and i had great soldiers, airmen, and marines working for me. you have to do two things. you have to understand how the missions unfold, but two, you have to trust the troops to do the job. what do you do when things go wrong? well, you have a plan b, c, and d. when the helicopter went down in the compound, the reason i wasn t overly concerned, one i was able to hear the radio traffic going on so i knew quickly the guys were okay. we had a plan b. we knew the potential for the held continue tore go down was always there. we thought that would occur by fire. but we had another helicopter standing by to help out. so, all of our missions we say in the military no plan survives first contact with the enemy. every military planner, every officer and nco understanding that. you ve got to have a back up plan and be ready to execute it. how do you teach courage? from somebody who looks from the
economic and diplomatic sanctions over the long time with a lot of allies in the world. right now we re not doing that. i think that s a strong weapon we re not using at this point. secondly, if we re going to involve ourselves in syria, there needs to be an end goal. what is it? is it the removal of asaad? what replaces asaad? what kind of government is going to be there? and are we going to occupy it to stabilize it? these are the things i don t think the american public wants to do. but if you re going to even consider this, you need to come and talk to congress. this is why we are authorized to do this under congress to actually be the initiators of war. at the pentagon this morning a top military planner general said the u.s. goal in syria to eliminate isis. what s not what he called regime change meaning get rid of bashar al assad, the dictator there. what s your reaction to that? well, that s the case, then you should come back to congress. you re attacking asaad which has n
other military planner would tell you that could lead to the death of half a million koreans and within a week. here s a man who calmed for the preemptive bombing of iran and still claims all these years later his role ginning up support for the iraq war was the right thing, that, in fact, the iraq war was a worthy cause and actually the only mistake that was ever made in that war are the greatest mistake was when barack obama brought the troops home. this is a man who seems to have a default switch that says use the military, go to war whenever possible. joe, i think he s the rare person in washington and around the world that hasn t learned anything from the experience of the iraq war certainly our military has, most policy makers have.
exercise so many of the foreign specialists we need for intelligence operations, the bulk of them come from our reserve forces. this is really compounding the readiness crisis. what a military planner like general mattis needs or secretary mattis needs more than anything else is predictability. he needs that when when s trying to put together when he s trying to put together the military operations for the future of this country. eric: your message bluntly to the politicians? go back to the constitution of this country. it is all about providing the common defense of the american people. let s take care of our military. let s get together and send the right message to friend and foe alike all over the world. eric: whether or not you blame the trump shutdown as we see there live with senator menendez from new jersey or the schumer shutdown, the call from van hipp from those people in washington to get their acts together. thank you. thank you. arthel: meanwhile vice president penc
we also have sea-based options, right. we have submarines, we have aircraft carriers, we have destroyers. all of those can be used for cruise missile attacks. i think the military has been thinking about north korea for a long time. they have plans off the shelf and we have got a variety of tools. no one wants to go to that option, of course, but as we see the military option being discussed, no doubt u.s. military planners are refreshing those plans as well as dusting off some of the old plans that they have seen. and what do we have to worry about from the north koreans in terms of retaliation in. the most immediate and concerning is obviously their conventional attacks on south korea. you have their munitions targeted on seoul. i think that s the principle concern for any military planner, the fact that you have conventional attacks, missiles, that are trained on huge population centers in the region. so it is less a concern about the west coast to the u.s. or a missile raining