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Bulwark Takes
Trump Went to War Without a Plan. Now He's Scrambling to Get Out. (w/ Tom Nichols) | Command Post
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Ben Parker
Hi, I'm Ben Parker from the Bulwark.
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Mark Hertling
And I'm Mark Hertling from the Bulwark. And we are just honored to have our good friend Tom Nichols back with us today. What are we going to talk about, though? There's not a whole lot to discuss, is there? I don't know.
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Tom Nichols
Anything been going on? I'm watching news this morning.
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Ben Parker
Okay. So I'm going to lay out a bit of an ambitious agenda for us. We're recording on Wednesday afternoon. People probably won't see this until Thursday, so things will probably happen between now and when people actually see this video. But here's what we're going to try to cover. First, we got to talk about the is it a ceasefire between the United States and Iran and. Question mark, who else? We're going to talk all about what the strategic outcomes of the war have been so far. Will the ceasefire hold? I think we have to talk about Caroline Levitt's press conference at the White House today, partially because she has clearly been reading the Bulwark and specifically reading what Mark Hertling has been writing.
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Tom Nichols
I saw that.
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Mark Hertling
That was bizarre. And when they started the moral high ground, I'm thinking, holy smokes, this is unbelievable.
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Ben Parker
So we'll see if we can get to that and then if we have time, we'll hit the the Pentagon purge because we got a lot of questions about that. But let's start off. So here's where things stand now with the ceasefire at the time that we're recording on Wednesday afternoon, there is a 10 point plan that the United States and Iran have apparently agreed to. Not 100% clear to me that everyone is on the same page as to what the 10 points are unclear. Also, it seems like Israel is not on board with the part of the ten point plan that concerns it and its war against Hezbollah and Lebanon. And so the Iranians have once again closed the Strait of Hormuz because they said Israel violated the ceasefire that Israel never agreed to. Thoughts, gentlemen? Tom, you're the guest. I mean, what do you make of it?
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Tom Nichols
I've been waiting to catch up with Mark, because, you know, as a, as a military professional, he's, I wanted to see if he loves the expression as much as I do. A double sided cease fire. You know, if it's not double sided, it's not actually a ceasefire.
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Mark Hertling
It's sort of like an Oreo cookie. You can break it in half and dip part of it in milk, but not the rest of it.
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SpinQuest Advertiser
Right.
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Tom Nichols
But you know, almost as if again, he's trying to manifest it into existence. If I say this, the Iranians will then realize they're the other side of the double sided cease fire. You know what I, I, and you know, since it's only Wednesday and this whole thing has already, you know, turned into a dog's breakfast in a matter of hours. What I think is this. The American Donald Trump has been panicked and freaked and trying to get out of this for three weeks at least, maybe more. He doesn't care. He's in typical Trump fashion, it didn't go his way. And when things don't go his way, he gets boring, bored and angry and frustrated and he, he takes his toys and he goes home. He's like an angry 6 year old. So is it a ceasefire? Maybe it's not a double cease sided ceasefire. Maybe the only ceasefire is us. I mean, a month ago we were talking about ABs, unconditional surrender and that they were begging for a deal. Now the Iranians are saying we still own the straits, we still, you know, the Israelis can't do what they're doing.
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Ben Parker
We want all the sanctions lifted, we want to keep enriching uranium.
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Tom Nichols
Um, you know, none of these, none of these are really acceptable conditions. And I think Trump's just going to wave them away and drag this out because he really wanted to get out of this war. Hey, I could be wrong. I mean, he could be plotting, you know, a second wave of attacks or a ground war or something. But you know, that, you know, you guys were talking about the White House conference, but I was thinking about press conference. I was thinking about General Kaine's press conference this morning when, which really seemed like a wrap up than it did kind of a briefing during an ongoing war. He's like, here's the scorecard, here's all the stuff we destroyed, here's all the targets we hit. That's usually not something you say when you're kind of halfway through. It sounds to me like this ceasefire is just the Americans and Donald Trump in particular saying, I've had enough of this. It didn't go our way. This is killing me. At home. I'm done.
