Bulwark Takes - Command Post: Iran Is Doing More Damage to the U.S. Military Than We Knew

Episode Date: September 16, 2026

Ben Parker and Lt. Gen. Mark Hertling (Ret.) give their takes on the rapidly expanding Iran war, from attacks on U.S. military installations and disruptions to oil supplies to the growing conflict with the Houthis and the strain on American forces across the Middle East. They discuss the potential economic consequences, including the estimated $38 billion already spent on the war and the billions more it could cost each month.Plus, they examine Rep. Thomas Massie’s impeachment articles against Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, what the move could mean inside the Pentagon, and the military’s relationship with Congress.Read more from Mark: https://www.thebulwark.com/p/the-iran-war-is-moving-too-fast-for-washington-trump-houthis-yemen-saudi-arabia-pipeline-bab-mandab-hormuz-oil-iraqThe day always ends well with Casper. Right now save up to 30% on mattresses and up to 35% on everything else when you go to https://Casper.com.

Hi, I'm Ben Parker from The Bullwork. Welcome back to Command Post on the Bullwork takes feed. I am joined as always by our very own Lieutenant General Mark Hurtling General. We got some crazy news. As always, keeps happening. We do. And I always get a kick out of when you say our very own general because I feel like I'm a rent-a-general every once in a while. But let's talk about the crazy news today, Ben. No, you are our very own. And by the way, I do say that because I think I said it once just, I was just talking. And people made a big deal out of it in the comments. And I thought it was great. People in the comments like, oh, we love the idea that these are very own general. If you're not in the comments, by the way, it is great. We keep all these discussions going. People share really interesting ideas, reading recommendations. I think it's as much a part of command posts as these videos we do. So that's at the bulwark.com slash subscribe to become a bulwark plus member if you're not already. And please join us because it's great. We'd love to have you. And the comments, too, provide a bit of levity in this dire time that we're in because there are some really

funny people that provide information in the comments too so read them and become a subscriber right yeah no they absolutely are and uh we do have unfortunately some pretty troubling news to turn to uh see yeah photos of some of the middle eastern uh installations these are american military installations after attacks um let's see we can get some of those up here because uh this damage it's sort of hard to tell I mean, that one's pretty clear. That looks like it was maybe a refueling aircraft. They got hit with something. That's pretty clearly not going to fly again.

Some of the damage to buildings in some of the other pictures is a little bit harder for me to parse. It looks like these may have been trailers or tents. I don't know what that means. You've been in some of these places. You've been in some of these buildings. What do you see? That's a command center. It's a big portable, I don't want to say tent because it's more than a tent.

But those are the things the military normally uses when they go out. You see right smack down in the middle of it. There's a giant antenna array, which is also kind of a magnet for any kind of incoming missile. Whenever you see something like that coming out of a building, that's something that the enemy wants to strike. But those things are not hardened, Ben. Those are walls that shake a little bit. They're mostly made out of canvas in most place, but heavy-duty canvas. But they will sustain winds and all.

those kind of things. But as you can see, there are holes in many parts of those. And that is definitely a command post. And I think I know where it is, but I'm not going to say the location, but it is one of the major command posts in the Middle East. And so in terms of whatever that command post was commanding, whatever unit that was, whatever forces those were, I mean, what kind of damage to that organization are we looking at from a strike like that? Well, when you're talking about any kind of commanding, You're talking about massive numbers of computers and signals intelligence and equipment and the potential for various types of radios, high-speed advanced technology radios for communications, not just the forces in the area, but even back to Washington that are all secure and encrypted.

So you're seeing a significant amount of damage in just that picture. picture, probably as costly as that airplane that we just showed. And that airplane that you just showed is likely a refueler. And it's one of the very few that we have in the force. So whenever you take out one of those high demand, low density pieces of equipment, it has a significant effect on the force as a whole. Yeah, it's certainly not good. Matt, if we could cycle through some of these other pictures. Yeah.

This one, I think the caption- Go ahead. Go ahead. Okay. I think the captioned CBS provided something these had been trailers. It's not just a much of twisted, corrugated metal.

Those are more, from what I can tell, those are what are called the military called choose, CHUs, containerized housing units. So those are either sleeping quarters in the middle of the deserts are a whole lot easier to maintain

when you pull them in and there was a big contract with a bunch of folks to bring those into various locations in the Middle East. but they are not very viable, to be honest with them, Matt. They are, I mean, they're the equivalent of mobile homes on a smaller scale. So you see that there's a significant amount of damage to that corrugated metal in those areas.

