Bill Kristol and Margaret Donovan: Hegseth Should Be Impeached

- Hi, Bill Crystal here. Welcome to the Bullwerp podcast. I am not Tim Miller, as you probably noticed, and I'm happy to be pinched, however, for Tim Miller's, he finishes up his little break

and he'll be back on Monday.

“You'll be glad to hear, and I think the Bullwerp 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 side, I'm not sure I can handle the pressure,

but Margaret is a, teaches the Yale Law School, it was in private practice there, was an army captain in the army and the Judge Advocate Generals Corps in the 2010s. 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 a lot of really a ton right in day to day, every day, I think, and so has real familiarity

with the defense department where you serve six years, but also with combat and its strains on the laws of how it interacts with the wars and the laws of war. And you teach about that and comment on that now, both in print and on the media.

So thanks, Mark, for joining me. - Yeah, thank you so much for having me. - No, I'm really looking forward to this conversation. I've learned stuff from you over the last year and I will tell you.

So let's, I want to get to Iran, obviously, this is a lot of issues on Iran and you've spoken on several of them and also the drug war before Iran raises all kinds of issues of,

but I want to talk more broadly about the defense department

under Pete Haxeth under in the second 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, pannist even in terms of communicating to the public at DOD. I'd like to get your thoughts on that. Maybe use the begin though with this New York Times story

from just a couple of days ago of how Admiral Carl became chief of naval operations which happened a year ago, but pretty stunning account of how he got himself that job and remember, Haxeth had come in and fired, right?

To see it out and as well as the chairman of the Joint Chiefs and many of the general officers. So I mean, you know how this works. You've been in, you've been close to it and still are in touch with people, 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?”

- I mean, the time story on Admiral Carl and the sort of evolution of how he got to the position he's in, I just think it's 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 outstitly Cifrancatti, who's a vice-admoral manavie. 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 time story outlined,

basically Admiral Cifrancatti was like,

you know, there was a political wave coming and basically 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 gonna 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 Cottle heard that and thought,

“wow, there's a political wave like, how can I ride that?”

And then sort of separately try to coordinate with hex sets people as he was getting ready for his nomination hearing. So the backdrop to all of this is that Secretary Hegsef has been firing people,

similarly firing military officers, very senior, very experienced military officers or otherwise kind of forcing them into retirement in situations where they were normally advanced 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,

"Oh, we are," which is basically an annual review

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 his nearest anybody can tell

this internal judgment that he has that their politics don't align with his. And the irony of that, from a guy 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 when and don't meet standards and standards are lowered for women going to combat. And we've got to 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 of like culturally offensive part of this,

“which I don't really even think you have to have served”

in the military to understand that the people that are getting fired are true leaders, like completely respected, battle tested. They have dust on their boots, so to speak. They have seen action.

They have experienced far more in their military careers than Pete Hexf, could ever have green dev and his. And there are some striking differences. I think people chalk up Secretary Hexf's career, like he's a national guard major,

and I think his sort of defenders will say, well, he knows what the average Joe was thinking. And there's some like value to that. I don't want to really denigrate anybody's military career 'cause at the end of the day, everybody who served,

raise 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 Donna Hugh, who was sort of famed and completely adored and really revered special forces senior officer.

He commended Delta. He commended the 82nd Airborne, 18th Airborne Corps. So he's been in command in all of the sort of major story military units. Randy George, of course, the Jag officer,

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 Hexeth 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 Caudall, you have this scenario

where Lisa Francadi gets pushed out. Lisa Francadi, 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 a chief of naval operations. And you know, the other thing that I alluded to this a few moments ago, but the idea that your secretary Hexeth 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 one.

We're Admiral Francadi 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 you know, done the entire promotion before getting that. So that is sort of, you know, the odd part of Admiral Caudel's sort of elbowing his way

into his position and to the Safrancadi Admiral Francadi

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Quintes.com/thebork. Just more broadly, just a minute. On the firing of General Broward at the beginning, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of later on, is to say that Randy George is a very well respected

chief staff of the Army. I mean, George, he had intersected with Hexeth and Clash to the Brown hadn't. And these people were not, am I a pressure from talk to people?

A lot of them were not regarded as particularly political. And they're probably our individual generals who would have been more unhappy about a Trump administration

or a Hexeth defense secretary or a mayor's first doctrine.

