Steve Kwast
speaker
426 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2025
last heard May 2025
Steve Kwast’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Nobody would jump on a hand grenade in a foxhole for their brothers, but they do because they feel that sense of belonging so powerfully that I would die for you. And we do it in the military all the time. And it is a beautiful thing, and it's what God gave us, a sense of belonging. But even something good like that can be used by Satan for bad. But it also can be a trap.
So if I'm a fighter pilot, and I am in the Air Force, and I say that the strategic investment is to not have a person in the cockpit of a machine that doesn't have enough gas or enough weapons to go the distance and get the job done.
That we should invest in machines that don't have a human being in it, connected with sufficient awareness so that a human being can make the decision, if it's a moral decision, And now I have been ostracized from the entire tribe I belong to of fighter pilots that are celebrating the heritage of scarf around their neck. But it happens all the time in World War II, the beginning of World War II.
It's a great story in a book called Fast Tanks and Heavy Bombers, which is the oxymoron title. But it describes why we don't innovate and the cultural reasons why we don't innovate it. Back to one of your central questions. The horse on the battlefield was the key element of rapid maneuver. before World War II.
Even though people like Churchill and others had been screaming for mechanization for years, it was very slow in coming and it was not, it was a little trickle of money, not big money like the Germans did for Blitzkrieg. And so as they studied, And so every army officer was required to have equestrian lessons.
You had to know how to manage horses and deal with horses in the military because that was the big thing. And when the question was asked, how are you going to beat the tanks of Blitzkrieg? They did the studies and one of my favorite studies that shows how hard it is for us to change and how hard it is to give up our tribal allegiances to the way we've always done it.
On the horseback as a soldier or in a cockpit of a fighter aircraft as a fighter pilot or on the deck of a battleship as a Navy captain. We can be so biased and so stuck in a mindset. We can make any study say anything we want, really, if we're that biased and that deceptive.
So the report that's one of my favorites that is chronicled in this book is the report that basically came back and all the psychologists and all the experts said, if you take the horse off the battlefield, the IQ of the soldier will plummet. that the horse is essential and it should be our main strategic effort to beat mechanization.
And it went further to say the way we solve it is we put the horses in trailers and carry them to the front line and then they will be fresh and they will be able to outmaneuver the tanks and kill them from behind. And they used evidence like the tank can't get through trees or it can't get over tough mountains and the horse can. So there's always evidence that can confirm your bias.
But General Marshall was smart enough and had the power of the presidency and FDR behind him, where when General Herr, the H-E-R-R, the two-star in charge of the cavalry at the time, presented this report that said the way to win against Blitzkrieg is to have a better horse and more stuff on the horse and using the horse in a better way, incremental innovation.
General Marshall essentially started investing more heavily in mechanization. But even the mechanization was tough. They turned to Knutson, who was the most brilliant industrialist of the age, working with Ford and Chrysler and some of the big mechanization. He was just a brilliant man. And he went to the Army. He was hired to help us mechanize. He went to the Army and said, what do you need?
And the Army didn't know. That's how stuck we can get in the tribalism and the heritage. So how would it feel for you to be ostracized from all the people that you feel a belonging to? It's very lonely, and in fact, it is devastating. But this is what innovators put up with. I mean, they'd say it's lonely at the top. It's a component of that, but innovation also has that.
It is, you are ostracized from those, how dare you? You are a traitor to the fighter pilot community if you don't think a fighter aircraft is the solution.
Well, you're doing the same thing, but it goes back to there's nothing new under the sun and everything is rooted in human nature. So if you understand human nature and culture and history and the lessons that have happened, as long as the history is true, that's another thing you have to work for, you can navigate a better future.
But it requires this intellectual curiosity and aggressive learning where... you actually put in the time to study your history. And you triangulate truth with that too. You read history books written from different people in different perches around the world, different cultures around the world, to try to get after the bias that is written by the victors.
Because the victors always write it making themselves look like they are the heroes of the world, when in reality they may not have been totally. And you have to be honest with yourself about not wanting to be the hero of the story. Truth is the hero of the story.
Well, the first thing is to – be humble enough to anchor yourself in the fact that the only person that matters is God. And if you don't have that, if you aren't grounded in the fact that you are moral, ethical, legal, honest, and God is your judge, And you can't lie to God. You can't deceive God.
And then you surround yourself with people that keep you honest and keep you humble, where it's not about you. It's about God's will. It's about glorifying God, ultimately. That's that moral center where our worldview is that there is a God and that God loves us. And he asks us to love one another as much as he loves us. So if you have that as a grounding, you can weather all of this stuff.
When I was at the senior level of command and supporting the Space Force as an astronautical engineer and through my whole life watching this technology emerge and able to see the consequences of what this was gonna mean for the art of peace, to have strength, to prevail for American interests as the economy of space starts emerging,
and then being considered a traitor because what is a fighter pilot doing talking about space? And the Air Force did not, just like the Army did not want an independent Air Force for the same reasons why the Air Force did not want a Space Force. And so I was not welcome. And that's okay. That is the cost of innovation. And if you're not grounded in God, Look at Job in the Bible.
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