The job of America’s elected leaders is to get things done. The democratic process isn’t always pretty and almost never leaves everyone happy; but the effectiveness of our government and America’s stature as the world’s dominant superpower rest on Congress’s ability to find common ground on the issues.
Representative Jason Crow served in the United States Army 75th Ranger Regiment. He is now the Ranking Member of the House Armed Services Subcommittee on Intelligence and Special Operations.
In his 4th term representing Colorado’s 6th district he’s looking to return power to the hands of Congress and has found himself at the center of many of America’s most controversial and important Congressional matters; an area he has learned to navigate through his previous leadership of the For Country Caucus, a bipartisan alliance of military veterans serving in the House of Representatives.
Congressman Crow joined Fran Racioppi to share just how he balances the most polarizing issues facing both sides of the aisle; including the investigation into the withdrawal from Afghanistan, the impeachment of President Donald Trump and the inquiry into the pre-election assassination attempts.
We discussed the impact of budget and personnel cuts to Special Operations and why it’s more important now than ever to invest in our SOF capability to prevent the next major conflict. We also covered border security, the use of active duty military in the enforcement of the border and how countering the cartels and the drug trade aren’t a new mission for Special Operations.
Watch, listen or read our conversation from Congressman Crow’s office. Don’t miss our full coverage from Capitol Hill. Special thanks to For Country Caucus for setting up this series.
The Jedburgh Podcast is brought to you by University of Health and Performance, developing the next generation of fitness entrepreneurs from our Veterans. The Jedburgh Podcast is an official program of The Green Beret Foundation.
The opinions presented on the The Jedburgh Podcast and the Jedburgh Media Channel are the opinions of my guests and myself. They do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the Green Beret Foundation and the Green Beret Foundation assumes no liability for their accuracy, nor does Green Beret Foundation endorse any political candidate or any political party.
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Representative Crow, welcome to the Jedburgh Podcast.
Fran, I’m glad to do this. This is way overdue. Finally, after listening to a bunch of your casts, I am finally able to be with you.
The last time I saw you was in the drop zone in Normandy.
It was.
We were trying to corral you in, and we had to let you go. We got to talk to Mike Waltz, which was awesome. That was a cool experience.
That was so cool. The second time I did that was in 2019 during the 75th anniversary, and then this past June. I’m in the habit of, I think, every five years, all the big five-year remembrances. It was awesome. It was a bipartisan jump. We had 8 or 9 members of Congress up from just two because Mike Walz and I were the only ones who did it in 2019. It’s taken off since then.
They’re all trying to follow you because Rangers lead the way.
All the way.
They don’t look as cool.
Is that the first time a Green Beret has ever said that?
No, because I went to Ranger school, unlike some of my compatriots. Yes, I went and graduated from Ranger schools.
How many Green Berets don’t have the tab?
If you are on the commissioned officer side, almost everybody, I think I know one person in my career who may not have had it. On the enlisted side, you end up having to go at the senior levels if you haven’t gone. At the more senior levels, Sergeant Major, and like the E8 level, do you see a lot of it? At the junior level, you don’t. I always encouraged my guys to go because even though this is a program of the Green Beret Foundation, I will tell you that the best school in the Army is Ranger School.
It is, I agree with you. What class were you in?
I was 105.
I’m 1002. We’re both Winter Rangers, which matters.
It sucks.
It’s really damn cold. Georgia gets cold, so does Florida. No one believes us.
We were breaking ice on Malvesti and it was snowing in the mountains, and it was like 51 and 51 because below 50-50, water and air, you don’t go in the water. We were like 51/51.
I still like to get the shakes and get cold to my core every time somebody serves blueberry pancakes to me. It’s just like, “I can’t do it.”
They’re so disgusting. We’ve got to talk about Congress. We’ve got to talk about what’s going on in the world. Special shout out to the Four Country Caucus. They have invited us back. I guess we did a good job the first round when we were here before the election. We had a chance to sit down with a number of the members. They’ve invited us back. You’re the fourth of four on this trip, so I saved all the hard questions for you.
Listen, if you took it easy on Rich McCormick and Marionette, that’s cool. You can save it for the Ranger.