And, you know, maybe then you have a talk with them and say, look, I think it's fine, not gonna work great.

“And you should leave after to the end of this tour”

or at the end of 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 somewhat random. I was too excited. I mean, it happened to be disproportionately minorities and women, but so that that part isn't random. - I was gonna say--

- Well, no, that's unfair. That was not random. - Yeah, to be the rule, so to speak. It was a lot of it was, this is different. This is not the difference to the system that it 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. Some of its versions, they brought portrayers back.

I think to provide, 'cause I have one of these promotion boards for one stars and stuff like that. But even that was done very carefully and systematically in terms of preserving the military standards and having, you know, having beatings.

But I got to go on a long time where you discuss who's gonna be promoted. Once you're tries to exchange, you know, it's fired people who we're not doing well or we're not obeying orders. And obviously that's happened and that should happen

for Zoey's civilian control. But yeah, I think just bringing home to people how widely different this is from anything we've seen. And how widely a different it is from World War II of skipping over general is to find the best person

to find martial arts or lies and how or, you know, or someone to put them in command in the middle of the war, which you know what expected. And therefore, there's only the 1939 army did not have necessarily the best war fighters

at the very top of it. But this is very different, right? These people have been in charge of really important combat in the wars we had fought. And some had docked on well on that in those situations.

And they had mostly left or gone or have been, you know, and these people had, as you say, were the ones who were awarded by administrations of both parties. So I guess just, at the time it happened, if people thought out 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.

What do you think you to get promoted?

“You have to be on board with a particular political agenda”

of the secretary. So I'm sorry to go on, but I just think that's so striking. And people I know who were, some of them incidentally were pretty conservative and some were sympathetic to Trump that I was and some were still rattled, I think,

by that. 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 gonna 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's built on, which is that you are promoted based on merit, based on your experience and based on your capabilities

What's informing secretary, I accept some minute

and most of the rest of the cabinet, it's whatever they see on their ex-feet 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 then 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.

“- Yeah, I know, I think it would be demoralizing”

and so the organization, of course, can go down all the way down to the ranks because if people can be fired from being four stars or not promoted to be one stars, why not have the same standards for promotions

to Lieutenant Colonel or to Captain Icebus, right?

Is someone on? - Yeah. - How worried are you? - Or broadly about that in the military these days, 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 in that is still in uniform is holding the line and standing up for the principles and remembering the oath they took, whether they were an officer or enlisted.

I mean, the other prevalent 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 sell stuff,

I was in the military prosecutor back in the United States when I was domestic. And what I have seen, especially with the sort of aviation misconduct over the past couple months is if you were doing something that is deemed maga

or you are doing a fly over past Kid Rock's house, then you're fine, you're not gonna 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 Hex that 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, Hex that 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, no punishment, carry on patriots.

- I cannot overstate how damaging that is to his subordinate, the subordinate commanders authorities in those scenarios. - You look at these flyovers and the Kid Rock thing and the flyover that beach wherever that wasn't far

“and I think, and you know, I feel that's kind of amusing”

or maybe they shouldn't do it, but in the hand, you can see why Hex that thinks it's nice to do it. But yeah, but the actual head of those units was were conserved and thought things were not happening properly and it was real danger, I guess, in the case

of the demonstration in Florida and they wanted to investigate and take sets sort of up. No, but I like that, so we're not even gonna, how much does that undercut this authority of these? - It immensely, I cannot, like I said,

I can't overstate this how problematic this is for commander. So in the military, the authority to implement the uniform code of military justice that you see in J and military discipline, that vests with a commander. That's very different than a civilian job

if you're gonna get charged with a crime, a DA charges you not your boss. But in the military, that's one in 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 seeing 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,

a hundred and first airborne commander,

which was the aviation was mild, the aviation unit that did the fly over by Kid Rock's house. There are very, very good reasons that a commander would want to investigate what he or she suspects his aviation misconduct because they may have

a really serious down aircraft incident as we've saw just a few years ago in the counter and first airborne and it happens, unfortunately, all the time in training and in 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 was not inclined to punish everybody and not everybody gets punished, it 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 at the point that General Hurtling may be other day

the question I would be asking as a commander in those incidents is when there is an aviation accident

'cause there always is going to be,

but it's very sad and 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 down to aircraft. Of course not, that's gonna fall 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. - So the planetization, people like me see first

“and sort of worry about, and I think that's worth worrying”

about, but it's also not so much a planetization of what undercutting a professionalism and accountability, I guess. - It's kind of both, like, you know, if that 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 magra patriot and get the Secretary's attention.