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Ben Parker
General, I wanted to ask you. There's a doctrinal term, isn't there, for a one sided ceasefire? When one side stops fighting and the
- [04:46]
Tom Nichols
other doesn't, it's called a surrender.
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Mark Hertling
I think the doctrine term is bullshit. Let me, let me just talk a little bit about what Tom just said because I had a similar reaction to the press conference this morning at the Pentagon. And that was as I was listening to the roll off of the things that were struck and how many missiles and what they took out. And by the way, that's dating doctrine. That's not military doctrine. When you take people out or when you take things down, that's wrestling doctrine, which we make fun of a lot. But the thing that I remembered was when I, when the first armored division came out of Iraq in 2008 after the surge, I had to give a briefing to Congress because we, to members of Congress, because we were sort of unique in terms of the way we went in. And, and what I presented among the last several pages of the briefing was the same kind of thing the Chairman of the Joint Chief was presenting this morning what we had accomplished. The difference was I turned the ground, the battle space over to the next division that was coming in and we left them with something that they had to then take to get to Tom's point that this was a wrap up today and there had already been violations of. I'm not going to call it a ceasefire. I'm going to call it a, a temporary cessation of hostilities. There were already things happening that caused me to say, hey, this ain't done. And there's going to be a whole lot more things happening in the next couple of days. And that even was brought on by looking at the Iranian 10 point peace plan last night when they claimed that they wanted no actions in southern Lebanon by the Israelis. That was one of their 10 points. That's impossible to say. The Israelis are going to go after him. And so, you know, again, I don't know who the interlocutors were that exchanged the papers between the United States and Iran in terms of what they wanted, but as the President said, this is just the beginning. And I got to tell you, it's not even the beginning of talks. There's, there's a whole lot of dynamics that are going to go into this thing.
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Tom Nichols
Well, I mean, one thing to consider here is that the Iranians now have an incentive to say, to placate the Americans in every way possible because the, the body language, the political body Language of the Americans is let us out of this thing. And so now they can argue with the Israelis and they can give the stink eye to the Gulf states to, to say, you know, when the Americans are gone, you're going to pay. You know, we're not going to forget what happened here. But in the meantime, they have every incentive to say, yes, President Trump, 10 points. Sure, we agree on a whole bunch of stuff. It's just that, it's just the Israelis, you know, and I think the Israeli, I mean, it's pretty clear that this war violated every precept of decent strategy. Know why you're going in, know what your, your war termination plan is and what you want when you get out. Make sure that you have allies, or at least ally, and that you are both on the same page. Make sure that when you're negotiating that your opponent understands the terms you're offering. You know, Mark, it was you and I were talking earlier today. It was interesting that at the same time the President was going on about fire and fury and genocide and civilizational ruin. They were kind of sneaking these points over to the Pakistanis to say, hey, if you just put these out there, we'll say yes. That is not negotiating from a place of strength.
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Mark Hertling
Right.
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Ben Parker
And you can tell just by contrasting what the Iranians are saying to, again, what General Kaine said in his press conference. General Kaine talked a lot about sort of inputs to the war, the amount of, you know, things we had bombed, the amount of targets we had destroyed or thought we had destroyed. Because those, those reports are always a little bit sketchy. You know, the number of sorties we had flown in, the number of musicians we'd use, things like that. The Iranians are talking about what is the actual end state. We want you to lift sanctions. We want to control the Strait of Hormuz, we want to start collecting money, we want to keep enriching uranium. The Iranians are dictating what the end of this war looks like. And all the, all the Trump administration and all General Kane can say is, well, we launched a lot of bombs.
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Tom Nichols
So, you know, you know, the other thing about that briefing is it was all numerators and no denominators, and I'm stealing them from a very intelligent analyst over at the Stimson center who pointed that out. And with no absolute numbers, you know, it's one, it's one thing if you say we destroyed 95% of their minds. Well, if they have a whole galactic buttload of mines, I think that's a Doctrinal term, you know, but if you've got a whole shitload of minds, then, you know, saying that 95% of them are destroyed doesn't mean you can't then mine the Strait of Hormuz again. I mean, it just. It was. It was a. It definitely was the kind of thing again. I wonder if General Kane did this, knowing the President's watching. Here's all the numbers. Here's all this stuff we broke.
