Will Republicans warm to inexperienced Ben Carson?

That’s Ben Carson’s sales pitch.

The Republican 2016 hopeful, asked everywhere he goes if the Oval Office is a proper first job in politics and government, says it is really no different than his career as a celebrated neurosurgeon. You diagnose the problem, surround yourself with a medical team competent in their various specialties, and depend on them to do their jobs as you lead them through grueling surgery.

“Being able to put together a team that can accomplish things that have never been done before qualifies as running things,” Carson said during an interview in late February, when asked to address his lack of executive experience.

This is the message Carson supporters parrot when asked why a Carson administration would be any different from the administration of President Obama. Many Republicans have knocked Obama’s relative inexperience upon becoming president — a few years as senator preceded by a few years as an Illinois state senator — for what they have criticized as his poor domestic and foreign policy choices and inability to govern.

“Anyone who can put together a team of 100 surgeons, nurses and technicians to completely remove half of a child’s brain successfully is a proven leader because those sorts of things require weeks of preparation and knowledge about how to lead a team,” said Jerry Harman, 73, a Carson volunteer from Thousand Oaks, California. “I know that he would also choose very good people as his aides in different areas of endeavor that he may not be as familiar with.”

But would Republicans, even that portion of the conservative base hungry for a political outsider, tolerate Carson’s steep learning curve? Talk show host Hugh Hewitt put Carson’s argument to the test on Wednesday.

Hewitt, slated to question the GOP presidential candidates later this year in one of the primary debates, interviewed Carson on his daily radio program, focusing on national defense and geopolitics. Carson didn’t flub everything. But his answers to questions about the origins of Islamic extremism and U.S. military and foreign policy can best be described as rudimentary at best and ignorant at worst. Below are a few excerpts of Carson’s interview with Hewitt.

Hewitt: What do you consider to be [Islamic extremists’] tap root? What is the origin of their rage, in your view?

Carson: Well, first of all, you have to recognize they go back thousands and thousands of years, really back to the battle between Jacob and Esau. But it has been a land issue for a very long period of time. Possession is very important to them. And one of the things that we’re doing, I think, incorrectly right now is not recognizing that they are expanding their territory. Not only the land that they’ve taken in Iraq, but what they’ve taken in Syria, they’re creating an Islamic state. And we can bomb it all we want. But unless we actually can take the land back, we’re really not doing them any damage.

Hewitt: Dr. Carson, but you know, Muhammad lives in 632AD, so it’s a 1,300, 1,400 year old religion. How do you go back to Jacob and Esau, which are BC?

Carson: I’m just saying that the conflict has been ongoing for thousands of years. This is not anything new, is what I’m saying.

Hewitt: So it’s not specific to the Islamic faith or the Salafist offshoot to the Islamic faith?

Carson: Well, the Islamic faith emanated from Esau.

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Hewitt: Now as this campaign develops, there will be a lot of important questions which are detailed. For example, should we buy more F-18 Super Hornets, because the F-35’s aren’t in production at the level that we want? Are those fair game to ask Ben Carson, who’s a neurosurgeon and new to the national defense? Or are those off limits?

Carson: They’re fair questions to ask. But they have to be willing to hear the answer. And the answer to that kind of thing is the job of the commander-in-chief is not to micromanage the military budget or micromanage the way that things are done. It is to set out the goals and to produce those for the people who really are the experts in those areas to carry out. I think one of the big problems that we’re having right now, both in terms of morale and in terms of being able to accomplish things is that we have people who really have no idea what they’re doing trying to control the military.

Hewitt: But Dr. Carson, one of the things I know that’s going to come up, and again, I don’t do ambush interviews, but when it appeared you didn’t know that the Baltic states were a part of NATO, or where you date the…

Carson: Well, when you were saying Baltic state, I thought you were continuing our conversation about the former components of the Soviet Union. Obviously, there’s only three Baltic states.

Hewitt: Right, and they’re all part of NATO.

Carson: Right.

Hewitt: And so what I worry about as a Republican, as a conservative, is that because you’ve been being a great neurosurgeon all these years, you haven’t been deep into geopolitics, and that the same kind of questions that tripped up Sarah Palin early in her campaign are going to trip you up when, for example, the gotcha question, does she believe in the Bush doctrine when it depends on how you define the Bush doctrine. And so how are you going to navigate that, because I mean, you’ve only, have you been doing geopolitics? Do you read this stuff? Do you immerse yourself in it?

Carson: I’ve read a lot in the last six months, no question about that. There’s a lot of material to learn. There’s no question about that. But again, I have to go back to something that I feel is a fundamental problem, and that is we spend too much time trying to get into these little details that are easily within the purview of the experts that you have available to you. And I think where we get lost is not being able to define what our real mission is, and not being able to strategize in terms of how do we defeat our enemies, how do we support our allies? I could spend, you know, the next six years learning all the details of all the SALT treaties and every other treaty that’s ever been done and completely miss the boat.