That’s it. I knew you could handle it. As we’re joking, you serve in the 75th Ranger Regiment, you serve in the 82nd Airborne, multiple combat tours. You represent Colorado’s sixth district, which is also important because when I was in the tenth group and fourth ID, I lived in Castle Rock.
That’s right. I’m just above it. Castle Rock is just outside of my district by a couple of miles. It’s a beautiful spot, a beautiful area.
You’ve got Littleton, Centennial, Aurora. That’s where we had to go.
Englewood, Sheridan. That whole Southern Metro region is my district, which is a fascinating district because it’s a military community, because we have Buckley Space Force Base. There are over 10,000, both uniformed and non-uniform folks that work at that. It’s one of our largest intelligence centers in the world. We have a big defense and aerospace industry. I have over 260 businesses that work in the defense, aviation, and aerospace that employ tens of thousands of my constituents, over 70,000 veterans in the community. It’s a pretty fascinating place.
The Denver Tech Center, which is massive. You serve on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, as well as the House Armed Services Committee, and you’re the ranking member on the Subcommittee on Intelligence and Special Operations. You served in SOF. I served in SOF. This is an SOF-based show. We’re going to start there.
Let’s do it.
There are 100 veterans in Congress in the 119th Congress. It’s the most in eight Congresses. Veterans care about results, and they care about teamwork. I think that’s one of the biggest lessons we take out of our military service. I did see a ranking for you that said you were the fifteenth most politically right Democrat. I don’t know how they rank those. I don’t know where that data comes from.
Here’s what we do know is, you’ve been extremely bipartisan in your time in Congress, and it’s been critically important to advocate for our veterans and for national security. As you look across this now large percentage, almost twenty percent of when you combine the two houses of Congress of being a veteran. How do you expect the 119th Congress to come together and be led by veterans to form a bipartisan community to bring America together?
I’m so glad that you have highlighted the Four Country Caucus. We generally call it the bipartisan veterans caucus because when we were out in their communities, we were like, “I belong to the Four Country Caucus.” They’re like, “Which four countries are involved in that?” Like, “No, it’s the bipartisan veterans caucus.” It’s a great caucus. Last Congress, I was the Democrat co-chair. We self-govern ourselves. We switch out. We believe in rotating leadership and switching folks out. It was me and Tony Gonzalez, Republican from South Texas. Tony’s been on. He’s a good guy, notwithstanding his Navy roots. I’ve got to do it. I’ve got to say it.
He was a cryptologist. I don’t even know what that does.
I did not do as well. He did better on the ASVAB than I did.
All of us.
He took the test and like, “Cyptologists.” I took the test and like “Infantry.” We both turned out all right. This is a great caucus. We started it in 2018. Many of us came in, it was like the largest influx of vets in that class of 2018 that we had had in decades. We came together and said this place is not working. The culture is not working. You can talk all you want about rules and procedures, but the culture is not working. The culture being, if everybody digs in and takes an all-or-nothing mentality, my way or the highway, guess what you get?
You get nothing. Everybody gets nothing. That’s just not going to work. We are not just a caucus of moderates. There are people on the right, there are people on the left, and there are people in the middle. Our dedication is to finding the common ground, whether it’s 10%, 15%, or 20%. Guess what? It works. We’ve passed, as you’ve pointed out, over 100 bills in the time we’ve been together doing the work, and it’s phenomenal. It’s a really great place, and we hope to set an example and standard for the rest of the country and for Congress so that this can work.
We can get back to having some discussion. Frankly, reasserting congressional authority. We’ll probably get to that in a minute. Congress is at an all-time, certainly in my lifetime, a weak point. The presidency is an all-time strong point. I think the constitutional balance is out of whack. I think it’s because Congress has given away its authority for decades. Republican and Democratic Congresses have done it, and they’ve done it to Republican and Democratic presidents. We have constantly given away our authority, whether it’s on the Immigration and Naturalization Act or issues of war powers.
It’s Congress’s role to debate and decide when to send us into war. That is Congress’s role. There are very narrow exceptions from the president can, on his own, use his authority to do so. That has gotten way out of whack, and Congress has allowed that. Frankly, allowed it to happen. I’m of the view, and there’s a fair amount of bipartisanship on this, that it’s time for Congress to reassert its control, to have debates, and to be held accountable. Why do we have a twenty-year war in Iraq and Afghanistan, both of which didn’t end well, which is a longer conversation?
