'Pressure' Is a Great Movie With the Wrong Eisenhower

Summary

Bulwark Takes – "Pressure" Is a Great Movie With the Wrong Eisenhower

Podcast Date: June 8, 2026
Host: Sonny Bunch (Culture Editor, The Bulwark)
Guest: Mark Hertling (Ret. Lt. Gen., U.S. Army)
Main Topic: A review of the World War II film Pressure, focusing on the D-Day weather dilemma and military command under uncertainty, with comparisons to other films about unforeseen challenges in military operations.

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Episode Overview

This episode centers around Pressure, a new World War II film that dramatizes the fraught days leading up to D-Day, focusing not on combat but on the critical weather decision facing General Dwight D. Eisenhower. Host Sonny Bunch and guest Mark Hertling discuss the complexities of command, the underexplored significance of weather in military history, and the film’s depiction of Eisenhower. They broaden the discussion by comparing Pressure’s themes to other movies—The Perfect Storm, Argo, Black Hawk Down, and 13 Hours—each illustrating the unpredictability and challenges faced in high-stress military situations.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. A Unique Perspective on D-Day: The Weather Decision

• Pressure spotlights the true story of the weather forecast that shaped the timing of D-Day, a narrative seldom explored in war films.
• The film illustrates the incredible pressure on Eisenhower to decide whether to launch the largest seaborne invasion in history, facing unreliable forecasts and alliance politics.
  • “It takes a snippet of the command requirements of Eisenhower having to do with the conditions of the weather, which most people don't know about…” (Mark Hertling, 01:55)
• The story delves into risks beyond just weather: troop movements, alliance dynamics, logistics, deception operations, and the human factors at play (03:33–07:57).
• Exercise Tiger, the disastrous rehearsal for D-Day, is poignantly depicted, showing the real costs and uncertainties in the lead-up (04:54).

2. What the Movie Gets Right (and Wrong) About Command Decisions

• Eisenhower’s mission statement was “enter the continent of Europe and defeat the Nazi war machine”—an immense but vague directive (03:33).
• The film centers on the British group captain-turned-meteorologist whose forecast warned of deadly storms, forcing a postponement and near-disaster scenario.
• The pressure cooker environment for leaders is faithfully depicted: “There are so many things ... the command decisions, the risk mitigations, the kind of pressure, hence the name of the movie that was on Eisenhower to really make some tough calls.” (Mark Hertling, 01:55)
• However, both Bunch and Hertling feel that Brendan Fraser is miscast as Eisenhower, lacking the real leader’s understated authority and emotional control.
  • “There were a couple scenes where Brandon Fraser was chewing out people in front of an entire audience. Eisenhower was not like that... Frazier kind of let his emotions go a couple of times and he was pretty brusque.” (Mark Hertling, 14:16)

3. Leadership Lessons and the Unpredictability of War

• Hertling recounts his own experience as a commander, highlighting the constant, sometimes impossible, decisions prompted by weather and intelligence failures:
  • “Every briefing I got in combat...the first element...is the intelligence. And part of that intelligence briefing is usually the Weatherman...” (Mark Hertling, 10:18)
  • Anecdote: U.S.O. entertainers (including Robin Williams) stuck during a sandstorm in Iraq, illustrating how even the best-laid plans are upended by weather (11:35).
• Core takeaway: No operation ever goes fully to plan—commanders must constantly adapt, mitigate risk, and make judgment calls with incomplete or shifting information.
  • “There are always three steps forward and two steps back at best.” (Mark Hertling, 28:11)

4. Comparing Pressure to Other Films About Uncertainty and Crisis

The Perfect Storm (17:32)

• The Coast Guard’s struggle against impossible weather is likened to D-Day’s weather dilemma.
• Showcases how no amount of skill can override nature’s unpredictability.
  • “Nature doesn't care about Human plans, it just is nature.” (Mark Hertling, 17:32)

Argo & Operation Eagle Claw (19:26)

• Argo is explored through the lens of failed military intervention and a pivot to intelligence/diplomacy—highlighted by Operation Eagle Claw’s fatal dust storm and interservice coordination failures.
  • “This operation was literally the birth of the Joint Special Operations Force in the United States as well as...the United States Special Operations Command.” (Mark Hertling, 20:10)
• Shows the evolution in crisis response: sometimes military action must give way to intelligence and diplomacy (23:24).