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Here's.
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Tom Nichols
Here's all the people we killed. But that doesn't tell you anything. You know, if you say we destroyed 10,000 planes out of how many.
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Mark Hertling
Yeah, it is a. It is a body count mentality.
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Tom Nichols
Very Vietnam. Right.
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Ben Parker
Very Vietnam.
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Mark Hertling
It doesn't matter how many you've destroyed, how many you've killed. If you, as you said a minute ago, Tom, if you didn't have a strategic objective going in, if you didn't do risk assessment in terms of what you wanted to accomplish, and if you didn't have Plan B, C and D, that are the branches and sequels, and if you didn't dictate the terms at the end of. Unconditional surrender was one of the things they said early on in this thing, which quickly went away, but it was just a constantly changing end state, an operational plan that was based on kinetic action from the air and not control of either the government. The other thing that I'd point out, too, that keeps coming up is the fact that Hegseth. Secretary Hegseth repeatedly named off names of different elements within the government. And after everyone, it was dead, dead, dead, dead. And what was fascinating to me, and that just shows he doesn't understand the culture of the Middle east, which. The individuals aren't important. The institutions are important. The institutions still exist in Iran. The IRGC is still there, battered, to be sure. Loss of some equipment, to be sure. The replacements have certainly been hurt or killed. But there is still a Supreme Council of Anne Ayatollah who's driving the shots. And there is a whole lot of people who in the past were rebelling, are now questioning why they rebelled. Because the Great Satans, Great Satans, plural of Israel and the United States still came in, bombed a whole lot of stuff, made their life miserable, and killed a lot of people, to include about 150 or so young women at a girls school on the first day of the campaign. These are the kind of things that drive the psychology of a nation afterwards, that there is no desire to join up with the United States, especially when they see, as you said, Tom, the terms being dictated of what's going to happen next. And Iran starting to share the $2 million a pop on boats that are going through the straits with their buddies, Oman across the waterway. It just is contrary to all logic and common sense.
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Tom Nichols
Well, first I'm going to put in a quick word for the war colleges because of course Hegseth and Tata, war against them, but things like branches and sequels, matching objectives, grand strategy, making sure that operations build towards it's all, all things you would have learned at a war college, you know, but apparently we don't need to hear any more of that.
- [12:51]
Mark Hertling
Let me add the four strategies summary that I've said a couple times on here that I learned in the last course of. Words are important, be precise. We haven't seen a whole lot of that yet. Logistics determine the art of the possible. And we've heard in the New York Times yesterday that General Kane was talking about the depletion of arms for these things. Personalities matter. And sure enough, we've got Witkoff and Kushner and others and JD Vance now dictating what our terms should be and always sees the high ground. Which goes back to your statement there, Ben, that even Carolyn Levitt is talking about the moral high ground.
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Tom Nichols
Now this war has, has shown you what happens when you go to war with the Secretary of Defense who doesn't know what the hell he's doing and how deeply in over his head he is. Because what you get is a kind of juvenile adolescent cheerleader of, you know, dead. And we kill these guys. Look, this isn't, this isn't Halo, you know, this isn't Call of Duty with your buddies. These are, these are real human beings on both sides. You know, one of the things that always impressed me about teaching military officers is they didn't talk about the enemy that way. I mean, yes, they were gung ho, they wanted to win. They were not, you know, these were not polite disagreements. But on the other hand, they understood they were killing other human beings. And Hegseth seems to have about the mentality of a 14 year old about all of this, which is why he ought to be replaced as soon as possible, especially in the wake of this, this mess.
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Ben Parker
Totally agree. Hexseth seems like the living embodiment of the Dunning Kruger effect where he thinks so highly of himself that, you know, he thinks he's obviously smarter than all those other dunces who used to run wars.
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Tom Nichols
He's smarter than all those senior officers who passed him over and didn't like him.
