Posted on 01/05/2011 12:10:25 PM PST by pissant
Folks, please welcome back former Congressman Duncan L. Hunter to Free Republic. It has been three years since he last joined us for a live interview. Back then, he was in the midst of vying for the GOP nomination for the presidency. The GOP instead turned to a moderate in 2008, and as easily predicted, the Marxist is now in the Oval Office .
Though he is not contemplating another run right now, at just 62 years of age, and being of a restless nature when it comes to promoting conservatism, he is not sitting quietly in retirement either. Aside from his efforts to get new, conservative blood into to the 2010 Congress, Hunter has lately been spending time taking some wounded Marines out hunting, raising money for their cause, and offering advice to the folks back in Washington on how to duplicate the successes of the Iraq War in Afghanistan.
He has also written an excellent new book on the Iraq War that both explains how America was victorious, and that places the spotlight on the warriors who did the heavy lifting. The book is seen here below, and today’s interview will focus to some degree on the book.
But Mr. Hunter is ready and willing to stay for an hour or so and answer your follow up questions. (The initial Q&A was conducted yesterday, 1/4/11, and is posted below as the thread body).
Without further adieu, the interview begins….
AJM: Hello Congressman. Happy New Years.
DH: Well Happy New Year to you and your family.
AJM: Thanks. Well, you ready to go live on FreeRepublic?
DH: Sure. How many folks see the site?
AJM: I’m not sure, but I do know it’s the largest conservative ‘forum’ in the country and one of the most popular conservative websites overall, as well. Not sure of the numbers, but I seem to recall that it is in the top 10 of websites. Drudge is number 1, I think. But Drudge is mainly an aggregator of news, that points you off to other websites. FR not only allows folks to post the headlines from around the world, but its main function is to allow folks to argue about them. It’s a rough and tumble place. As you know, Jim Robinson is the proprietor. He’s an old Vet, Navy I think, who started it up during the middle Clinton years as a place for conservatives to bitch and moan and to become active. It’s since grown to the largest conservative forum on the web.
DH: That’s great.
AJM: And the hot topic of the day (1/4) is that Sarah Palin, on her Twitter website, reposted someone else’s opinion - without commenting on it – she just reposted it on her own site, that basically has been construed to be in favor of the Don’t Ask Don’t Tell repeal.
DH: Really?
AJM: Yeah, it’s one of the hot issues of the day.
DH: What a turkey. But the question is: are you’re saying this was a mistake in putting that up, or are you saying it was purposeful?
AJM: If it’s a mistake, I’m sure we’ll get some clarification soon.
DH: This is kind of like people who put things into their speech – they don’t want to directly say I’m for the Don’t Ask Don’t Tell repeal – so they put in “here’s what George Washington said about it”, Right? Then they quote somebody as a deflective way of asserting their own position.
AJM: What it’s called in modern internet parlance is re-tweeting. (laughs).
DH: Could it have been put up by mistake?
AJM: Well, someone has to physically go grab that and post it into your own account. The quote that she put up was from a friend, a gal named Tammy Bruce. Tammy is a talk show host and while she’s mostly conservative, she’s also an out of the closet lesbian who has always been against DADT.
DH: Yeah. On the Don’t Ask Don’t Tell debate, the strongest statements I saw came from McCain. McCain said that “it would fundamentally damage the military for a long time”, or words to that effect. That was one of the few strong statements made about it in the Senate. All these other guys talked about how it was the “wrong time”, which acquiesces to the challenge. It’s like ceding the moral ground to the other side, which is a HUGE mistake in any debate. It especially shows that you really don’t believe in your cause.
Don’t Ask Don’t Tell has nothing to do with timing. It has everything to do with values.
AJM: Exactly. Last year, when Palin was on Chris Wallace’s show on Fox, Fox News Sunday, he asked her about that, because there had been a little bit of bubbling up of the issue back then. The essence of her quote was ‘no, not right now, we have other more important things to take care of now’.
DH: It’s the old timing argument. The timing argument basically cedes three quarters of the battlefield to the other side. It’s implicitly agreed that you’re going to do it. The question then just becomes the date.
AJM: Exactly. Maybe that date has arrived, based on the reposting of Tammy Bruce’s position. She may get enough blowback that she’ll run away from it again, we’ll see.
DH: My question is this. We all know these websites are run by staff guys, right? So the question really is, is that Sarah Palin’s position, or did she have some activist staff person who thought that that would be a nice one to put up?
AJM: If she comes out and says that’s the case, then all is well. But her answer last year was still a ‘timing one’. Especially if she runs, she’ll be forced to address the issue.
DH: That’s right.
AJM: Let me get a question in on your book. What lessons from your book on Iraq would you like see applied to the current ‘hot war’ in Afghanistan?
DH: On a practical level, the book describes the victories, the winning strategies from a couple of our brilliant tacticians in the US Marine Corps and the US Army, strategies that were exercised in Iraq successfully. And one of the best leaders in the Marine Corps is Colonel JD Alford. He tamed what is known as the ‘wild west’ of Anbar Province. That is the large area bordering Syria where massive smuggling of terrorists and weaponry took place during 2004, 2005 and 2006.
