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Fox News TV - The US must reorient the military, GOP lawmaker says  Sen. Tim Sheehy, R-Mont., unpacks the sweeping military transformation under President Donald Trump on 'The Ingraham Angle.

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00:00Accountability is finally coming to the Pentagon and its bloated bureaucracy.

00:05Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced a purge, ordering a minimum 20% reduction

00:10of four stars and flag officers in the active duty component,

00:14as well as a 20% reduction in the National Guard.

00:17We're going to shift resources from bloated headquarters elements to our warfighters.

00:22Now, this is not a slash and burn exercise meant to punish high-ranking officers.

00:26Nothing could be further from the truth.

00:27This has been a deliberative process, working with the Joint Chiefs of Staff with one goal,

00:34maximizing strategic readiness and operational effectiveness.

00:39Here with me to discuss this, Montana Senator and former Navy SEAL Tim Sheehy.

00:43Senator, I can already hear the complaints that Trump is just willy-nilly gutting all these essential personnel,

00:52endangering America.

00:53In war, there's no second place, and we have to be ready to win wars.

00:57And after every military disaster in American history, after the opening phase of the Civil War,

01:01when the Union was getting its butt kicked, to Pearl Harbor.

01:05President Lincoln and President Roosevelt both did a cleanse of our general officer ranks

01:09to, as Secretary Hex has just said, refocus on combat readiness.

01:14This is not an attack on these generals who served decades in uniform.

01:17We thank and honor them for their service, of course.

01:20But we have to reorient our military towards combat with battlefield readiness.

01:24The Navy has 300 admirals and 250 ships.

01:27Well, explain why is that?

01:29Well, normally a ship is commanded by a commander or a captain,

01:32and an admiral will command a flotilla or a squadron of four, five, ten ships at a time.

01:37Now we have ten times more admirals than we need as far as a ship count.

01:41And China builds ships 230 times faster than we do.

01:45So we have a structural challenge in our military-industrial complex,

01:48and that starts with the leadership.

01:50And in any organization, if you want to change it, you have to start at the top.

01:52The CNN military analyst is typical of those who are slamming Hegseth about what he's trying to do here.

02:00Watch this.

02:00I don't see the correlation between reducing the size of the general officer ranks, flag officer ranks,

02:07and increasing the size of the enlisted population.

02:11There's not a lot of real substance to what he's trying to achieve.

02:16I think he's flexing his muscles.

02:19Is the spider right?

02:20Well, so says a two-star general retired, still collecting a general's pension.

02:24Why don't we ask the sergeants and the privates and the captains and the majors,

02:26the people who are on the battlefield paying the price for poor decisions back home.

02:31And I can promise you when Afghanistan collapsed and folks like me and many of my friends,

02:35including my wife, who served on the ground in Afghanistan,

02:38we were pretty damn pissed off about the decisions made at upper echelons

02:41that led to a complete and utter disaster in Afghanistan

02:44that set off a domino effect around the world that we're now still seeing in Israel and Ukraine.

02:49So the simple fact is accountability starts at the top.

02:52There's never going to be performance in our leadership ranks without accountability.

02:55And what Secretary Hegsson and the president have directed

02:58is our military needs to refocus on battlefield effectiveness.

03:01We need to streamline our weapons systems and acquisition processes

03:04to focus on lethality, and that starts with the generals.

03:07That, to me, is just common sense.

03:09Trump says this isn't political. It's common sense.

03:11Great to see you, Senator. Thank you so much.

Fox News TV - The US must reorient the military, GOP lawmaker says

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