This is John Batchel, a conversation with my colleague, Bradley Bowman of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies,

about the challenges for the U.S. military and the budget from Congress, from the executive, from the American people.

What needs to be done is to fully fund the DoD.

If you want peace, you prepare for war and there are threats east and west.

In addition, Brad comments on unhappy remarks made by partisan and uninformed people about the military being trendy, woke.

Brad has blunt words about that association.

Brad Bowman, Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, fund the military and respect its hard work.

More of this later.

John, there's been, as many of your listeners will know,

there's been some recruiting challenges in recent years,

including for the U.S. Army.

There are anyone who's looked at this for more than a minute or two

knows that there's lots of reasons

why one typically has recruiting challenges.

It's in time to the economy and other factors.

There have been some policies by the Biden administration that we can broadly label in the

DEI lane that I would find troubling, but these are political appointees. And I think those on the

right should be real careful before they slander the U.S. military as woke.

I'm with H.R. McMaster on this one. The U.S. military is not woke.

The U.S. military is the greatest fighting force in human history, and we should be careful

with slanding a fighting force when we want our best citizens to join it and to stay in it.

And if you start calling it something that's not, you're going to hurt the military and you're going to hurt our national security.

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