So JD Alford is a guy, what you would call an ‘old hand’ in the Marine Corps. And a lot of the book is dedicated to old hands; that is Army and Marine Corps personnel who did 2, 3, 4 or more tours in Afghanistan or Iraq. In undertaking those multiple tours, they learned a lot of things about counterinsurgencies, especially. And JD Alford commanded the 3rd Battalion, 6th Marines in Afghanistan before he came to Iraq. He learned the art of splitting the population away from the insurgency, which is the key to a successful counterinsurgency campaign.
He brought that capability to Iraq. I’ll give you just a couple of points that JD Alford made that are well laid out in my book, that I think troop leaders in Afghanistan would be well advised to heed. One was that he had a strategy of putting together a local fighting force. Part of a counterinsurgency is building a local fighting force that can act as a counterbalance to the insurgents. JD Alford had a motto which he called “lead from behind”. And that means when he was putting together a local government and a force strong enough to hold off the insurgents – a local police force, helping to put together the units for a local militia – he would pull back into the background and let local leaders rise to positions of prominence. He called that “leading from behind”. And in western Anbar Province, he would sit in the back of these meetings with the tribes, which had often been fighting each other, who would get together and decide that they’d fight the insurgents and Al Qaeda. And the only requirement that JD Alford had made, was that all the tribes be present before the meetings began. But he always sat behind the mayor, or behind the particular militia commander, or the brigade commander form the 1st Iraqi Division, and he let them rise to the fore and assert themselves.
And I think that is a problem that Americans have in Afghanistan and had in Iraq. That is, Americans like to lead. Every American infantry commander is assertive, he’s got leadership qualities; that’s why he’s in the position he is in. And they all have a natural desire to take over and command the operation. But what Alford realized, as well as some of the other counterinsurgency strategists, was that you have to leave a native force behind capable of holding off the terrorists by themselves after the Americans leave. So the book describes JD Alford’s leading from behind. He was able to stand up a native force that could hold off the insurgents long after the Marines were gone. That is what we have to do in these remote villages in Afghanistan.
So there are a lot of lessons there from guys like JD Alford, Lt. Col Bill Jurney, who tamed Ramadi, and a number of great Army leaders who did the same thing in the Diyala River Valley, up north of Baghdad. So there are certainly lessons for the folks who are going to lead troops in Afghanistan in this book about Iraq.
AJM: That’s excellent. Now you just have got to get everyone to read it.
DH: There it is.
AJM: You mentioned earlier the lame duck session and the START treaty which was passed. Unfortunately, in the Senate, about half the GOP senators went along for the ride. What is your take on Obama’s new START?
DH: I think the new START is a reflection of political expediency on the part of the Obama Administration, which from my perspective, is simply punching the ticket on having some kind of an arms control deal halfway through the administration that they’ll be able to point to in the next election period.
The fatal defect of the START draw-downs is this. There are of couple of countries which weren’t included, the most important of which is communist China, which has been left totally uninhibited with respect to its production of nuclear weapons.
China is acquiring a defense industrial base which will dwarf that of the old Soviet Union. And they are now producing high end nuclear weapons. They have a few of them right now targeted on American cities. But they have the capacity to build lots of them, very quickly. And one example of their ability to produce quickly is the fact that their production program right now for submarines is out-producing American submarines by more than 3 to 1. They have the same capability with respect to missiles. They are producing about 100 medium and short range missiles per year, but they are also fielding this new road-mobile nuclear tipped missile which will have a big reach, able to reach the United States. And it has a large degree of survivability based on its mobility.
So as the US moves into further draw-downs on its nuclear systems, the real threat on the horizon, that is the nuclear program of communist China is totally unrestricted. So this is a movement in exactly the wrong direction from my perspective.
You also have, obviously, North Korea acquiring a modest nuclear capability and at some point they will marry that capability with their ongoing missile program.
AJM: They continue to export them too.
DH: Yeah. And you’ll have Iran developing some kind of a nuclear capability in the not too distant future. And Iran also has a delivery program, a missile program, which will result ultimately in having a deliverable nuclear package which will reach a number of American allies, if not the United States itself.
So while North Korea, Iran, and most importantly, China, remain totally unrestricted by this treaty, we are continuing to unilaterally draw down, with Russia, America’s nuclear stockpiles. You know, one of the arguments made by liberals in the “old days” - in the 1980s when we were trying to modernize our nuclear weapons, the strategic TRIAD – one argument from the liberals was, “We already have enough weapons to kill every Russian soldier 10 times over”. And our answer back was that we didn’t want to have to kill any of them! And the way you kept form having to do that is by maintaining an overwhelming counterstrike capability. So the guys that threw the first rock, in this case the Soviet Union, could count on being obliterated by the return volley. As a result of having an overwhelming counterstrike capability, the United States never had to kill any of them with nuclear weapons. And that is the point: To deter would be adversaries from throwing that first rock.