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Ben Parker
That's Right. And. And so he. He literally is too ignorant and maybe too dumb to understand all the things he doesn't know and doesn't understand, which is why one of the reasons he's a terrible leader, obviously. I did also want to say a lot of the failure of this war has to do with the fact that this administration has been actively and severely hostile since its first days toward anyone who has any kind of specialized expertise. I mean, how many Iran experts do you think they had in the room saying, hey, guys, here's a little bit of history with Iran. The first thing this regime did when they consolidated power was go to war for eight years with Iraq was a terrible war where they lost hundreds of thousands of people where they were using chemical weapons. The Iraq. The Iraqis, rather, were using chemical weapons. The Iranians at one point were. Were reduced to just sending waves of basically children at the enemy to stop their Iraqi advances. By the comparison with that, this war was nothing. This was easy by comparison with the Iran Iraq war.
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Tom Nichols
The only Middle east expert in the room, apparently was Bibi Netanyahu.
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Ben Parker
Yeah.
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Tom Nichols
Shall we say, presenting. I mean, I. I'm gonna. You know, I. I am relentlessly critical of this administration, but I have to say I was impressed to find out that John Ratcliffe, of all people, the CIA director, goes to Trump afterwards and says, farcical, you know, that actually representing God, God bless him, you know, it wouldn't have been my choice for the intelligence community. And I think this is, you know, basically a bunch of hacks. But if the CIA director took the, you know, the position of the intelligence community forward and. And said, Mr. President, what you were just told was a lot of crap, you know, good for him. But it shows you that in the end, you know, personalities do matter. Donald Trump wanted this war. You know, let. Let's dispense with another, you know, I think, emerging fantasy, which is that the Israelis dragged us into this. The Israelis told Donald Trump, Netanya told Trump what he wanted to hear. You'll be a hero. You'll be the liberator of Tehran. The regime will fall. Know, flowers in the streets. You know, Donald Trump had plenty of advice from. From people around him. And by the way, isn't it interesting, you know, I'll put this to both of you. Isn't it. Isn't it interesting that despite all the gaslighting about what a great victory this is, how many people have lined up to talk to the press and say, it wasn't my idea? Boy, did I not like this. I tried to tell the President, you know, no, there was nobody in the room, but. And you notice the only guy that gets thrown under the bus when everybody says, well, there was only one guy in the room who was really gung ho about this. And his name rhymes with shmeet, peg, Seth, you know, so, I mean, it's inside baseball. Mark. I also noticed that Dan Driscoll felt the need to stand up yesterday and day ago and say, I'm not going anywhere.
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Ben Parker
Yeah, that's the Secretary of the army who has been at loggerheads with bdxf.
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Mark Hertling
Well, the other thing along with that too, it was fascinating to me that yesterday, well, during the press conference yesterday, the president, he prays on Hexeth. And the way he did it was by saying everybody was against this guy. They said he should be fired. And, and, and we think he's great now. And all this other stuff. That's usually the first indicator that he's
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Ben Parker
about to get canned in this administration. Yeah.
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Mark Hertling
And what's. I, I don't know. I, I don't. That's the way I looked at it.
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Mark Hertling
But Driscoll saying that afterwards is certainly because he's the one that a lot of people are considering to take his
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Tom Nichols
place was a question nobody asked.
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Mark Hertling
Yeah, right.
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Tom Nichols
And I just want to say, Mark, I. I too, have no plans to be fired anytime soon. I just want to make that announcement right now. What does that mean?
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Mark Hertling
Yeah. Yeah. You know, what's interesting, too, is there's obviously some tension in terms of replacements of officers within the army under Driscoll's reign and countering some of the things he's been doing and he's been standing up for, from what I understand. And in terms of keeping people on promotion list and saying, don't relieve these people or don't tell them to retire. But one other thing I'll comment on, Tom, because you brought it up, I think Keynes commentary about Israel, at least what was stated in that New York Times article when he said, hey, I know these guys, and they tend to be hyperbolic when they portray their threats. I've dealt with Israel, too. They used to be in the US Army, Europe footprint back in the day. They no longer are. And I spent a lot of time in Israel. And you continually get the same messages when you go in there. They are great people. They're in a really bad neighborhood. I get it. But they will tell you that the worst things will happen to them unless the United States helped them out by killing Arabs that are contrary to what they believe in.
