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When genocide has been carried out in this country almost with impunity and when it is near to completion,

people talk about intervention. You don't get freedom peacefully. Freedom is never safeguarded peacefully. Anyone who is depriving you of freedom isn't deserving of a peaceful approach.

Hello and welcome to angry planet.

I'm Matthew Gull.

It's a weird time for the U.S. military, with endless small-scale wars,

veterans joining the insurrection at the capital, right-winged

extremism in the ranks, and tens of thousands of troops refusing the COVID vaccine.

So, time for a status check. To help us understand what's going on, we have Megan Myers, who is the Pentagon Bureau Chief for Military Times. Thank you so much for joining us.

Can we start with the biggest most basic question? In your view, what's the state of the military's

readiness? That's a really good question. So that will all depend on each service.

Each service does that in-house.

My biggest experience is in writing about the Army.

And in the past half decade or so,

the Army made a big push to fix its readiness after all of these years of conflict.

And the way they measure that is by their brigade combat teams and how many of them are ready to deploy at any given time.

And several years ago, there were only a third of them who were

trained up and ready to go and had all their formations filled had enough people and

that was a problem so they spent a few years working on that, making sure that everybody was ready to deploy

individually as well as a group. And they got that up to about two-thirds, which is a much more comfortable

level for them. Of course, if you ask a Pentagon official, if you ask an Army Air Force,

...