The idea of whittling our systems down to the point where one of the new players in the nuclear game may feel that they can surge production and come close to the United States’ arsenal in terms of destructive capability, that’s not a scenario that will lead to a stable world for the next 10 to 20 to 30 years.
The United States needs to keep an overwhelming ability to deter an enemy strike on America or our allies. And to this date, because we don’t have the defensive capabilities that can handle a fairly substantial strike, our deterrence is manifested in our nuclear tipped systems atop our TRAID – our bombers, our ICBMs, and our submarines.
So one of the main defects of the Obama package is that it left out the real player over the next 10 to 30 years, and that is communist China.
AJM: And one more defect was what some of the conservatives, and I think you were one of them, were saying that we are at least tacitly giving up our missile defenses in exchange for this agreement with Russia. Obama came out and said “no, no, no, we aren’t doing that”. Immediately thereafter, Medvedev and Putin both said ‘that if America continues with their defensive systems, we have the right to withdraw from this treaty’. So something’s not right here.
DH: Yeah. I think you are right in the sense that Russia thinks they extracted a de facto concession on missile defense from the Obama Administration. The first concession was our agreement not to put the systems in eastern Europe that could handle strikes from Iran on the European community. Obama agreed not to do that. His first statement was, “we are still looking at that”. And that was, for practical purposes, the opening of the door, or the first step backwards on those systems. And a few months later, Gates confirmed they would not be going in.
So it’s interesting. Reagan could back down the USSR on missile defenses when he used the word “Nyet”, when Gorbachev tried to include the closure of the missile defense program in the United States as a precondition for any Soviet/US reductions. Reagan closed the door on the Soviets demanding concessions with respect to defensive system. Obama has foolishly re-opened the door and is in the process of conceding in a de facto fashion an aggressive missile defense system that is based on the premise that we have the right to stop incoming ballistic missiles which are targeted on our cities, our troops and our allies.
I am watching the House now. It seems Repeal of Obama Care is a given. Are you all going to wait for the Senate and President to reject the Repeal, or will you begin immediately to defund and remove provisions?
Thank you...and you as well. Notice how old AJM wouldn’t let me in on the calls anymore. ;*)
;-/
Welcome Congressman Hunter!
A grateful nation salutes you for your service. And even though I am “Live in Fame or go down in flame” I wish you a hearty “Semper Fidelis” and throw in a “HOO-RAH” for good measure!
My question for you is this....
Who would you like to see run for and/or win the GOP nomination in 2012, and who do you see as the most likely winner?
Thanks, Jim, and speaking of nukes it appears that the trademark of the Obama administration will be the emergence of Iran and North Korea as members of the nuclear group with some capability to deliver the payloads per their ongoing missile programs
Mr. Hunter, what do you think the priorities should be for the current House Armed Services Committee?
Welcome
Good afternoon Congressman Hunter.
The new members of the House seem to show some promise. However, they are limited in what they can accomplish, as the democrats still control the Senate and the executive branch.
1) What should we expect them to accomplish?
2) What can they do to stretch their accomplishments beyond this expectation?
Thanks in advance for your reply
The discussion was about the hypocrisy over US Navy Capt's Honors of the Enterprise:
Again, glad to have you back with us Congressman.
Yes it was. Hope he answers. SecDef at the VERY least.
You have spoken before about the security implications of our trade deficit with China. Of course a lot of our huge debt is also owed to China. What do you think are the most important strategies for restoring some balance to this situation and improving the fiscal and security status of our country in the long run?
I know at least one Republican who will fight for spending cuts of at least that magnitude...his name is Duncan D. Hunter...Seriously, the Republicans have gotten the message on budget cuts. The problem they haven’t addressed is the massive exodus of the U.S. industrial base to China.
I know at least one Republican who will fight for spending cuts of at least that magnitude...his name is Duncan D. Hunter...Seriously, the Republicans have gotten the message on budget cuts. The problem they haven’t addressed is the massive exodus of the U.S. industrial base to China.
I know at least one Republican who will fight for spending cuts of at least that magnitude...his name is Duncan D. Hunter...Seriously, the Republicans have gotten the message on budget cuts. The problem they haven’t addressed is the massive exodus of the U.S. industrial base to China.
Congressman...we need to cut taxes, cut spending...small businesses are scared to hire people because they have NO IDEA what rules and regulations they are going to be subject to in the coming years...we need permanent tax cuts and incentives for growth, and we need it NOW. I am not a small business man, but just another American who recognizes what we need to jump-start the economy.
Welcome Congressman!
Good afternoon Congressman Hunter.
The new members of the House seem to show some promise. However, they are limited in what they can accomplish, as the democrats still control the Senate and the executive branch.
1) What should we expect them to accomplish?
2) What can they do to stretch their accomplishments beyond this expectation?
Thanks in advance for your reply
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