You see the air conditioning units off to the right side of that photo. Each one of them has something like that. They could be smaller command posts for smaller elements like a battalion or, you know, even a brigade headquarters might have some telegraphic and signals equipment in them. I'm not sure exactly what they are. I'm not sure where that is because those kinds of choose containerized housing units are all over the Middle East because they were brought in there during the various conflicts in Iraq and Saudi Arabia.

So this is just, I mean, these are older photos that are just. coming out now. We have had a bunch of developments. Yeah, you can see that used to be a truck. Yeah. And what I'll point out behind that truck, Ben, you see that wall with kind of the drawings on it. Those walls are all over the different locations in the Middle East. And they're called T walls because they are literally a T, upside down T of concrete. And what has happened over the last 20 years of war is units that come in and out of there on deployments. both entering and leaving the country. The units have a tradition of painting their unit symbols

or a specialized motto on it. So you can see that one photo right there on the right hand side. It appears to be, and I'm not sure I can tell from this photo, but it appears like a unit from Texas because it has, or Puerto Rico, I can't tell. But each unit has kind of a specialized, you know, they nominate artists from their organizations. I could show you one of the units paintings that First Armored Division did when I went in Iraq in 2007 through one of the ports in Kuwait.

And it's a big pride issue. So you can see they've been damaged significantly as well as the truck in front of it, which is probably a Nissan or a Toyota that's kind of one of the trucks that's kept in those areas. Yeah. The CBS said that some of these photos are from Kornb. Kuwait, so it gives you an idea of how far some of those missiles are flying. So that was sort of detail from those attacks where a while ago. We also wanted to talk about what's been happening more recently, just the last two weeks. You have an article that's up on the bulwark this morning, just detailing the Iran War is moving too fast for Washington to keep up.

And it is about all the developments that have happened in the past 10 days, diplomatically, economically and especially militarily, that seem to be sort of spiraling, I won't say out of control, but certainly out of Washington's control, right? This is a war that we started back in February, and now things are just sort of happening without anyone waiting for Washington to respond

or say yes or no. So why don't we just walk through a few of those developments? We've talked about a few of them already on command post, but it's really remarkable how after so many weeks, months of relative stasis, things are starting to move again. Well, you know, last week on command post, Ben, we were kind of predictive. You and I were talking about the possibilities of things happening.

And I watched very closely and truthfully between Thursday and Monday, it not only spiraled, but it expanded. And some of the things that occurred, I mean, we sort of talked about an element of the things that occurred. like we had last week, we had talked about the early attacks on the East West pipeline that goes from one side of Saudi Arabia to the other, about 800 miles worth of pipeline. Well, that turned into a major issue because, you know, we assumed it was some kind of Iranian attack. In fact, it was a proxy force from Iraq that conducted that attack. But simultaneously to those pipelines being interrupted in a significant way, The Houthis and the Yemenis were going at it. The Saudis were asking the president on Thursday for help in pushing the Houthis back,

and they wanted some aircraft to join their aircraft. And I made a point in this article that Saudi Arabia has close to 400 upper generation fighter aircrafts. And what I mean by that is F-15s, F-18s, and F-22s in some cases, 400 of them. but at the same time, they've been fighting the Houthis since 2015 and have not been able to have an effect on them. One of the reasons for that that we didn't talk about last Wednesday is Yemen and the population of that country, as well as the number of rebels that are in that country that are joining the Houthis is close to 40 million.

Now, when you take a look at Saudi Arabia, UAE, Qatar, Kuwait combined, their indigenous population of Arabs, not, you know, third party nationals that come into the country to help, is less than the population of Yemen. So anyone who thinks that Yemen is a small little country doesn't have an understanding of the culture and the size of it. It is a small, relatively geographically an intense country, but it has a large population. And what's fascinating about what's been happening in Yemen for the last several years is the Houthis are considered Iranian proxies. They are an Iranian Shia terrorist group. But over the last several years, because of the dynamics between Saudi Arabian government and the disfavor of the Yemeni government, there have been Sunnis that have been joining the Houthis. So you literally have a mixed bag that you almost never see in the Middle East of both Sunnis and Shia fighting against the government. So when we talk about the complexities of the Middle East, that's one of the aspects of it.

And you have the Saudi Arabians who have made a deal with the Yemenis to try and protect them from the Houthis that are attacking the western boundary of their country and trying to abscond with the port facilities. And you have the Saudis asking the United States for help, the president of the United States, saying, no, we're not going to help you with more equipment because we don't want to open up a second front in our operation on the western side of, of Arabian versus the eastern side in the Strait of Hormuz so you're seeing the dynamics are not only spiraling but they're expanded

and you combine that with the fact that on Friday Oman made an announcement that they had a deal to meet with the Iranians to talk about movement of merchant ships through the strait of Hormuz it looked like they're

might be an opportunity there. Oman kind of garnered some other Gulf state nations, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, UAE, Dubai, that it looked like on Saturday that that might happen. And Iran said, yeah, no, we're not going to do that. We're going to continue what we're doing. So you see an expansion of economic warfare, what we termed in the past, the asymmetric approach to what we're what we're trying to do and getting the straits back open, and at the same time, the president is still talking about nuclear weapons, which hasn't been a focus of this campaign lately, although it is a key talking point. And at the same time, on Sunday, I think the president said Iran is still begging for a deal.

