← The Bulwark Daily
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- [00:00]
A
This is Iris Palmer from Against All Odds with Iris Palmer. Okay, you guys, if you're anything like me and you're always on the go, this is a great new go to the McDonald's Caesar snack wrap. The now crispier McCrispy strip and Caesar sauce is la Combination Perfecta. Add a Diet Coke and you're ready to take charge. Dien El Crunch, Dien El flavor. And it's only $2.99. Pricing and participation may vary. Try the Caesar Snack wrap at participating McDonald's for a limited time queue. Rico, you guys,
- [00:45]
B
Hi, Bill Kristol here. Welcome to the Bullwood Podcast. I, I'm not Tim Miller, as you probably noticed, and I'm happy to be pinch hitting, however, for Tim Miller as he finishes up his little break and he'll be back on Monday, you'll be glad to hear. And I think the Bulwark podcast will be dark tomorrow. So this is our last non Tim Miller podcast. The pressure's on me and our terrific guest, Margaret Donovan. I think Margaret can live up to this. I'm not sure I can handle the pressure, but Margaret teaches at Yale Law School and is in private practice. There was an army captain in the army in the Judge Advocate General's Corps in the 2000 and tens served. It was a JAG in Iraq and Syria in 2016, 17, I think. So it was right in the middle of the fighting there against ISIS and gave a lot of legal advice to people who were involved in that war. And not a lot really. A ton right in day to day, every, every day, I think. And so has real familiarity with, with the Defense Department, where you served six years, but also with combat and its strains on the laws of how it interacts with wars and the law and the laws of war. And you teach about that and comment on that now both in print and on other media. So thanks, Margaret, for joining me.
- [02:03]
A
Yeah, thank you so much for having me.
- [02:05]
B
No, I'm really looking forward to this conversation. I've learned stuff from you over the last year and I will today. So I want to get to Iran, obviously, because there's a lot of issues on Iran and you've spoken on several of them and also the drug war before it was before. Iran raises all kinds of issues. But I want to talk more broadly about the Defense Department under Pete Hexeth, under in the second Trump term because I've been a little, well, I'm very much an outsider looking at it. But I've talked to people who are there and have been there and are close to people who are there. And I'd say they're more alarmed than I think they expected to be by the state of politicization, professionalism, honesty, even in terms of communicating to the public at dod. And I'd like to get your thoughts on that. Maybe use the Begin, though with this York Times story from just a couple of days ago of how Admiral Cottle became Chief of Naval Operations, which happened a year ago, but pretty stunning account of how he got himself that job. And remember, Hegseth had come in and fired, right. The, the CNO and as well as Suez, the chairman of Detroit Chiefs and many other general officers. So I mean, you know how this works. You've been in, you've, you've been close to it and still are in touch with people. Give, give us a sense of what you thought reading that Time story. Maybe you knew a lot of that already, but what does it tell us?
- [03:20]
A
I mean, the Time story on Admiral Cottle and the sort of evolution of how he got to the position he's in, I just think is really fascinating because it's like this little microcosm of, you know, a lot of different problems that people are seeing in the military right now. You have these legal conflicts of interest, you have what appears to be not an entirely merits based promotion. And then in the center of it all, you have a highly qualified officer who was ousted, Lisa Franchetti, who's a vice admiral in the Navy. And you know, I think just like taking a step back, thinking about the context in which this particular chain of events happened, as the Times story outlined, basically Admiral Franchetti was like, know knew there was a political wave coming and basically as, as the reporting states kind of gathered some of her subordinate leadership and her key players and was like, look, everybody focus on the mission. There's going to be this political wave rolling through. And like, remember what's important, it's the people and the mission and you know, making sure that we stay eyes forward and staying focused. And supposedly according to the story, Admiral Cottle was actually in that group, in that audience. And the sort of, I guess, really sort of clever way maybe that the Times wrote that made you think that Caudle heard that and thought, wow, there's a political wave, like how can I ride that? And then sort of separately tried to coordinate with Hagseth's people as he was getting ready for his nomination hearing. So the backdrop to all of this is that Secretary Hegseth has been firing people, summarily firing military officers, very senior, very experienced Military officers or otherwise, kind of forcing them into retirement in situations where they would normally advance into. Into leadership positions. And he's doing so not based on merit, not based on the entire body of their life's career and their life's work, not based on their officer evaluation reports, something called an oer, which is basically an annual review that allows you to advance in the military not based on their combat records, not based on their command time, not based on the schools they've been to, the awards that they've earned, but instead based on, as near as anybody can tell, this, like, internal judgment that he has that their politics don't align