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Tom Nichols
This is my one brush with Israeli greatness. 35 years ago, I was on a co dell because I was a. I was on a congressional staff trip and I met Netanyahu and he gave us a brief, and it was the same, like, you know, 35 years. Like, you watch him today, it's like 35 years haven't passed. You know, the brief he gave. You walk out and your eyebrows are singed, you know, and your glasses are all fogged up. I mean, because it is. It is a hard sell that, you know. And like you say, there are great people living in a tough neighborhood, but that can't be why you. You buy into whatever you're told. I mean, the whole point of having a room full of advisors is so that when your guests leave and go back to their country, your people tell you what's what. And it sounds like you, you know, for a notoriously cowardly cabinet. Nobody said it was a bad idea, but they did put stuff on the table to say, here's some stuff to think about. And Trump just didn't want to hear it.
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Mark Hertling
You know, who else lives in a tough neighborhood? Iran. You know, they live in a tough neighborhood. Unfortunately, they have a really Bad government, but they've got some great culture and some great people. It's just that they've been led down a very bad path. So that reinforces the commentary about, you want to destroy this culture. You want to commit genocide against the Persians who were about, oh, I don't know, 6,000 years on Earth and have a pretty good culture over those 6,000 years. Seriously, you want to do that?
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Tom Nichols
I'm going to guess that the. The Iranian people are a lot less pro American than they were five years ago.
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Ben Parker
Than they were five weeks ago.
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Tom Nichols
Five weeks ago. Yeah. I mean, but this. Because this was the biggest. This was kind of the Hungarian revolution level kind of mistake.
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Mark Hertling
Right.
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Tom Nichols
That Trump comes out on night one, he says, get ready to rise up and take your government and then just leaves them there. You know, that's why you shouldn't. Again, violating every rule. Basic rule of strategy 101. You know, unless you know that you're going to be able to deliver on that. You don't go to the civilian population and say, get ready to take back your government, because then not only do you. Will they feel betrayed if it doesn't happen, but anybody who thinks about doing that becomes exposed within their own country.
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Ben Parker
They.
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Tom Nichols
I mean, I can imagine what kind of repression there's going to be in Iran now. The IRGC is still in charge.
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Ben Parker
Yeah.
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Tom Nichols
You know, the mullahs are still in charge, and they're going to be taking some names about what happened during this war. And, you know, really, I would not blame Iranian reformers if they. If they now felt abandoned by us,
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Ben Parker
and they wouldn't be the first ones. I mean, look at all the people around the world who have reason to feel abandoned by the United States recently. The Afghans, the Kurds, the Ukrainians, most of Europe soon, you know, our allies in the. In East Asia. I mean, certainly Japan, which by used to buy a lot of oil from Iran, has a reason to feel a little bit abandoned that we didn't consult them on this. We're not a good ally anymore, and we haven't been for some time. But real quick, since Tom used to teach senior officers. General, you of course, were a senior officer. I want to do a little bit of a war college exercise here.
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Tom Nichols
I never had Mark in class, so anybody wants to blame the U.S. you know, for that is he. He is his own man. I've been getting all these tweets about you ruined the American high command. And I'm like, if only if I had had that much influence as a
- [24:29]
Mark Hertling
professor at the Naval making up for not having me in class now because he's continued to school me on a whole bunch of things.
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Ben Parker
Okay, well, let's do a, let's do it. Let's do a little bit of a prospective exercise because I think there are some easy answers to this question and some really hard ones. What kind of lessons should the American military learn from this war? Because I think there are some that are like, hey, you got to spend more on drones, you got to be more prepared for anti drones, and if it's directed energy weapons and things like that, like, we got to make some major investments. But then there are some lessons like, I don't know, what do you do if the commander in chief who is in charge for setting overall strategy is totally out to lunch? Like, I don't know what kind of lessons you learned from this kind of thing. Because if the whole plan is from the start, where do you go from there?
