Marsha Blackburn of the Seventh Congressional District of Tennessee, joined Breitbart News Executive Chairman Stephen K. Bannon Saturday for an exclusive radio interview at the South Carolina Freedom Summit. The two honed in on the war on radical Islamic terrorists and critical national security issues facing the U.S. following the Texas terror attack and the military’s heightened threat level.
Blackburn’s district is home to the famed 101st Airborne Division, as well as the 160th and 5th Divisions at Fort Campbell, she stated.
“We have a President that refuses to say we are at war,” she said, adding:
We are at war. We are at war with radical Islamist terrorists, and they have now attacked us on our soil. This happened last weekend (in Garland, Texas), and it is time to fess up and say, “Look, we realize we’re at war, and you’ve got to get in behind this.” The raising of the threat levels on our military posts to the Bravo level…that should not be lost on us. There is heightened awareness and heightened risk, and we need to be watchful.
Referencing the threat level, Bannon asked Representative Blackburn how we could have allowed this to happen.
Blackburn attributed it to “political correctness and not admitting that we are at war.” We need to be prepared, she warned.
Based on Blackburn’s experience with national security, is she seeing the necessary national security experience among 2016 presidential candidates?
She responded:
What you want to see is someone that admits that this is war and we are in a time and a season of war–that they’re going to practice good decision-making. You want to see the discernment that they bring to building a team around them to address this. That is one of the hallmarks of good leadership.
She stressed Obama’s tendency is to allow others to lead the charge, coming in after the work is over, which, she said, “is completely unacceptable.”
“Our allies around the globe are waiting to see what we are going to do,” Blackburn asserted. “We repeatedly know that rooting out those that would seek to do us harm means that we go in and we help our allies. Then we liberate and we leave.”
Blackburn outlined a three-component approach to national security: honor our men and women in military; “build it up and fund them”; and secure the southern border. “We know there is all kinds of illegal entry here. Illegal immigration [is] a problem, yes, but so is drug trafficking, labor trafficking, weapons trafficking, sex trafficking. Secure that border.” She stated that we must have a defined national foreign policy–“something we have always had, except in this Obama administration.”
Responding to calls to cut defense spending, Blackburn said, “This is one of those areas where you just can’t do more with less.”
“We also need to be building our cyber warfare units,” Blackburn emphasized. “Look at what is happening in China and in Russia. They have units that are specifically targeted cyber warfare. They are carrying it out. Our critical infrastructure is attacked thousands of times a day.”
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