CLAY: We are joined now by Tim Kennedy, who is an expert in many different fields, all sorts of fighting related —
BUCK: He’s a Green Beret sniper, a UFC headliner.
CLAY: Yes.
BUCK: He’s tackled a bull with his bare hands.
CLAY: I’m reading that introduction right now. That’s a heck of an introduction. Dove to the depths of the ocean. Traveled the world hunting poachers, human traffickers, and the Taliban. The book is Scars and Stripes: An Unapologetically American Story of Fighting the Taliban, UFC Warriors, and Myself. And, Tim, that is an incredible entry and probably making a lot of people out there think, “Hey, maybe I haven’t actually done that much with my own life.”
But I wanted to start… Thanks for coming on. I wanted to start with this question for you. American interest in the war in Ukraine has plummeted down. It’s now, I think, like 1/22nd of what it was immediately after this war beginning. We’re a hundred days in now. What’s the impact of American interest in terms of how in your mind it implicates what might be happening in Ukraine?
KENNEDY: Yeah, I mean, this is our first war against a near peer, you know, after fighting in the Middle East and in the hills of Afghanistan. It’s… I think we got comfortable with — and this sound terrible — fighting brown people far, far away, right? And now here we are with not just a humanitarian crisis on the Ukrainian side but a communist dictator that is Putin moving against what is going to be… He is now going to be, if he… Once he finishes Ukraine, his borders will go along all NATO lines.
And I think that was something that we had never realized how much encroachment there would be. And until you’ve seen the devastation that is Russia, the things that they do — the human atrocities, war crimes, they’re indescribable. And this isn’t, you know, in some faraway place. This is a European cosmopolitan, like, I was just in Kiev and walking down streets that are so iconic and so famous. Like, the same architects that did some of the areas of Spain did Kiev as well. And it’s rubble. It’s destroyed, because that’s what Russia, that’s what communism does. They go and destroy. So, you know, for American interests, unless you want, you know, communism and totalitarianism and dictators knocking on your door, we should have an interest about what happens there.
BUCK: Hey, Tim, it’s Buck. Thanks for being with us. The day-to-day in Ukraine has fallen off the headlines, people aren’t spending nearly as much time in the media talking about it. My understanding from some of the military analysts that I know is that the Russians are continuing to now take ground. They did seize the city of Mariupol, they’re now pounding another city in the Donbas region very hard in the hopes of seizing it in its entirety. What do you think the Russians…? Where do you think Putin intends to stop? What does he want?
KENNEDY: You could look at as far as Lviv, you know, one of the furthest, most western cities inside of Ukraine that borders Poland. That’s a big manufacturing city. Like, there’s no doubt that he’s looking that. They make helicopter engines there. You know, the majority of their military training happens there. So I don’t think there’s a part of Ukraine that he doesn’t want. The one thing they know is the port cities… You know, he could landlock Ukraine and by taking just a few more cities in the southeast region of Ukraine — and then Ukraine would be landlocked.
The vast majority of all of their exports go out of that port, and he would effectively starve that entire country. They’d have no means of moving any of their commerce. Their GDP would go down to pretty much zero, and they would have no choice but to succumb to whatever Putin wanted. And you can see the land that he’s starting to conquer inch by inch moving in that direction — and, man, I hate that guy.
CLAY: Tim, closer to home, there’s obviously been a massive discussion about what happened with the school shooting at Uvalde and what the response was from police officers and how this ended up being so incredibly violent and murderous in terms of the actions of that shooter. Based on what you’ve seen, what did we get wrong, what did the police get wrong? How could this situation not have become what it did?
KENNEDY: This is a by-product of — and I’m gonna blame society. This is a by-product of what we have asked of our police. I’m not gonna make excuses for them. If I my children were in there, I’d be kicking in door. If there was a police officer standing in my way, I’d be kicking his teeth in. But if you want passivity, if you want political correctness out of our police officers, then they’re gonna stage, they’re gonna process, they’re gonna do due process — or the other option is to provide them with training, to provide them with resources and to equip them with confidence that we’re gonna stand behind them.
