Retired Rear Admiral Mark Montgomery

speaker

181 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Dec 2025 last heard 13 Dec

Retired Rear Admiral Mark Montgomery’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Dec 2025 with 1.

Appearances

newest first · ▶ plays the moment

The President's Daily Brief · PDB Situation Report | December 13th, 2025: Inside Japan’s Biggest Military Shift Since World War Two & Iran’s Student Uprising · 13 Dec 2025 podcast

And in addition to the Taiwan issue and some issues in the South China Sea that Japan is interested in,

Japan and China have a significant disagreement over a set of islands called the Senkaku Islands that Japan holds and China claims.

And China's basic premise is, if we've ever held anything and have a claim to it, we're taking it back between now and 2049.

But all of a sudden, Japan got this wake-up call.

Now, historically, by their constitution, they only spent 1% of gross domestic product on defense.

Now, they hit it.

They really spent about 1.5%.

I won't get into all of it, but they suppressed it to have a good defense.

And I will tell you, outside of Israel, Japan had the most effective defense spending of any of our allies and partners, and certainly much more effective than anyone in Europe or the United States.

What they got previously for about $45 to $50 billion a year was fantastic.

Now, what's happening now is they're cranking up their defense spending.

They just announced that next year's will be, they'll hit 2% of GDP with $60 billion and further increases over the next four years.

And they're headed up to that, I think eventually that NATO standard of 3.5%.

And in addition, they definitely spend the 1.5% on critical infrastructure associated

with like military mobility or rail systems, aviation system, port systems.

So they're coming up.

And so here's the most efficient country in the world outside of Israel beginning to really expend more money on equipment.

That's got China a little nervous because they also have geographic proximity, obviously.

Their weapons,

are 100% in theater all the time.

Showing 81–100 of 181 · page 5 of 10