All across America and around the world, this is Veterans Radio.
This is Veterans Radio.
Welcome to Veterans Radio.
I am Jim Fossone.
I'm the officer of the deck today.
We've got some great programs for you.
I think you'll find very interesting.
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something you didn't know before by going to VeteransRadio.org.
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We want to welcome to VeteransRadio today, Carrie Philippetti.
She is the Executive Director of the Vandenberg Coalition, which we're going to talk about.
But she also was involved in writing an op-ed piece for the Washington Examiner,
which is where I saw it earlier, about how civics education maybe could help solve
the military recruitment crisis.
So you'll want to listen to her here.
Carrie, welcome to VeteransRadio.
Thank you so much for having me, Jim. I'm excited to be here.
Well, you have a very interesting career path out of the University of Virginia with your degree
and then on to work at the United Nations as a Senior Policy Advisor for the United States Mission.
You advised then Ambassador Nikki Haley on issues related to counterterrorism in the Middle East
and things in the Western Hemisphere.
You've done work for the State Department in a lot of things down south of Venezuela,
for example, and now find yourself as the Executive Director of the Vandenberg Coalition.
Can you tell us a little bit about the Vandenberg Coalition?
Sure, I'd be happy to. And I've been very fortunate to have great mentors like Ambassador Haley
and others in the last administration that helped establish my career path.
So the Vandenberg Coalition, we started it in 2021.
I was just leading the Trump administration and was concerned by what I was seeing
as this rise in a sentiment of American retreat,
the sense that it's a longer, powerful nation and should not
seek to promote its interests and its values around the world.
And as someone who grew up on the outskirts of New York City on 9-11,
I'm very much aware that no matter how much we want to retreat from the world,
our enemies are going to try to attack us and it's going to cost far more American lives.
If we wait for that, then if we address the threat in smaller ways before they get to our borders.
So that was generally the emphasis for the coalition.
We wanted to create a network of conservative thought leaders,
people who had served in governments before,
who could really create a new foreign policy for 2023 and going forward.
Not looking back at what previous presidents did,
not saying everything that Reagan did was right or Bush did was right or Trump did was right,
but really recognizing that we're in a completely different threat environment
than we've ever faced before.
And how do we appropriately confront that threat environment using both the new opportunities
that technology provides us, as well as the new challenges and obstacles that we have
with things like the rise of communist China.
So the coalition exists to push for that kind of an agenda,
to push for an American people first foreign policy
that better serves American interests and promotes American prosperity,
American freedom, and American strength.
Well, I have to admit that I didn't know who Senator Vandenberg was
when I started researching, hey, how do I talk to the author of this interesting idea?
Only to learn that Arthur Vandenberg, who died in 1951,
was a senator from my home state here in Michigan and that he studied law at the University of Michigan,
but made his mark in journalism before going on to the United States Senate.
Tell us a little bit about Arthur Vandenberg and why that became the name of the coalition.
Absolutely, and it's not unusual.
I mean, I'll be honest with you, when we started this group and we're trying to come up with the best name for it,
I also was not familiar with Arthur Vandenberg.
Up until meeting with some folks and then demanding him to me.
As you mentioned, Arthur Vandenberg was a senator from Michigan who served from 1928 until 1951,
which is of course a very pivotal moment for American foreign policy.
He was a true conservative, a true Republican, and for much of his life as a political leader,
he was an isolationist and then Pearl Harbor happened and he had what is known as this sort of
massive public conversion, the quote, speech heard around the world, where he subsequently said that
our oceans have seats to be mowed, which automatically protects our ramparts.
Essentially acknowledging that no matter what we want here, no matter how much we want to avoid war,
we have enemies and they are going to try to attack us unless we put up stronger defenses.
And he ultimately became the chief architect for some of the most sort of modern forms of
conservative foreign policy.
So he was the chief legislative architect of the Marshall Plan, of NATO, of the UN,
and the Truman Doctrine.
And he really established what it means to be a Republican leading in foreign policy
in that post-world era and really set the stage for uniting conservatives around a strong foreign
policy.