with his. And the irony of that, from a guy who. Who has really campaigned for this job by saying that the military is filled with woke promotions and people who don't deserve to be where they're gonna be, and women don't meet standards, and standards are lowered for women going to combat, and we've gotta just make one standard for all. And that's how the military should be. The irony of the guy who has been pushing that to then fire people not based on merit or not based on their careers, based on something entirely political, is just kind of astounding. The other sort, sort of like culturally offensive part of this, which I don't really even think you have to have served in the military to understand, but the people that are getting fired are true leaders, like, completely respected, battle tested. They have, you know, dust on their boots, so to speak. They have seen action. They have experienced far more in their military careers than Pete Hexef could ever have dreamed of in his. And there are some striking differences. I think people chalk up Secretary Hegseth's career as he's a National Guard major, and I think his defenders will say, well, he knows what the average Joe is thinking, and there's some value to that. I don't want to really denigrate anybody's military career because at the end of the day, everybody who served raised their hands to do so. But you have to understand that he has never been in command. He has never planned it like an operation in a combat environment. He has never managed a major budget, and he certainly hasn't been planning for, like, logistical preparations for major operations. And so you have somebody who, like, yes, he served in the military, like I served in the military. You know, it doesn't really qualify him. You want to be looking for something else within his professional background that would make him ready for the job that he has. And so, by contrast, you have these very senior People getting jettisoned who could be there to help him. He could turn to CD Donahue, who was sort of famed and completely adored and really revered Special Forces senior officer. He commanded Delta, he commanded the 82nd Airborne, 18th Airborne Corps. So he's been in command in all of the sort of major storied military units. Randy George, of course, the JAG officers, the top military judge advocates. Right off the bat, he fired all of these people. And so you can be inexperienced and be the Secretary of Defense. I actually truly believe that as long as you are surrounding yourself with people who have experience and you're listening to those people and you know how to take advice and sift through different recommendations, Secretary Hexseth is basically not doing that. He's surrounding himself with people who aren't going to push him on anything and aren't going to challenge anything he's thinking and basically kind of building a little cadre of yes men. So with Admiral Cottle, you have this scenario where Lisa Franchetti gets pushed out. Lisa Franchetti, you could read her bio on any random website. This is an extremely qualified military officer who had been a Deputy Chief of Naval Operations, which means, like she was completely primed for the gig that she had as the Chief of Naval Operations. And you know, the other thing that I alluded to this a few moments ago, but the idea that Secretary Hexseth can come in and say like, you only got that job because you were a woman. You only got that job because you're a minority. So I'm going to take you out and level the playing field. That ignores the fact that these people are wearing multiple stars by the time he fires them. So we're talking about multiple administrations throughout their decades long careers that people have objectively looked at them, not just the Biden administration, not just the Obama administration. We're going through Trump won where Admiral Franketti held again leadership positions. We're talking about George W. Bush and in some cases we're talking about people whose experience goes back to Clinton. And so it's just a very short sighted view and it's the tell to me of why these aren't actually merit based. It's because he's just ignoring the fact that in order to get your third or fourth star, you had to have first gotten your first or your second or pinned full bird or done the entire promotion before getting there. So that is sort of, you know, the odd part of Admiral Cottles sort of elbowing his way into his position into Lisa Francetti, Admiral Franchetti's old position.
- [10:38]
C
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- [12:16]
B
more broadly, just a minute on the firing of General Brown right at the beginning, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs later on of as you say, Randy George, the very well respected chief of staff the Army, I mean George, he had intersected with Hexeth and clashed with them. Brown hadn't. And these people were not in my impression from talking to people is a lot of them were not regarded as particularly political. There probably are individual generals who would have been more unhappy about a Trump administration or a Hexath Defense Secretary or America first doctrine. And maybe then you have a talk with them and say look, I think it's probably not going to work great and you should leave at the end of this tour or at the end of the day a few months or something like that and take retirement. But that wasn't the way it was done. I do feel like there was a lot there of just pure intimidation. I mean it was, it was somewhat random almost who he fired. I mean they happen to be disproportionately minorities and women. But so that, that part isn't random.
- [13:07]
A
I was going to say.
