US Senate hopeful Blake Masters criticism of the military questioned

Republican Senate hopeful Blake Masters repeatedly has said there’s “rot” in the military and that its leadership is inadequate, incompetent and should be fired.

Over the course of several podcasts, interviews and social media posts between September 2021 and January, Masters, the GOP Senate nominee in Arizona, aired his criticisms of top military brass and his disdain for the military not winning more wars.

"Our top generals have turned into woke corporate bozos, and our troops deserve better,” he wrote on Twitter in November, accompanied by a campaign video of him lambasting the military.

“I hate to say it, but our military leadership is totally incompetent,” Masters said, standing in what appears to be an agricultural field. “No active duty American general has ever won a war. Think about how crazy that is. These people get promoted by giving politically correct PowerPoint presentations.

"That helps explain why after trillions of dollars and 20 years of effort, this grand project to remake the Middle East and democratize Afghanistan — it just didn’t work. Instead we gotta get serious about the real threats, like China. … We’ve gotta put American troops first. Not defense contractors, not foreign refugees, and sure as hell not woke generals, like General ‘White Rage’ Milley. We gotta do better.”

Masters, who received former President Donald Trump’s endorsement in June and won the Republican nomination in August, made similar comments on other platforms late last year and early this year. He tweeted last year a few times about “wokeness in the military," but hasn’t mentioned the military much on the platform recently. Masters has not served in the military.

His competitor, incumbent Sen. Mark Kelly, D-Ariz., and other Democrats have called attention to some of Masters' comments ahead of the Nov. 8 general election.

Kelly has worked to highlight his military service as a U.S. Navy combat pilot and his support for service members and Arizona veterans, including through his work on the Senate Armed Services Committee. Some veterans from both parties met in Chandler on Wednesday to discuss issues they are facing and their support for Kelly.

“We’ve served, Senator Kelly has served and he wants to continue to serve,” veteran Martin Sepulveda said at the event. “The stuff I’ve heard from this opponent, as a veteran, is appalling. Fire the generals? A guy who’s not served one minute in uniform says fire the generals? … (We) veterans don’t need that; the country doesn’t need that.”

Kelly’s campaign has used some of Masters’ military rhetoric to portray his opponent as extreme and to court the military vote. More than 490,000 veterans were living in Arizona per a U.S. census estimate last year, comprising about 7% of the state’s population.

"Senator Kelly spent twenty-five years in the Navy and flew 39 combat missions during Operation Desert Storm. He understands the meaning of public service, while Blake Masters clearly does not," Kelly campaign spokesperson Sarah Guggenheimer said in a written statement. "Masters’ comments demean and disrespect the service of the hundreds of thousands of service members and veterans who call Arizona home.”

A Masters campaign spokesperson declined to comment on Masters’ past remarks.

Masters: ‘Clean house”

One of Masters’ common refrains has been that military leadership is incompetent.

“I know we still have a lot of great assets, a lot of great people in the military, but the leadership is frankly piss-poor. It’s embarrassing,” Masters told the Daily Wire in November.

“We need a Republican president in office, then a Republican Congress, but you’ve got to clean house in the military,” he said. “We cannot have these left-wing generals in charge. These people have gotten promoted not by winning wars, because they haven’t won wars in a long time at this point, you know, the U.S. generals, at least above a two star, they get promoted for giving politically correct PowerPoint presentations or approving diversity recruitment ads.”

Criticisms of military generals

Masters has not pulled punches when it comes to expressing his views about military leaders, whom he called “woefully inadequate.”

"Our military, in some sense it’s the strongest, but it's also kind of there’s rot in there with the critical race theory and like the general corps, I think is woefully inadequate, and frankly, I think they’re ruining the military,” Masters said in January on entrepreneur Noah Kagan’s podcast OkDork.

“We're on track to be in a position where by 2030 we would lose a war with China. And so I think it’s really hard for people on the right to admit that because they’re like, ‘But this is the best country that’s ever existed, how could this happen?’ And the lesson is, no, it is the best, and understand why, but then you also have to do the work every single day, every year, every generation, to renew the institutions.”

Masters has called for military generals to be fired if they haven’t won wars.

“It is a little weird to think that anyone who’s made, anyone who’s like a working general today, maybe I’m wrong and there are still some current generals that served in the Gulf War. I think maybe not, but I think every general serving today got promoted for not winning a war,” Masters said in a Twitter Spaces conversation in September 2021, a recording of which was obtained by The Arizona Republic.

“And I think that’s bad, and I think you probably want to fire most or all the generals and replace them with apolitical colonels, who will probably have conservative politics,” he said.

Masters has said he wants to “reform fundamentally the U.S. military” to “get it back into fighting shape.” That’s largely a “cultural project,” addressing critical race theory and “social, emotional, whatever diversity training in the military,” he told the Daily Wire.

“First, you’ve got to get rid of the, sort of, left-wing rot. And then it’s going to be a little bit longer of a project to rebuild,” he said in that same November interview.

The military is one example of “a country that just doesn’t work,” as Masters has put it. He said in the Twitter Spaces conversation that the middle class has been hollowed out and the border has become like a war zone.

“Speaking of war zones, like we go and fight stupid — I was going to say endless wars — I guess this one ended. But it ended in sort of classic, classic failure, which is what we’ve come to expect from our, from our leadership class and from our military brass in the last few decades. So it just feels like things are badly off-track,” Masters said, apparently referring to the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan.

Americans in general are confident in the military, per a Gallup Poll from earlier this year: 32% of people had a great deal of confidence in the military, 32% had quite a lot of confidence, 26% had some confidence, 8% had very little confidence and less than 0.5% had no confidence in the military. (The margin of error was plus or minus 4%.) Other than small business, the military was the only American institution a majority of people expressed confidence in.

Veterans issues 'aren't partisan'

Wednesday at a veterans meeting in Chandler organized by the Kelly campaign, about a dozen veterans discussed their top issues, ranging from health care to preventing sexual assault in the military and explained why they back Kelly.

They said Kelly’s seat on the Senate Armed Services Committee is critical, as is his support for veterans as seen in various legislative efforts.

Paul Hickman, a former longtime aide to the late Republican Sen. John McCain, who chaired the Armed Services Committee, pointed to parallels between the two senators.

“Two carrier-based combat pilots, two Navy captains, two guys who really care a lot about the veterans community, about national security policy. And issues like that create an opportunity to put a coalition like this together, where partisanship is secondary and it is the greater objective that binds us,” he said.