United States Department of Defense

That's not where you went if you were a hard-charging career man or woman.

Uh, after Nine Eleven, though, all that switched on a dime, and so you had a complete reshuffling of talent inside the Department of Defense because all the folks who were assigned to work on the Middle East, uh, they were not the winners in their particular organization.

That's why they got that assignment.

It's the way bureaucratic politics works.

And alongside these larger wars as we saw in Afghanistan and Iraq, Syria, uh, we had a explosion in where the special operations personnel were being deployed.

There's a hundred and ninety-five countries in the world, and we were conducting special operations in almost a hundred and fifty of them during the Global War on Terror with very little oversight, not independently authorized by Congress.

And this institutionalized the idea that the executive branch and the Department of Defense could operate independently with extremely little oversight by, from anybody.

And let's talk about why that is.

In five months you go to 130,000.

20 years Intel Department of Defense, right? I'm like, yeah, I, I, I don't-

[laughs]

How many spooks in the alt media space...

The agency itself is another direct piece of the security structure America built after 9-11 to keep criminals from other countries out and to keep Americans safe.

Now, for most Americans today, the Department of Homeland Security sounds as permanent as the Department of State, right, or the Department of Defense, right? But it isn't.

It exists only because of September 11.

Before those attacks, there was no cabinet department whose central mission was protecting the American homeland from terrorism and coordinating many of these domestic security responsibilities in one place.

Commander came with several rumble rants.

September 10, 2001, DOD Donald Rumsfeld, Department of Defense, announced they lost $2 trillion.

Next day, all the paperwork and personnel in the Pentagon offices performing the audit to find $2 trillion were blown up on 9-11.

In the days after the 9-11 attack, DOD Donald Rumsfeld crafted the campaign against Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, even though the 9-11 terrorists allegedly came from Saudi Arabia.

These were just, you know, these were license plate readers for lack of a better word.

The Department of Defense released the short two angle security video sequence in May 2006 following a freedom of, and it took a FOIA request to get them to give us that.

Request by judicial watch, which showed only a brief blurry glimpse of the aircraft during impact.

Why? Why is there so little footage of the Pentagon and a plane hitting it? I don't think that's an unreasonable question.

And so, you know, we've seen some, you know, some important transitions over the last decade where groups like, I mentioned the Defense Innovation Unit or DIU, you know, really pioneered the use of what's called other transaction agreements, so OTAs, in the use of defense spending.

These have been previously used by NASA, but were not something that there was a lot of authority for in the Department of Defense or a lot of knowledge in how to use them.

These contracts make it much easier to switch a company across that gulf from research and development to procurement dollars.

We've also had the CBER reauthorization in the last year, or the Small Business Innovation Research Program, which has been around since the early 1980s.

And that's a big deal.

And then we've got, I think, a more muscular use, certainly in the last year, of the Title III of the Defense Production Act, which is really one of the only mechanisms that the department has to put in place kind of multi-year, if you build it, we will buy it type contracts with the private sector outside of congressional authorities for multi-year contracts or appropriations.

And so today, the Department of Defense can say, We have a DPA budget and we can give a $50 million award to a company for a product that may be ready in 12 months, it may be ready in 24 months, it may be ready in three years, but we're giving them a $50 million award and they could use that award to go off and raise funds to get to the point where they can deliver it.

Now, that's a little bit small for getting venture capital and other private investors excited, but the caps on the DPA haven't been inflation adjusted since the early 1990s.

There was no one to save anyone.

Our guys, these, the, the men that were with me did things, you know, the, the DOD didn't want to enter with us because there was no seesaw.

We'll go anyway.

We did missions, you know, they wouldn't do missions without seesaw.

That's the Twin Towers too, but look at what was in 7.

Export-Import Bank, IRS, U.S. Secret Service, Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, Defense Department, Securities Exchange Commission, and the CIA, but it was classified, but it came out it was a giant CIA base.

They have like eight floors or something.

So, oh, yeah, a big CIA building.

Well, these people in the United States military, I just got done talking about Britain.

Well, I'm talking about here in the good old U.S. of A., our Department of Defense became woke.

People were pushing this internally.

I saw in 2006 when we started going into Afghanistan in Marine Special Operations, they had this guy, Greg Wartensen.