- [13:08]
B
Well, no, that's fair. It was not random individual, so to speak. It was a lot of it was. This is different. This is not the deference to the system that used to prevail really in all administrations. And there were times when people reached in, Bob Gates reached in and others and thought that the military was being too conventional in some of its froz. They fought Petraeus back, I think to provide over one of these promotion boards for 1 stars and stuff like that. And but even that was done very carefully and systematically in terms of preserving the military standards and having, you know, here, you know, having meetings, I gather go on a long time where you discuss who's going to be promoted once or twice Dick Cheney and others fired people who were not doing well or were not obeying orders. And obviously that's, that's happened and that should happen presulli with civilian control. But yeah, I think just bringing home to people how much how wildly different this is from anything we've seen and how wildly different it is from World War II of skipping over generals to find the best person to find Marshall or Eisenhower or someone and put them in command in the middle of a war which no one expected. And Therefore, presumably the 1939 army did not have necessarily the best war fighters at the very top of it. But this is very different. These people have been in charge of really important combat in the wars we had fought and some had not done well in those situations and they had mostly left or gone or been. And these people had, as you say, are the ones who were rewarded by administrations of both parties. So I guess just at the time it happened and people thought, oh well, he's different and firing some of the holdovers. And I don't think people really understood how much of a shock that was to the system. But not just to the system, but to the whole notion that the military should not be politicized in the way that it does. When you think you to get promoted, you have to be, you have to be on board with a particular political agenda of this secretary. So I'm sorry to go on, but I just think that's so striking. And people I know who were, some of whom incidentally were pretty conservative and somewhat more sympathetic to Trump than I was and so forth, were still rattled, I think, by that.
- [15:10]
A
Oh, completely. I mean, it is completely unusual for the secretary of defense to go by name down a list of potential promotions and decide, you know, I'm just going to pick a few people that maybe he read about on his ex feet or God knows what else and pull them off. It undermines the entire system that the military is built on, which is that you are promoted based on merit, based on your experience and based on your capabilities and not because, you know, who knows what's informing Secretary Hicksett's opinion and most of the rest of the Cabinet, it's whatever they see on their ex feed that day. So, you know, it is very disruptive, I think, all the way down the line because particularly when you see these officers that, you know, people owe their lives to, quite literally, you know, who have been to combat with these men and women and seeing them get sort of picked off because the strong implication is that the secretary has deemed them politically dislikable and there's just virtually no evidence of that in their military careers. It's extremely disruptive.
- [16:14]
B
Yeah, no, I think it would be demoralizing. And so then the politicization, of course, then can go down all the way down to the ranks. Because if people can be fired from being 4 stars or not promoted to be 1 stars, why not have the same standards for promotions to lieutenant colonel or to captain, I suppose. Right. At some level. How worried are you more broadly about that in the military these days?
- [16:34]
A
I mean, extremely. I'm as worried as any other military veteran who's looking at this and is just kind of horrified by what is going on and hoping that everybody that is still in uniform is holding the line and standing up for the principals and remembering the oath they took, whether they were an officer or enlisted. I mean, the other troubling piece to that, and I know we don't have to go into detail about this now, but I worry about the promotions. I also worry about the military justice as a form. I was a, when I wasn't overseas doing Strike Cell stuff, I was a military prosecutor back in the United States when I was domestic. And you know, what I have seen, especially with the sort of aviation misconduct over the past couple months, is if you are doing something that is deemed, you know, MAGA or you are doing a flyover past Kid Rock's house, then you're fine, you're not going to get in trouble. And there's no military discipline for you. But there's a different standard for everybody else. And that is, again, it's just the hypocrisy of what Secretary Hegseth has sort of trumpeted as his vision for the military is. It just really kind of knows no bounds there. Because what we're seeing is a different disciplinary and justice standard for people who do something that, again, Hagseth reads on X as being politically aligned with his politics. And he'll make an announcement or one of his secretaries will make an announcement saying, no investigation, you know, no punishment. Carry on, patriots. I cannot overstate how damaging that is to his subordinate, the subordinate commander's authorities in those scenarios.
- [18:12]
B
You look at these flyovers and the Kid Rock thing and the flyover, that beach, wherever that was in Florida, I think, and, you know, think, oh, well, that's kind of amusing, or maybe they shouldn't do it. But on the other hand, you can see why Hegseth thinks it's nice to do it, you know, but. Yeah, but the actual head of those units was. Were concerned and thought things were not happening properly. And there was real danger, I guess, in the case of the demonstration in Florida and they wanted to investigate. And Hexeth sort of up, no, I like that. So we're not even gonna. I mean, how much does that undercut this authority of the.
