Video: Fmr. Rep. Denver Riggleman (R-VA05) Says Trump, Hegseth et al Are “almost like Caligula’s court on crack…making decisions on what’s happening in the [Iran war] airspace”

Yesterday, former Rep. Denver Riggleman (R-VA05) was on MSNOW to talk about the rescue of the missing U.S. airman and…what else, Trump’s insanity, of course. See below for video and highlights of what he had to say.

• “There’s an incredible amount of resourcing [to rescue the airman shot down in Iran]…I got to tell  you, the fact that we can do that is amazing. There’s a number of instruments that are on the pilot and other things that we can utilize…the amount of resourcing that goes in there and technical acumen and the training of the pilot…in order to do that just goes to the testament of the training and the people who care about our pilots on the ground and I was one of them.”
• “…when you know when you’re talking about beaconing or you’re talking about some of the other things that they have available to them, based  on what he ejected with what pilots eject with…it’s fraught with danger. But there’s also other things that you’re briefed on and the best thing I can say, Alex, is a communications card with certain types of activities you engage in when you go down… but that individual was very well trained. But we also have some incredible sensing technologies in the battle space there that we can identify using that type of beaconing and those type of communications that they have available to them.”
• “When they talk about radars, President Trump is pretty ignorant. You just don’t need radars to identify threats. When you’re looking at passive infrared, it doesn’t emit any signals and it’s very effective. The Russians and the Chinese are very good at, that’s what I was trained on, Alex, that’s what I had to do. Even when I heard the radar comment, it was absolutely ridiculous. And when Hegseth is saying, ‘oh, if they shoot a missile, we will shoot them down’ – well that’s not happening. I think, Alex, we might have lost seven aircraft total. Two, I think we destroyed ourselves because they couldn’t get off an air strip. So, I just find it incredible. It’s almost like, and Alex, I try not to be too hyperbolic, but it’s almost like, you know, Caligula’s court on crack and essential oils making decisions on what’s happening in the airspace…I’m just absolutely just as stunned about the mission planning that’s going on there and the fact that we’re not identifying those threats and the order of battle is what it’s called. But there were a few things that went wrong and I hope the debrief is specific on why we have aircraft in that envelope or we didn’t have the intelligence resources to identify where that system was located. And we also know what Iran has gotten from China and Russia. Those systems anybody can Google right now and look at some of those systems that could have shot down and even the unclassified ranges of those systems. This is something that the military and the mission planners should have had well on their radar, no pun intended, but also in the mission planning about the envelopes and the combat air patrol the altitudes that the aircraft can actually fly in.”