Col. Macgregor Warns Multiple Wars Will Bankrupt America

Col. Douglas Macgregor says the Washington event with President Trump and the secretary of war looked less like a strategy briefing and more like a pep rally. He expected concrete changes—command realignments, readiness plans, the rationale for cuts or consolidations—and heard slogans instead. If America truly had “the strongest, most lethal, most prepared military,” he asks, why convene the nation’s senior officers to declare it rather than explain what’s broken and how to fix it (03:37, 05:04).

On substance, he points to basics: aircraft with poor readiness, a Navy struggling to field forces, and a headquarters culture that inherits problems it didn’t create yet is told to “do more with less.” Real military change, he argues, takes a decade or more; celebrating “investments” from a prior term won’t alter today’s readiness shortfalls and equipment issues. Pep-rally praise without a concrete plan won’t fix those problems (07:10, 04:40).

Macgregor is equally blunt about Europe. He disputes sweeping claims of Russian culpability for every cyber or sabotage scare; most allegations, he says, don’t withstand scrutiny. The larger political dynamic, in his telling, is a set of leaders who tied themselves to the war and now fear the domestic reckoning that a negotiated peace would bring—de-industrialization and high energy costs they helped create (17:16).