And then they can probably trust that the Secretary is gonna swoop in and save them somehow. - Well, and we're seriously, if people commit war crimes or we've seen this, unfortunately, in Trump won, and Trump too, right?

I mean, the ex-FP, personally, is very much a fine in this direction that, you know, you get off if it's in the service of if it sounds good to Mac or older Trump personally, and then you really talk about serious crimes, not just, you know,

this judgment about how of using the aircraft. - Right. - Let's talk about that, because that comes up in the context of Iran. I mean, when we were talking before a couple of days ago,

you made the point about how unusual, I mean, there's so much to talk about with Iran and again, worries some both police station, 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 you're worried about the beginning of the war,

“I think you were very interesting on that.”

We were chatting, and then also just about ongoing what has it been, is we're now in the six month of the war. So what strikes you as someone who served in combat and those, you know, what it's challenges that face every administration, such circumstances.

- 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 Spear, which is a campaign that the administration invented

to basically, similarly execute people who are drugged meals,

people that we wouldn't even prosecute. If they showed up on American soil, we would probably maybe flip them again. I mentioned I'm a former Jagam, also a former federal prosecutor. Maybe we flip those people, try to get up the chain,

but they're usually not even gonna 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 health-fire missiles and seal team six

“to take out these drug and police fisher men”

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 ship wrecked survivors after that first strike.

And as we all know, this was, you know, huge news several months ago, somebody in the chain of command made the decision to engage again and fire on ship wrecked survivors. It was the first strike that was a very first strike of Southern Spear, that was September 2nd.

In fact, the legal opinion wasn't even written until or at least published its date at September 5th three days later. So I just offer that, you know, you get somebody like Secretary Hugseth

in charge of the Department of Defense. And that's what you get. You get this hair-brained 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 let's do 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.

You we have February 28th. And so that's the opening of the Iran War. And the strike that everybody, thankfully, and my opinion are still talking about and it has not washed away with the new cycle

and I'm grateful to many media outlets for that is a strike on the Minab Elementary School. That has been reported to have killed over 100 children that 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

if it was not intentional,

if that's going to factor into it, so the ones were not the intended target. They are not by the U.S. 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 where 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 want to be clear, 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 Raka in 2017. And I did well over a thousand of your strikes. 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 an on our province. And in Syria, it was pretty much all over and over three Eastern Syria and Raka province. And 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. And the military has a requirement that we investigate it.

Congress has standards laws that we report it to Congress. The amount of civilian casualties are incurred. And we followed all of those requirements. And it's a very, of course, a tragic and unfortunate and frankly, you know, really on savory 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, you know,

the idea that there are civilian casualties in war is not itself like completely shocking to me.

“That's why war is bad when 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 them in up

school strike was in 2015, the United States Army, in a C-130 gunship opened fire on a Doctors of Bad Borders, Hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan. And within days, the St. Com 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 I/O an investigating officer, do an internal investigation,

figure out, you know, everything's recorded. The military's very good at recording, you know, radio and transmissions and chat logs and strike information and logistical data. And so it takes some time to gather that information.

And so whenever there was a strike like the Doctors

“of Bad Borders 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, you know, that we did not mean to strike up a Doctors of Bad Borders hospital, we're going to figure out what happened here.

And I promise you, Congress, that I will do so. And, you know, 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. Havely redacted, but a unclassified version

was released to the public. So that was like flesh to bang as they say, very a quick and, you know, 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 further south and Baghdad. But I had a lot of friends who were up in the strike cell on Mosul in Urbile.

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 of the secondary explosions,

there's been estimates of anywhere between 100 and 500 civilian casualties dead or wounded. So it was another really significant event. But again, the commander that had responsibility for that strike within weeks had a an investigative commission.

“And I think even quicker than the Hindus 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, the same nothing of the people who were killed

and the families of the people who were killed in the strike. But what is so uphauling to me about the Monop school strike is that we don't even have an admission of formal acknowledgment from the United States

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's an investigation and then it's finished and they're trying to release it. But the lack of transparency and really the lack of acknowledgment

of that strike is to me. I mean, that is like impeachment level offense for Secretary Hegsev because you are going to start a war, which we can talk about in a few minutes by 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 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 sympathy for the civilians of your enemy country like that's unwise and on Christian. 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 was begging allies to help us, as somebody who wants to prevent anti-American sentiment 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 that you cannot be in that position. If you are not going to acknowledge civilian casualties and war.