Black Hawk Down (24:20)

• Exemplifies how missions morph unexpectedly—from a snatch-and-grab to a rescue amid urban chaos.
• The film viscerally communicates the breakdown of command and control under combat pressure, with communication and order rapidly disintegrating.
  • “The mission you deploy for isn't always the mission you end up executing.” (Mark Hertling, 24:59)

13 Hours (29:37)

• Benghazi is used as a modern example of extreme command uncertainty: long distances, lack of intelligence, rapid escalation, and impossible response times.
  • “The 13 hour commander didn't even know what to adapt to. I mean, he had no information that could help him solve the problem...” (Mark Hertling, 34:19)
• Reiterates how critics often overlook the logistical realities and intelligence gaps confronting commanders during high-speed crises.

5. Reflections on Military Leadership and Learning

• The Army’s concept of the “three-legged stool” of leadership: formal education, firsthand experience, and studying books/films.
  • “The third leg of the stool is reading books and watching movies. You know, the storytelling. So when military guys go into movies like Pressure, they're saying, holy smokes, look at the things Eisenhower had to deal with.” (Mark Hertling, 35:45)
• Such films serve as invaluable case studies, illustrating not just tactics but the human dimension of military decision-making under stress.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Eisenhower’s Orders:
  “Eisenhower got a message from Marshall that was a one sentence mission statement. It basically said to him, enter the continent of Europe and defeat the Nazi war machine.” (Mark Hertling, 03:33)

• On the Complexity of D-Day Prep:
  “He had to consider alliance politics and managing some very strong personalities like Bernard Montgomery and George Patton...” (Mark Hertling, 03:52)

• On Forecasting the Unknowable: “They could not be 100% sure what was going to happen one way or the other. They had to make a decision.” (Sonny Bunch, 09:01)

• On Leadership Under Pressure:
  “You can't completely eliminate these kinds of risk. You can recognize it, you can mitigate it, but you have to accept what's going on.” (Mark Hertling, 17:32)

• On Adapting to Unknowns:
  “The mission you deploy for isn't always the mission you end up executing.” (Mark Hertling, 24:59)

• On Films as Leadership Training:
  “When, when military guys go into movies like Pressure, they're saying, holy smokes, look at the things Eisenhower had to deal with. And just compound the one factor of pressure...” (Mark Hertling, 35:45)

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Key Timestamps for Important Segments

• Main Review of Pressure: 01:00–09:01
• Deeper Dive on Eisenhower’s Many Pressures: 03:12–07:57
• Weather & Command Decisions in Modern Warfare (Hertling's Stories): 10:18–13:19
• Discussion of Brendan Fraser as Eisenhower: 13:39–15:07
• Other Films – The Perfect Storm: 17:32–19:26
• Argo & Operation Eagle Claw: 19:26–24:20
• Black Hawk Down: 24:20–29:37
• 13 Hours & Benghazi: 29:37–34:19
• Reflections on Command, Films & Leadership Learning: 35:45–37:22

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Tone and Style

The conversation is thoughtful, lively, and peppered with personal anecdotes and wry observations (especially about Hollywood’s take on military leaders). Both speakers balance critique of the film’s accuracy with appreciation for its unique storytelling approach, and they use the movie as a springboard for wide-ranging reflections on military leadership, the unforeseen chaos of war, and the value of honest depictions in film.

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Recommendation

Both Bunch and Hertling recommend Pressure highly, particularly for audiences interested in leadership, military history, or untold stories of World War II. While they wish for a truer-to-history Eisenhower (favoring Tom Selleck’s earlier portrayal), they see great value in the film’s dramatic illustration of command under pressure.

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Endnote:
Pressure is praised for putting a vital, overlooked moment in war history at center stage, reminding both military professionals and the public that the fate of thousands can hinge on a single, agonizing decision—often made with imperfect information and under intense pressure.

Transcript

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[Sonny Bunch]

Hey everybody. Welcome back to Bulwark Takes. I'm Sonny Bunch. I'm culture editor at the Bulwark. I'm joined today by Mark Hertling. There's a great new movie out in theaters right now. It's called Pressure, which is about the invasion of D day, but from an angle we don't really see very often in films or in tv. You know, we don't see it in Band of Brothers. You get a little bit of it in Saving Private Ryan with that initial boat ride, but it's about the weather.

[Movie Clip Voice]

Fate of the war hinges on this. There's only one imponderable that remains. I need a forecast.

[Sonny Bunch]

When the trailer for this movie dropped, Mark, I saw some people kind of laughing like, have they run out of World War II? Stories to tell. Now we're telling stories about weather forecasts, but it's actually an incredibly important part of the story. And a true story like this is, this is one of those things that I, I had read about and kind of remembered in the back of my head. And when I saw the trailer for this, I was like, oh, that's right. This is actually a really good and interesting story. Right?

