By the end of World War II, we had about 6,000 ships.
Four years, They were made here.
The United States does not have that capacity anymore.
People's Republic of China can build more ships in one month than the United States can build in a year.
Hello, my name is David Olds and I'm the co-host for Mississippi Happenings.
Joining me each week is my co-host and my friend Jim Newman.
Jim, how are you my friend?
I'm cold, I don't know about you.
We've had some miserable weather, that's for sure.
Each week we discuss kitchen table issues that all of us face in Mississippi.
Not only do we discuss those issues, but offer information from experts in the field with solutions and also a plan of actions.
Today, we want to focus on national news and events under President Trump's new term.
Each day we read and hear about national security issues surrounding Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency, DOGE, withdrawing from NATO, the America First
agenda, turning our backs on our European allies, and terrorist war.
Joining us today is a man that has experience and first-hand knowledge in these concerns.
Our guest today is retired Rear Admiral Jamie Barnett.
Admiral Barnett is an adjunct professor in the Ole Miss Center for Intelligence and Security Studies, teaching national security and cybersecurity policy courses.
He served 32 years in the Navy and Navy Reserve, rising to the rank of Rear Admiral and serving as Deputy Commander, Navy Exp-
expeditionary combat command during the height of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
His first flag assignment was director of Navy education and training at the Pentagon.
Admiral Barnett also has a website called OpinionAided, which is opinions aided by facts that can be found on substack.com.
is an honor to have you as our guest and we appreciate your service to our country.
Thank you David and Jim.
I appreciate that and appreciate being here.
Jim, I'll let you get us started.
Well, I don't know whether to call you Admiral or Professor or...
Jamie would be good, yeah.
I'm sure you've probably heard of Michael Hayden, General Michael Hayden.
He wrote a book called The Assault on Intelligence that I read last year.
we are faced in this country with.
I just call it like I see it, outright lies with no factual basis.
Trying to tell what is fact and what is not has become a real issue for the average citizen these days.
I was talking with Julian Carroll this morning, Senator Wickers, a man here in Tupelo, and he was mentioning that Facebook was kind of...
really beating up on Senator Wicker's position regarding the Ukraine and some of things he said.
But the thing that interested me was he said, it's hard to tell, they're probably our Russian bots.
What a Russian bots?
So, and I'll just say botnets in general.
So the term comes from a robot network and.
And you know, anybody's computer, anybody's telephone may actually be part of that.
It's not like they're in Russia.
you know, when you get an email that's been, been forwarded for three times and you click on a link, that actually may be, downloading botnet malware onto your computer that
operates in the background without your knowledge.
And first you get a hundred and a thousand and millions of these, are operating around the world.
And they've also started.
infecting not only laptops but servers.
I mean there's some company servers that are now part of that network.
And they can do a couple things.
The first way that a lot of people came to know about botnets is that they can be part of distributed denial of service, DDOS attack, where you have just millions of inquiries into
a website.
It just shuts it down.
And you've seen this over in Europe.
was one in Estonia, hit the Estonian banks.
I want to say that...
early 2000s, the Russians hit it.
You know, the Russians were upset that Estonia moved a Russian monument from a graveyard and they just started assaulting their financial sector.
So that's one way that botnets can go.
But the other way that botnets can happen is there's a group called Internet Research Group in St.
Petersburg, Russia.
and we know where it is.
We know what the building looks like and they continually are researching and developing fake news, fake news that infuriates different segments of the American public.
And they do this for other countries as well.
And then what they can do is set up a fake news site.
And you know, it might be like instead of being CNN.
calm, might be CNN.com or CNN news.
It's, you know, it's what's called, squatting, you know, it's basically website squatting.
It looks like a regular news organization.
They put a fake news, article on it, and then they use these botnets to spread it around on social media.
And so the way that, things come to be trending,
is the people are looking at them.
But in this case, and what Senator Rickers person is talking about is those are rising to the top because of these botnets run by the Russians are trading on the ramp.
And then you get one person and it really only takes one who says, well I'm going to repost that on my social media.
And then it becomes legitimized.
It's not fake bots.
It's actual people that are doing it.
And this is one of the reasons why we see sometimes
even members of Congress repeating Russian talking points on the floor of the House and the Senate.
And we've had the Republican head of the Intel committee, House Intel committee, that's complained about it.
And so what are the problems that we have in today's information world?
