Ask the Sergeants, Montana’s Veteran Senator on DOD Reform

We've got some of the highest numbers of veterans in the country here in Montana on a per capita basis. Ask a post-9/11 veteran what they think? Is there too much bureaucracy at the top?

I think Montana's US Senator and Navy SEAL veteran Tim Sheehy (R-MT) speaks for so many of us veterans when he spoke up in support of the latest batch of reforms announced by SECDEF Pete Hegseth.

Hegseth spoke earlier this week on cutting back on the Department of Defense bureaucracy by trimming back 20% of the general and flag officer ranks. He calls it the less generals, more GIs policy.

Senator Sheehy joined Laura Ingraham on Fox News this week where he laid out the numbers very clearly. (Click here for the full interview)

Sen. Sheehy: "The Navy has 300 admirals and 250 ships...Well, normally, a ship is commanded by a commander or a captain, and an admiral will command a flotilla or a squadron of four, five, 10 ships at a time. Now, we have 10 times more admirals than we need as far as a ship count, and China builds ships 230 times faster than we do."

Sheehy says we have a structural imbalance in our military, and we need to reorient the force for the battlefield at hand.

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth shared these numbers in a public message earlier in the week:

SECDEF Hegseth: "When we were fighting across the globe during World War Two, we had a force that was 12 million strong. For that 12 million man element, we had 17 four and five star generals. Today, we have 2.1 million service members, with 44 four star and flag officers. So it used to be a ratio of one general to 6000 troops. Today it's one general to 1,400. More generals and admirals does not equal more success."

Laura Ingraham played a clip from a retired 2 star general criticizing the DOD reform plan. Here's how Senator Sheehy responded.

Sen. Sheehy: "Why don't we ask the sergeants and the privates and the captains and the majors, the people who are on the battlefield paying the price for poor decisions back home. And I can promise you, when Afghanistan collapsed and folks like me and many of my friends, including my wife, who served on the ground in Afghanistan- we were pretty damn pissed off about the decisions made at upper echelons that led to a complete and utter disaster in Afghanistan, that set off a domino effect around the world that we're now still seeing in Israel and Ukraine."