[Mark Hertling]

It was. I thought it was excellent. I mean, I went to it immediately because first of all, you said we wanted to do this clip on it, but I pulled my wife to it too. And she said basically the same thing you just said. Oh, great, another normandy World War II movie. Because she's sick of me watching those. But she was riveted by it because it takes a snippet of the command requirements of Eisenhower having to do with the conditions of the weather, which most people don't know about, and how the storms that were coming into the coast during the week of the scheduled D day invasion of the 5th of June basically caused it to be postponed today. But there are so many things that really emanate from that. The command decisions, the risk mitigations, the kind of pressure, hence the name of the movie that was on Eisenhower to really make some tough calls. It turned out to be a central theme of the movie, although it was not the main consideration that was bothering Eisenhower. It wasn't the only thing in his rucksack, as many people said. But it certainly caused a whole lot of tension and it could have caused a disaster in terms of what would have happened next had there hadn't been a break in the weather with the meteorologists predicted.

[Sonny Bunch]

Well, let's, let's talk about the different things that Eisenhower had to keep in mind here because I do think that this is, again, this is really the crux of the story here is that it's not just the weather. It is also, you know, troop movements. It is keeping the alliance together. What were the, what were the things he had to wrestle with before a single shot was fired on D Day?

[Mark Hertling]

Oh, my gosh, Sonny, it's a, it's a question that is almost boundless in terms of the things we could talk about. Eisenhower got a message from Marshall that was a one sentence mission statement. It basically said to him, enter the continent of Europe and defeat the Nazi war machine.

[Sonny Bunch]

Sure.

[Mark Hertling]

You know, there were a couple of other things in that it literally fit on one page. And he had to decide many months beforehand, put a staff together and said, where do we enter the continent of Europe? What kind of force do we need? What kind of air power are we going to have? Do we use airborne forces? What about, what are our alliances are like? So these are the kind of things that were part of the planning factors that, that Eisenhower had to address. He had to consider alliance politics and managing some very strong personalities like Bernard Montgomery and George Patton, who he had already fired once and had kind of put in the penalty box for a while. Arthur Tedder, Omar Bradley. I mean, there were some very interesting personalities, each one of them requiring a book or a movie in itself. Prior to the D Day landings, there was a failure that not many people know about of rehearsal. It was called Exercise Tiger just weeks before. And the movie addresses this too, by the way, in a very poignant tone.

[Movie Clip Voice]

Tiger was a training op, dress rehearsal for D Day. They walked right into it.

[Mark Hertling]

But it doesn't show why that rehearsal failed. It just showed dead soldiers on a beach that really were impacting Eisenhower as he thought about what was going to happen. You know, German U boats attacked the training grounds. Hundreds of Americans were killed in this training rehearsal. And the event exposed a whole bunch of things that could also go wrong in the real thing, like communication failures and convoy vulnerabilities. Then Eisenhower had to think about airborne operations. You know, when you're putting that a couple of airborne divisions, not just us, but British as well as Polish and French, into the air and assigning them drop zones behind the lines of the D Day invasions. You know, there were literally thousands of paratroopers with various missions to help bring the people ashore. How do you assign those drop zones? How. How can they seize the key bridges that the tanks are going to roll off? Then they had the landing craft performance, all kinds of things there. You know, we see Saving Private Ryan's, which we talked about during our last movie review, and you see all the soldiers coming off the landing crafts. There were also tanks on those landing crafts. The proverbial, they call them the duplex drive Shermans. So if you hit a landing craft and destroy it, you're not going to have armor support once you hit the beaches. There was a deception plan Eisenhower gave Patton, as he put him in the penalty box. He made him the commander of what they called a ghost army in something called Operation Fortitude, where they literally had signals intelligence, inflatable tanks, which they show in the movie pressure, dummy landing craft, double agents, all sorts of bizarre things. And then, of course, the last thing that all commanders think about are logistics, the kinds of things that flow to provide the force of several hundred thousand soldiers going ashore at key locations to defeat the Germans. So all of those things were part of the planning factors which Eisenhower had to face. And so the movie Pressure takes one thing that should always be a consideration of commander and puts it at the forefront, is this storm that's coming ashore with winds up to 100 miles an hour and waves 10 to 18ft tall, you know, knocking around landing crafts, affecting aircraft that are going ashore. All of those things could have been disastrous because of the weather requirements. And then the whole thing, when you're talking about invasion on amphibious assault, gee whiz, I mean, you can't just postpone it and go the next day because you have literally hundreds of staging area, thousands of boats, hundreds of airplanes, hundreds of thousands of soldiers.

