McCormick Unveils Defense Policy Agenda in Pittsburgh

August 8, 2024 Press Releases

This is Part Five of His ‘Keystone Agenda to Reclaim America’

PITTSBURGH, PA. — Dave McCormick, a combat veteran and Pennsylvania job creator who served in the highest levels of government today in Pittsburgh delivered the fifth in a series of speeches as part of his “Keystone Agenda to Reclaim America.” During the speech, McCormick described how America is losing a generational fight for global primacy because of the failed policies of Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, and Bob Casey. 

McCormick proposed three steps to rebuild America’s strength, restore peace, and deter our enemies:

1. Rebuild our military power.

2. Change the way the Pentagon does business.

3. Restore the sense that America is worth fighting for.

Please reach out for access to raw video footage. 

Remarks as prepared for delivery

I am speaking to you today at a time when America is in a generational fight for global primacy. The sad fact is that we’re falling behind, and our adversaries are gaining ground.

Under the leadership of President Joe Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, and Pennsylvania Senator Bob Casey, America is less safe. Their weakness is the reason our national security is under attack around the world.

It has not always been this way. When I left West Point in 1987, America was winning, the communists were losing, and the Soviet Empire would soon be added to the ash heap of history. That’s because President Reagan understood that the best way to achieve peace was through American strength, not weakness.

But where does our strength come from? It comes from having the military power to win on the battlefield, the will to use that power in defense of America, and, most importantly, a belief that America is worth fighting for.

Power, will, and belief—these are the fundamental sources of American strength. But under Biden, Harris, and Casey, all three are missing. And our enemies know it.

They have seen Biden lose his will and abandon Afghanistan. They knew that Biden and Harris didn’t have the courage or will to stop the invasion of Ukraine.

They witnessed how Bob Casey and Joe Biden sent coffers full of cash to Iran in 2015, and Iran smiled as Harris’s radical progressive allies celebrated Hamas’s horrific massacre of innocent Israelis on October 7, an attack made possible by the money Biden and Casey made available to that dangerous regime.

Our adversaries have long understood that Biden and Casey will put their green crusade above military power and willingly inflict devastating cuts on our military.

And our enemies watch as our military faces a serious recruiting crisis driven by failure of belief because civilian leaders have politicized uniformed military services that should exist for one reason alone—to deter, and if necessary, fight and win wars.

Our enemies are no longer waiting in the shadows for America to decline. They are on the march.

To restore peace and deter our enemies, America must rebuild its strength. And to do that, we must have leaders who are strong, not dangerously weak. We need leaders who prioritize military power, who don’t make empty threats, and, most of all, who will always fight for America.

I learned those lessons as a cadet at West Point and a young lieutenant in the 82nd Airborne Division. I saw and went to war in defense of a strong, diverse, and confident America. We can see that America again if Pennsylvania sends me to Washington as its next senator.

Weakness on the World Stage and At Home

When I arrived at West Point in 1983, I learned the three words that became what General Douglas MacArthur called the “rallying points” for every cadet: “Duty, Honor, Country.” I didn’t grow up in the military—and I was the first Bloombsurg, PA, kid to go to West Point in decades—but those three words changed my life. I studied for four years to become an engineer and Army officer and was co-captain of the Army wrestling team my senior year.

Just three years after I graduated, my unit in the 82nd Airborne Division deployed to Saudi Arabia. I will always remember that night in February 1991 when my company of paratroopers sprinted across the Iraqi desert—with Apache helicopters and A-10 Warthogs flying overhead—during Operation Desert Storm. In that moment, America stood unchallenged. The strongest nation in the world. Sadly, that moment has passed.

 West Point and the Army baptized me in a culture of selfless service to the nation. Kamala Harris and Bob Casey come from the exact opposite culture in Washington.

Their weak leadership has emboldened our adversaries around the world, not deterred them.

Their weak leadership has eroded American military power and failed to adapt the world’s greatest fighting force to a rapidly changing world.

And their weak leadership has undermined the strength of purpose that inspires brave young men and women to put on the uniform and defend our nation.

It all started in Afghanistan.

While the U.S. Army demands accountability, in Biden’s Washington, accountability is nowhere to be found. To this day, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris have not said aloud the names of the thirteen fallen heroes who were killed in Kabul, and not a single senior administration official was fired for the failures in Afghanistan. Despite desperate Afghans falling off the side of airplanes and at least 9,000 American citizens left to fend for themselves against the Taliban, Senator Casey said that he fully backed President Biden’s decision. This sent an unmistakable message of weakness to our enemies.