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Mark Hertling
I'm going to jump into that, Ben, because. And then let Tom speak, because I was thinking exactly that thought during the Pentagon briefing this morning. What is the military after action going to look like and what is the government after action going to look like? Because normally those things are conducted. Neither of those, I think, are going to have any credence whatsoever because we've already been told what the results are. But even after the invasion of Iraq in 2003, there was an after action with all governmental agencies saying, how did we screw this up? How did Ambassador Bremer make such bad decisions? How was there such a bad dynamic between the SEC State and the CIA director and the Defense Department director? Those are some of the things that you talk about at the strategic level. But the biggest thing I would say from a military perspective, and hey, you know what my lesson learned is maybe we ought to go back to doing rehearsals and war gaming, because those were obviously not done for this operation.
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Tom Nichols
Well, I want to make a civil military point, but I also, again, I'm going to kind of drag the war colleges into this to draw an analogy. You know, in the future, this case, this war will be at the command and staff level, a series of great cases of operational successes that they will teach at the command and staff level. Right. At the senior level. At the, at the senior service level, it's going to be the opposite case of a tremendous strategic failure because the operational successes and the strategic goals didn't align. They didn't match. So the, the, I think the question for this, the, the after action kind of, you know, autopsy for the senior military is how do we work with civilian colleagues who want us to do impossible things? Because I think ever, you know, this has been a problem for years that the American that have successful American governments and Trump has it worst of all. Trump thinks the military can, you know, turn unicorn pee into gasoline. I mean he just thinks they can do anything but that a lot of Americans and a lot of American governments have said this is just too difficult, we'll just give it to the military. Well, the military can't affect regime change. You know, I, I took a lot of static when I said early on, you know, maybe we should have somehow forced the surrender of that frigate. You have the crew be, you know, defectors or you know, a political gem in the crown instead of proving that submarines can still fire torpedoes. You know, that's a civilian decision to say we want POWs, we want defectors, we want, you know, to, to. There was no public diplomacy effort, nothing. And this. And at the senior military level, at Marx level, at that three star level, four star level, civil and military authorities have to work hand in hand on that stuff. You know, the military thinks it's political, the political guys think that the military just blows stuff up. But in successful operations, that's not it. They are all political leaders. You know, what's the expression, Mark? That you're promoted to 1 and 2 stars, you're appointed to 3 and 4, something like that. That you become at that point you are part of the national command leadership, the national command authority. And that fell apart in this war. This was Donald Trump talking to Cain, go do these things. While Hegseth was busy firing everybody that might be a friend of his competitor. That was, this was a, a complete shit show of civil military affairs and, and civil military relations and, and that needs to be addressed at a very senior level within the military in tandem with civilian policymakers and thinkers.
- [29:18]
Mark Hertling
And I second that motion. And the one thing I'd add to that, Tom, is maybe Susie Wiles, the Chief of Staff has a role in this to say, hey, Mr. President, maybe we ought to bring back the National Security Council and the National Security Advisor and not make it dual headed with the Secretary of State so we can tee up these kind of discussions in an accurate way and get everybody's input to include maybe, oh, I don't know, the Treasury Secretary or the DNI or
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Ben Parker
Secretary of Energy, maybe.
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Tom Nichols
Oh, just spitballing.
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Mark Hertling
And you have a body that does that for you and keeps you straight. That body is not there right now. And it's supposed to be the kind of Things that Tom was just talking about.