So the information age, it's the paradox that we have more information available than ever, and yet people are less informed.
And the reason
is that, and I'll put it left, right, center, we all have a tendency to devolve into a news and facts, basically echo chamber.
We're not looking across things.
We don't have Walter Cronkite that's talking to everybody, Huntley and Brinkley anymore.
There with cable news going down, newspapers going away, there's not a common American forum for discussion anymore.
so it's one of the reasons I'm really glad that you're doing this.
I hope you can reach across political divides to where we can discuss actual facts.
But as long as we have to understand that we're under
by the Russians with various fake news that are designed to anger us and to get our ire up.
And anytime that an American feels like, this makes me mad.
We ought to be careful and make sure we check the source.
And checking the sources is a problem a lot of times because you can't find it.
That's true.
And unfortunately for the United States and the world, Mark Zuckerberg has opted to end his fact checking.
There are some great fact checking organizations out there.
There is an international fact checking standard of conduct.
One of those is the Washington Post fact checker.
There's PolitiFact, there's NewsGuard, but Zuckerberg and others have chosen to not do that anymore.
Elon Musk with X chose not to do it.
He's gotten rid of his fact checkers.
Consequently, it relies on people in the comment section say, well, that's not so.
Well, that's why people say that you can
One fake news article, one disinformation article can go around the world six times before the actual news can get out there.
One of the things I heard this morning on MSNBC, they were interviewing the chairman of Oracle.
And she was talking about the cloud.
And she was talking about that it could be a group, it could be a business.
And she went so far as to say that it could be isolated to a small
such as a ship.
where the cloud is secure and only the ship has access to that cloud.
Is our Navy up to all of this AI stuff nowadays that is coming about?
So if we're talking about the cloud, and I'll set AI aside for just a second, it used to be that our warriors and strategists used to talk about how our weapons and sensors would
make war on their weapons and sensors.
And a few years ago, some of the members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said, now it's how our networks make war on their networks.
And when I say network, it's not just
communications network, we're talking about, you know, space infrastructure.
We're talking about cables, sensors, you know, the sensors that are on aircraft, the sensors on surface ships, the sensors that are, you know, on drones.
It's, you know, integrated common operating picture.
And we have to understand that our military units have to operate in a communications denied environment.
we, know their frequencies.
We know how they communicate.
know how we do.
And so if which, if what, the chairman of article or president of Oracle was talking about here is kind of ship or maybe a carrier, a strike group, operate independent of connection
back with the United States or connecting back with a, a, a headquarters.
Absolutely.
That is something that has been anticipated for a long time.
And so they can carry a great deal of the information they need.
on the ship itself or at least within the strike.
Now AI is something different and there has been a lot of experimentation, a lot of interest by the military in AI.
It is transforming warfare, but it is still too early for me, at least to be able to see exactly how it's going to operate.
in some ways, Jim, it's not unlike the beginning of the smartphone era.
You know, when the smartphones came out,
most of it just thought, this is a slightly better cell phone, but it's transformed the way that we, we communicate and are entertained and store knowledge.
And in some ways it is, you know, if you want to see somebody panic, you know, just take their, their cell phone away from them because it's actually part of our augmented
cognition.
Now, you know, I don't remember people's telephone numbers anymore.
It's in my cell phone.
So, I think we're at that.
at that beginning stage with AI as well.
The one thing I would hopefully would do is not have the hubris to assume that we're ahead.
I think the DeepSeek app that came out from China that shocked the stock market would be an indication is that, you know, we have to put money into innovation and into application
of those innovations in order to stay ahead.
David, do you have any questions?
Admiral, thank you for sharing the fact-checking, excuse me, the fact-checkers.
You had mentioned NewsGuard.
You had mentioned, what was the other two that you mentioned for our listeners?
Okay.
I subscribed to NewsGuard.
think anybody can do that.
It's either no money or low money.
PolitiFact is another one that was developed by Professor Bill Adair, who's at Duke University.
And then the Washington Post Fact Checker.
And all of those subscribe to the standards of this international fact checking body.
Gotcha.
Okay, thank you for that.
What's your thoughts on Snopes?
Snopes is really good.
my son who is a computer engineer, computer scientist is the one who put me on to Snopes.
I think it's very accurate.
I sometimes forget to check it, but then again, know, I'm, I think, you know, it's the number one, I'm a dinosaur, but I'm also not as susceptible to some of the social media
stuff because I, you know, it may be 10 years ago that I decided in trust Zuckerberg, I got off of Facebook.