- [18:41]
A
Immensely. That's like. I cannot, like I said, I can't overstate this, how problematic this is for commanders. So in the military, the authority to implement uniform, the Uniform Code of Military justice, the ucmj, and military discipline that vests with the commander, that's very different than a civilian job. If you're going to get charged with a crime, a DA charges you, not your boss. But in the military, that's one and the same. Your boss can bring a charge against a criminal charge against you. And the reason for that is because good order and discipline is central to how the military must operate. And I think, you know, I don't think I have to explain why that's so important to the military. I want to qualify my statements here a little bit, because I'm not saying that every time this happens, and I don't think anybody's saying every time this happens, it should result in a court martial or these people should have the book thrown at them. But what I am saying is that that should be a commander's decision. The commander of the Blue Angels, the 101st Airborne commander, which was the aviation. It was my old Unit, the aviation unit that did the flyover by Kid Rock's house. There are very, very good reasons that a commander would want to investigate what he or she suspects is aviation misconduct because they may have a really serious downed aircraft incident, as we saw just a few years ago in the 101st Airborne. And it happens, unfortunately, all the time in training and in war. War. And so aviation incidents or deviations from aviation standards are one of the most aggressively investigated types of events in military training or combat. For that very reason. They're extremely fatal if something goes wrong. And even if a commander, you know, was not inclined to punish everybody, and not everybody gets punished, really the goal of the investigation is just to figure out what went wrong. Who in that chain decided, like, let's not follow the training book today, let's do something different, because you want to identify that person and make sure that you can prevent a worse event from happening in the future. So a point that General Hertling made the other day I was on, we're doing some media together is, you know, the question I would be asking as a commander in those incidents is when there is an aviation accident, because there always is going to be. It's very sad. It will happen. Maybe not this year, maybe next year, but they happen. Who's going to take responsibility? Will the Secretary of Defense say, like, oh, that's on me, you guys. I told you, you couldn't investigate the last instance of misconduct or the last suspected deviation from the standard. I'll take the fall for this downed aircraft. Of course not. That's going to fall on the unit commander. So it is really problematic to just kind of swoop in as a higher level authority and basically divest that subordinate commander of the ability to run his own unit or her own unit.
- [21:28]
B
The politicization people like me see first and sort of worry about, and I think that's worth worrying about. But it's also the not so much of politicization, but what undercutting of professionalism and of accountability.
- [21:39]
A
I guess it's kind of both, like, you know, if you can see a very clear pathway where like if somebody gets in trouble on post and they want to get out of it somehow, they just need to generate enough X followers to tweet that they're a MAGA patriot and get the Secretary's attention and then they can probably trust that the secretary is going to swoop in and save them somehow.
- [22:01]
B
Well, and more seriously, if people commit war crimes, and we've seen this unfortunately in Trump 1 and Trump 2. Right. I mean, and Hegseth personally is very much opined in this direction that you get off if it's in the service of if it sounds good to MAGA world or to Trump personally. And then you really talk about serious crimes, not just misjudgment about using the aircraft.
- [22:23]
A
Right.
- [22:23]
B
Let's talk about that, because that comes up in the context of Iran. I mean, when we were talking beforehand a couple of days ago, you made the point about how unusual there's so much to talk about with Iran. And again, worrisome, both politicization, but also lack of professionalism at times, perhaps lack of candor or transparency about certain things that the military has been reasonably transparent about in the past. But say a word about the beginning of the war, I think you were very interesting on that when we were chatting. And then also just about ongoing, what has it been? We're now in the sixth month of the war. So what strikes you as someone who served in combat and knows the challenges that face every administration in such circumstances?
- [23:03]
A
Yeah, well, I'll actually take you a few months before the beginning of the war to September 2nd, because that was the opening strike of Southern Sphere, which is a campaign that this administration invented to basically, basically summarily execute people who are drug mules, people that we wouldn't even prosecute if they showed up on American soil. We would probably, maybe we'd flip them. Again, you mentioned I'm a former jag. I'm also a former federal prosecutor. Maybe we flip those people, try to get up the chain, but they're usually not even going to be worth the resources of a federal prosecution because they're just taking cash and moving product for people. They have more intelligence value, really than anything else for the government. But so they started a campaign using basically hellfire missiles and Seal Team 6 to take out these drug mules, these fishermen in the Caribbean Sea. And on the opening strike of that campaign of Southern Spear, we have what was widely regarded, in my opinion as, well, based on the facts as I know them, to be a war crime. So you had a shipwrecked survivors after that first strike. And as we all know, this was huge news. Several months ago, somebody in the chain of command made the decision to engage again and fire on shipwrecked survivors. It was the first strike. That was the very first strike of Southern Spiro. That was September 2nd. In fact, the legal opinion wasn't even written until or at least published. It's dated September 5th, three days later. So I just offer that you get somebody like Secretary Hagseth in charge of the Department of Defense. And that's what you get. You get this harebrained operation and the very first strike. Something that like nearly every former military lawyer, probably current military lawyers, if they could speak freely, would consider a war crime or otherwise unauthorized under the law of armed conflict. So lest you thought that was a fluke, that sort of rushing into an operation ill prepared and not fully thought out in terms of your legal basis, we have February 28th. And so that's the opening of the Iran war and the strike that everybody, thankfully, in my opinion, is still talking about and it has not washed away with the news cycle and I am grateful to many media outlets for that is the strike of the Manob elementary