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Tom Nichols
That is a hugely important point, Mark. There was functionally no National Security Council here. You know, Ben, your point about. Hey, wasn't there anybody around who speaks Farsi? Yeah, normally at a time like this, that's somebody who's detailed over from CIA or State, you know, to, to be on the National Security Council, which is made up of serving military people and civilian experts and intelligence community folks and diplomats all sitting. That's the pre. I always try to explain to, to folks outside of government. The National Security Council is the President's private think tank. It's his personal. You know, there's a reason the National Security Advisor isn't confirmed by the Senate. That's the President's guy. That's the person be standing right next to the President says I don't answer to any. I don't answer to the Senate or anybody but you. I am your personal security advisor and just didn't exist because Donald Trump and you know, like Pete Hexet thinks he's just the smartest guy in the room and that he got this and now and, and that the other place where a National Security Council would have been really helpful was, would have been to draw up terms and establish some kind of path toward war termination. You know, again, just spitballing, but, you
- [31:22]
Ben Parker
know, what a concept. Yeah, what a concept. Everyone says Brent Scowcroft was the best national security adviser and the reason is that he didn't think it was his job to make the policy. He just ran the process and that is ideally what the National Security Council is supposed to do. Everyone gets heard, everyone gets their thoughts in front of the President. The process works smoothly. Everyone knows that, you know, it's a fair process. And whatever Donald Trump is allergic to process, he could have Brett Scowcroft in there and you know, Susie Wiles could be as good as, you know, we were saying, we hope she would be. It wouldn't matter because the President is going to listen to process. He's not going to sit down for meetings, he's not going to read memos.
- [32:00]
Tom Nichols
He's unbreakable. He's unbreakable. When he first became president, a friend of mine told me about something that he witnessed at southcom. Apparently, or it was a. No, it was a SOCOM where, you know, he president, the President elect is getting this briefing and he wouldn't stop talking like he could. The, the briefers couldn't get a word in. And finally some senior officer, three, three or four star officer, leans over, puts his hand on Trump's Forum and says, Mr. President Elect, this is important. And that stopped him for about five minutes before he started. You know, you can't brief the guy. And I think if you want to know why we're in this situation, why we started this whole conversation saying what's going on and you know, is there a ceasefire? Is there not? Did we get what we want? Because he doesn't, he doesn't know what he's doing and he doesn't.
- [32:51]
Ben Parker
Listen, Tom, we know you, you have to go at some point. We've kept you longer than I think we agreed. So thanks for chatting with us. If you want to stay on, you're more than welcome. But we also understand if you need to, if you need to duck out.
- [33:02]
Tom Nichols
Well, I've got one more minute and then I got to run. But if there's anything we need to there. Should we just solve this whole ceasefire in the next 60 seconds or.
- [33:10]
Mark Hertling
Yes, yes, go ahead, tell us what we need to do.
- [33:13]
Tom Nichols
Yeah, I, you know, I opened my big mouth and said that and I didn't have an answer for it.
- [33:18]
Ben Parker
That's because he's not left us with any good options.
- [33:21]
Mark Hertling
Right.
- [33:21]
Ben Parker
This is what happens when you don't think.
- [33:22]
Tom Nichols
Here I'm going to, I'll leave on a pop culture reference because one of my favorite cult movies is the, is the movie Streets of Fire, the 1984 rock musical. And there's a scene in it where the, the cops think that they're gonna deal with this gang and the gangs show up with 100 guys with guns. And the cop turns to the hero of the movie, he says, well, my plan went to shit. Let's see how you do like after like the first three days of the war. That was where we were. Well, you know, that's it. My plan went to, now what do you know, what do we do? And, and I think that's where we've been ever since. So that's, that's why I don't have a good sense of where we go from here. Because I think all that Donald Trump wants, and truthfully my sense is all that America wants is to just get out of this and to, and to wish it never happened.
- [34:13]
Mark Hertling
Yeah, well, I'm going to add my own pop culture that. And cite the line from the movie Drumline, which is one of my favorite all times movie. And that is one band, one sound. We haven't been there in a long
- [34:25]
Ben Parker
time either, you know, that's for sure. Tom, thanks so much for joining us. We're going to keep chatting after you go.
- [34:30]
Mark Hertling
All right.
- [34:30]
Tom Nichols
Thanks for having me, guys.
- [34:31]
Ben Parker
That was great. It's always great talking to Tom. Okay, so I promised this earlier, but you have an article at the Bulwark about the Pentagon purge and the moral high ground. This is about the latest round of technically not firings, but senior officers who were invited to take early retirement before their posts were up. The Chief of Staff of the army and the head of the Army Training and Futures Command. And then one person you knew who was the, the head of the army chaplain. So you wrote about, like, why would you get rid of the head of the army, the chaplains.
- [35:03]
Mark Hertling
Yeah, and I, I still don't understand that. But of course, I wasn't in the room either, so I don't know what transpired. But Major General Bill Green was the Chief of Army Chaplains and, and I know him personally because he was, when he was much younger as a captain and then later as a major, he was in the unit I commanded and just a terrific guy. And I can't understand it. You know, I can understand Secretary Hegseth saying, hey, I want to get rid of all the chiefs of various services within the Joint Chiefs of Staff and replace them, which he has in fact done over the last year. I can understand him saying, I want to get rid of these other four star generals or three star generals, which, which he has done. He's relieved nine different four stars and close to 24 different general and flag officers over the last year. And that's more I think we cited before. That's more than what occurred in the time since the Civil War in the United States. Overall, I can't wrap my head around relieving the Chief of Chaplains, especially a guy that I know who is just a phenomenal spiritual leader, a great leader and organizer, manager, and just an example to a whole lot of other people. So again, I can't say why he was told to retire one year into a four year term, but it just baffles me and I think it speaks to, you know, during the Civil War, the article I wrote talked about how during the Civil War, the mantra was always seize the high ground because that gives you an advantage. Well, since then, that's kind of transformed into seizing the moral and the intellectual and the ethical high ground. And we seem to be failing in, or at least bending in all three of those categories.
- [36:54]
Ben Parker
Ben, I totally agree. And it just so happens that this question, if we can get the moral high ground question, came up at Caroline Levitt's press conference today.
- [37:04]
SpinQuest Disclaimer Announcer
Yesterday The President threatened to destroy Iran's civilization, the entire civilization, not the Iranian government, but the Iranian civilization, the Iranian people. The US has been a moral leader for most of its history by fighting wars against other governments, not against civilizations. How can the President claim that America can ever have the moral high ground if he's threatening to destroy civilizations and not casting wars as fights against other governments?
- [37:39]
Caroline Levitt
Ms. Andrew, I think you should take a look at the actions of this President over the course of the past six weeks and the actions of our brave men and women in our United States military who have taken out the, essentially taken out the military of a rogue Islamic regime that has chanted death to America for 47 years, that has killed and maimed thousands of Americans in soldiers over the course of the last five decades. The President absolutely has the moral high ground over the Iranian terrorist regime. And for you to even suggest otherwise is frankly insulting.
- [38:10]
Mark Hertling
Yeah, as you mentioned, taking out his dating doctrine, that doesn't address the issue that he's killing people. And that's what combat is all about. So, yeah, Ben, it, it was interesting. I think Ms. Levitt actually dodge the question completely or else she doesn't understand the concept of moral high ground or morality for that reason, because there was an immediate wrapping of the President along with the military effectiveness and efficiency without understanding that on Easter Sunday he used the word people and, you know, burning everything and praise be to Allah, which insulted about a billion Muslims around the world. And all of those kind of things are not equated to taking the moral high ground either in speech, thought, or action.
- [39:06]
Ben Parker
Couldn't have said it better myself. We're really screwed, aren't we?
- [39:13]
Mark Hertling
I'm the eternal optimist, Ben, you know that. And I think we will recover from some of this, but we've got a lot of soul searching to do, a lot of hubris to rid ourselves of and take on a little bit more humility and understand how we contribute to global security and being part of a better alliance in the future. But we're not there right now.
- [39:38]
Ben Parker
Yeah, it's going to take a lot of work. And, you know, there's no such thing as ultimate defeat and no such thing as ultimate victory. We just keep fighting. And with that, it's been another good command post. General, thank you so much. If you like the video, please hit like on the video. Please leave us a comment. Send us your questions at command post@the bulwark.com and if you really like what we're doing, go to the bulwark.com, become a Bulwark plus member join our community. I am in the comments talking with people after these episodes. We share more thoughts, book recommendations, things like that. So definitely become a member if you want to get the most out of this and general. We will talk next week.
- [40:14]
Mark Hertling
It's always a pleasure to be with you Ben. Thanks for being my battle buddy.
- [40:17]
Ben Parker
Yeah, you too. Thanks.
- [40:18]
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