I got off of Twitter before it became X.
you know, I'm still on LinkedIn, but that, that is a little bit, uh, more vetted.
Um, and, so I don't know that I'm susceptible, but when I do hear somebody, you know, come up with, uh, you know, some, some weird thing that, uh, uh, is out there, I do check
Snopes occasionally.
Gotcha, thank you.
And I will add the news card and PolitiFact also to my list of fact checkers.
I think that you brought up an important part.
What's your thoughts as far as what's going on with...
Donald President Trump dropping out of NATO.
So I cannot tell you how disturbed I am about that.
And the one thing that I would tell you and would tell Americans is this is not a surprise.
This was predictable.
He's talked about it in his first term.
He talked about it during the campaign.
And so don't think anybody should be shocked.
if he withdraws or if he denigrates, or if just his, you know, commentary to them undermines the NATO Alliance confidence in the United States, which, you know, it is a
transatlantic, Alliance, but we have been a pillar and the European nations have existed under the protection of our nuclear umbrella for all, all these years.
And, you know,
As many people will remember, the main part of the North Atlantic Treaty is Article 5, which calls for collective security.
If one member of NATO is attacked, it will be considered as an attack on all.
Now, that's only been invoked once, and that was in our favor after 9-11.
Europe came to our aid.
They went into Afghanistan with us.
It's just amazing to me to think that we would abandon that.
And for no good reason.
We are not getting anything for it.
We're just leaving it.
as we've seen, the European leaders are very rattled by that.
it's just one other...
So I'm putting on a professor hat for just a second.
Some people like to say, well, we're not the world's policemen.
Yes, we are.
We took on that role even before the end of World War II.
We set up the world monetary system at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire back in 1944.
And to have that work, you had to make sure that people were going to follow the rules, that they weren't stealing from each other.
It wasn't piracy.
And so, you know, there was only one Navy that really could project a force, one military force that could...
project around the world and that was the United States.
And that's what's happened.
And that's why we've called it the Pax Americana.
Now we've been a superpower really since World War II and we've been the sole superpower since the fall of the Soviet Union in the 89 timeframe.
And I'm afraid that has led to a lot of American complacency.
There may be some feeling of entitlement that we will always be a superpower and that is not true.
Uh, the assessment of our intelligence community and of the last national security strategy is that we are in the post post-co war era.
In other words, the post-co war is over and we are back to a major power competition.
Well, there are a lot of Americans don't remember what that was like.
And, um, the fact of the matter is that we had to invest
in our national security in a way that we haven't had to in the last 30 years.
And Mississippi Senator Roger Wicker issued a report last summer.
And while I don't always agree with everything he does, I agreed with this.
He noted that, you know, we need to start and we don't need to cut defense spending.
We need to increase it.
And, you know, we spent 20 years in Iraq and Afghanistan and we
put trillions of dollars into the deserts of Iraq and the mountains of Afghanistan.
And what did we get for that?
Did we get more national security?
Did we get more global stability for that?
We didn't.
The war in Iraq was a mistake.
I admire and applaud the service of our service members who served there.
They did so honorably.
But it was a political decision that should not have been made.
And we took our eyes off the ball in Afghanistan and we actually couldn't articulate a reason why we were there after we defeated Al Qaeda.
But we spent millions of dollars in there, billions, trillions of dollars there.
And what did that money not go to?
It didn't go to refreshing and upgrading our Air Force, renewing and expanding our Navy, making sure that our Army recruiting was on track.
And so we've got a deficit right now that concerns me.
And there's a, I don't actually know who the, said this, but, an adage that, know, don't go to war if you don't have to.
We've, we violated that a couple of times.
If you do have to go to war, don't go alone, make sure you got your allies and whatever you do, don't go for long.
So we've gone long, we've gone alone and we don't need to.
dismiss our alliance is right now.
It's the worst thing that we could do.
And Jim and David, one of the things that I'm concerned about is like, okay, we're out of NATO and people say, okay, you know, look around for what bad happens.
It won't happen right away, but we will start noticing that countries are not doing what we want to, not cooperating with us and things are not going our way.
And it would take a long time, if ever, to rebuild those.
You mentioned a couple of times the size of the Navy.
I'm wondering now, we've got what, 200 plus ships?
And isn't the general consensus that we need somewhere 300 plus?
Yeah, we need about 355 ships and we need a different mix.
One of the things that's happened over the course of the 21st century is the stalwart of American sea power, the aircraft carrier has changed.
And just like is going into World War II, the Navy felt like the battleship was going to be the most important aspect, but it turned out to be the aircraft carrier.
aircraft carrier has been a tremendous force for projecting force and it will continue to be for some time, but there's something different now.
And that is that with supersonic missiles, which China, the People's Republic of China has invested in greatly, and also the aircraft that can deliver them, the ability for our
aircraft carriers to get close enough
to have an effect means it brings within something called a weapons engagement zone, the WES.
And so for us to endanger one of our aircraft carriers, more than one of our aircraft carriers, by putting it in the weapons engagement zone means that we could lose one of the
11 that we have.
Well, you know, if you lose one aircraft carrier, if you only have 11, that's a strategic event.
So we need to continue to, I'm not telling you that there aren't things that are being done about that.
We are definitely, I mean, you see what's going on in the fifth fleet in the middle East.
They're experimenting with drone ships.
They're all over the place.
They're in use right now.
Unmanned aircraft in the unmanned surface craft, unmanned underwater vehicles.
There's lots of stuff going on with this.
We're doing our own work with,
hypersonic missiles.
The Marine Corps is coming up with new ways of breaking up their forces so that they're dispersed and they're spread out.
And there's a for a while that the military has had this concept of distributed lethality so that you're not, you know, you're not providing a big target that can be taken out.
But we need to continue to invest in that.
And we do not have
know, for any one carrier that you've got forward, dissuading the, the Chinese not to come across the States of Taiwan or to discourage them for, shouldering or attacking Filipino
shipping or Vietnamese shipping in the South China sea.
You've got to have one that's back in the yards being repaired and one that's in training to go replace it.
So that's a pretty fast rotation.
so, yeah.
And here's one final fact that really concerns me.
So at the beginning of World War II, had 300 ships, I mean, 400 ships.
We only had 400 ships because Franklin Roosevelt went ahead and started pumping up the numbers that we had.
By the end of World War II, we had about 6,000 ships.
Four years, 6,000.
I mean, we didn't make those someplace.
They were made here.
The United States does not have that capacity anymore.
People's Republic of China can build more ships in one month than the United States can build in a year.
And some of that's money.
We need to put more money into it.
We need to have more shipyards.
Some of the shipyards we have may not want there to be more shipyards.
I definitely know that one of the problems that we have is we don't have enough workers.
Eagle shipyard, Huntington, Eagle shipyard and past Google of Mississippi.
They could run another shift, but they don't have the people.
it's highly skilled people.
And so where are they running three shifts?
Well, they're running three shifts in South Korea.
It's one of the best and biggest shipbuilders right now in the world.
You know where they're getting their workers?
Malaysia, they're importing them.
So our immigration laws, you know, are actually hurting
our own national defense.
So it may blow people's minds to think that we need to actually do immigration reform in order to get the workers that we can have to do welding, the high pressure welding and
things that we need to do.
But that's the way that we need to think about it.
That's quite frightening as you just mentioned, that China can build more ships in one month than we can in a year.
That's frightening.
David, what's frightening is that they are doing it.
It's not that they can, they are, and we're not.
And at one time we had 6,000 ships in our fleet.
Yeah, back at the end of World War II, we had 6,000 ships and we very quickly, I mean, we were fighting two wars.
mean, really it was the Pacific war and the one in Atlantic and Mediterranean and all of it.
The army was depending on landing craft and...
delivery of supplies and things like that.
So after that was over, we could draw back a whole lot.
And you know, we don't, we don't want to a Navy with 6,000 ships.
There's not, there's not really a need for it.
You know, with the, the weapons and sensors that we have have much longer reach now, but we, we do need to have more.
And for a long time, our, our military budget has been coming down.
I mean, it actually goes up, but as, as a
percentage, it has been going down for years and we need a plus up on the top line and an impetus.
And I'll just tell you, I think that Senator Wicker is in a good position to promote that.
You know, we've had a great tradition in Mississippi of support for the military.
As you know, a lot of people from the South and specifically from Mississippi go into the military.
We have four
military bases here.
have over 90 National Guard units around the state.
And so this is important to Mississippians.
I think Mississippians understand the importance of our alliances.