It’s because we stopped debating it. There was virtually no public discussion. It certainly wasn’t a part of our elections because we were financing it with that. We were doing it with an all-volunteer force. Most folks, with the exception of a few, weren’t feeling it. It wasn’t a part of our political rhetoric. My view is to return that power back to Congress and hold us accountable. Every two years, we’re up for election. We need to be voting on this stuff, and we need to be going back home and telling people why we’re voting the way we are.
You brought up the war, the two wars, and the twenty years of global war on terror. Everybody who served in whatever component of the military all served admirably and did a great job in fighting for the nation. We could argue and debate the root causes behind it, but we have to give credit where it’s due. We also know that Special Operations carried a big component of both of those wars. What is the job of Special Operations? I would say that outside of counterterrorism, they need to operate left of the bang and in an area that prevents conflict.
How do we work with partner nations and our allies to develop them and keep wars and conflict off of our soil? Also, we need to keep the term near in near-peer. I think they play a big role in that. As you sit on the subcommittee on intelligence and Special Operations as the ranking member, what do you see as the role of SOF over the next 5 or 10 years as we look at both threats and encounter terrorism in the peer-near-peer fight?
We spent, and I know I’m preaching to the choir here, two decades, mainly on a CT mission. We restructured, we trained that way, our doctrine evolved around that. Now, that’s rapidly shifting back to the near-peer threat and great power competition. Number one, the CT threat is not gone. We still do have a CT threat. It’s going to be a smaller percentage of the mission, and it needs to be because we can’t do all things, and we have the capability and capacity of addressing the CT threat not by having boots on the ground everywhere and having large-scale troop formations in multiple countries. We can address that.
The foreign internal defense mission, getting back to the roots of the Green Beret, as envisioned by John F. Kennedy when he created you all, is going to be so powerful because I believe strongly that our greatest strength, other than our people and our incredible troops, is our partners. It is the envy, and why do I know that? Russia and China desperately want what we have. They desperately want a NATO-like alliance, a Quad, an AUKUS.
All of these alliance structures we build up, and they’ve tried really hard to build them and have largely failed. We’re the envy of the world in that, and the ability to capacity build and use the force multiplying effect of our soft forces and not necessarily be doing direct action ourselves, although there is a time and place for that, and that’s not going to go away. It’s going to be really powerful in that enabling mission.
One of the things that I’ve spoken with the commanders and the senior leaders across SOCOM is that they’ve been directed to reduce some forces. They’ve had money cut from the appropriations committee that has gone into the SOF. That money, a lot of it has gone into the development of long-range deep-strike capability and investment in the other components. How do they continue to remain at the tip of the spear if the directive is, “You got to cut forces, and you got to take money away?”
They can’t is the short answer. I think it would be a huge mistake to do that and we’ll resist it. There are a lot of people who will resist that. Listen, we are nearing a $1 trillion defense budget. You look at how that is spent and the proportion of that. There’s all sorts of discussion here in Washington about plus-ups and five percent increases, and we need to increase the top line. There isn’t nearly enough discussion, although there’s starting to be, about internal reform. There are hundreds of billions over multiple years of wasted money. We are building systems now and procuring systems that will be completely ineffective on the battlefield of the future.
We spend so much money on things from the last wars. The wars of 20 or 30 years ago. It’s got to stop. It just has to stop. We’re wasting taxpayer dollars, we’re wasting time. Our adversaries aren’t doing it. Listen to the fact that everyone loves to see these aircraft carriers. It’s a show of strength. It makes good videos, and they look great. We spend billions of dollars, tens of billions, building and maintaining these things, and they can be knocked out with a $1 million cruise missile. It’s insane.
We have to be making hard decisions, and we have to be pushing DoD to respond to different incentives. Those incentives, those demand signals, had to be sent by Congress. DoD is a rational organization. It responds to demand signals. It responds to the incentives that we push out and that we send it. If we just keep on pumping money into that system, there’s zero incentive for change. Let’s stop.
Let’s say you’ve got to be able to pass an audit. You’ve got to be able to show us how you’re spending your money and what you’re spending it on. You have to show us how everything that we’re doing will deliver results on the battlefield now and in the future. I guarantee you there are tremendous savings and efficiencies that we can then use for things like SOF, which have proven ability to have an impact on the battlefield.
