Audio Recording Available:
VOST:
Let's start with the day the NDRA passed.
DELANEY:
You mean the day they gutted us. Sure. I remember.
They'd been floating versions of the bill for weeks, but none of us thought it would actually go through. Not like that. Not without hearings, without a national address. Just one morning, we're in full posture, and by sundown I'm being told we've got forty-eight hours to stand down entire divisions.
You don't shutter a command like Pacific Strike Fleet and call it “budget optimization.” That fleet had a memory. Generations of it. Years of readiness. Gone in the stroke of a pen.
VOST:
To be fair, the bill didn't eliminate the military.
DELANEY:
No, they left enough to run a Coast Guard and guard a few satellites. It was theater. A skeleton crew with a ceremonial budget. They called it “strategic redundancy minimization.” What it was? Disarmament.
They stripped us back to the studs. Armories locked. Bases sold off to private firms before we could even pack up. Career officers laid off by email. There were places--operational hubs--where the lights were still on and people were still inside when the shutdown order came. We lost encrypted materiel, classified archives. Not from foreign threats. From bureaucratic speed.
VOST:
But you saw the data. You've read the historical analysis. It worked. Redirecting that funding enabled the breakthroughs that powered the grid, the reversal of climate change. It put America back on top.
DELANEY:
Yeah. And I can't argue with the results. Doesn't mean I have to like how it was done. They made enemies of their own defenders. They gutted a culture in one fiscal cycle. You don't erase institutions that fast without scars.
I'm not even talking about legacy or sentiment. I'm talking operational shock. Morale collapse. Suicide rates spiked. Families that had moved base-to-base for twenty years found themselves unemployed, uninsured, and unwelcome, because suddenly their history was labeled "obsolete."
VOST:
Do you think it could have been done differently?
DELANEY:
Of course. Everything can be done differently. But they didn't want gradual. They wanted spectacle. They didn't want reform. They wanted erasure.
They wanted to prove that boldness was a virtue in itself--that tearing it all down was the same thing as vision. And sure, maybe it was. But don't ask me to pretend it was graceful.
And I'll be damned if I ever call that leadership.
You want the kicker? We're still not back to full strength. Not really. And yeah, we lost people because of that. Quiet, off-the-books operations that didn't go the way they should have because the right tools or teams weren't there anymore. You won't find those names in the victory reports. But they're real.
There's a base in Djibouti--or was. Black site. Low visibility. High value. After the cuts, it was rolled up and the assets reabsorbed. Nobody knew the op was still running. No one told the field team we weren't coming back. We lost them all. Took three years to even confirm what had happened. We only found out because one of the analysts kept a printout in their desk drawer and didn't follow the purge protocol.
VOST:
And yet, here we are.
DELANEY:
Yeah. Here we are. Grid's clean. Kids sleep with full stomachs and the lights never flicker.
Still doesn't mean it was right.
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