And I definitely hope that they're not falling into the Russian propaganda trap of somehow thinking that we shouldn't be involved in Europe.
So I have to tell you something.
There's one aspect of the America first phrase that makes me think we may end up being America alone.
And that is not a situation we want to be in.
Thank you.
Thank you for that.
Speaking of Senator Wicker, the other day he kind of broke, possibly broke ties with President Trump when he called Putin a war criminal.
What's your thoughts about that?
Yeah, I was very, I was very proud of Senator Wicker on that.
You know, I raised my children over in Tupelo.
They all went to school with, with Gail and Roger Wicker's children.
We've not always had the same political beliefs, but I will tell you, he occupies a good position right now.
He just got reelected.
He can speak his mind and not worried about getting
primaried by somebody who may not have the same views, but he spoke absolute truth.
Remember the question he was asked, do you trust Putin?
No, he was immediate.
didn't have to think about it.
And that has been the assessment of Intel and national security strategists since World War II.
is that you cannot trust the Russians.
They are not going to do things for their, for your benefit.
You can't trust them in the alliance.
And we found that over the years.
We couldn't trust them on arms control.
We couldn't trust them on anything.
And they have, you know, we talk about them trying to undermine our elections.
Well, yeah, but I mean, that was only in addition to all the other stuff.
And it's not just us.
They try to undermine every country.
They want to subvert them.
And that was what the whole policy of containment was.
So when he said, no, I don't trust him, he's exactly right.
And it's based on hard evidence.
And he said he's a war criminal and he has, mean, Putin is a war criminal.
He has been indicted by the international criminal courts.
And that's why you're not going to see him in the United States anytime soon or some of the Western Europe, because he could get arrested.
Now, maybe not the United States now, but, um, so I was very proud of, uh, of Senator Ricker and I'll have to tell you, I mean,
There are members of his party that could have spoken up earlier that might've avoided some of this, but I'm very proud.
And this is what I think when, you know, I know y'all are all about action.
Everybody loves to call their Senator and member of Congress to complain about something, but I hope people will call Senator Wicker's office and call the members of Congress and
say,
We want strong alliances.
We support NATO.
Just like you mentioned, he's going to get criticism from the other side on that.
Maybe it's botnets, maybe it's people who just want to follow whatever the president says about Ukraine.
But there's one thing that I can promise you, is if we bolster our NATO alliances, our friendships around the world,
then we're going to avoid sending Mississippi service members into a war sometime down the line.
And that's what Mississippians can do for national security and Mississippians can do for Mississippians.
Thank you.
That's that's.
what I think it was Roosevelt about speak softly and carry a big stick.
Yeah, the first Roosevelt, that's right.
Roosevelt, yes.
Teddy.
What's your thoughts regarding the United States and Russia talking about Ukraine without the presence of Ukraine?
Yeah.
So, I heard this repeated on the news the other day, but you know, if you're, if you're, if you don't have a seat at the table, it probably means you're on the menu.
And, that sounds very much like, other instances in history, Soviet Russia meeting with, Nazi Germany and deciding how to divide up Poland.
it sounds like the Trump administration,
meeting with the Taliban without including the Afghani government that the United States had tried to set up.
It's not diplomacy.
And I have to tell you, just the beginning talk of it, we have Russia under sanctions, some of the heaviest sanctions in the world.
And it's not just us, there are other countries that we encourage to enter into those sanctions.
So just the fact that there are...
of shoving that off is a breach of what I would call normal diplomatic protocols, ill-advised not to go into it.
And Senator Rickers mentioned some rookie mistakes that are being made where they're actually taking bargaining chips and just giving them away before you even get to a
bargaining position.
So I think it's ill-advised.
They should include Afghanistan unless...
There's something surreptitious going on, something nefarious, and that they are trying to sell Ukraine to the highest bidder.
So I'm hoping that as they move forward, that Secretary Rubio will be inclusive in the discussions for actually seeking some type of reasonable settlement or ceasefire or
something.
One of the things that...
possibility with what's going on now between Russia and Trump that there would be a possibility of, and could Trump do this, could he, what's the word I'm looking for, could
he eliminate those sanctions or could he get rid of those sanctions against Russia?
Yes, yes he can.
He can lift a lot of those sanctions by presidential order.
you know, and quite frankly, if he goes to Congress, he might be able to get them to reduce some of the others on that.
That would be really unfortunate because, you know, economic sanctions can have some effect and it has an effect on the Russian economy.
We started imposing pretty heavy sanctions on Russia in 2014 under the Obama administration when they invaded Crimea.
Some of them were more effective than we thought.
mean, they, sanctions that we put on them crushed the Russian ruble.
I I think it lost like 40 % or more of its value.
And I don't know that we really, we intended to punish Putin and the oligarchs, not the Russian people.
So you have to be careful.
But the other thing is with economic sanctions is that over time they erode because the recipient of the sanctions is going to find ways around them.
And the people imposing the sanctions sometimes get tired of it or lose focus or things like that.
So for America to say we're going to lift them, I think means that Russia will not have sanctions anymore.
And it'll be back to business as normal.
And what that means is that once again, Russia can take what it wants from its neighbors.
And, you know, the Russian people may have paid a price, but I don't, I don't think, Vladimir Putin's even gotten a hang nail out.
One of the things that you mentioned in negotiations, it seems to me, and it's been my thought for many years, that the United States is behind in not having diplomats.
tend to, every time we have a new president, we tend to have ambassadors go to various countries.
A lot of times depending on how much money they donated to the campaign, et cetera.
But the diplomatic corps to me is kind of a lifelong pursuit of knowing your adversary or your friend as closely as possible.
And when it comes time to negotiate,
It's not like.
Senator Rubio going over to Saudi Arabia got no experience in international relations and negotiations and all of that.
And here we've got diplomats that have got that experience.
And it seems to me we don't listen to them.
Jim, you're exactly right.
is this concept I think that Americans have is that, anybody can do this.
I had a...
My wife was a school teacher and I remember her basically saying, it seems like everybody's an expert on education because they went to school.
I'm Senator Rubio, at least he's had a lot of foreign affairs experience in the Senate.
and, and so you've seen his past statements that he seems to be walking back now that he's part of the Trump administration, but I do think he's got the capability.
But I do think that there is a lack of appreciation for our foreign service core.
And we saw it the first time during the first Trump administration, when he was getting rid of top people left and right.
So the equivalence of three and four star generals in our foreign service core, people who were expert, who built a career under understanding.
you know, the flows of money, you know, in terrorist networks or understanding, you know, the dynamic of ethnicities within the Middle East and how that affects it.
You know, to get rid of those, you can't just go to industry and hire one of those folks.
And so that would be an indication that we devalued them.
The other thing is, and I'm part of a group of retired generals and admirals that advocated for more money for the Department of State,
You know, there's, think there's only about 30,000 people in, the department of defense.
I'm not sure if that maybe includes some foreign nationals that we hire at embassies for security and other things like that.
That's tiny compared for say, for instance, our military.
And we need to bolster that up.
mean, yeah, we're a big, powerful Navy, a big, powerful military, but we don't want to use our military.
think it was Eisenhower or somebody else said that, know, the
reason you want to have a military is so that you don't have to use it.
And the way that you not use it is you start with diplomacy and it's not a pickup game.
So I know, you know, it's the American system to, you know, have a few people, that, that get ambassadorships based on their contributions.
typically our most important one, you know, okay, so you go to the, you're ambassador to the British Virgin Islands or something like that.
You're, you know, ambassador to Belize or something like that.
But you know, when you, when you've got people that really have no experience that are going to some of our major allies, that may be of concern.
We need to understand and promote the concept and increase the ability of our diplomatic corps.
I'm interested in what you're teaching over at Ole Miss.
The department, is it the Department of Intelligence or what is it?
of Mississippi, about 13 years ago, a former intelligence officer helped found the Center for Intelligence and Security Studies.
and it became a intelligence community center of academic excellence.
And so students that come here, they can minor in intelligence studies, and then they go off to a career in the intelligence services.
And that would include FBI, Naval Intelligence, CIA, Defense Intelligence Agency, any of the other ones that are like our space intelligence, National Conscience Agency or the
National Geospatial.
intelligence agency.
And, you know, it's great because what they do is they come back and recruit other Ole Miss students.
So I'm very proud that Ole Miss is having such a contribution to our law enforcement and to our intelligence services.
And I tell my friends, I'm not part of the intelligence pieces.
I was not an intelligence officer in the military.
I was a consumer of intelligence that was developed.
So I get to teach national security and I'm teaching a course called Introduction to Global and National Security, which I thoroughly enjoy and great, great students.
have co-taught a cybersecurity policy course in the past, but I'm not doing that right now.
That's a frequent term that's used, cybersecurity.
Can you explain that?
Yeah, so, you know, in the past we've had the understandable domains of air, subsurface, surface for our warfare domains.
You know, that is expanded now to the space domain and we now have a space force.
and if anybody thinks that, that, you we're not, we're not talking about Star Trek, but the space infrastructure that we have invisible above our heads is critical to our
wellbeing.
If somebody exploded a nuclear weapon in space, or quite frankly, just got a big satellite off orbit, it could start something called the Kessler syndrome.
It could wreck the infrastructure.
And if our satellites go out, it's not just that we don't have intelligence.
It also means that our cell phones won't work, our electrical grid relies on that timing.
So that's another domain.
that we have that we have to protect and we have horse.
And the cybersecurity aspect of it is all things having to do with computer network interactions and security.
And the interesting thing about that particular domain is it's not something that the military can put its arms around.
It's divided up.
I mean, you don't want the military involved in your civilian networks, but you do want them protecting them from firing actors.
And over the years we finally
developed, I think what is a pretty good regime for that.
We have the National Security Agency that's kind of the outward looking, it's the intelligence aspect of trying to thwart and exploit networks.
then we also have the military aspect, that which is cyber command, US cyber command, but all things relating to computer networks and communications.
Recently on your website, Opinions Aided by Facts, you wrote an article titled, Murder on Pennsylvania Avenue Reduces American Global Power.
In that article, you talked about USAID, or the US Agency for International Development.
Tell us more about that.
Yeah, so USAID has been around for decades.
you know, as I mentioned in the article,
typically ask my national security students, well, how much of the U S budget goes to foreign aid?
A lot of Americans will answer, it must be 20, 25%.
Most of my students say, well, you know, 15 % and I it's lower than that.
10%, 5 % now it's about 1%.
It's, it's minuscule amount.
And yet it has tremendous effect on promoting goodwill, opening up markets,
goodwill from going to our adversaries and you know they're
Part of it is American altruism.
We don't want people to die of preventable diseases.
We don't want them to starve to death.
But we also, you we don't, we want good to be out there, but beyond altruism, we would like to have influence with those nations.
And we'd like to do it without having to do it in no imperialistic way of stationing troops there.
So it's an incredibly good bargain of what we've been getting.
Now,
So I call it a murder on Pennsylvania Avenue because they, I don't think it is in any way functioning right now.
There was despite court orders to say that when I don't think it's functioning.
And the thing that's most alarming to me about that, David, is that there's something called the People's Republic of China Belt and Road Initiative.
Sometimes you'll see this abbreviated in the press as BRI.
And this has been going on for 10 years.
And what they'll do is a slightly different approach than America has used, where they'll come in and they say, well, you need a new telephone system.
We'll build it for you.
We'll loan you the money and we'll send you the engineers and we'll build it.
and that might be a train system, might be a transportation system, it might be water systems, any number of things like that.
And the difference with the American system is if they can't pay and sometimes they can't, then all of a sudden China owns them.
It's called a debt trap.
And what's happening is
The United States is abdicating its position of leadership in the world and pulling back all this foreign aid.
China has already, we already have instances where they've come in and said, well, we'll take over that project for you.
The Americans are gone.
You can't trust them.
And we'll take that over.
And so it's kind of a double whammy.
It's kind of like handing the prize to our adversaries.
they were already spending more money around the world than we were.
So it's a real tragedy to me.
And if it was reversed right this minute, we still would have sustained significant damage because people are not going to trust us.
And the damage to...
Americans is also pretty significant.
We've run a lot of American NGOs, so non-governmental organizations that were helping take that aid.
And we've got farmers in Iowa with silos full of corn that's rotting and that they've got debt for doing it.
It's just a mess.
I think one of the funniest things I've heard lately in the last couple of weeks with Musk was his minions, I'll call them, had found in the USA group that Reuters News Service had
gotten several millions of dollars.
And they made a big deal out of it.
And it was...
picked up and it was reported.
And then after it was dug into, the truth of the matter was it wasn't Reuters News Service.
It was a company whose name was...
Thompson Reuters, yeah.
Thompson Reuters, Unrelated to the news organization.
unrelated.
So, it's dangerous and.
Well, you're exactly right, Jim.
And I have to tell you, Elon Musk doubled down on that.
Just the fact that they corrected him on it, doesn't mean he doesn't keep repeating it.
And they did the same thing with the magazine Politico, which quite frankly is read a lot by a lot of people in Washington, but the political pro aspect is read by a lot of people
in business.
you know, that...
It's just a ridiculous.
And here's the thing that, that concerns me about Elon Musk.
You know, we, we've always had a strong tradition of, an independent press and media.
We, sometimes we chafe.
We don't like what they say.
you know, there can be arguments.
can be lawsuits about it.
but it's always been independent and we do not have a state media the way that
that Russia or China does.
But now we see that outlets are being persecuted.
be Associated Press, which has been around, I think, almost a hundred years, being thrown out of the White House.
So there's that aspect of it.
Now you've got somebody close to the president in the Oval Office with him who has access to over 270 million people.
who respond to him at an incident.
It's not state media, it's state social media.
And it's hard to stand up against that.
he decides to go against somebody, it can have an immediate and disastrous effect and hard for regular media or any other social media to counter it.
So I see the willingness to repeat untruths and to use scathing
damaging, disparaging epithets on Twitter X is very dangerous.
And I have a very simple thing that everybody can do on that.
Get off X.
I've been off of it for years and you know, it hadn't hurt me a bit.
There are other ways to communicate with folks.
I don't, I mean, I don't personally use Facebook anymore, but you know, I use Facebook.
use something else besides that.
And any platform that is promoting, you know, things that have been proven to not be true should not be trusted.
And that's, David, I posted something just yesterday called a bearing false witness.
You know, I'm not a theologian or very religious really, but the King James version talks about bearing false witness.
That's more than just lying.
mean, the,
They could have, they could have said it a different way.
They could have said, don't lie.
but they said, don't bear false witness, which also means accepted, you know, sustain somebody else lying and silence in the face of somebody lying that hurts our country,
hurts other people should not be sustained and it should be called out to know that's not right.
That's why it's one reason.
Well, I'm glad that Senator Wicker, they asked him a question that he knew would run afoul of the president.
He said, no, I don't trust Putin.
Good, thank you.
Thank you for sharing that.
Jim, do you have anything to add as we wind down?
I think we could have another podcast.
There's plenty to talk about.
I mean, we really haven't gotten around to talking about security and some of the things that are going on nationally.
It's really been a pleasure talking.
and talk about that, one of the things I'm afraid is they've been holding off, but it now looks like that they're going after our military people in the Department of Defense.
And this is one of the alarming things to me is that somehow or another these folks have gotten the idea that our federal workforce, and in my particular case, the defense
civilian workforce,
or somehow fat, unnecessary, slothful, unresponsive.
And I would tell you from personal experience, nothing could be further from the truth.
The people that work for our Department of Defense in civilian clothes are dedicated.
They have probably passed up more money going to do something else in civilian world.
Why do they do that?
Because they're doing something that they feel is important, that has meaning to them.
And the other thing is certainly for our people in uniform, but also for our people that serve in civilian roles.
Sometimes they're not easily replaceable.
Sometimes you have to grow them.
And when you are now dismissing people at the top, so you're getting rid of a lot of experience up there and you're getting rid of your probationary folks, the new hires.
So you're getting rid of your seed, your seed corn.
you are, they are going to do something that will affect us for a long, long time.
It's not like firing the people who are, you know, experts in bird flu and they say, come back.
You know, if you're doing that, you're damaging our department defense for now and for years to come.
Thank you for that.
Thank you for that and and Admiral, please we'd love to have you back and we could spend it spend more time and As we know what's what's going on today is going to be changed
Tomorrow or going to be worse tomorrow and the months after that so we do appreciate that To our viewers if you've got any questions comments suggestions or top topics
please send us an email at mshappenings1@gmail.com That's mshappenings and the number one at gmail.com.
Also at the bottom of your screen, you will see a link to Admiral Barnett's website, Opinions Aided by Facts.
And that's jamiebarnett76.substacks.com.
Admiral, once again, thank you so much for being with us.
We learned so much about what's going on.
Thank you for your service to our country and thank you for being with us today.
Also, thank you.
And also, one of the things that you know that we say at the close of every podcast, may we never become indifferent.
to the suffering of others.
So thank you guys, good to see you.
And I'm glad you got the, I got the memo of the blue, blue, blue shirts.
All right, thanks guys.
Thanks.
Have a good one.
you.