This morning, Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-WI) joined Fox and Friends and Varney & Co. to discuss the weak state of the U.S. military following his remarks at the Heritage Foundation that warned the U.S. military is entering into a “window of maximum danger.”

Read highlights from the conversations below, or watch Rep. Gallagher’s interview on Fox and Friends HERE and Rep. Gallagher’s interview on Varney & Co. HERE.

On Biden’s reticence to provide Ukraine with needed weapons:

“Putin is getting desperate, but he’s not only trying to wear down the Ukrainians will the fight, he’s trying to wear down the Biden administration’s nerve here. And unfortunately, what we’ve seen throughout this crisis is the Biden administration has had to be dragged kicking and screaming when it comes to providing certain lethal assistance. They slow rolled the stingers, they slow rolled the HIMARS, and now they’re slow rolling the ATACMS weapons systems. We can’t lose our nerve. We need to steadily provide Ukrainians with the hard power they need to defend themselves. We can’t allow this salami-slicing tactic on the part of Putin to get us to back down right now.”

On the findings of the Heritage Foundation’s 2023 Index of U.S. Military Strength:

“If you dig into the data from this report from the Heritage Foundation, the story is actually worse. The services that are performing the worst, the Navy and Air Force, are precisely the services that are going to be center stage if we find ourselves in a conflict with China; that’s a maritime theater, that’s an air theater. So this is bad news. And the Biden administration’s defense budget would make this much worse. They’re proposing to further cut the size of the Navy to 280 ships by 2027. That is, of course, the target date the Chinese military has set for taking Taiwan. They’re going to cut 1000 aircraft over the similar timeframe. And their woke agenda is driving people in droves out of active duty. We’re entering a very dangerous period, a window of maximum danger. And if we’re not careful, if we don’t wake up, we’re going to find ourselves in a war that we’re not prepared to win right now. We need to abandon the woke agenda domestically and stop projecting weakness internationally.”

On the new Axis of Evil:

“The thing we need to realize is that the Iranians, the Russians, and the Chinese are effectively allied against the West right now. They may have meaningful disagreements, but they share a common goal of undermining the United States and of destroying us and our allies. We have to understand that basic connection, that axis of authoritarian powers that’s trying to destroy our way of life in order to be effective. The other thing we need to do is rebuild our ability to make a lot of these weapons systems. We found incredible fragility in our defense industrial base. We’ve blown through so many years’ worth of javelins, we just don’t make some things that we need to make here domestically in order to restore freedom’s forge and restore America as the arsenal of democracy.”

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