Robert Wilkie has served in the United States Navy Reserve, and he is currently in the United States Air Force Reserve, where he holds the rank of Colonel. In the first Trump administration he was the Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness, before taking over the position of Secretary of Veteran Affairs in 2018, which he held until the end of the administration in 2021. Mr Wilkie was in Budapest, Hungary for the 4th Danube Institute – The Heritage Foundation Geopolitical Summit, where he sat down with Hungarian Conservative for an exclusive interview.
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At the panel last night, you complained about how under the Biden administration identity politics and critical race theory had bled into the army in the last three and a half years. Do you think it has affected the efficiency of the army?
Absolutely.
And one more question. Has there been any backlash among the senior leadership of the military or among the enlisted men about this development?
Well, the tradition of the American military is to never go public with complaints, so you certainly don’t hear that. But the effect of diversity, equity, inclusion, politics, and critical race theory has created a division amongst the armed forces of the United States along racial, ethnic, and sexual lines. It’s also destroyed the military ethos by looking at the armed forces as a jobs programme and not a profession.
So what do I mean by that? Under Biden, the United States Army, the Secretary of the Army, the head of the Army, has told the country that she doesn’t want second and third generation soldiers. Well, 79 per cent of the soldiers in the Army come from military families. She doesn’t want that. She says that that’s at war with diversity. Well, the other thing that she has done is that she has destroyed physical fitness standards. If you want to see what the lack of physical fitness standards does on the battlefield, look at what’s happening to Putin’s conscripts, who are just thrown onto the front lines with no military training, no physical fitness training, and they’re dying by the thousands. You can now pass the Biden Army physical fitness test with ten push-ups and going two miles in 25 minutes. The average American 65-year-old can walk a mile in 12 minutes…
When the Secretary of the Army was asked what she was doing, she said, ‘Well, tougher standards are at war with diversity and they impact underrepresented groups’. Well, my response is: Underrepresented groups? You’re going to have overrepresented groups, but dead on the battlefield if this is your standard. So you see where this woke mentality is now playing out in ways that actually put Americans in danger. You can now go to the United States Military Academy, an academy created in 1803 by Thomas Jefferson, when he was president.
West Point.
Yes, West Point. And you can study diversity, and equity inclusion and come out with a degree or a minor degree in those studies. You can substitute military history and tactics for gender studies. Mr Trump, in his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention said that he would do away with all of that. And I expect that he would because our country deserves better, our troops deserve better, and the world needs a strong America.
Would you recommend a young person, let’s say a recent high school graduate, to join the army under these circumstances? And if yes, what would you advise them to do to push back against it?
It’s interesting that you raise that question because in March I participated in a ceremony in Fayeville, North Carolina, where I helped swear in 172 high school students into the military. Now many of these youngsters come from military families.
I knew some of their parents from high school and growing up in that area. And for the first time, I heard the parents saying, ‘We don’t know if our child has made the right decision’. And this is coming from people who represent multiple generations of service men and women. Well, we still want people to join, but we want them to know that if Mr Trump wins, the cavalry is coming.
There is one other thing, and it’s something that you and this country have done. That is you imbue your young people in primary and secondary school with a sense of Hungary’s place in history. We’re sitting at a citadel that represents a thousand years of not only history, but of standing to block oppression. I mean, this was the country that turned back the invasions from Turkey and the Muslim lands and saved European civilization hundreds of years ago. But we need to teach history in our schools, teach our young people that their country is something to be proud of, that it is not an oppressor nation as the left paints it to be. But we’ve also, because of the wokeness, we’ve done away in so many of our schools something as simple as physical education because the left says somebody might not be treated fairly or be left out. Well, as a result of that, only four per cent of American high school students can qualify to pass the basic military physical entrance exam. So there are a lot of things that need to be changed, our culture needs a change in trajectory.
That was a recent controversy about President Trump being invited to the Arlington Cemetery by the families of fallen soldiers. Do you have an opinion that, and on the way the Harris campaign responded, because there was a major backlash to that?
There’s no controversy. The families of those thirteen who died in Afghanistan because of Mr Biden’s incompetence invited Mr Trump. And I’ll say this for your record, there was no soldier in the military who advised him to carry out that operation the way it was carried out. My understanding is that the senior generals said this would not work, it cannot work. You will get people hurt. And that’s exactly what happened. We lost 13 young Americans because of the incompetence of the White House. Now, the families of those 13, who’ve never been mentioned by Ms Harris or by President Biden, requested the Former President of the United States, Mr Trump, to attend. He laid a wreath with family members. It was the political forces within the Pentagon who created that problem because so much of our military structure has been politicized by the left. So it’s fascinating. Trump went to Arlington. Harris went to a sorority meeting. I think that says it all.
And do you believe that the failed withdrawal in Afghanistan kicked off a sort of domino effect that led to the Russian invasion of Ukraine and then maybe even the Hamas attack on Israel?
Absolutely. And you don’t have to take it from a former Trump minister. I think it was the former Prime Minister of Sweden—he is a socialist—who said that the withdrawal from Afghanistan created a cascade of effects that’s led to war in the Middle East and war in Europe because the Biden administration was perceived as weak, the Biden administration was perceived as indecisive. They also saw the Biden administration wrecking the American military budget. We have the smallest military budget since the end of World War II in terms of gross domestic product. And I think the Prime Minister of Sweden was correct, that this created the effect that the tyrants want. They needed this because thus they knew there would be no forceful response from the White House. I mean, the notion that American vessels are attacked in the Gulf of Aden, and there is no sustained response from the Biden administration, is absurd. Now actually, when they do respond, they tell the Houthis we’re coming. So we’re going to hit you at 3:00 in the morning, so there’s not going to be any civilian casualty. I mean, this is what I call faculty lounge lunacy, and it creates the perception of America as a toothless giant.
President Trump has repeatedly talked about the need for European NATO members to contribute more. I don’t know if you’re familiar with the Hungarian defence policy. Do you think the Hungarian government is living up to that standard?
Absolutely. The nations Trump was addressing are the nations you would expect him to address: Germany, France, and Canada. You know, when I was born in the 1960s, Canada had the fourth largest army in NATO and the fourth largest navy. Now most of its ships are icebreakers, and its army is about the size of one of our states’ national guards. Even Great Britain, with its long military history, the combined strength of the British army, the Royal Navy and the Royal Air Force is smaller than 120,000. That’s the size of the United States Marine Corps, which is the smallest of our defence services.
So let me ask you, you have worked with President Trump personally, right?
Yes.
What was it like to meet this historic figure? What was he like in person?
He’s not what the media wants you to believe. He’s very decisive. He has an ability most politicians don’t have, and that is the ability to look at a problem and automatically see through the fog and get to a clear decision. For my department, Veterans Affairs, it was left in shambles by Obama and Biden. Trump gave me incredible authority to fix it. We released 8,000 employees. That’s unheard of in the United States. It’s unheard of in most of the capitals of Western Europe that you would dismiss 8,000 career civil servants. What did Biden do when he got into office? He brought them all back, including 2,000 who were released by me for grievous misconduct. The VA went from a 37 per cent approval rating under Obama and Biden to 91 per cent amongst veterans when Trump was in office.
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