So what we appreciated about him and why we chose his name is because he understood what it was
like to be an isolationist.
He understood why he needed to shift from that man and the kinds of threats that were in front of
him.
He remained true to his conservative roots, but at the same time was willing to work across the aisle
to do what was best for the United States.
And those are things that we all try to bring into the Vandenberg Coalition.
So I'm hoping that part of what we do can help spread the word about this fantastic
Michigan senator who really had an outside influence on conservative foreign policy and
American foreign policy.
And yet very few people are familiar with his story.
Well, and I would encourage anybody who is interested in that story or the history, if
you will, go to vandenbergcollection.org.
Go to the about us tab and check down to who is Arthur Vandenberg.
There's a nice explanation of all this, including the speech heard around the world after Pearl
Harbor and sort of how he converted from, hey, United States, be an isolationist.
Just worry about your own area to this recognition that, hey, we have internationalism here.
We have to deal with the whole world.
So very interesting.
And I'd encourage people to look at it, Carrie.
But before we lose too much more time, I want to come back to what caught my attention,
which was your piece in Restoring America about, quote, how civics education can help
solve the military recruitment crisis.
Tell us a little bit about that.
Sure.
Well, as somebody who works in national security, obviously, you know, having a declining military
capacity is essential to many of my conversations.
And of course, many of your listeners will know that the United States is experiencing one of
the most significant recruitment crises.
And by the way, retention crisis that it has seen since the end of the draft.
So the question is, what's spurring that forward?
And there's a few different things.
One thing is just, you know, medical records are now online.
So while people in the past will be able to join the military and maybe they wouldn't
have any dive holes that they had, you know, ADD or they broke some part of some bone at
some point.
Now it's all online.
And so the military has access to it.
So some of those things need to be updated.
Other things are just the physical fitness of our youth.
So the staff that we've seen from 2020 suggest that only about 23% of Americans between the
ages of 17 to 24 are even eligible for military service.
And when you think about that number, then the question is how many of those want to serve?
And that's where civic education really does play a significant role.
Because civic is all about teaching people about why our country was created, what we
stand for, what our principles are, and why it's so important to preserve those things
and fight for what it means to be an American and understand what it means to be an American.
And to integrate into America if you are, you know, immigrating here from another
country.
And so I think it makes sense that we're seeing a decline in interest in the military.
You know, in the last year, in 2023, the only branches that met their recruitment targets
were the Marine Corps and the State Force.
And you had about a 41,000 person shortfall in the Army, Navy, and Air Force.
And so it's critically important that people understand why service matters so much.
And I think that's where there's really been this gap.
Throughout the last few decades, we've seen declining civic education in universities,
declining civic education in K through 12.
Nobody is being taught why being an American matters and the good that it does for the world.
And then therefore, why would anybody want to serve?
So I think making sure that people are educated in those things is critical to inspiring them
to want to serve their country, whether it's in the military or frankly, whether it's through a
corporation that can bring economic benefit back to the United States as well.
Yeah, I think it's an interesting thought here because this recruiting and retention problem
is ultimately a national security problem.
We've been talking about it with a lot of different thought leaders and writers
and military men and women on Veterans Radio.
And we're talking to Kerry Philippetti, who's the executive director of the Vandenberg Coalition.
And I think some of this is related to, well, you know, that 1% of the population or less
takes care of us. I don't have to involve my family, whereas during World War II,
certainly it was every family during the Vietnam draft.
Because of the draft, it became almost every family.
So we've really gone generations now where we think, well, we don't think about it.
Somebody else takes care of it for us. And it really, people aren't taught.
And this is the, you know, I grabbed the yellow marker when I read this line that you guys wrote,
which is, if people are not taught why their country is worth defending,
they are less inclined to serve in the military or contribute their skills to its success.
It's really that simple, isn't it?
I think it is. I mean, again, what people are being taught today in schools,
particularly universities, but even at the K through 12 level now, is that America is bad.