Vladimir Putin heard that message and invaded Ukraine just six months later. And Senator Casey directly contributed to that weakness. Just one month before Russia invaded Ukraine, when the world was watching how America would respond to Russia’s massive military mobilization, Casey voted against imposing sanctions on Putin’s Nord Stream II pipeline. That sent a clear signal to Moscow—feckless leaders in Washington like Bob Casey will not stand in your way.

In the Middle East, Israel has faced thousands of rocket and drone attacks since the barbaric Hamas attack on October 7. Yet policies supported by Biden, Harris, and Bob Casey enable the true perpetrator of these attacks and the atrocities committed by Hamas: Iran.

The mullahs in Tehran get away with arming and funding terrorist groups on Israel’s borders because weak American politicians like Senator Casey cave to their demands time and time again. In 2015, Senator Casey was one of the decisive votes for an Iran Nuclear Deal that provided the world’s largest state sponsor of terrorism with billions of dollars. Now, Casey stands by while the Biden Administration withholds weapons that Israel needs to defend itself against these barbaric terrorist groups and pro-Hamas mobs terrorize our cities and college campuses.

In the Pacific, our military continues to fall behind in the face of a stronger China. Beijing is conducting one of the largest military buildups in human history and flying spy balloons over our skies. Yet the response of Biden, Harris, and their rubber stamp Bob Casey has been to send senior officials to China to bow to the Chinese Communist Party while they undermine our economy and security every single day.

On Vice President Harris and Senator Casey’s watch, America has forfeited its military might. As an independent, bipartisan commission created to evaluate the Administration’s National Defense Strategy recently concluded, “the U.S. military lacks both the capabilities and the capacity required to be confident it can deter and prevail in combat.”

Last year, China’s Navy added 30 new ships. We fielded 2. Yet this year, the Biden-Harris defense budget proposes shrinking, that’s right, shrinking, the size of the U.S. Navy by retiring more ships that it buys. And in response to China’s growing technological innovation, that same commission said that the Pentagon is an “ossified, risk-averse organization” that is failing to build and field the military America needs in the 21st century.

Here at home, Border Czar Harris and Senator Casey have created a wide open southern border that allows fentanyl and illegal immigrants to surge into our country. More than 4,000 Pennsylvanians and 100,000 Americans die every year from fentanyl overdoses—nearly twice the number of Americans who were killed during the entire Vietnam War. And hundreds of people on the terrorist watch list, including those with ties to ISIS, have crossed the border illegally and been released into our communities, putting our national security at risk.

Finally, our national sense of purpose is being undermined by radical ideological agendas that inculcate a culture of weakness. Any military officer will tell you that time is their most precious resource, yet advancing diversity, equity, and inclusion has now taken center stage at the expense of military might. During the first year of the Biden-Harris Administration alone, our military spent nearly 6 million man-hours on DEI training and a stand down to discuss “extremism.”[2] It’s no exaggeration to say that on Bob Casey’s watch, there are parts of the Pentagon more focused on advancing DEI than winning wars. No wonder the Army, Navy and Air Force all missed their recruiting targets last year. This is a far cry from the incredible military I served in 35 years ago, where the binding of lethality, meritocracy, and diversity were a source of strength.

In a sane world, our leaders in Washington would be working around the clock to answer the call of history. But in Biden and Casey’s Washington, they’re asleep on the job. Kamala Harris and Bob Casey would rather spend hundreds of billions of dollars to make America more dependent on China for green technology than invest in the weapons our brave servicemembers need to defend our nation.

We cannot and will not accept this state of affairs.

Battle Plan to Restore American Strength

After more than 20 years as a leader in the private sector, I know a “turnaround” situation when I see one. Solving these massive problems to restore our national security requires shock therapy in our nation’s capital—and that includes retiring weak career politicians like Senator Casey who helped create this mess.

First, we need to rebuild our military power. As a member of President Trump’s Defense Policy Board, I saw firsthand what it looked like to prioritize military strength, and we can do it again with strong leadership.

The blueprint is clear. Senator Roger Wicker, the Senate’s top defense leader, has a plan to build a military that can actually deter the threats we face around the globe and, in the process, strengthen our defense industrial base.

I applaud and endorse his vision, especially his recognition that America must once again become the Arsenal of Democracy. At the height of World War II, Pennsylvania pumped out as much steel as all the Axis powers combined. We must recapture that productive capacity. If we want to deter a Chinese invasion of Taiwan, for example, we must have enough missiles deployed forward to sink the communist invasion fleet in the Taiwan Strait. And we must have the ability to replenish those missiles quickly after the shooting starts.

Right now, our defense industrial base is woefully small and weak. We must make the hard choices necessary to rebuild it now.

These investments won’t be cheap. But I’ve seen what war looks like, and I guarantee you it’s cheaper to deter a war than to fight one.

And let’s be clear, an investment in our defense industrial base is an investment in American workers. Expanding facilities like the Scranton’s Army Ammunition Depot, which produces tens of thousands of artillery shells every month, creates good-paying jobs for American workers. It would restore Pennsylvania’s storied position as freedom’s forge.

And given the problems facing the U.S. Navy, we need a Ships Act that makes historic investments in American shipbuilding, technology, and the workers who make it happen. This legislation would help rebuild, retool, and expand our shipyards—with Philadelphia at the top of the list—to meet the needs of the Navy and Merchant Marine. This plan would create union jobs right here in Pennsylvania and treat our shipbuilding workforce as a strategic asset, not a dying trade.

Second, it won’t be enough to just invest more. We must get more with each and every taxpayer dollar. To do that, we’ll have to change the way the Pentagon does business.

As a business leader, it was my responsibility to set the vision, get the right team in place, and move fast enough to stay ahead of our competitors. There was no time to rest on your laurels. As the saying goes, we had to adapt or die. And people’s jobs and the returns to our investors depended on the decisions that I made.

The same is true for our natural defense. America’s ability to out-innovate our adversaries is one of our greatest assets—but a generation of misplaced priorities has paralyzed it. Simply put, America’s military must learn to innovate again. That means we have to invest in cutting-edge technologies to ensure our servicemen and women are armed for the fight of the future and innovate on top of existing weapons platforms to get the most bang for the taxpayer’s buck.

But, more than anything, we need new political leadership that will build a culture of innovation in the military services and drive fundamental change. The next secretary of defense must focus every day on rebuilding our military power and promoting officers who have an unshakable focus on what it will take to fight and win the next war. Personnel is policy—and you can only win with the right leadership in place. 

Finally, we must restore the sense that America is worth fighting for. Ronald Reagan’s first Secretary of State George Shultz described Reagan’s guiding principle during the Cold War as “be strong.” Being strong, he explained, doesn’t just mean military strength and economic strength. You “need to have self-confidence and strength of purpose in our country.”

I fear we are losing our strength of purpose. The American spirit fills our national character with courage, ambition, and creativity. It is our source of strength when times get bad, and the defining feature of American exceptionalism.

Yet far too many Americans have been fed a narrative of victimhood that puts grievance, not leadership and strength, first. Now, our all-volunteer military is in peril because fewer and fewer young Americans are inculcated with the sense of patriotism and purpose that inspired me and my fellow West Point cadets to serve.

We need new leaders to cultivate the American spirit and restore institutional integrity. In the Pentagon, put war fighting and deterrence first; in schools, teach civics and America’s exceptional story; in business, reaffirm the principles of merit and capitalism; and across society, create a new national commitment to citizenship. 

Leadership

It bears repeating: Not since the Cold War’s darkest days have Americans confronted such serious threats to their security, well-being, and way of life. And never has America’s superpower status been more in doubt. What’s missing is leadership: an honest reckoning of the forces arrayed against us and urgent steps to ensure peace through strength and strength through prosperity.

I’ve heard the skeptics who say it’s time for America to give up the burden of being a superpower and become a normal nation. We’re not strong enough, they say. They claim America isn’t cut out for leadership anymore. They’re wrong.

America’s not like other nations, and it never should be. America is exceptional. We just need leaders with faith in our exceptionalism and the will to fight for it.

Global politics is a messy business. President Trump understood that. He recognized that our enemies speak one language: the language of power, and under his leadership, America did not enter any new wars. He put China on notice, and he used military power selectively to restore deterrence in the Middle East and defeat ISIS. He also got our allies to pay their fair share while working with them to make all of us more secure. That’s what peace through strength looks like.

When I think about all the problems our country faces, I also try to remember all the problems we’ve overcome. I think about Morning in America and the end of the Cold War. I think about Americans answering the call of service in World War II. And I think about the blood spilled right here in our Commonwealth to give our nation a new birth of freedom, as Abraham Lincoln said. I’ll never forget the thrill of doing a parachute jump with my parents looking on over the hallowed ground at Gettysburg when I was a young lieutenant in the 82nd Airborne.

Restoring American strength will require experienced and bold leadership to take on the Harris-Casey weakness that has undermined our national security.

Pennsylvania needs a strong leader in the Senate who will work to restore American strength. That’s who I am, and that is what I’ll do with your support in November.

Thank you.