Meet Mike Gallagher, the GOP Marine Running in Wisconsin’s 8th District By Avner Zarmi
https://pjmedia.com/election/2016/08/24/meet-mike-gallagher-the-gop-marine-running-in-wisconsins-8th-district/
The eyes of the nation were on Wisconsin once again because of the August primary elections, principally because Paul Ryan was being challenged in the First Congressional District. The challenger, Paul Nehlen, was widely perceived as a Trumpkin, even though Trump himself had finally been coerced by the party into endorsing Ryan at a rally in Green Bay mere days before the primary. Nehlen enjoyed endorsements from the likes of Sarah Palin, Michelle Malkin, and Ann Coulter, but was nonetheless crushed by Ryan, who won with more than 70% of the vote.
However, there was another primary race which deserved at least as much attention.
In the Eighth Congressional District, a three-way contest developed for the chance to replace the retiring Reid Ribble. The contest was handily won (also with over 70% of the vote) by Mike Gallagher, a 32-year-old native of Green Bay with an impressive resume for his age.
After graduating from Princeton, Gallagher entered the Marine Corps and spent seven years on active duty. He served in Iraq, where he was responsible for the gathering and analysis of human intelligence (information from human sources is known as Humint, as opposed to signals intelligence, or Sigint, and electronic intelligence, or Elint). A fluent Arabic speaker, his last duty station in Iraq was the town of al-Qaim on the Syrian border. There he helped hand out school books and soccer balls to children who, just a year before, had been too terrified of al-Qaeda goons to go to school.
He was convinced at the time that his job was over, that we had won. This was before the rise of Daesh and their invasion of Iraq. The town is now controlled by Daesh.
From there, he went to work for General Petraeus at CENTCOM, where he acquired some sense of the high-level, strategic thinking behind the tactical measures he’d earlier been involved with. He also worked with the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Drug Enforcement Agency, and other federal agencies, and eventually he was the Middle East point man for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
From there, he was tapped to become national security advisor to Scott Walker’s short-lived presidential campaign. He moved back to the Green Bay area and went to work for an energy firm when the campaign folded.
Gallagher and I immediately found a common chord when I mentioned an old novel, Robert A. Heinlein’s Starship Troopers (ignore the rather campy movie; read the book). Heinlein imagined a future society in which the human rights of all residents were respected, but civil rights, the obligations of citizenship such as voting and holding office, were limited to military veterans. The theory was that those people who had demonstrated a willingness to place their bodies between their society and those who threaten it would exercise those rights more seriously than the others.
It is in this spirit that Gallagher wishes to extend his service from the military to the policy sphere; it is why he is running for office. In this, he is typical of a number of recent and current candidates and office-holders, such as Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas. By one count, 37 congressional office seekers this year have either a military or law enforcement background and no prior political experience.
Unsurprisingly, Gallagher’s strongest interests are issues related to defense and foreign affairs.
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