school that has been reported to have killed over 100 children. The horrific nature of it is frankly hard to even comprehend, to really articulate correctly. And while I will stop short of saying that that is a war crime, because you actually really don't know what type of information people had, if it was not intentional, that's going to factor into it. Civilians were not the intended target. They are not by the US Military. And we just don't have enough information about the strike in general. But what's remarkable to me about that strike is that we still don't have any information on it. That was now, as you said, nearly we're going on to the six month mark. We just finished five months since the war started. And when I was in, there were two civilian casualty events that I can compare that to in my mind just for, I guess, context and reference. And what is making me feel like it is such an unusual chain of events after a civilian casualty event. But just at the outset, I just, I want to be clear. You know, I worked in a strike cell in both of my deployments. I did back to back deployments in Baghdad in 2016 and then outside of Raqqa in 2017. And I did well over a thousand airstrikes. I was advising, when I say I did, I was advising the chain of command and the target engagement authority on whether or not we could strike a target in Iraq. It was in Al Anbar Province and in Syria, it was pretty much all over northeastern Syria and Raqqa province. And you know, in those instances, things happen. Our enemy at that point was the Islamic State. But it is kind of unavoidable that you're going to have civilian casualty events. The military has a requirement that we investigate it. Congress has standards laws that we report it to Congress. The amount of civilian casualties that are incurred and we followed all of those requirements. And it's a very, of course, a tragic and unfortunate and frankly, really unsavory part of being in combat and being deployed. But it's why you really shouldn't take going to war lightly. It's because civilians are going to die, even if you don't intend for that to happen. And so I say that just to say the idea that there are civilian casualties in war is not itself completely shocking to me. That's why war is bad and we should avoid it. But the idea that we've had a civilian casualty event of this magnitude and we have heard nothing from the Department of Defense on it. The two other strikes that I mentioned that I sort of thought of when I read about the Manha school strike was in 2015. The United States army in a C130 gunship, opened fire on a Doctors Without Borders hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan. And within days, the CENTCOM commander was in front of Congress testifying about it. He, General Campbell at the time, he, you know, didn't have all of the information himself, of course. Nobody really does. You have to assign what's called an IO, an investigating officer, do an internal investigation, figure out, you know, everything's recorded. The military is very good at recording, you know, radio transmissions and chat logs and strike information and logistical data. And so it takes some time to gather that information. And so whenever there is a strike, like the Doctors Without Border strike, I think it was really crucial for the United States military to say, that was us. We're going to investigate it. Obviously, that was not the intended target, that we did not mean to strike up a doctor, that Borders Hospital. We're going to figure out what happened here, and I promise you, Congress that I will do so. And. And the actual investigative report was finished, I think a month later. It was like November of that year. It was released to the public. Shortly after that, heavily redacted, but a unclassified version was released to the public. So that was flash to bang, as they say. Very a quick and kind of standard timeline for those things. The next strike that I'm thinking about was in 2017 in Mosul. It was right after I had just gotten back from. I was in a little bit further south in Baghdad, but I had a lot of friends who were up in the strike cell in Mosul, in Erbil. And it was a strike that was intended to be on basically a high value target. And it ended up having a lot of what are called secondary explosions, which means that there's explosive material in the target or on the target. And so as a result, for the secondary explosions, there's been estimates, I've read, anywhere between 100 and 500 civilian casualties dead or wounded. So it was another really significant event. But the commander that had responsibility for that strike within weeks had an investigation commissioned and I think even quicker than the Kunduz on strike had a report readily accessible to the public. So all of that is to say terrible strikes happen in war. And it is a really unfortunate thing. It heavily affects the people involved in the strike, to say nothing of the people who were killed and the families of the people who were killed in the strike. But what is so appalling to me about the Manha school strike is that we don't even have an admission, a formal acknowledgment from the United States that that was our Tomahawk, that that was, you know, that was our strike and we're going to do something about it. We've heard rumors, I've heard probably the same as you. I mean, there's been reports saying it was based on decade old DIA Defense Intelligence Agency reporting that was not properly verified. We've heard rumors that there, you know, there's an investigation and it's finished and they're trying to release it. But the lack of transparency and really the lack of acknowledgement of that strike is to me, I mean, that is like impeachment level offense for Secretary Hegseth, because you are going to start a war which we can talk about in a few minutes. Why? This is just, we're beyond unconstitutional at this point. But you're going to start a war by yourself on a whim in the executive branch and blow up a school on your very first strike, and you're not even going to face the public over it. You're not even going to acknowledge, you know, fine, you don't want to have, you know, sympathy for the civilians of your enemy country. Like that's unwise and unchristian, I think. But fine. But at least think about the effect this has on the US Military strategically as a fighting force, as somebody who wants allies, who is begging allies to help us, as somebody who wants to prevent anti American sentiment from, for decades, generations to come, who wants to, as they say, not wage a war that creates more terrorists than it kills. It is a failure on so many levels of leadership of the actual logistics of the strike, of any semblance of taking responsibility for that. I hope that tomorrow after this podcast, there's a full report and we can all kind of digest it and understand what happens. But the fact that the Secretary would probably in his best world just move on and not acknowledge that is unacceptable to me. You cannot be in that position if you are not going to acknowledge civilian casualties in war.