[Movie Clip Voice]

This is the largest seaborne invasion in history. Strait of the war. Thousands of lives hinge on this.

[Mark Hertling]

So, you know, when we talk about this one weather event that really rested on the back of the group captain from the British army, that was new to the operation because Winston Churchill suggested to Eisenhower that this guy knew weather better than anybody else. And he basically had to stand up and say, hey, there's a storm front going. And if you go on your planned deployment date of 5 June, a lot of people are going to die. Hell on earth.

[Sonny Bunch]

Torrential rain.

[Mark Hertling]

He's selecting the data that suits him

[Sonny Bunch]

and ignoring the rest. And we must face the facts.

[Mark Hertling]

And that decision was left up to Eisenhower. And he had Montgomery saying that they should just go anyway. Tedder was saying they should launch the assault. So you can see the kind of things that weigh on the mind of a commander in any operation, something like this. And it was a. I thought it was a great movie.

[Sonny Bunch]

Yeah, it's. It's a really. It's really compelling and it's. It's very tight. It's about 105 minutes, something like that. It's, you know, it's a. It's a. It's a good, concise story. It's got a really compelling human element. The group captain, you know, has a pregnant wife, and, you know, there are still bombing runs happening on the hospitals. He wants the war to end as well, but, you know, he. He doesn't want to. He doesn't want to push this thing. And then you get into a lot of the interpersonal conflicts, which. I was saying this before the. Before the show, but I don't think I've ever seen a film in which Monty is portrayed as anything other than just like the most arrogant, stereotypical British commander that you could imagine. It's funny. And that kind of plays here. Damian Lewis does a fine job as Monty, but again, this core problem gets to something. This core problem of weather, of an unexpected weather front and an unknown weather front. Just, simply put, they could not be 100% sure what was going to happen one way or the other. They had to make a decision. In your own experiences as a commander, you have come up against this in combat. What were some of the unexpected weather events that you had to deal with as a commander?

[Mark Hertling]

Yeah, the first thing I'd say on that, Sonny, is every briefing I got in combat, anytime we were conducting an operation, the first element of a briefing is the intelligence. What is the enemy doing? What are our forces doing? And part of that intelligence briefing is usually the Weatherman, as we used to call it, usually an Air Force weather detachment guy who steps or gal who steps forward and says, here's what the weather is going to be like. And sometimes it's predictable, sometimes it's unpredictable. You don't know what's going to happen. Sometimes it will affect troop movement or in the case of modern warfare, the intelligence feed. Because you may not get the hits that you may want to get from satellites or from communication traffic or even from overhead platforms that are giving you locations. And sometimes you have to call off the event. I had to call off several events in Iraq in 2007 because of something. And we'll introduce our listeners to the terms shamal and haboob. You know, two crazy words which mean dust storm and sandstorm. And in one case, it literally blacks out. Your capability to see the sand is so intense blowing through the area that it not only hinders your observation, but it also affects machinery. You could not launch aircraft during a shamal or a haboob because sometimes they can't see where they're going. And I was stuck in a shema one time when we had. We were flying back from northern Iraq to our headquarters in Tikrit, and we literally tried to fight our way through it, and finally we had the land because we were in a pair of helicopters that were 50ft apart and we could not see each other. So when you don't have the radar in a helicopter and you're trying to figure out where that wingman is, and you can't see them because the winds and the sand are so tough, you have to shut down. There are other times when we had to postpone an operation for more than a week because just a huge wall of dirt, sand, red sand came in and it blinded everyone. So we just had to hunker down where we were. It was interesting at the time. I'll share this vignette with you. We happened to have a USO show that had come in. It was around Christmas time, and it had a Miss Universe, it had Robin Williams, it had Jack Black, it had a couple of sports figures, and they literally were stuck at my headquarters for five days, where, you know, Robin Williams was going nuts trying to entertain troops. And yet he was kind of hindered by not being able to move around all that much to all the different locations they were scheduled to go to. So there was a bad thing in terms of the weather, but there was a good thing in the fact that I got to have dinner with Robin Williams a couple of times.