You mentioned the term battlefield. I think that when we look at what we’ve called the next battlefield, we could define that a number of different ways. Being veterans, we think more about of land. The battlefield, as we look at our competition with China, can be across the dime spectrum of national power, diplomatic, information, military, and economic power. I think that’s really important to look at.
It’s a great point. It’s a huge point that that definition is expanded. Not just in a kinetic way, but every electrical outlet and every computer terminal is a battlefield. Every satellite. It’s all part of the battlefield. Our adversaries certainly are treating it that way, but also the so-called soft power. The aid, the diplomacy, all the things that prevent conflict and build our alliances.
I’m going to ask you, because you went there, do we have the will, though? You brought up the electrical outlets, everything, and we just had a great conversation with Representative Fluger about this, where I asked him about denial of service attacks because that’s a huge threat. I had a chance to sit down and interview the former Boeing chief security officer, and he said, “The biggest threat we have today is denial of service attacks.” How do we build capability across the whole government for something like shutting off the water, shutting off the power, or contaminating the air?
You mean defending against that. That’s a leadership challenge. That’s what leaders are supposed to be doing. I need to reframe the discussion about how we build political will. You build political will by leading. That’s, in part, our job. We have both a function of responding to the needs of our district. That is, the primary function is to advocate for our districts and our constituents to help bring federal funding to respond to their needs. We also need to communicate as leaders in the direction in which things are going.
We need to make the case that big shifts are necessary in how we’re allocating resources. That is what leaders do. They don’t simply respond. They’ve got to be out front, and we have to be helping shape that debate because we’re not doing it enough. When we talk about political will, I don’t view that as a passive term. That’s an active term. It’s a term that if you’re an elected official, you need to be engaged in and helping to build that will because it’s dangerous. Our adversaries, China and others, they don’t want a war with the United States.
We build political will by leading. Leaders don’t simply respond. They got to be out front.
Although they are building aggressive forces and there are issues of Taiwan, I think they want a war potentially with others. What they want to do, they never want to go ship for ship, plane for plane. They want to completely cut off our ability to move, shoot, communicate, and do everything necessary before one bullet is ever fired. That is what they’re trying to do. That’s how they’re investing their money. That’s how they’re building their infrastructure. If we don’t defend against that and build our defenses and build our resiliency against that, we’ll be in real trouble.
One of the areas that’s been hotly discussed, I’d say, for the last few years, and certainly through the election cycle and over the last couple of weeks, is immigration. Your district came front and center on a lot of the immigration discussions because of the Venezuelan gangs that were reported to be operating across Aurora. Now, what we’ve seen are these mass deportations since the Trump administration has come into power.
Some of this has also been tied to potential terrorist activity, and do we know who’s coming to the country? What’s your assessment of the border situation and how it’s affected your district? I know that you were vocal about not using Buckley Space, which I used to call Buckley Air Force Base. It’s hard to get that term down, but not using that for mass deportation. You’ve also been very vocal about, “Look, if they’re here illegal, they’ve got to go.”
I’m a national security Democrat. I’m a public safety Democrat. I believe in public safety and law and order. If someone is committing a violent crime in our community or is a danger to our community, they have no place in our community. They have no place in Colorado. I don’t know of anybody, nor have I spoken to anybody, that says, “If there’s a violent offender, we shouldn’t sweep them up and detain them.
If they don’t have status, deport them. You got to get them out.” That is not up for debate, in my view, but that’s also not what we’re talking about when we’re talking about mass deportation. I will loop back to that. I have one of the most diverse districts in the nation. Nearly twenty percent of my constituents were born outside of the United States. I have over 130 languages spoken in my public school system. These are folks from all over.
They’re business owners, they work in our industries, they’re a fundamental part of our economy and our workforce, they’re our neighbors, and they’re our friends. They live, we all live, within a fundamentally broken immigration system, broken in every single way. We talk about border security, and that consumes a lot of the discussion, and I’m concerned about it, too. We need border security. We do not have border security, and the border needs to be secure. There are smart ways of doing that effectively, and there are dumb ways of doing that. I’m a big fan of George Patton.
Who is he?