- [32:45]
B
I guess there's been reporting that the group of people at DoD who had the responsibility to look over to review the strike plans and make sure that the information was up to date and, and try to make sure this kind of accident didn't happen. A lot of them had been removed or transferred because Hegseth wasn't interested or someone under Hegseth wasn't interested that much and thought that was not important. And so we're going to save manpower or just not want to know certain things. I guess it's pretty bad, don't you think? In terms of you authorized an awful lot of strikes that killed people and unfortunately, as you say, to kill sometimes civilians got killed in different ways. It's never been US Military doctrine that you can't ever kill a civilian or even knowingly if it's of if it's a high value target. And that's the only way to get to gets complicated if US forces are being threatened immediately and so forth. So I mean, I don't think we're on the super dovish side here of how to conduct wars. But you want people to come in who will want to lift up to high standards and fight wars as honorably as they can be fought. You don't really want to be recruiting people who kind of think, ah, yeah, this is great, and if we make a mistake, there's nothing ever, no one's accountable for anything, you know, and if we fire people who we think it's boring to go over these lists and make sure we're not hitting a girls school and then maybe that comes out later and it hurts your career that you fired those people. No, not under. You don't really want those kinds of people to be coming in or rising in the military.
- [34:10]
A
We're not the Wagner group, we're the US military and we fight with precision and excellence. And it is what separates us and has separated us from our enemies for all of our existence. And the boat strike campaign is sort of almost like an easy comparison because, you know, I was deployed under when we were fighting the Islamic State was the declared hostile force. And so that was one of the most horrific and inhumane and unforgiving enemies. And even fighting the Islamic State, we still held ourselves to the standards of the law of armed conflict. And as you say, One of those principles of the law of armed conflict is preventing unnecessary human suffering, civilian suffering, but that implies that there's some amount of necessary suffering. And so it is true, like these things happen. But I'm telling you, as somebody who has investigated these, has been on one side of civilian casualties on more than one occasion in these combat environments. This is unusual and in my opinion, it's unacceptable.
- [35:11]
B
Give us your sense of more broadly, the kind of professionalism, if I can put it that way, with which the war has been conducted. The most obvious thing has been the apparent using up of expenditure of a very high percentage of kind of important munitions. I mean, who knows, maybe they just miscalculated. Right? Military's pretty good at keeping track of these things, you know, much better than I, that, you know, there are people who keep track of how many whatever Thads and patriots, whatever batteries we have.
- [35:37]
A
The military is very good at keeping track of what's going on.
- [35:39]
B
And they tell you, the combatant commander might say, hey, you know, it'd be great if we could use a couple hundred of these. And they tell the combatant, well, actually we can't now because this is the total number we have. And so we should be careful about how many we expend and should really use them for high value targets, but not all the time, blah, blah. And it's pretty clear in this case, isn't it, that Trump and Hegstaff just wanted to do everything very fast. And maybe they were just wildly confident the war would last only a week or two. Maybe they just thought the initial shock and all was worth it and who cared about later on. But I don't know. I feel like it's pretty shocking that our military, which is so good at this kind of planning and logistics, just seems to have been caught short of very important and people are dying, missiles are hitting US bases and drones are hitting US bases. Maybe as a result that now we can't do as much as people want to do. I don't know, maybe I'm overstating that. But tell me what your sense is, reading these stories about the munitions and so forth.