[Sonny Bunch]

Well, that I mean, I can just imagine having that energy kind of all bundled up inside for five straight days. I've been in the room with him once and it was a lot just for that. You know, he is, as one of

[Mark Hertling]

our soldiers said, he was like a well hit golf ball inside of a telephone booth. That's how he sings around.

[Sonny Bunch]

That's a good explanation. Just to jump back to pressure for a minute. You know, on the last episode we talked about how good Tom Selleck was as Ike in the TV movie about D Day. I think we're both a little softer on Brendan Fraser here. I like him a lot in a lot of things. I don't love his performance here. I just think he's slightly miscast.

[Mark Hertling]

Yeah.

[Movie Clip Voice]

Monday is not long term for Chris. Does Monday sound like long term? Do you and Janet Summers.

[Sonny Bunch]

It's still, again, it's as far as critiques go, it's a relatively minor one. It doesn't destroy the, the entertainment or the, the realism of the film. I just. He just doesn't. He's not quite right.

[Mark Hertling]

Yeah, well, I'm a typical military geek and when I go to war movies, I'll think to myself, oh, yeah, that, that wouldn't have happened that way. I mean, there were a couple scenes where Brandon Fraser was chewing out people in front of an entire audience. Eisenhower was not like that. He was. Eisenhower was a very good leader. He would not have allowed his emotions over some of the things that we saw in the movie to carry over, I don't think. You know, I didn't know him personally, but I just know of him as a leader and how his troops saw him. And Frazier kind of let his emotions go a couple of times and he was pretty brusque. You don't see that in a lot of four star generals, but you're right, Frazier did okay. Just okay. I liked, believe it or not, I liked Tom Selleck a whole lot more playing Eisenhower than I like Brendan Frazier.

[Sonny Bunch]

It's understandable. And behind you on the wall. Well, explain to folks what's behind the wall. You'll explain better than me.

[Mark Hertling]

I'm pointing to a flag. That was a flag given to me as I retired from my last command, which was, excuse me, the head of U.S. army Europe. That is a successor of the organization that Eisenhower led. The Supreme Headquarters, Allied Expeditionary Force Europe. So that patch in the middle of that flag is the one that all senior troops in Europe wear today. And it was the same patch that Eisenhower designed. Well, it's close to being the same patch that Eisenhower designed. The reason I say that is because in the movie, you see Eisenhower with that patch on his shoulder, but the patch is black. And that's because the symbolism was a flaming sword entering the dark continent of Europe. Well, the next commander of Europe, Lucius Clay, said, we have liberated Europe, so let's change the color from black to a light blue and that you can't see it real well on that flag, but that's a light blue patch with this flaming sword in the middle of it. So it's quite an honor to be a successor to Eisenhower in that command position.

[Sonny Bunch]

Yeah, that's very cool. Nice continuity there. All right, so Pressure's good. It's in theaters now. You should go see it. There's a great lineup of movies in theaters right now. There's really something for everyone and. And all ages. And Pressure is like prime, prime for that kind of older adult audience, wants a little more, you know, adult drama, that sort of thing, rather than, you know, some of the horror movies that are out there or the, you know, kids movies. This is. It's really good. I recommend folks check it out, but there. There's plenty of other examples of, again, like, unexpected things that you simply don't know. You can't necessarily be expected to deal with as you, you know, head out to take part in a. In a military operation. And we. We wanted to run through a couple of the other films where this sort of thing happens. Sticking with the weather theme you had mentioned, wanted to talk about the Perfect Storm, which I think is another really good example of a military unit, in this case the United States Coast Guard, just being in kind of an impossible situation and not being able really to delay it because of trying to rescue somebody who is in one of these storms. It's. What was your takeaway from the Perfect Storm?

[Mark Hertling]

Well, as we were talking about the films we were going to do, I kind of mentioned this storm because Coast Guardsmen don't get enough credit for what they do. They are in danger on a daily basis anywhere around the United States. But in this case, the Perfect Storm, for those who haven't seen it, it's a story about a fishing boat. It's a fishing boat that goes out with and hits an unexpected nor' easter off the coast of Massachusetts. It showed how the fishermen had experience and skill and courage to face the kind of weather dynamics they have. But none of those factors eliminated the environmental realities of what the Coast Guard had to face by going out to rescue them. So it talks about how nature doesn't care about Human plants, it just is nature. So, you know, the reason I thought that might be an interesting movie to pick for today's discussion is because while the focus on that movie was the fishermen, it talks also about what the Coast Guard did. And you know, military commanders face the challenges of weather. Some can call it off like Eisenhower did on 5 June. Some have to go out in it, like all these coasties that go out to rescue seamen or civilians that are out in boats in the middle of storms. And it just, it just tells you you can't completely eliminate these kinds of risk. You can recognize it, you can mitigate it, but you have to accept what's going on. And that's why it's so important to have the US Coast Guard on our shores.