One of Patton’s famous quotes was, “Fixed fortifications are monuments to the stupidity of man.” He knows in history that no fortress, no wall, whether you’re talking about Hadrian’s wall or the Maginot line, nothing can’t be overcome. You can’t go up over around something. You pour all this monies and money into things. What we know is that there are ways with technology, with surveillance, with ISR, with personnel of securing border in space. Let’s have a discussion about how to do that because I’m concerned about terrorism, too. That’s one.
Two, there has to be a pathway to citizenship for folks who are living peacefully within our community, which is the vast majority, that own businesses, own homes, that are fundamental to our economy, that are following the rules and want to normalize their status. That’s good for all of us. Let’s have that discussion. We had the ability to do that with a bipartisan deal that we heavily negotiated last Congress that was killed by the president, by President Trump. Three is, because I have such a diverse community, very few people are talking about the visa issue. There is talent.
People still want to live in the United States because we have a great quality of life. We’re still the envy of the world. We have wonderful innovation. The American dream is something that people around the world still talk about. People want to come smart, educated, skilled folks. They literally can’t. They apply for a visa, and it’s a 10, 15, or 20-year wait time.
That is destroying our economy, and it’s holding us back. I go to small businesses all the time. I do business visits almost every time I’m in Colorado. I always ask them the same question. I say, “What is your number one problem with your business?” Across the board, they always say workforce. I can’t find enough people to grow my business and to make more money and to expand.
Why don’t we have an actual discussion about how we normalize status for folks, how we fix our visa system, how we secure our border, and how we do so in a humane way that’ll be good for our community and good for our families? That requires the last piece. The last piece is that it requires that we have a discussion about what is and isn’t happening, all the focus in Aurora and these mass gang takeovers.
I live in Aurora. It’s my home. I spend time talking with local elected leaders, with the federal law enforcement, with the head of the FBI, with all the local police officers. I have a good sense for what’s happening and what’s not. I can tell you that no transnational gangs are taking over Aurora. It’s just not true. Are there issues that need to be addressed in this federal law enforcement, working with others to address it? Yes. Do I support that? Yes. We need to have fact-based discussions.
When we look at our active duty military force, one of the things that’s come into the immigration discussion is the deployment of active duty down to the border. The other piece from a Special Operations discussion that’s happened is that the president has said, “We can deploy Special Operations to fight narco-terrorism. If we say the cartels are terrorist organizations, which they’ve done in the last couple of weeks,” which isn’t out of the ordinary. If we go back to the Columbia cartels, we deployed Delta Force down there, and I think Rangers.
Much of what we talk about, Tom Clancy talked about decades ago.
There are books. Killing Pablo was a real story. What’s your opinion on using the active duty component, whether it be Special Operations to go after the cartels or the deployment of the border to help fortify that?
First of all, this goes to my earlier point about needing to have a transparent debate and understanding that certain things are classified and you need to be kept secret for operational security reasons, but there are ways of us doing oversight and Congress being involved in that. I sit on the Intelligence Committee, and over 95% of what we do is in a SCIF. It’s all classified. If what we want to do is use military for foreign counter-terrorism and counter-narco trafficking operations, there is some precedent for that.
I want to see Congress involved. Congress needs to be involved, constitutionally and legally. This is something that no president should do on their own, whether they’re a Republican or Democrat. The elected representatives that constitutionally have the role of deciding when to send our people proactively into conflict need to be engaged, and so far, we’re not engaged. That’s fundamental to me. That’s what needs to happen.
Congress needs to be involved constitutionally. No President should do this on their own, whether they’re a Republican or Democrat.
We can have a discussion about what’s appropriate use of our military, what’s tied to our national security, and what’s not. We also have to look at the broader picture. We simply can’t do everything everywhere. I would like to, but we have finite resources. The world is a dangerous place, and people are making decisions all the time about how to allocate our resources and our forces and our money given what are the biggest conflicts and what are the biggest threats. We need to have that conversation.
I’ve got one more question for you, and this is going to be hard because I know you got a lot of things to do and it’s not easy to lead in Colorado and lead in this country, but you are a ranger, so you’re going to lead from the front. I want to ask you about, we talked a little bit about bipartisanship and we talked about teamwork, but I’ve got to ask you, how do you do it? I think that’s what the tangible discussion has to be.