- [36:32]
A
Yeah, I don't think you are at all. And I get this sense both from talking to people who are still in and who are involved in the conflict, and just from reading open source information on this. There's a saying, infantry wins battles, logistics wins wars. And that I think is very true. And that requires higher level long term strategic thinking. I don't know if you remember this, but way back in February or March The President was declaring that the Iranian people will rise up and take their country back and then we can just wash our hands of this and everything will just work itself out. All we had to do was just drop a few bombs for a week. And that is obviously completely insane. So, you know, we are in this position now where, as you said, I think most military officers, again, who have like eons more of command experience than the Secretary does and obviously of the President are probably seeing these problems, are probably identifying like, whoa, we're going to need some Patriot interceptors like in the Middle east, like in general, for the Indo Pacific threat. And we're burning through those, sir. My impression is that the leadership in the administration doesn't want to hear it, that they're just, they don't want to be told that what they're doing is, you know, possibly creating vulnerabilities for us. And by the way, it's not just the United States States. I read a statistic, and this is now two months ago, so God knows what it is now, but that the Gulf states had burned through something like 2,200 Patriot interceptors already that they themselves had been stockpiling for this Indo Pacific threat. And in doing so, you know, to give you some context to that, there's about 600 manufactured a year at the current rate. So that's a long time to replace those really key air defense assets. And you can imagine, you know, how important it is to the US Government to have those. In fact, we declined to provide support to Ukraine earlier on in this administration, specific, before Iran started, specific siting depleted stockpiles and that we needed to basically build up our own defenses back to where we were comfortable again. So again, infantry can win battles, but logistics wins wars is just a way of saying it's not just about dropping bombs, it's not just about knocking off key leaders within their own government or military structure. You have to think if you're going into a war, you need to know how to exist long term. The other kind of part that I noticed, I know we talked about this the other day, but in Secretary Hexaf's testimony the other week, he kind of his go to pivot was, well, I inherited this completely ill maintenanced and neglected and awful military. And Biden did so much that set us back years. And I had to correct all of that. And I just kept thinking to myself, why in God's name did you start a war then? Like, why was that your first go to instead of like maybe another week of whatever asking Kushner and Witkoff to like, I don't know, do whatever it is that they're doing that's obviously so effective. Why was your first instinct, like, let me take this extremely ill prepared and neglected military to war and then like, ask for Congress for permission to do that later? None of it makes any sense, and I just hate to say it, but like, this is what you get. You have a secretary who at his confirmation hearing, the reports that he was financially irresponsible at his two veterans charities, he obviously had discipline problems, I'll put it that way. And this is how this plays out. It does make a difference if you have a Secretary of Defense who has military experience or who surrounds themselves with people with military experience, or if you have who we have now. So it's really disappointing. And I do just want to make one final point that this is precisely like the scenario that we are in right now. You can read the context, you can read the letters surrounding the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia. This is precisely the scenario that the Framers wanted to avoid. This is why they vested not one, but two war powers in the first article of the Constitution. The Article 1, of course, establishes the legislator. Article 2 establishes the executive. Article 3 establishes the judiciary. War powers are shared across Article 1 and 2. The framers not only put the declare war clause in Article 1, but also the clause to fund the militaries in Article 1, thinking, okay, if we're going to start a war, it's going to be a runaway train and you're going to lose American lives, you're going to lose American supplies, American assets, and we are not going to stand for one person dragging our sons and daughters into a war that only one person decided, of course, decided to enter. Instead, we, the people, through our elected representatives, are going to decide when the country goes to war. And that is why declaring war and that verb declare was a very intentional addition to that clause in Article one should rest with Congress. That lies with Congress once you're in war. Article two, the Commander in chief review, have to very quickly respond to a national. An invasion in their minds, but a national security threat. Today, the Commander in Chief is the commander in chief. You can imagine that they envisioned what type of person would inhabit that role, beginning with George Washington. That's not quite who we have today. But I just want to, I guess, close with that point that this is why it is so important. All of the consequences, the stockpile depletions that harm to the military's reputation, just this sort of loss of dignity that we're seeing for soldiers who are being killed in this war. This is why this needs to be a decision that the people make. And I just think that people through their elected representatives need to demand that hegseth is either removed or we somehow find a way to extricate ourselves from this or both. And I said one more point. This is my final point, I promise.
- [42:24]
B
Fine, fine.
- [42:25]
A
I get, you know, the response to that and the response to a lot of the criticism that I've been giving on media about this is, you know, you don't support the troops. And like, how could you say this? We have people at war and you're not being supportive enough of the military by criticizing how we're going to war. I am a two time combat veteran. I'm telling you like, it is not not supporting the troops to demand that there is a coherent plan in place. It is not not supporting the troops to say we need some type of aim to this war. We need real leaders in charge of them. I think it is entirely unsupportive of the troops to treat their lives as transactional and to trust their safety and us using them to their greatest ability to people without a plan and who are acting as if they will never see repercussions. So anyway, I just offer that to say if people are feeling that they're not supporting the troops or they can't criticize what's going on because they're not supporting the troops. I strongly disagree with that. I think finding a way to maintain the dignity of the United States military and bring troops home safely with a decisive victory that we can all agree on that is supporting the troops.