You know, they were so… There was so much reservation, hesitation about what they should doing. Is this hostage rescue, is this hostage situation, should we be bringing in a negotiator? And all the while, kids were dying inside. There were system failures about what was happening on the dispatch side, calls coming from the school — you know, communication from people inside — to what was happening being clearly communicated on the outside. All of these were faults, all of these were system failures.
And, you know, so we need to make our schools hard targets. We need give authority back to our police officers. We have been emasculating them figuratively for a decade now where there is so much fear about taking action. And where there’s children’s lives, I’d rather bury 20 appeasers than one kid. And, you know, shame on us and shame on them for not having the authority and confidence that they could just go in there and do that needed to be done, which was put an evil, murderous (pause) thing on the ground. That’s what had to happen.
BUCK: Speaking to Tim Kennedy, former Green Beret, author of the book, Scars and Stripes: An Unapologetically American Story of Fighting the Taliban, UFC Warriors, and Myself. Tim, you know, we just had someone call in before who is military, has a son is military. They’re getting kicked out for vaccine — or concerned they’re going to be kicked out, I should say, for vaccine — refusal issues. We also got people that write in pretty frequently about wokeness in the military command structure. I know you’re out now, but you were in for a long time, and you know a lot of people who are still serving their country, active duty. What do you make of that? How woke has the military gone?
KENNEDY: Um. (sigh) Yeah, it’s complex, right? (pause) A Few Good Men, Tom Cruise and —
CLAY: Jack Nicholson.
KENNEDY: Yeah, Jack Nicholson is Colonel Jessup. When Colonel Jessup was on the stand and he was describing about living in the freedom and safety and security that was provided by him, and then complaining about the methods and the means with which he was providing it. So I’m still in the military and my time in the military continues to grow look at him as the hero and not the villain now, and I look all of the…
I call ’em “ankle biter trolls” that are, you know, accuse perpetuating lies and propaganda about what the military should look like. But all of those people with those little opinions — and I keep saying little people, little opinions, little trolls, little ankle biters, because they’ve never once experienced what it feels like to have to fight for freedom, but they think they’re in a position of authority to then say how we should do it.
And those ankle biters have negatively affected what the military is and how it conducts itself. I grew up in a post-9/11 military where we were hazed. We fought in the barracks and it was encouraged by the drill sergeants. You know, I was crawling through gig pits with dead raccoons in them and I would never change anything about it, not even the hazing ’cause it was so important to shaping what a war fighter should look like.
I am fearful about what we will look like as a force if we go and fight a peer and we continue down this road of softening our military. I want fierce, vicious monsters that love freedom that are rough around the edges, that speak inappropriately, ’cause those are the guys that you want with you in a fight, those are the gals that you want to take with you in the foxhole. And knowing the product of what we need in a fight, the direction that we’re heading is not building that.
CLAY: Tim Kennedy we’re talking with right now. Scars and Stripes is the new book. Tim, obviously right now Buck’s going to the show on Friday. I took my kids last Friday. Top Gun Maverick has taken over the country, and it seems to me that there is, to what you were discussing, this woke culture. There is a attack that is bouncing back in the opposite direction where it seems to me like the nation as a whole wants to be very pro-America.
They want to acknowledge American greatness and the profundity upon which our country was founded, as opposed to trying to tear it down. Do you get that sense as you’re out about in the country that there is this desperate desire for pro-America, pro-patriotism, America is a force for good that is coming back and fighting, rebounding in a strong way against this woke culture?
KENNEDY: Man, I’m so glad that you said that. I have been seeing this everywhere and even one of the most unexpected places, that be of Twitter, where a shooting just happened. A couple police officers shot someone, and the initial headlines was that this unarmed black woman was killed by police officers with her hands raised. The truth comes out we find out that she was an active shooter with a gun and the police saved a whole bunch of people’s lives by shooting this criminal.
But what happened was when the inaccuracies of the reporting were happening, we saw all of these people with this kind of unified voice and this unified face all attacking the lies, the divisive lies. And just like Top Gun where people are, like, the difference between patriotism and nationalism. There is definitely a patriotic spirit that is I think has been suppressed via covid or whatever the reasons, and people are just clamoring for reasons to be unified.