War Secretary Pete Hegseth called a surprise meeting with top generals and President Trump at Quantico. Glenn Beck’s head researcher, former Marine Jason Buttrill, watched the entire event and was blown away. He joins to explain why “this wasn’t just a speech. This was a complete realignment of the way the military has been run for over a decade.”
Transcript
Below is a rush transcript that may contain errors
GLENN: Jason Buttrill joins us.
I asked Jason earlier today, to watch the Pete Hegseth -- I don't know. Meeting or speech. Front of all of the military leaders.
I think he brought them in, to show them how deadly serious the changes at the Pentagon are -- are going to be.
They -- you know, changed them from the Department of Defense, to the Department of War. To show that we are a war machine. That is our job. To break things and kill people. We don't want to. But when we have to, that's when we have to be the best in the world at. And when I was watching this, it was so full of common sense and things that I -- I would think that if I were a soldier, I would have wanted to hear a long time ago. In fact, he said, you know, this is not the Pentagon that you dreamt about serving in. When you were young.
You didn't join the army to do this.
He said, we're getting back to what it really is.
And I thought it was really powerful. It seemed really important. But I only saw bits and pieces. Jason just watched the entire thing.
Jason Buttrill joins me now. What are your thoughts, Jason?
JASON: Wow. Glenn, I did not understand the reason for just doing this on a Zoom call. I didn't see the point of really bringing them all in, until I saw this.
Holy crap. The message is clear.
I mean, it is very clear, that American military power is back. It's lethal.
It's deadly.
It's every single reason why men and women put on the uniform. And go to defend their country.
I haven't seen a military speech like that, outside of a movie. Or --
GLENN: You know, it's so funny. I saw -- because he was standing in front of a giant flag. And the last time I saw this, it was done with somebody in the uniform. He wasn't in the uniform. Was from the movie Patton. And it kind of felt like that. Kind of felt like one of those that you're like, yes!
You know, but the audience was very quiet. I don't know how they related to him, but that's how you felt too?
JASON: Yeah. There was one time when I heard a few people cheering in the crowd.
I guarantee you, these are not guys that are supposed to cheer in situations like that. But all of them.
Okay. I don't want to say all of them.
Probably 99 percent of them were going insane. They wanted a mosh pit.
And they wanted to crowd surf.
That's how excited they are.
I guarantee you, that's how they felt.
GLENN: What was it, that he said, that would cause the military leaders to do that?
JASON: Oh, man. Let's start off with.
This wasn't just a speech. This was a complete realignment of the way the military has been ran over, I would say, over a decade. A complete realignment. Yeah. Longer than that.
We talked about it yesterday, on some of the things we thought they would talk about. They actually combined with his speech. And the president's speech. They actually covered every single thing that we talked about yesterday.
But Hegseth's portion was just the most exciting to me.
Because now they're talking about doing away with all the DEI crap, all the stuff they were focused on. They're switching completely to without lethality and being a deadly, fighting military force. And we just haven't heard that. It's been dressed up in politically correct garbage.
All the politically correct garbage is getting tossed out the window. But not only that, they're focusing on change. And how to, as Bruce Lee said, to be like water. With the direction of how defense tactics. And, you know, how the -- the way a modern defensive capability is going.
That's the direction we're going. He said, he will be making additional speeches that are going to cover infrastructure, supply chain, changes.
I mean, this is music to our ears.
Everything we need to do to harden down in case an actual huge conflict breaks out.
We will be ready for.
And I guarantee you, with this Department of War.
With this secretary of war. And with this president, we will be ready.
It might take a couple of years to fix the damage.
But now, not only we. But all the military leaders that have been frustrated for over a decade, now they can feel confident in where we're going.
And this is just amazing, Glenn.
It's absolutely amazing.
GLENN: To me, this makes total sense. And is in line with everything Donald Trump says he's doing.
Remember, the world has we know it, was set up at Bretton Woods.
It was our financial.
Everything, after World War II, everything was decided on how we were going to behave economically, and militarily.
In 1962, I think it was, a Carl -- Carl Quimby.
I can't remember his last name. But he was a Harvard professor.
And he wrote tragedy and hope.
And he was an insider. And he had been advising presidents. You know, from -- from Truman, all the way up to Nixon.
But in 1962, he was banned and everybody looked the other way.
Because he wrote this book. And he said, look, I've been part of this.
And I'm so excited. We're going to get rid of war.
Because we have now tied our economic system so tightly together. That we will only have police actions. There will never be an all-out war.
We'll use economic sanctions. And both sides will pay a price, and there won't be any of these big, big changes any more.
And he was right!
That is exactly what happened.
And so the changes that Donald Trump is making, he's going back, to the Bretton Woods stuff.
