Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-TX) warned Thursday that the United States no longer has the “ability to keep Americans safe” because the country isn't “forward deployed” anymore.
“Look at every big mission that we've had that the public knows about for the last decade or so. Osama bin Laden, Soleimani, Baghdadi,” he told Fox News’s Bill Hemmer. “Everybody likes those. A lot of the people who think we shouldn't be anywhere in the world except on our own shores, they say 'see, we can just go do that kind of stuff and we don't have to have a forward presence.' Well, I suggest you figure out you know what you are talking about because the only reason we were able to do those things is because, one, we were forward deployed.”
He continued: “We had networks in place, and we were doing intelligence collections prior to, and we had people on the ground forward stage so they could actually do those missions. We have no ability to do that anymore. We have no ability to keep Americans safe."
Crenshaw, a Navy veteran, has been a fierce critic of President Biden’s disastrous Afghanistan withdrawal, saying earlier this week America is in a worse position than it was Sept. 10, 2001.
"It’s always worth reminding people we weren’t at war then,” he said, responding to a question about the upcoming 20th anniversary of 9/11. “But somebody was at war with us, and guess what? They are still at war with us."
"Joe Biden did not end any war. That was always the myth," he continued. "That was always the false promise from politicians, ‘we’re going to end the wars’...Well, the enemy has a say in that."