[Sonny Bunch]

Yeah, I remember seeing the Perfect Storm in theaters and I did not know the story. So I went in very cold and I was like, oh no, they're all, they're all gonna die. This is terrible. This is, this is very bad.

[Mark Hertling]

Yeah. And yet the Coast Guard is called to go out amidst that and try and rescue them. Yeah, so they could die too, Right.

[Sonny Bunch]

It's just awful, awful, awful stuff. And then another, another kind of weather, kind of weather related thing is the movie Argo. So the, the movie Argo is, you know, it takes place largely after the hostage taking in Iran. And it's about the plan to exfiltrate those people by doing a fake movie production that the CIA kind of set up in, in Iran to, to gain access to these sites.

[Mark Hertling]

Science, fantasy, adventure, moonscape, Mars, desert. They need an exotic location to shoot.

[Sonny Bunch]

Before all of this happened, there was, there was another weather related, not solely weather related, but weather related incident that kind of necessitated it. Right?

[Mark Hertling]

Yeah. Well, after, in Tehran when the hostages were held hostage in 1979, the president decided to try and do a rescue operation which was called Operation Eagle Claw. It occurred in April 1980. A lot of people just call it Desert One. Well, Desert One was actually the name of the landing zone where the helicopters crash. But the overall operation was called Eagle Claw. And what happened, the operation reality was just really complex. It had to do with the factors involved. You're talking about helicopters going into Iran. First they went into a mountainous region. So there was massive distances for these very large helicopters. There were multiple aircraft types. There was night flying across the board, communication difficulties because of the shamal, another sandstorm that was going on, mechanical failures, dust storms rose up, complex coordination among different services. So this was really, Sonny, I think this is such an important movie. Because Argos followed the failed rescue attempt by the military of a bunch of joint special operators from the different services. And because this mission was so disastrous, the helicopters encountered severe dust conditions during crossing the Iranian deserts. One of the helicopters turned back because of equipment problems. Some experienced navigation and visibility issues. But by the time they got to this landing zone, which was the final coordination point, too few helicopters remained to continue the rescue. So they basically made a call on the ground that they were going to abort the mission. After they made that call to abort, as they were starting to leave, there was a collision between a large helicopter, what was called an RH53, and a C130 aircraft, and it killed eight service members after the mission was aborted. So this was a disaster of an operation because the Army, Air Force, Navy and Marines were not talking to each other. They all had elements on the ground, but they couldn't communicate. There was had not been Special Operations integration. And this operation was literally the birth of the Joint Special Operations Force in the United States as well as the United States Special Operations Command. And it showed how the masterful training for these kind of operations under perilous conditions that have all kinds of risks would later, in just a few years, be successful in places like Panama and Afghanistan and during the bin Laden raid. So all of this occurred prior to the storytelling in Argos, which was more of a diplomacy and intelligence collection mission, which is outlined in that movie.

[Sonny Bunch]

Well, yeah, let's talk about. So Argo is like kind of how is, at least in part, kind of tangentially about how plans have to change, how you have to go from, okay, well, we can't do this militarily. How are we going to get them out? What do we have to look at instead?

[Mark Hertling]

Yeah, well, I think what we look at there is just a coordination between not as much the military community, but the intelligence community and what they had to do in order to get into Tehran to, you know, put deception measures in, to find ways to get people out, to really fool and demonstrate to the Iranian government they were doing one thing while they were doing another. So I think really this is kind of a tale for today. When we depend too much on military force and not enough on very good intelligence and extremely good diplomacy, you're probably going to have disconnects. But when we take all of those elements of national power, diplomacy, economics, military, information, intelligence, and really go after a holistic form of operations, things can be a lot more successful.

[Sonny Bunch]

Yeah. All right, so let's go now to Black Hawk Down. We Discussed this a little bit in our, in our last video, Black Hawk Down. The interesting thing about this movie, from our perspective, from this, from this kind of purview, is that, you know, this is a very good example of a mission that has to change on the fly. That goes from a pure extraction, basically a snatch and grab to get a war lord out to a protracted kind of bogged down urban combat. What is the unexpected, the unknown unknown that happens here that, you know, folks are like, oh, this is. So this is what we can learn.