- [43:36]
B
Yeah, and accountability for mistakes and then correcting mistakes. Everyone makes mistakes. God knows in war and things don't go the way you expect. And some of that's certainly much of that's understandable and some of it is more understandable than other parts, depending on how foolish the mistake was or how predictable it was. But the idea that you don't correct it and don't acknowledge as you say, the really bad things that happened, the bombing of the girls school, but also just don't correct other things. And that was a problem in Iraq. And people like me were very critical of Rumsfeld and this was when you were in high school or something and we got attacked for not supporting the troops. And how could you be so critical? And McCain of all people was attacked. Luckily McCain was the leader of this faction of the Republican party and no one could criticize. Well, they did nonetheless, but pretty hard to criticize him for not caring about the troops and stuff. The late Lindsey Graham was very involved in this and also who served obviously as a jag. So, and so what did I. People like me had no standing really to do this, but it was very clear. And Roosevelt was, I think, did not do what he should have done. It didn't correct things. He was very dug in on his plan and eventually Bush removed him. Would have been better to have done so sooner, in my opinion, and changed military strategy in Iraq. But even so, I mean, even there, the principle that one, that he had to defend what he was doing, that he had to testify to Congress, that Congress could see things, that we all could get a lot of information about what was going wrong. There were embedded reporters. Why did we know that Iraq was going. So why did I editing the Weekly Standard, who has not served in the military? Why did I know that Iraq was going badly? Because we could say that Steve Hayes was over there and reporting and of course, many, many, many other people as well. And there was testimony to Congress and other people spoke up. The whole shutdown of information dishonesty, honestly, in terms of presenting information, which I don't think was the case under Rumsfeld. He was just stubborn. But the facts of what was happening were not really masked. Mostly. I mean, just one last point, just because I want to go to Iraq, which is my own. But, you know, when Abu Ghraib broke, that was a huge. It was broken by the military, I think really more than by reporters. Or maybe it was a little of both, I can't remember. But anyway, they. They didn't deny. They denied it for like two days. And then they. They exceeded. They. They was a huge scandal.
- [45:46]
A
Y. We knew the names.
- [45:47]
B
We knew the names. People were disciplined, removed from, you know, and stuff. I. I have no view and no knowledge about whether it was perfectly handled or, you know, but at least no one pretended. We didn't have to acknowledge that this was a terrible stain on the US Military and all the way up to the level of President Bush. Yeah. So at least the principle of accountability and honesty, I think was. Was. Was honored there, even if occasionally it wasn't fully lived up to. To. We've just seemed to have abandoned the principle now is that. Which is really bad.
- [46:17]
A
Yeah, I would say it's kind of unforgivable. And from a constitutional sense as well, like this theory of accountability, the framers envisioned that the people's closest connections to their government, their elected representatives. That is how you see accountability. And so that's how if the war goes bad, it's not just the President and his chain of command and all of his military officers that made a mistake. All of us together decided that we were going to go to war. And all of us together as a country will, you know, kind of work through and try to course correct if things aren't going the way that we want it to. We don't have that here. You know, we're not implementing how the framers intended us to engage in wars.
- [46:56]
B
That's really a good point that I really myself been focused so much on what's happening inside DoD, but in a way that's, that's important, very important. And there are things people, military and civilians shouldn't do and so forth, but really it is Congress, isn't it, at the end, as you said. That's why you come back to that constitutional issue, which sometimes seems abstract, but it really is not abstract. Right. Without the congressional core of accountability, the rest of it becomes much harder to sustain, I guess is one way to say it.
- [47:22]
A
It's the executive branch checking itself, basically, which is not the way that should happen, incidentally.
- [47:29]
B
Did happen when you were a jag and, and Congress trusted it to happen, but it also partly happened because you all testified before Congress and Congress did it, made sure that it was happening
- [47:39]
A
or at least, you know, our reports were released. I had to prepare statistics to send up to Congress on a quarterly basis when I was deployed. And yeah, that was very much in place.
- [47:50]
B
This has been really helpful and not entirely cheerful, but important, I think. Really important. Sorry, not important. And I do think very important to get. Look, there are many policy mistakes and those need to be argued about. And I think you and I are probably both pretty big critics of the policies in many ways. But there's also. This is in a way beyond policy mistakes. This is a question of the character of our government and its honesty and what's happening to what are the most valued institutions in America, the military and civilians too, honestly, at the Defense Department and associated agencies, intelligence community and stuff. I really appreciate your taking the time to do this today. It's such an important topic.
- [48:30]
A
Thank you for having me and thank
- [48:32]
B
you all for being with us. I really appreciate your taking the time and being as thoughtful about it. So thanks. Thanks, Margaret, and thank you all. And Tim Miller comes back on Monday.
- [48:41]
A
You must say that I'm young. You must say I'm unlearned.
- [48:49]
B
But there's the one thing I know,
- [48:54]
A
I'm younger than you. Even Jesus would never forgive what you do.
- [49:03]
B
The Bork podcast is brought to you
- [49:04]
A
thanks to the work of lead producer
- [49:06]
B
Katie Cooper, associate producer Ansley Skipper, and with video editing by Katie Lutz and
- [49:11]
C
audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown.