Threats to America are at an all time high. Our national security and law enforcement professionals have warned us. Our military leaders are preparing for anything and everything.
Representative August Pfluger is the chairman of the Homeland Security Subcommittee on Counterterrorism and Intelligence. He is now a 3-term Congressman representing Texas’s 11th District. He is also an Air Force Academy graduate and an F-22 fighter pilot with over 300 combat hours. As a member of the bi-partisian military Veterans alliance, the For Country Caucus, one of his biggest efforts is to build coalitions across the aisle.
With Homeland Security, terror threats and nation-state brinksmanship front and center, I sat down with the Congressman to ask him what exactly the biggest threats to America are. We dug into the theory of an imminent terror attack, what the battlefield with China really looks like, and why preventing denial of service attacks and the cyber-security risks against America’s critical infrastructure should be at the top of the priority list.
We also discussed the future of SOF on an undefined battlefield, how the reduction of fraud, waste and abuse will open up funds for discretionary spending, and why disagreement should be encouraged; but when the decision is made, everyone needs to get in line and execute.
Watch, listen or read our conversation from Congressman Pfluger’s office. Don’t miss our full coverage from Capitol Hill. Special thanks to For Country Caucus for setting up this series. Follow the Jedburgh Podcast and the Green Beret Foundation on social media. Listen on your favorite podcast platform, read on our website, and watch the full video version on YouTube as we show why America must continue to lead from the front, no matter the challenge.
The Jedburgh Podcast and the Jedburgh Media Channel are brought to you by University of Health and Performance and are 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 host Fran Racioppi. 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 Pfluger, welcome to The Jedburgh Podcast.
Thank you. It’s nice to be here with you.
You represent Texas 11th District, so Northwest of Austin. This is your third consecutive term in Congress and you graduated from the Air Force Academy. You spent twenty years as a fighter pilot flying F-15s and F-22s. I saw the gun barrel out there. Before I went into Special Forces and became a Green Beret, I was a Bradley platoon leader, and so we had the 25-millimeter main gun, but that thing was pretty impressive out there.
I think it’s the only one in Congress. When you walk around, it’s the only gun barrel like that. It came out of an F-22 20-millimeter barrel. Proud of that and it’s fun to see that, but thank you for your service, too.
It was the highlight of my life and it’s critically important and even when we look at the Congress in the 119th Congress, you’ve got 100 veterans sit in this Congress, which is the most out of the last eight Congresses, which is pretty impressive when you start doing the math on that. That’s a significant percentage. As you look across the Congress, and you look at the other veterans who serve, how are you going to come together as the veteran community to focus on teamwork building America and getting results because that’s what veterans care about. How do you get the result and how do you do it collectively?
I love this topic and it starts with the fact that whether you are a Green Beret or a fighter pilot, whether you serve in the Navy or we are in the Marine Corps, there’s a level of trust when you know that somebody else has served. When you see that regardless of the party and the affiliation, the political environment, there’s a trust level that’s there.
One of a couple of things, number one, working on the NDAA, working on what we can do for our veterans in the military, but also then expanding beyond that. Let’s tackle some things or topics that are not typically what veterans always work on in Congress. To have 100 people means that we have veterans on every single committee and we have to tackle these things together. The 119th is the time to do that.
One of the things that’s being tackled across the veteran community and you are seeing it, is national security. National security was certainly a top line issue as we went into the election. We have sat down and been fortunate, and before we go on, I do want to thank the For Country Caucus for bringing us in. This is our second round through Congress of interviews that we have been fortunate enough to do, but they have been great in supporting not only the members, but then also people like the Jedburgh show and the Green Beret Foundation, who are coming in and having these conversations and then getting that out to the veteran community.
You serve as the chairman of the Homeland Security Subcommittee on counter-terrorism and intelligence. I have been fortunate over the last couple of years to have some great conversations with all of our senior military leaders. I will tell you that to a commander and the NCO leadership, they look at me and know that we are closer to a 9/11 than we are removed from 9/11. They know that the charge to both prevent it and respond to it is going to fall on their watch, especially in the special operations community. As you sit in your seat as the chairman, how do you assess the terror threat to the homeland?
Unfortunately, you are right and as chairman of the Counterterrorism Committee on Homeland Security, we have had multiple hearings about this. The landscape is ripe, that you have situations going on, not just in Afghanistan with the return of the Taliban, but also throughout Africa, the Sahel, places like Yemen and in the greater Middle East, that it’s still ripe for this. Unfortunately, some of these people are now in the United States that have these affiliations.
I’m very worried about it. We challenged the last administration and we will challenge this administration to do the right thing to protect this country, to take the steps that we need to take in order to prevent another attack, and it starts with transparency. We live in a dangerous world. It’s not the terrorism threat. We are facing multiple threats and multiple different theaters. We have to understand that it’s asymmetric, too. It’s cyber and AI. There’s things that are now piling on. Deterrence and good policy are important. We are going to keep pushing from our committee in a bipartisan way.
We have had a lot of conversations about readiness as it comes to the military. When we think about readiness, we think about force structure, manning training, leadership development, and equipping. Always when you think about readiness, I go to the AUSA conference and you are like, “It’s weaponry,” but you have been bringing up the cyber threat and you’ve been a very vocal advocate that we have to get on this cyber threat. We have seen attacks from North Korea, China, and Russia. How do we stay ahead of that when we always default to, “We need more weapons?” One of those weapons is a counter-cyber capability.