I guess there's been reporting that the group of people at EOD who had their responsibility to look over to review the strike plans and make sure that the information was up to date and trying to make sure this kind of accident didn't happen.

A lot of them have been removed or transferred because success wasn't interested or somewhat under-hexeth, wasn't interested that much, and so that was not important. And so why we're going to save manpower or just not want to know certain things, I guess.

I mean, it's pretty bad. I mean, don't you think in terms of, you authorize the lawful of strikes that kill people and unfortunately, you say to kill sometimes civilians got killed in different ways.

They've never been in U.S. military doctrine.

You can't ever kill a civilian even or even knowingly

“if it's a high-value target and that's the only way”

to get to complicated the U.S. forces being threatened immediately and so forth. So I mean, I don't think we're on the superduverage side here of how to contact wars, but you want people to come in who will want to lift up to high standards

of fight wars as honorably as they can be fought. You don't really want to be recruiting people who kind of think, "Yeah, this is great." And if we make a mistake, there's no, nothing ever, no one's accountable for anything.

You know, when if we fire people, who was we think it's boring to go over these lists and make sure we're not hitting a girl school and then maybe that comes out later and it hurts your career that you fire those people,

no, not under, you don't really want those kinds of people to be coming in or rising in the military. We're not the Wagner group, we're the U.S. 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 both 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 and on more than one occasion in these combat environments. This is unusual and in my opinion, it's unacceptable. - Give us your sense of more broadly the kind of professionalism, if I can put it there with which

the war has been, context of those obvious thing has been the apparent using up of expenditure of very high percentage of kind of important munitions.

“I mean, who knows, maybe they just was calculated, right?”

Military is pretty good of keeping track of these things. You know, much better than I, you know, there are people who keep track of how many, whatever it has and pages, and that's a bad idea. - Yeah.

- It was very good at keeping track of them. - And they tell you, they tell the combat and commander might say, "Hey, you know, be great if we could use a couple

we can't now, is this is the total number we have?" And so we can, we should be careful about how many we expanded should really use them for high value targets when not all the time, blah, blah. And it's pretty clear in this case, isn't it?

The Trump and Hex that just wanted to, you know, do everything very fast and maybe they were just wildly confident the world would last only a week or two. Maybe they just thought the initial shock at 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 logistics, just, you know, seems to have been caught short of very important and people are dying, you know, missiles are hitting US bases and drones are hitting US bases.

Maybe it's the result of that now we can't do as much as people wanted to. I don't know, maybe I'm overstating that, but tell me what your sense is reading these stories about the munitions is how for it.

- Yeah, I don't think you are at all and I get this sense built from talking to people who are still in and who are involved in the conflict and just from, you know, reading open source information on this, there's 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, obviously of the president, are probably seeing these problems, are probably identifying, like, whoa, we're gonna need some patriotic 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 wanna hear it and that they are just, they don't want to be told that what they're doing is possibly creating vulnerabilities

for us. And by the way, it's not just the United 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 have 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, specifically before Iran started. Specific sighting 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. It's just a way of saying like, 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 Hexf's testimony the other week, he kind of his go-to pivot was, you know,

while I inherited this completely ill-maintenance 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 of myself like,

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's asking Kushner and Whitkoff 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 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, it is confirmation hearing the reports that he was financially irresponsible. It has two veterans charities.

“He obviously had discipline, discipline problems,”

I'll put it that way. And this is how this plays out. Like, 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, we have now. So it's really disappointing. And I do just want to make one final point that this is precisely, like this 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 or powers

in the first article of the Constitution,

the article one, of course, established as the legislature, article two, established as the executive article three established as the judiciary. War powers are shared across the article one and two.

The framers not only put the declare war clause

to fund the militaries in article one.

“Thinking, OK, if we're going to start a war,”

it's going to be a runaway train. And you have, 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 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 or if you have to very quickly respond to a national 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 stockpiled applications that harmed the military's reputation,

the, 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 headset 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.

- Fine, fine. - I get 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 save people or 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. - Yeah, an accountability for mistakes.