That America has a scary problematic history. And rather than reading America through the lens of
this, what Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. called the promissory note, right, this idea that we would
always seek to be a more perfect union. Instead of understanding that as the root of what it
means to be an American, people are trying to say that what it means to be an American are,
you know, accepting and being racist or being opposed to other cultures. And that's not at all
what it is about. That's not what it has been about. And I think there's a way of teaching the
reality of, you know, American history with a very clear understanding of what a beautiful system the
United States has created and how different and unique it is among all of the nations in the world.
There used to be institutions that would do these, you know, I was a Girl Scout, I'm sure many of
your listeners were Boy Scouts. And by the way, the correlation between those who are Eagle Scouts
and those who serve in the military or the exceptional things is unbelievable. Absolutely.
Yep. So and we no longer have an emphasis on those sort of civics minded organizations. We don't
teach it in schools anymore. We don't teach the Pledge of Allegiance anymore. We don't teach the
founding documents anymore. And giving people the tools to understand how the United States has grown
and developed. If you really understand our history, you will be inspired to serve this country,
whether it is through the military or some other capacity for whatever reason, you don't meet the
fitness requirements. But people today are just not excited to be American. People today don't
think that their children are going to have a better future than they will. So this is all part of
this broader cultural decline and cultural malaise where we just no longer have confidence in the
United States anymore. So why would somebody young decide to put their life on the line for the
country? And that's where civics education, I think, can make a significant difference.
Yeah, we don't teach history at all. And a little bit we do teach is often slanted against this idea
of why your country is worth defending. You had a co-author on the article Hans Zegger, I believe,
from the Jack Miller Center. Can you tell us a little bit about that relationship?
Sure. So Hans is the leader of the Jack Miller Center, which is a fantastic organization that
builds and sustains a higher education community that's focused on the teaching of civic education.
So they create resources and teacher education for those individuals who will be teaching others
about what it means to be an American. So they're very much involved in this, what they call the
the the civics knowledge crisis. They focus on teaching about the American political tradition.
They host a summit on civics education and have something called the Constitution Day Initiative,
which I think would be fantastic for. I'm trying to get more people to celebrate Constitution Day,
which is September 17th, which marks the signing of the U.S. Constitution. They work very, very
hard on trying to promote civics education and have been involved in this space for many,
many years, a lot longer than I have. So Hans is a brilliant leader of this organization and also
the co-author of this op-ed. So here becomes the important question. Okay, guys like me read this
and said, hmm, that's a really good idea. How has it been received by the educational world though?
You're saying, hey, we have to teach this down in the lower grades. Any feedback from the
educational world yet? You know, I think there is this recognition and it's growing as we start to
see how some of these initiatives that were intended to sort of recognize issues within the
United States, things like that, you know, DEI initiatives and so on. Lately, there's been a
lot of pushback against those things as we're seeing it play out, you know, with respect to
the crisis in the Middle East and how it seems people are unable to kind of differentiate good
versus evil at this stage. And so the education space, I think, is ripe for change and now is
the moment for us to focus on this aspect. Regardless of your beliefs on, you know,
DEI or other things, I think civics education is an essential pillar of making good citizens,
citizens that want to contribute. So far, we've started to get a little bit more interest as
that community, the educational community is opening itself up to recognizing, you know,
maybe we've made some mistakes and seeing how different leaders of universities are being
forced out because of those mistakes. So I'm hoping that now is really the moment,
but it does require people like you, people like your viewers, people like me, as we, you know,
if we have children to push for civics education there to try to get our children enrolled in
things like, you know, the South Program to be involved as community leaders, because those are
the types of people that will be inspired to want to serve the country as well. So there's a lot
that we can be doing at the local level. And, you know, as a conservative, I always believe that it
starts local. So that would be my advice is to work as hard as you can with your own children
within your own school district, pushing for small things that can get people acquainted with the
founding documents acquainted with, you know, the federalist papers and the Constitution and
things like that and celebrating Constitution Day and making it a fun event that people are
excited to participate in when they're younger. And then they'll ask the question of, well,
what does this really mean as they start to get older? And that's a great teaching moment.