That’s a great point, and a lot of these tactics are in the grey zone. Is it warfare? Is it crime? or Is it somewhere in between? That’s where these non-nation state actors and even nation state sponsored cyber activities lie in that grey zone. These grey zone tactics that undermine critical infrastructure, that undermine the financial sector that dig into personal information. We have seen those breaches.
Staying ahead of it is hard, but we have to be vigilant, and it starts with education throughout our country at universities like Angelo State that I represent. We need kids focused on this, learning these skills and then going into this business. Putting real resources behind the defense of critical infrastructure in the United States, and working with the private industry. Making sure it’s not a military activity. This is a whole government approach, and I don’t think we have gotten there yet. We are going to keep challenging this administration to do those things and to protect us.
It comes back to what’s the attack on the homeland look like? You can classify that in a lot of different ways. You can say, “It can be a terrorist attack,” like we saw on January 1st, 2025. Is there a likelihood that someone’s going to launch an international ballistic missile on us? It’s out there. It’s probably on the one end of the spectrum that’s out there, but think about it like a denial-of-service attack. Take down the energy grid, the natural gas grid.
The colonial pipeline for instance. You are right. These are the kinds of things. What about water treatment facilities in local communities? That’s where we are vulnerable is some of the smaller communities, banks, and entities that provide these denial-of-services. You nailed it, and that’s what we are worried about. The government has to be able to provide a structure so that private industry can know the intel, be prepared for the techniques that they are using in the cyber domain, protect, push back, and secure whatever it is that they are securing to make sure that they can provide those services.
I want to ask, as we look at an organization like Doge. There’s been a lot of pressure on Elon Musk and the president about some of the cuts that they have made. If we tie that back to national security, where does something like a denial-of-service attack fall? Is that Homeland Security or Department of Energy? Is that a DOD thing? How do you then go about from your position in the house appropriating funds?
Yes. It involves all of these agencies. What Elon Musk is doing is critical to national security because every dollar of improper payment that is going somewhere else is a dollar we are not spending on security. It’s a dollar we are not spending on cyber defense and on readiness. Funneling that money back into the intended buckets to the recipients that need it to bolster our defenses is critical.
In the couple of weeks, we are going to learn that there are billions of dollars that were improperly spent and are going to places that we never intended that Congress, Republicans and Democrats never signed up for, that we didn’t approve. We have got to claw that back and then put it towards the right things, as you said, to help the Department of Energy, the Department of Defense, Homeland Security, and all of those departments to have the right resources.
I got to ask you about the role of special operations in the future, because we come from a special operations background. We have seen that appropriation of funds come away from SOF over the past couple of years because we have seen a huge investment in deep strike capability across all service components.
What we know is that SOF’s job is to do two things. One, we have to operate in that left of bang, left of conflict area through strategic partnerships with our allies and our partners. Number two, we have to keep the term near in front of peer for all our nation state adversaries. What do you see the role of special operations being as we prepare for the next conflict, whether that be a counter-terrorism or in nation state on nation state potential?
Great point. We don’t want them to be pure adversaries. We want to keep our competitive advantage. While I didn’t serve in the SOF world, our appreciation for having the innovative approach, always staying one step ahead of our enemies and being. If you need to be somewhere and undercover, you can do it. If we need to gather intel, surveil, and have reconnaissance, you can do that. It’s keeping that innovative spirit going. All of these things have to come together.
We need to look at the overall command-and-control structure of our military again. We are at that point where we need to make some decisions on how we empower communities like the SOF community to keep doing the good work to have deterrence. It’s all about deterrence at the end of the day. President Trump said it in his inaugural address that the metric that we are going to measure ourselves by is the wars we don’t fight. SOF plays a huge role in deterrence. That, to me, is weight in gold.
Last question, then we got to get you on your way. You got a busy day ahead of you with some super important
people. The military teaches us perspective. You are a fighter pilot. For those of us who were on the ground while you were high above, we say you got the 30,000-foot view. I always think about perspective like that because the situations we have been in, you had over 2,000 flight hours and 300 of those in combat environment, so you look at things a little bit differently. There are 100 veterans in Congress, but that means that there are 500 or so, plus that have not served. You got to walk these halls with everybody every day. What are the lessons that you take from your time and service that you apply in the halls of Congress every day?
I had a group of Air Force Academy cadets in my office and we talked about this exact thing, and it’s teamwork that in a partisan and a bipartisan way. There’s a time to act as a team. We always had in our planning sessions when we would do missions to support those that were on the ground to deter from not having to put boots on the ground.
We have what was called the GICL, the Good Idea Cutoff Line. You sit around the table and everybody argues for their version of how this mission is going to go, and it’s a heated discussion. At the end of that mission planning time, you slap the table. You agree to sometimes disagree on the exact approach, but you agree on the approach that we are going to take. That’s the lesson that Congress can learn both in a partisan and a bipartisan way. It’s like, let’s agree to slap the table.
Let’s agree to move on. Let’s not hold things up. Let’s strengthen our economy, our military, our national defense and our security. Slapping the table with a good idea cutoff line is important. Unfortunately, some of our colleagues don’t like that approach. At the end of the planning session, they want to keep going and be an obstructionist to that. It’s okay to stand your ground, but it’s also okay to say, “I stood my ground. I fought for what I thought, and now we got 80% of it, but not 100%,” and that’s okay. That’s the lesson that the military veterans bring to Congress is that understanding.
Once the decision is made, you get on board, and execute. Congressman, I appreciate your time. It’s good to catch up, gather your perspective, and your thoughts on where we are. We got a lot to do. It’s happening fast around us, but our veteran community is going to be impactful and impacted by this administration in the next couple years. I appreciate all you are doing.
Thanks for being here.
Thank you.
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