And then correcting mistakes. I have everyone makes mistakes, God knows the war and things don't go the way you expect. And some of that's sort of a matter of much and that's understandable and some of it is more than other parts.

It's 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, you say, the really bad things that happen, the bombing of the girl school,

but also just don't correct other things. And that was a problem in Iraq

and people like me were very critical of Ramsfeld

and this was when you were in high school, something and we got attacked for not supporting the troops. And how could you be so critical in McCain of all people was attacked, luckily McCain was the leader of this faction of the Republican Party

and now it criticized, well, they did nonetheless, but you could pretty hard to criticize it for not caring about the troops and stuff. And the late Lindsey Graham was very involved in this and also served obviously as a drag.

So, and so what arrived, people like me had no standing really to do this, but it was very clear. And Ramsfeld 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 especially Bush removed him, would have been better done. So sooner in my opinion, and changed military strategy in Iraq. But even so, I mean, even there, the principle that he had

to defend what he was doing, that he had to testify to Congress, the Congress could see things. That we all could get a lot of information where what was going wrong. They were embedded reporters.

“Why did we know that Iraq was going so white in Iraq?”

- Yes. - And it ended in the weekly standard with not serving the military. Why did I know that Iraq was going badly? Because if we could send Steve Aes 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 shut down of information dishonesty, honestly, in terms of presenting information, which I don't think was the case under Ramsfeld.

He was just stubborn, but he was the facts of what was happening. We're not really massed mostly. I mean, one last point, just going to go to Iraq was my own, but when I grew a broke, that was a huge.

It was broken by the military. I think really, more than by reporters, or maybe it was a little both I can't remember. But anyway, they didn't deny it tonight for like two days, and then they exceeded.

They was a huge scandal.

- Yeah, people in the United States.

- Yeah, people in the United States. - Yeah, yeah, people in the United States. - Yeah, people in the United States. - Yeah, people in the United States. - Yeah, yeah, people in the United States.

- Yeah, yeah, people in the United States. - Yeah, people in the United States. - Yeah, people in the United States. - Yeah, people in the United States. This is a terrible stain on the US military,

and although we have to the level of President Bush. Yeah, so at least the principle of accountability

“and honesty, I think was odd or dare even if occasionally,”

it wasn't fully lived up to.

We just seem to have abandoned the principle now,

is that which is really bad. - Yeah, I would say it's kind of own forgettable. And from a constitutional sense as well, like this theory of accountability, the framers envisioned that the people's closest connections

to the 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 gonna go to war and all of us together as a country will, kind of work through and try to course correct if things aren't going the way that we want it to. And we don't have that here.

We're not implementing how the framers intended us to engage in wars. - It's really a good point that I really side by side but folks, you know, so much attempting inside DOD, but in a way that's important, very important.

And there are things people will tell you, so really it shouldn't do and so forth, but really it is Congress isn't at the end, as you said.

“That's why you come back to that constitutional issue”

which sometimes seems abstract, but it really isn't not abstract, right? Without the congressional core of accountability, the rest of it becomes much harder to sustain, I guess is what we're gonna say.

- It's the executive branch checking itself basically,

which is not the way that should happen. - Sure, that happens. - And it has been when you were a Jag and Congress trusted it to happen. But it also partly happened because you all testified before Congress and Congress did it,

they sure that it was happening or at least, you know. - Our reports were released. Our, you know, 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. And this has been really helpful and not totally cheerful,

“but, but important, I think really important.”

- Sorry. - No, no, important. And I do think it's 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, the 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 one of the most valued institutions in America, the military and, and, and civilians do, honestly at the defense department and associated agencies and intelligence community and stuff, I really appreciate your taking the time to do the steps.

It's such an important topic. - Thank you for having me. - And thank you all for being with us. And I really appreciate your, you're taking the time and being as thoughtful about it.

So, thanks for thanks Margaret. And thank you all and Tim Miller comes back on Monday. ♪ You must see it on you ♪ ♪ You must have unlearned ♪ ♪ But there's a one thing I know ♪

♪ I'm younger than you ♪ ♪ That even Jesus wouldn't ever forgive what you do ♪ - The board podcast is brought to you. Thanks to the work of lead producer Katie Cooper, associate producer Ansley Skipper

and with video editing by Katie Loots and audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown.