Restore the Military

Episode 7: The Truth Behind the NDAA Process

September 22nd, 2026  |  18 mins 58 secs

combat veterans, military life, military pay, military reform, national security, ndaa defense policy, veterans affairs, warrior culture

Congress passes exactly one bill every year without fail. The NDAA has cleared for more than six decades straight, and that streak hides one of the most dysfunctional processes in Washington.

In this episode, Doug Truax and Will Thibeau open the hood on how it actually works: a calendar that jams the year's most important defense decisions into a lame-duck window, an authorization that grants permission without money attached, and a must-pass status that turns warfighting priorities into trading stock.

Then they get into what that dysfunction costs — how a provision that clears the Senate can vanish before it ever reaches the President's desk, why the Senate's merit and standards reforms are at risk this fall, and what a member's office can still do about it while the conference is open.

Episode 6: America’s Military Readiness Crisis

July 21st, 2026  |  18 mins 46 secs

combat veterans, goldwater nichols, joint staff, military life, military pay, military policy, military reform, national security, ndaa, ndaa defense policy, pentagon reform, restore the military, veterans affairs, warrior culture

Can the United States actually fight one war right now — let alone two? Hosts Doug Truax and Will Thibeau dig into the Strategic Equipment Reserve, the state of the American defense industrial base, and why the numbers behind U.S. munitions stockpiles should worry every voter.

In this episode:
• What CSIS's 2023 Taiwan invasion wargames revealed about how fast key precision munitions run out
• How U.S. aid to Ukraine drained Javelin, Stinger, and artillery stocks with no fast replacement plan in place
• Why China's grip on rare earths and critical components is a vulnerability an adversary could exploit early in any future conflict
• The Strategic Equipment Reserve provision: a two-war stockpile, dedicated training stocks, a five-year domestic sourcing mandate, and new restrictions on diverting reserves abroad
• Why this is the rare defense reform with bipartisan support — and the lowest conference risk in the entire package
• The real cost of rebuilding the arsenal, and why it's dramatically cheaper than the cost of losing

Episode 5: The Battle for Control of America's Military

July 14th, 2026  |  19 mins 29 secs

combat veterans, goldwater nichols, joint staff, military life, military pay, military policy, military reform, national security, ndaa, ndaa defense policy, pentagon reform, restore the military, veterans affairs, warrior culture

Episode 4: How America’s Military Academies Lost Their Way

July 7th, 2026  |  19 mins 30 secs

combat readiness, combat veterans, critical race theory military, dei in the military, military culture, military excellence, military life, military pay, military readiness, national security, ndaa defense policy, officer formation, rotc dei, tactical commissioning, veterans affairs, warrior culture, west point dei

United States Military Academies are supposed to produce officers who can win wars. For the last decade, it has produced officers who can recite the official position on systemic racism.

Episode 3: Fixing the Military's Broken Incentive System

June 30th, 2026  |  14 mins 59 secs

combat veterans, military life, military pay, military reform, national security, ndaa defense policy, veterans affairs, warrior culture

Is the military paying its warriors what they're worth?

A Pentagon staff officer behind a desk and an infantry platoon leader who took fire yesterday earn the same base pay. In this episode, Doug Truax and Will Thibeau break down the Elite Warrior Incentive Program — a proposed structural overhaul of how the military compensates its combat arms personnel — and why the current pay table sends the wrong message to the people pulling the hardest assignments.

In this episode:
• The mid-career retention crisis hemorrhaging experienced NCOs and junior officers — and the $75K–$120K replacement cost the institution keeps explaining away
• What a formal Elite Warrior Designation would actually require to earn and keep
• The full incentive stack: special pay, deployment bonuses, VA priority enrollment, and expanded federal hiring preference
• Why visible distinctions like the Ranger tab and SEAL trident drive aspiration — and how a pay differential does the same thing in the wallet
• What it will take to get this through the FY2027 NDAA

The pay table tells soldiers what the institution values. Right now, it says combat and bureaucracy are the same thing.

Episode 2: The Truth About Women in Combat Units

June 25th, 2026  |  19 mins 54 secs

defense bill, defense policy, doug truax, military policy, military readiness, military reform, ndaa, will thibeau, women in combat

In 2015, the Marine Corps conducted a landmark nine-month study on gender-integrated combat units and found that all-male squads outperformed integrated squads on 69 percent of tasks — yet the Obama administration opened all combat positions to women anyway. A decade later, Congress is finally attempting to legislate sex-neutral fitness standards into permanent law, and this episode breaks down the data, the political decisions that overrode it, and what's at stake in the current fight.

Episode 1: The Battle Over Merit in America's Military

June 23rd, 2026  |  14 mins 58 secs

2027 defense bill, ndaa

The episode opens with a pointed argument: the Supreme Court's 2023 Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard ruling struck down race-conscious admissions in higher education, but the service academies have continued operating under identity-based admissions frameworks using an untested "national security" rationale. Doug and Will argue the legal exposure is real and growing — and that it's better to fix it through statute now than have a court opinion force the issue later.