What also I had to deal with was each. And we changed the concept of the reservists over the last 20 years. Now we call it an operational reserve. Used to be the reserve was just the people that would drill on a weekend a month, and then they'd go on two weeks training every year. And that was it. It was fairly cut and dried and it was predictable. Okay. Suddenly, when we started using the Guard as an operational reserve, we did that because, one, we had a better asset. Because now we were getting in the garden reserve, we were getting better equipment. The government was providing us with updated equipment, but it allowed now some of this equipment was more sophisticated, so we had to keep them on active duty a little bit more so that they could do that. And then when we started using them in the wars, then they had to be more of a unit cohesion, not only with themselves, but they had to be able to integrate with other units to provide the total package of war fighting. So that took more training. And so we started having to spend more time on active duty, not just the two days a weekend and then a two week in the summer. Then we started deploying them all the time. All right. Now, what that did, a company like Boeing or any big company that may have hundreds of reserves that work for them, if you take 30 of them out of the package, it's not a big deal. But when you got Joe's garage down here, he's got three mechanics. [01:37:00] Speaker B: Exactly. [01:37:01] Speaker A: And one of them takes one of them. That's a third of his thing. So now the way we were doing it when we first started this whole concept of using the reserves as an operational reserve. The guys had come to drill, and the next day they were told, you're going to be called active duty and you're going to be gone until we tell you you're not okay. So that left the employer hanging. They couldn't plan their manpower requirements to do what they need to do to keep their business going. So I had to do a lot of education and a lot of discussion and begging and pleading with the military part to say, don't do that to the employers. Use a little bit more planning, you know, so that they can plan. Because we got. This is a. This is a one team, one fight operation. We got to be in this together. Because what they bring to the country is important to the country. What you allow them to do and to come back is also. It's important to them as individuals. So let's work together to make sure that we have as smooth a transition going and then coming so that you don't. [01:38:12] Speaker B: And that's what you did at the Pentagon. [01:38:13] Speaker A: That's right. That was our organization was all over the country. We had 50 organizational in Polishboard and garden reserve units all over the country, and then the four trust territories, you know, Guam, Samoa, Puerto Rico. And so my job was to make sure that all of our people knew what they were doing. Because part of that was we called them ombudsman. You know, we talked about before, if there was an issue, we had people that were experts, we called them ombudsmen, and they would go and talk the legalese stuff to the people. Now, in order to accommodate and make the employers understand how important it was to their organization to have a garden reservist in their organization, we would take these bosses out and wherever these guys were on deployment, and we'd let them see what they're bringing to the country. And also based on what they do, the dangerous situations that they're in, the thinking that they have to do, the planning that they have to do, it adds value to their organization when they get back into the organization. [01:39:27] Speaker B: Yeah, I want to follow up on that. One of the things that the military does, especially the Marines, is they take. I think it was in the movie Paper Chase where the professor came in and says, I'm going to take your skulls full of mush and I'm going to develop it into a legal eagle sort of thing. You take young men and you kind of get rid of the bad part and make them truly men. And this is one of the reasons that reservists are such good employees is because they've gone through this process. But you also have a third thought of applying this to maybe the youth of our country. Could you talk about that a little bit? [01:40:04] Speaker A: Sure. Let's just go back for just a second about that whole concept of what we do in the military. It's not just the Marines. I think we. In the Marines, we're noted for being a little bit more disciplinarian than the other services. You know, we don't have as many amenities for our troops. You know, the Air Force lives in real nice boqs with golf courses and all that. And I'm not degrading now. I'm just saying this is the way it is. This is a reality. The Marines were living in pub tents. And I'll give you an example. When I was in Vietnam, I was living in a tent and we were eating sea rations. And one of my friends, that was a thud driver, a 105 driver. He was an electrical engineer buddy of mine from lsu. As a matter of fact, he was flying in the Air force, flying the F105. And I went over to Koret, Thailand to visit him one time when I was in Vietnam. And here guy was living in a house that was air conditioned. He had individual rooms in each house with a common living area that had a kitchen and all this stuff. And they had maids and stuff that prepared all their food, cleaned all their stuff. Must be nice. Yeah, that's good on him. Okay. But I'm a Marine. I expect to live in the mud, you know, I know. You know, it's a dollar thing. It's where you spend your dollars. But the real dramatic part of the thing was he was getting substandard housing pay, and I wasn't getting anything except wet and money. And money and money. But I'm not downplaying the roles of anybody else in their role. It's just we do different. We have different missions and we treat our people different. And we found that in the Marine Corps that it's very, very important that the first thing that happens when a guy or girl gets to boot camp is we take the me out of them. Yes. We become a unit. [01:42:16] Speaker B: Yes. That's the reason you shave their heads and they all look the same. [01:42:20] Speaker A: Exactly. [01:42:20] Speaker B: One of the reasons. [01:42:21] Speaker A: That's exactly right. And so we want people to leave me on the beach because everything else, the focus is on the mission, on taking care of your troops. Because of our. What we always like to say, and it's not necessarily true, always, but we do forced entries in the countries, that's what the Marines amphibious landings were all about, is in the hostile environment, we hit the beach with a lot of high speed metal flying around. Because of that, everybody's got to be doing their job. There's no room for slackers. So when we teach someone to be a Marine, we make them forget about themselves. We make them understand that the Marine Corps and their mission in the Marine Corps is more important than anything else in the world. And as I've talked to you about before, one of the things that I think we don't do well as Christians. [01:43:13] Speaker B: Yeah. Just for a background, both Bob and I are followers of Christ and we certainly want to take some of these things that work well and maybe apply them to kind of a squishy church. So. Okay, go ahead. [01:43:28] Speaker A: And this is my thought process on this whole thing is that the Marines are so successful and teaching an individual that is not about himself. It's about country. It's about God and country. When we as churches have convinced through biblical teachings that someone needs to be a follower of Christ, that me has to go away. And you look at all the tenets of Jesus teaching, it's all about doing away with me. [01:44:00] Speaker B: Isn't that true? If you look at the 13th chapter of Corinthians where they talk about love. Love is not about me. It's not about my pleasure, it's not about what I want, it's not just about me. It's actually giving. It's kind of that simper fi, be faithful. Love is being faithful, isn't it? [01:44:20] Speaker A: And focus on someone else other than yourself. [01:44:24] Speaker B: So how can we help churches today impose that? Not impose, but teach. [01:44:31] Speaker A: Well, I think we have to take a little bit more serious about what accepting Christ is all about, especially with young kids. And there's some statistics, I can't remember the exact number, but when kids go to college, there's something like 80 plus percent of the kids turn away from Christ. [01:44:48] Speaker B: Well, they quit going to church. Yes, that's statistically true. [01:44:52] Speaker A: Yeah. Now I've got some friends of mine that are Muslims, my Muslim friends, when they were nine years old, they were memorizing the Koran and they were required to memorize it. Oh yeah. And that used to be the Jewish people did the same thing. That was a Middle Eastern kind of a trait that when you brought your kids up to memorize scriptures. Now when you deemphasize the memorization of scriptures and not put an extremely important part on that, those kids don't get that importance anymore. You got to drive that home. That's something that's not an inherent thought process. You have to be taught how important it is. [01:45:35] Speaker B: You have to memorize it, but also understand what it means. Internalization. That's right. [01:45:39] Speaker A: And that's what churches are about. And that's why we have all these programs. We have Sunday school. Somebody accepts Christ. We hope that they've learned why they accepted Christ in church, in Sunday school, or. Or in what we used to call training union on Sunday night, which they don't do much anymore. But awanas, any of the other youth programs that they have are all about teaching these kids about Christ. Part of being a Christian is learning to be obedient. Just like in the Marine Corps, any military. Obedient to God. When you say, I accept Jesus Christ as my Savior, you have committed yourself. You have taken me out of your life and thrown it away and said, jesus is my focus. [01:46:24] Speaker B: I never thought about that. That's just exactly what the Marine Corps does. Right. Just like the military does. [01:46:29] Speaker A: And it seemed like such a simple concept that while we haven't, as a church, started adapting those procedures so that these kids understand that it's not just a casual commitment to say, oh, yeah, I believe in Jesus. There's more to it than that. There's a learning process. When you go in the Marine Corps, you're taught these things basically, but we never stop training. And it's expectations of what you need to do to maintain yourself as a Marine. Now in the Marines, they always say it's kind of the motto. It's not given to be a Marine. It's earned. Christ is just the opposite. [01:47:08] Speaker B: Yeah. That is. [01:47:09] Speaker A: We don't earn anything. Christ has died for us, and we [01:47:12] Speaker B: don't deserve it either. [01:47:13] Speaker A: Well, we don't deserve that, but we have an obligation to obedient to God, to his commands, and to show him that that means something to us. And I think that's a part of the educational process that we don't emphasize enough. Once someone accepts Christ as their Savior. [01:47:34] Speaker B: Excellent, excellent. [01:47:35] Speaker A: I think we as a church need to be more focused on those things. Look at our programs and see. We don't want to be imposing too much. We don't want to be pushy with the kids. It's time to be pushy. It's time to be disciplined. You've accepted Christ, now you have to follow him. There are certain things that are expected of you. He's given you eternal life. Think about that. [01:48:00] Speaker B: That's a beautiful parallel. So hopefully that's Some of the way that the youth education can refocus, if you will, because I think they many of them, and I'm not intimately involved, but the ones I'm familiar with, it's kind of like get together and have a good time and that's sing some [01:48:18] Speaker A: songs, you know, to play some games. [01:48:19] Speaker B: Yeah, exactly. [01:48:21] Speaker A: Way more serious than that. And that's what we have to do, is make people understand. And that's not just young kids, but other people that accept Christ at a later stage of their life. [01:48:33] Speaker B: Exactly. [01:48:34] Speaker A: You know, you just don't. It's not a casual thing. It's not just going to church that doesn't make you any better. It perhaps will help you to be better. But we got to remember that the Gospel is not something we go to church to learn. It's something that we go away from the church to teach. [01:48:53] Speaker B: Okay. [01:48:53] Speaker A: Yep. [01:48:54] Speaker B: That's wonderful. Well, I want to end up with a story that you related to me, which I think was really fascinating. And that was at the Pentagon. Your battle with having. Was it a Bible study? Tell us about that. [01:49:09] Speaker A: Well, it was always. Anytime I was in command of anything and I could set the rules. And I learned this from one of the good friends of mine who later became a commandant when I was under his command while he was on the Pacific. His name was Chuck Krulak. And Chuck always made available an opportunity each morning to get together before working hours in a way that we could get together, study the Bible and pray. And I just thought that was a fantastic idea. So I put that in my little book of repertoire that when I'm in command, that's what I'm going to do. And so I did that. And while I was at the Pentagon, I was every morning before work, you know, work started normally at 7:30, but at 7:00 clock every morning before hours, no requirements, no invites, no insistent on anybody doing this stuff. This is. If you're on a volition, you're welcome to come to Bible study. And the next thing I know, I'm getting hollered at saying, you can't do that. This is government property and you're trying to intimidate other people. Au contraire, sir, we're not. All we're doing is providing an opportunity outside of working hours for people to express their love for Christ. And they shut me down. They did, they did. And God bless. One of the guys that wasn't even a member of our Bible study that came all the time, he happened to be a member of a Methodist church. It was about two blocks from where our office was there. And as soon as he found out that we got shut down, he went to the church and he. And talked to the pastor. And then we started having our Bible studies in the church just down. [01:51:13] Speaker B: And that was close to the Pentagon then? [01:51:15] Speaker A: Yes. Yeah, well, see, the Pentagon, it's a five sided building, but there are