And he's saying, look, that was for that era.
That doesn't work anymore.
And it hasn't worked for years. You know, when you look at Carl Quimby.
I can't remember his last name, sorry.
But when you look at what he wrote, that was basically putting the State Department, as the boss of the Department of Defense.
They would do work. The Department of Defense and the soldiers would start doing work to democratize the world. And bring peace and everything else.
It was a total flip. And in the little that I heard Hegseth do today.
It sounds to me, that this is the next massive step, in what Donald Trump is going to be remembered for. People don't understand it yet.
He is resetting the entire structure of the world.
Completely redoing it. And he's doing it, not just, you know, with our foreign policy. He's now doing it, inside our own government. And he's making those changes in the Department of War, to say, look, this is what we do. This is the tool that you are.
You kill people, and break things.
If I wanted to have peace. I'm going to go someplace else.
If somebody wants to have war with us, we will kill them quickly. And we'll say, it wasn't going on for 20 years. It will last 18 months. And it's over. And it will be decisive.
That's a whole change to the entire global system.
It's why they hate him so much at the United Nations. I'm convinced of it.
JASON: Yeah. What you're talking about was echoed by geopolitical analysts all over the world.
I think his name was Francis Fukushima. Who wrote, what was it?
The End of History. Talked about that as we're done. All war is over, and now it's just economic.
Just like you said, kind of putting the State Department and other organizations that are in charge of the Department of Defense.
One of the crazy things, one of his students, Samuel Huntington, wrote a -- kind of like a rebuke of that. And said, he wrote a clash of civilizations, which basically said, no, no, no, no.
We need to be very careful. Because future wars will be civilizational.
GLENN: Which is what we're headed for.
GLENN: Exactly what he predicted is what we're headed for. Clash of civilizations. Look for Europe. Look for the United States right now.
Look at how war is being waged on us. And we're not even concentrated on it, and the president pretty much addressed that, as you pointed out.
Where he was like, for far too long, we've been focused on providing trillions of dollars, focusing on places like Somalia, or places like that. He actually called a couple of countries out. Said, we shouldn't be out and doing some of these things.
He said, we need to look at you are on own hemisphere.
He said, this is something that we pointed out yesterday. That we should mention.
He did. The president did.
This is a complete different realignment of what the threats are against the United States and addressing them and being prepared to combat them. And I tell you, I still got goose bumps from the entire thing.
I now see why they decided to call the men and do that.
Not only is the military on notice.
I think the military is relieved. But now our enemies are on notice.
It was kind of funny, the secretary of war. Pete Hegseth.
He actually turned to the camera and addressed our enemies. And he said to our enemies. And he said the acronym. FAFO, and then that's when everyone -- that was the point where a few people started cheering. And he goes, "If you need help with translating that, just ask a few of your enlisted guys." But I was like, "Yeah. It's on. It's on."
GLENN: The President also said yesterday, that they're going to be looking at new technology.
Did they talk at all about new technology?
JASON: So vaguely, they talked about new directions, that they need to be going in.
They did -- he was very vague with it. He also mentioned another follow-on speech. On some of the things they will be focused on.
That's definitely part of it. That was part of it. I think we will be getting more details on it. Not only new technology. But how we'll manufacture them. And how we're going to supply manufacturing entities within the United States. And it's all going to be. It sounds like, homegrown.
So that we're not reliant on other countries. They included everything in this speech, Glenn. It was amazing.
GLENN: I mean, I'm not a military guy. But I have to tell you, when I heard stuff like that, I'm like, finally. Finally somebody is -- because we all know the answers.
We really do. We know the answers to most of these problems.
You want to fix the economy, stop spending so much money!
Get your budget under control. How do we do that?
It's not that hard. You can get ten citizens, pulled randomly. And you can pull them out, as long as they're not college professors.
Just pull them out of their jobs. And say, hey. This or that. This or that.
And you could slash so much.
Nobody is going to say, they want sex changes for frogs studied in Africa.
Nobody is going to say that. And it's all such common sense. And it's so nice to see common sense play a role.
Because it hasn't in a very, very long time. Thanks, Jason. I appreciate it. By the way, tomorrow, I will talk a little bit about digital ID.
And I want to take you to India, on digital ID, and show you what happened there.
I mean, this is a real threat to America.
And to freedom! All over the world. China already has it. And we know what that is.
Now, it's coming to the west. And it already came to -- what are the other countries. China. Not Japan. Australia.
JASON: Switzerland, just voted on it.
Australia, South Korea.
GLENN: Yeah. It's -- it's really bad.
It's really bad.
And, again, it's not about anything other than complete control. And we'll show you all about that, on tomorrow's broadcast.
Jason, thank you so much.
JASON: You bet.