[Mark Hertling]

Well, you can, you can even. You set it up very well, Sonny. It was great because there was a requirement for a snatch and grab of a warlord, a guy by the name of Mohammed Fared Adid, who was interfering with, with the distribution of humanitarian relief supplies. That's the part that I'd like to start off because many people think Black Hawk down is all about a raid gone wrong. And it sort of was, but it sort of wasn't. What we sometimes forget is that the American forces were in Somalia on a humanitarian mission, right? In 1992, the United States established something called Operation Restore Hope to establish food distribution in a country that was undergoing famine and that threatened literally hundreds of thousands of Somali. So it was a mission that began with feeding people and protecting relief supplies. But as they continued the mission, what we saw is a bunch of warlords within Somalia kind of co opting the mission and stealing the humanitarian relief supplies and using it to build their own terrorist network. So it turned from a humanitarian mission into a, hey, we've got to stop these warlords from doing this. And the main warlord was a guy named Adid. So this is another thing that military commanders instinctively understand that the mission you deploy for isn't always the mission you end up executing. So humanitarian operation, which was a peacekeeping operation, can suddenly become a manhunt, and a manhunt can then become a rescue operation. So each one of these things brings new risk to a commander, new logistics challenge, and really, really hard decision. So the vast portion of Black Hawk down, the movie talks about the urban fight inside of the city, but it was really some very courageous actions on the part of infantrymen and special operators. Again, about its special operations, a couple of Medal of Honor winners came out of this post immunestly and it was just where one helicopter, the first helicopter, crashed. As soon as that happened, the mission fundamentally changed and it turned in from a snatch and grab mission to basically a rescue operation for American troops.

[Sonny Bunch]

One of the things that this movie does really well is capture the Difficulty of both communication and overview site. Tracking the troops as they are moving through the city is almost impossible at certain points. And even when they know basically which way to go, they wind up in a road and there's a roadblock they're not expecting. It's a really kind of fascinating and harrowing glimpse into how things can look like you have them in hand, but all of a sudden, things are just wrong. Everything is wrong, and nobody is entirely sure how to fix it.

[Mark Hertling]

Well, that's, that's the thing about combat. I think it's. It's interesting that we're doing this series of movies because I think it gives the bulwark audience an understanding of how complex any kind of combat operations are and how they never, and I'll emphatically say this, they never go as planned. There are always three steps forward and two steps back at best. And so when a military organization is asked to do some kind of mission for the United States, when they're ordered to do that by the President, they've got to rehearse it, they've got to plan it, they've got to do branches and sequels, and they have to really understand the risk of any operation and then attempt to apply risk mitigation. How do we do this? The best way possible to accomplish the mission, but also protecting our troops. And I think that's the big lesson from Black Hawk down, that what you were describing before in terms of the complexity is what military commanders call command and control. It's not only giving the orders to do something, but then controlling the forces that are doing it. And when you literally have thousands of human beings conducting a military operation, that control piece is pretty tough. So you have to have a very disciplined and well trained and well rehearsed force whenever you are asked to accomplish a mission. And sometimes that's really hard to do.

[Sonny Bunch]

Yeah, I mean, kind of in that vein is the next movie, 13 Hours. I remember when 13 Hours was being discussed and when it was about to come out, a lot of people were like, oh, a Benghazi movie. You know, this is, you know, is this appropriate? Is it, you know, tied to the election, blah, blah. But the really fascinating thing about 13 hours is all of these things you just mentioned about what does the actual action on the ground look like? And it's easy, you know, it's easy to read the stories about Benghazi after the fact and be like, why didn't we have anybody there? Why wasn't anybody there trying to rescue them? And my understanding, anyway you can, you Can I think speak to this better than I can is just simply we had no idea what was going on on the ground, right?

[Mark Hertling]

Maybe I'm not making myself clear. I'm looking at multiple radical insurgents of AKs in a 50 cow technical, set the Bulma Rover all the way back to Zimbabwe, over.

[Sonny Bunch]

It's not my call, brother. And we had no idea how to get these people out or who was even still alive or who was there. I mean, what were, what were some of the things that happened in that operation that led to the chaos on the ground?

