Wanted them home instead of suffering for years. Lieutenant colonel Daniel Davis is a senior fellow and military expert thanks so much for joining us. So how is it that the president, who has done more to withdraw american troops from war zones, is the guy who hates the troops? You have to look at everything in context in context from the very beginning, going all the way back to the twenty sixteen campaign. President Trump has been saying: he wants no more stupid wars, no more regime change wars and he has been on that from the very first few months he has been in office. He went about trying to say: why do we need any troops in Afghanistan lets get the troops out of Afghanistan that has been covered many places, something that started right then and has gone all the way through. He was immediately

pushed back by his most senior advisors, whether its generals and civilian people every one and established in Washington. As you said, both Republican and Democrat pushed back on that and President Trump said im going to defer to the professionals at this time. Now that you see after year after year after year of the same thing, everyone resisting any attempt to get out of anywhere even know there is no national security threat to the United States. Hes saying forget it on the commander in chief and heres, what we are going to do. We are going to reduce the troops in Germany, reduce the troops in Iraq and reduce the troops in Afghanistan. He is in the right here. His instincts have been proven right and as someone who was fought on the ground twice in both Iraq and Afghanistan, I can tell you he is dead spot on the numbers on the

number of senior Pentagon brass, who transition seamlessly into the defense industry are shocking. I know some of them are good patriotic people. There is also corruption, and the system gives the appearance of corruption and shakes the countrys faith in its military leadership. Why is this allowed? Because it is an institutional morass. Every colonel wants to be a general in and once there genera want to be a two star general. It is baked into the calculation that you cant go against the status quo, and if you want to be the next commander, you want to get command. You have to get a war to fight in you have to have a place to deploy to. That is how you get moved up the chain, the system predicates, that it definitely is a.