Yeah, it really is a grassroots kind of thing to get civics reinstalled the right way back into the
school system and the educational system. And if you can't get it in your school system,
if you're a parent or a grandparent, are there resources out there that should be being used
with the children in their homes? Yeah, well, I first of all, yes, I think there's always
ways that you can do this just in your own home. If you have access to a Constitution, if you have
access to any of the founding documents, which by the way, you can find for free online as well,
reading through those with your children and just asking questions, you know, why was it done this
way? What were the other ways that this could have been done? What is this? How can you sort of
reflect the same principle in your own life? I think the most the best we can do is get back to
those basics, get back to, you know, those founding documents are the absolute best resource that we
have. You don't have to be a law school, you know, student or a law professor. I think just
understanding where we come from and engaging in your community are the two best ways that you can
do that. Yeah, I think there's a lot of ways and it does start at that very ground level,
whether you can move it into the school systems or make sure you're at least doing it at home,
because people really do need to understand why their country is worth defending. That's the long
term solution to the recruiting and retention issue. And we're talking to Kerry Philip Petty,
who is the executive director of the Vandenberg Coalition. You have an interesting area in which
you volunteer that I want to bring up. So you are an EMT with your local fire department.
Well, again, let's go back to the idea of service. I will actually say part of that came from,
I tried to join the Marine Corps and unfortunately are among those Americans who are unqualified for,
in my case, a medical reason. And so I tried to join in 2016 and was with politely told, you know,
they'd love to have me, but thanks, but no, thanks. And so I wanted to find another way to serve my
country and serving as an EMT I served throughout the entirety of the pandemic with a great way for
me to focus on, again, bettering my community, being a service to those around me. So I really
enjoyed it. And it also has a little bit of that, you know, military hierarchy to it, which I think
I was looking for as well. Well, importantly, I think our veteran radio listeners like to know
that the people that they're talking or hearing about here on Veterans Radio either have served
or understand the value of service or are displaying that sort of, hey, I'm going to serve my community.
And that's great. Congratulations on the EMT work. If people want to know more about
the Vandenberg Coalition, how do they find that out? Yeah, well, you, you were great in giving
us the giving your listeners the website address. So it's vandenbergcoalition.org. And you can find
out more about what we do and subscribe to our weekly newsletter, which is called Beyond the
Water's Edge. I also recommend a fantastic book if you want to learn more about the senator himself.
It's called Arthur Vandenberg, The Man in the Middle of the American Century, and it's by someone
named Hank Meyer and E.I.J.E.R., which is a fantastic resource into understanding how American foreign
policy was shaped. And there's a there's a big piece of civics education as to why Vandenberg
himself was inspired to serve. And then lastly, I would just also encourage your listeners to
check out the Jack Miller Center, which is jackmillerscenter.org, where you can read more about
Hans and his organization, which focuses every day on trying to create a strong America based on,
you know, teaching about our founding principles. Well, thanks for doing the Jack Miller Center.
I was going to give that website as well, jackmillerscenter.org. And the Hans is,
I think he's a member of the head here, International Guard. So again, somebody who is
walking the talk and that's something our veteran radio listeners really, really appreciate.
Carrie, we appreciate the time that you've given to veterans radio today and keep
pressing these good ideas and we'll keep promoting them for you.
Well, thanks so much. And many thanks to you and all your listeners for everything that you do
every day to promote a strong America. It's what our success is based on. So thank you very much.
Thank you. And I want to thank everybody for listening to Veterans Radio today. I am Jim Fawson.
It's been a pleasure to be your host. I'm a Veterans Disability Lawyer at Legal Help for
Veterans and you can reach us at 800-6934800 or legalhelpforveterans.com on the web.
You can follow Veterans Radio on Facebook and listen to its podcasts and internet radio shows
by visiting us at veteransradio.org. That's veteransradio.org.
And until next time, you are dismissed. We again want to thank our national sponsors,
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