[Mark Hertling]

Well, first I probably ought to state a fact that I was actually in Europe, commanding US forces in Europe when this happened. And the European Command commander, the Africa Command commander, had just given me his position and he had moved up to Africa Command, and that was General Ham. But in 13 hours, you're talking about from the very start of an ambush against some American civilians thought to be civilians, that included a couple of ex Special Forces Delta operators in an American embassy that moved to a consulate that few people knew were even there. So you have a small group of individuals fighting for their lives, talking through radios that couldn't quite describe the situation. They didn't have intelligence on the ground of what was happening. You're talking extremely long distances from the Africa Command headquarters in Stuttgart, Germany down to Libya. You have uncertain intelligence and information, a request for reinforcement. Even at one time there was just a request for, you know, have some F16s fly over and do a performative run to scare the terrorist away. That's not what F16s do. And when you launch an F16, those pilots want to know what are the dangers on the ground? Do they have shoulder fired missiles, missiles? Do they have the ability to shoot us down in the middle of nowhere? Are there combat search and rescue teams out there to get me? If the pilot ejects from his aircraft, you know, what is the enemy situation? What's the friendly situation? Who are we going in to pick up? How are we maintaining command and control, the signal communication with them? So if you put all these things together and ask all the questions that a commander would ask, by the time you start getting the answers to those questions, the individuals that were in that consulate location were all dead. So what do you do then? This is the extraction problem we were talking about with both the couple of other movies we talked about, but also a crisis response. It had to happen within hours. And yet even the flight time from Germany to Libya was about three hours away. So the commander in Europe faced a whole lot of questions familiar to any commander who's been in these kind of operations. He was probably wakened up, awakened in the middle of the night, told he had to do something, but had no intelligence of what he had to do and how he had to get some people there. So, you know, for all the, the commentary from people who don't know how the Benghazi operation went down or what was at stake, or the lack of intelligence that was there, or the lack of ability or the long distances to get there, Once you understand all those kind of things, it becomes a much more complex problem that people playing Call of Duty really don't understand.

[Sonny Bunch]

Yeah, I mean, I was thinking about this in a slightly different context, but the game risk, you know, in the game risk, you roll the dice and the troops go and they, they either win or they don't. But there are, again, there are so many factors that go into any of these decisions before a single shot is fired, before a single troop is sent in that it's, it's almost, it is overwhelming to consider. It is just, it is overwhelming.

[Mark Hertling]

Well, if you, if you think about all the movies we've talked about and put it in perspective, Eisenhower had to adapt to the weather. The Eagle Claw commander prior to Argos had to adapt to dust storms and equipment failure. The Mogadishu commander had to adapt to aircraft losses and urban chaos and a lack of command and control. The 13 hour commander didn't even know what to adapt to. I mean, he had no information that could help him solve the problem of a couple of individuals that were stowed away in a consulate fighting off a large terrorist organization. So the common thread is that commanders are constantly confronted with not just changing conditions, but how to adapt to different things that may occur during the execution of their mission.

[Sonny Bunch]

Yeah, these decisions, they're just impossible. They're nightmares. And again, it's one of these things where it's easy to look at after the fact. And I think this is one of these reasons why somebody after we did the last movie was like, or last video was like, why are you talking about war movies? You know, that's not. But I, again, I just think that there really are lessons that people can learn about the reality of combat. Not every war movie, of course, but the ones that we're discussing here, I think do a better job of it.

[Mark Hertling]

I'll share something with you as kind of a final thought, but in the army's doctrinal manual on leadership, it talks about learning leadership as a form of a three legged stool. The first leg of the stool is what you learn in the schoolhouse by going to classes. The second learning ability is what you get from your experiences. What kind of things have you experienced in your lifetime of soldiering? But the third leg of the stool is reading books and watching movies. You know, the storytelling. So when, when military guys go into movies like Pressure, they're saying, holy smokes, look at the things Eisenhower had to deal with. And just compound the one factor of pressure, which, by the way, I'm thanking you for doing this program today because even though it was a bizarre movie with a unique topic, it really teaches you a lot about the kinds of demands that are placed on military commanders in any kind of operation.

[Sonny Bunch]

It's a good movie. Again, it's in theaters now. You should, if you're, if you need something to do this weekend or you just want a good story, if you want a good dramatic story, a true story, you should go see it. It's, it's, I, I strongly recommend it. Again, make sure you hit like and subscribe and you know, leave a comment, tell us what you think. We're, we're always, we're always glad to hear from folks. There were so many good suggestions on other movies to talk about in. On the last video that I was, I was really heartened by that. So leave, leave us a comment, let us know what you think and share this with a friend. And you know, we'll, we'll be back next. We'll be, hopefully we'll be back again for another one of these. These are fun. Thanks, Mark.

[Mark Hertling]

They are fun. Thanks, Sonny. Thanks for having me, too. Appreciate it.