other buildings all around that house people because the Pentagon is not big enough for all these entities. And so they got government buildings all over the. All over the city there. And I was in one of those buildings. It was about. It was a few blocks from the Pentagon. But so anyway, long story short, what I did was I went back to my boss because he called me in and told me I couldn't do it anymore. And I told him, respectfully, sir, that's not true. I went and got all the regulations and showed him that we were in compliance with all the DOD regulations. But somebody had complained. And so somebody complained and said I was forcing, I was intimidating them because I was having this Bible study. [01:52:06] Speaker B: Oh, you hurt their feelings. [01:52:07] Speaker A: I hurt their feelings because it wasn't an inclusive operation. That had nothing to do with what we were doing as a unit. And so after I broke out all the regulations and stuff and showed him that it wasn't true then there was no regulation that prohibited that in that aspect. Then after taking it up the chain of command quite a ways, I had to go all the way to the Secretary of Defense. [01:52:40] Speaker B: Really? Secretary, who was the Secretary of Defense then? Do you remember? Okay, I don't either. He's probably the same one that spoke on your C SPAN video. Bob's on a C SPAN video where he was talking about helping the reservist and they had a top guy there. And I can't remember his name either. So. Donald Rumsfeld. [01:53:01] Speaker A: Donald Rumsfeld. [01:53:02] Speaker B: Donald Rumsfeld. That was the guy that spoke, when you spoke about the Reservist that was on the C SPAN video. Donald Rumsfeld. Okay. [01:53:09] Speaker A: So finally it floats with him fairly closely. He was pretty supportive of our organization. [01:53:14] Speaker B: And so Rumsfeld said it was okay for you to have a Bible study, [01:53:17] Speaker A: or is that right after we went through all the attorneys and attorneys gave them all the information that wasn't illegal. [01:53:24] Speaker B: Good for Donald Rumsfeld. That's great. That's great. [01:53:27] Speaker A: But a few weeks later, the next thing I know, I get intel from the White House that somebody had gone to Office of Personnel Management and tried to get rid of me. [01:53:39] Speaker B: Really? Because of your faith? [01:53:41] Speaker A: Well, because of me. Doing nothing. [01:53:44] Speaker B: Okay. [01:53:44] Speaker A: Being obedient. [01:53:46] Speaker B: Being obedient. Who was president at the time, if I could ask? [01:53:49] Speaker A: President Bush. [01:53:50] Speaker B: Bush. [01:53:51] Speaker A: Bush, too, you know, 40. [01:53:52] Speaker B: Oh, that surprised me, that. Because he was a man of faith, I believe. [01:53:56] Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah. [01:53:57] Speaker B: So that was. [01:53:57] Speaker A: He was the one who appointed me, you know, to the position. Yeah. But so I had. I had top cover over at the White House, and what a joy. [01:54:08] Speaker B: God bless you for doing that, man. It's a rough battle, but it's a battle worth. Worth fighting, and is something better than not doing anything at all, which would have been the easy thing to do, which is, I think, the track that most people would take. [01:54:22] Speaker A: But again, what I was so impressed with was people that weren't even attending to that had gone to bat and just made arrangements for us to continue to do it in a church just down the street, which I thought was great. [01:54:33] Speaker B: That was great. Well, thank you, Bob. This has been a wonderful set of three talks to you. We've been talking to Major General Bobby Hollingsworth, United States Marines, about his life, his work as a fighter pilot, his work in the Pentagon, and what a full life you've led, Bob. [01:54:50] Speaker A: Oh, it's been blessing. And I tell you what, I guess you should always. When you're saying I was major general, I should always say I'm retired, you know, because I don't represent the government. [01:54:58] Speaker B: Oh, okay. [01:54:59] Speaker A: Or anything like that. [01:55:00] Speaker B: I'm sorry. I did not say that. And I meant to say that these [01:55:03] Speaker A: are all my opinions. [01:55:04] Speaker B: Okay. These are all your opinions. By the way, we have a follow up after the podcast as the opinions are belonging to the person who expressed them. So certainly we have that cover. Okay, thank you, Bob. God bless you. Until next time on Mind Matters News, be of good cheer. This has been Mind Matters News with your host, Robert J. [01:55:33] Speaker A: Marks. [01:55:35] Speaker B: Explore more at mindmatters AI. That's mindmatters AI. The opinions expressed on this program are solely those of the speakers. Mind Matters News is produced and copyrighted by the Walter Bradley center for Natural and Artificial Intelligence at Discovery Institute.