It’s easy to say, “We’re going to get along.” I want to throw something out here that I think is really important about you. In President Trump’s first term, you led the impeachment inquiry. However, fast forward to several months ago, when President Trump was almost assassinated, you were one of the first ones to raise your hand and say, “I will lead this investigation.” Here you have yourself, who on one end of the spectrum said, “We got to get rid of this guy.”
On the other side said, “I got to stand up for this situation here, and we got to figure out what happened.” How do you build consensus, and how do you rally people to come to the table and have the discussions that you’ve gone back to in this conversation, brought up multiple times about sitting down and having a discussion? I’ll throw one more thing out to you, and then I’ll turn it over. Patrick Murphy, former congressman and secretary of the army, sat down with me a couple of years ago, and he has a great quote that I use all the time. He said, “You can disagree, but you can’t be disagreeable.” How do you do that?
That is the ultimate challenge. Your examples are right. First of all, I have this knack for being pulled into these big assignments. I’m just sitting around minding my own business and having a coffee, and I get the call. I get the knock on the door, and they’re like, “Do you want to be like an impeachment manager? Do you want to help lead the attempt at the assassination task force? Do you want to lead the effort to do the investigation into Afghanistan?”
I’m here to serve. I don’t always know what that looks like. I will answer the call when it comes if it’s appropriate. I try to call balls and strikes. I have a lot of issues with the policies of this administration, but if there are things that I can get behind, I’m not going to just burn the entire house down. Again, this goes back to my earlier comment. If you take the all-or-nothing mentality, if that’s what everybody does, then everybody gets nothing. That’s just not going to work. My simple approach is relationships.
If you literally just sit down and talk to somebody, grab a drink after work, grab a dinner with them, take a CODEL, one of these congressional delegation trips overseas to visit our troops, jump out of a plane. You get to know the person, and you get to know their family and their spouse and what drives them. You realize that, listen, the vast majority of people are not evil. They’re not trying to destroy your way of life. They have deep-seated differences in views. That’s not to say I’m not going to fight ardently for my beliefs and to protect my constituents because I will.
It’s about relationships. If you just sit down and talk to somebody, you get to know them and realize that the vast majority of people are not evil. They just have deep-seated differences in views.
That’s not what I’m saying. I will fight if I need to, but I’m not going to approach something in any conversation at the outset and say, “Your motivations are bad, or you hate America.” The second you do that, you’re done. The second you go to somebody and say, “You’re evil, or you’re an existential threat to me, or you hate America, or whatever the case might be.” There’s no place to go. The conversation is essentially over. I’m one of the most bipartisan members of Congress.
One point, I was ranked 11 out of 435 last Congress and 75% of the bills that I introduced. I introduced with a Republican co-lead because I mean it. Some very conservative folks co-sponsor and work with me on bills because I know them, and they trust me, and they know that I wouldn’t ask them to do something that I wouldn’t do myself. If they came to me, that I also wouldn’t do. It’s just as simple as that. It’s relationships and getting to know your neighbor and your friend.
In the Special Forces, we call it a warrior diplomat which is awesome to see from a Ranger.
We can cross our own lines in the service.
Sometimes, you don’t need to blow the door. You can just turn the handle and open it up and ask if anyone’s inside.
Sometimes you can. We have lessons to learn from each other, Fran.
I appreciate you taking the time to sit down with me. It’s been an honor to plan this for a while and really throw the difficult questions at you because Congress is there, as you’ve mentioned, to get things done. I think that the job of a congressman or any in all levels in both the House and the Senate is to find a way to get the result because that’s what matters. Results. The American people want results. How do you get there?
They want it because they deserve it. That is our job. It’s not just what they want. It’s what they deserve and what we owe to them. I always say that the problem of legislating and its challenge are the Goldilocks challenge. You need that porridge just right. Not too hot, not too cold. A lot of these issues are not easy issues. They have unintended consequences. That’s our job.
The problem of legislating is the Goldilocks challenge—you need that porridge just right: not too hot, not too cold. A lot of these issues are not easy issues. They have unintended consequences.
I tell people all the time in leadership seminars that I give that as a leader, it doesn’t matter how you feel as long as your team achieves the result that you want.
That’s right. My personal feelings are largely irrelevant here.
I appreciate all you’re doing.
Thanks, Fran. Appreciate it. Thank you.