They're not. They're not begging for anything right now. They know they have an upper hand, and that the Middle East is, as you said, a minute ago, spiraling and expanding in a bunch of different areas. Yeah, I mean, first of all, I was, I was smiling a little bit because, you know, how many times, like when you were in Iraq, were we thinking, why can't the Sunni and Shia just learn to get along? And now they are. Not like that.

Yeah, good point. Yeah, not quite the same way. And interesting, in Iraq, there were some, you know, Shia groups, Shia insurgent groups and Sunniasurgeon groups that were working together. I had about 20 of them. It was, as I once said, kind of the Star Wars bar scene in northern Iraq. But when Al-Qaeda came in and really got a little bit sporty as well as ISIS, that's when the group split apart again and it became somewhat of a civil war.

We're not seeing that right to a degree. We are seeing a civil war, but it's between the government and the hoodies. The one thing I didn't mention, Ben, and I think this is the interesting factor. So we talked about just now what happened over the weekend. On Monday and Tuesday of this week, with the combination of the Strait of Hormoz being relatively shut down, and it's decreased the number of ships that are passing through from the weekend until today, the pipeline explosion, the East-West pipeline that is kind of an alternate route for Saudi oil being damaged, and the western port facilities in Saudi Arabia and in Yemen that have been captured by Houthi insurgents,

you basically have a shutdown in any kind of exports from Saudi Arabia to the point where on Monday they said there's going to be a slowdown in both oil delivered to the Middle East or excuse me to Europe. And then on Tuesday they said we're almost going to shut down these ports and have no oil delivered. to Europe. And now, as of this morning, the China, the Chinese are starting to play a role saying, hey, where's our aisle, gang? You said you were going to prioritize us, and it's not coming out. So you can see it's expanding even further. And like you said, the last seven to 10 days sure have been fascinating to those of us who are watching these issues in the Middle East. Yeah, that is a really fascinating development. I would love to be a fly on wall, the conversations between the Chinese and the Iranians, right? The Chinese have been supporting

the Iranians. They're part of that, you know, sort of quasi-alliance axis of whatever you want to call it. It's like, hey, guys, when we, you know, wanted to help you create chaos in the Middle East, we didn't think it would impact our oil supplies. Yeah, right. Oops. So, so, I mean, I want to just dwell on this for another second. The Iranians are clearly trying and to some extent succeeding through their proxies in opening a second front in the other half of the Arabian Peninsula in the Red Sea, the Houthis are taking not only port towns along the Red Sea coast, but also islands in the middle of the Babal Mandab Strait

that controls access to the Red Sea and therefore to the Suez Canal and connecting the Indian Ocean to the Mediterranean. And as far as I can tell, the Trump administration's response is, no thanks. And we have this statement from J.D. Vance to the New York Post saying, the Iran world will, quote, enter a much different phase in a couple of months.

He said, quote, right after the midterms that things are going to change. So, I mean, the strategy of just saying like, we choose, we choose no thanks. I don't understand what they're expecting to get out of that. Yeah, well, they're basically saying vote for us on November 4th and you'll see us start winning. I mean, you know, if the desire was to quote unquote win, and you can never say that in any conflict because things happen, that would have happened a long time ago because the president's been proclaiming that he's winning for the last almost seven months now. I don't see a whole lot of change occurring in November. I mean, we've heard many people talk about the alleged October surprise. We're already experiencing it.

There's going to be more of a surprise. And as long as we're adding bad news to the equation, I heard one of the oil companies, I can't remember if it was golf or Chevron basically say we're running low on diesel within the United States. So you're not only going to see gas prices rise. We've already seen the massive. increase in diesel prices. And for those of you who don't have a diesel car and you say, well, it doesn't affect me.

Every truck on the highway runs mostly on diesel. And every truck, the literally hundreds of thousand trucks that are moving across the United States deliver everything from, well, there's nothing they don't deliver. Yeah, I mean, food, Amazon packages, building materials, everything, not to mention trains. right? Aren't a lot of trains that also move things around diesel? Right. So we, I think we're going to see some major issues with the economy. And it's not going to be solved either before the November elections or even after. I think we ought to buckle up a little bit, Ben, in terms of, you know, we've made predictions on command post before.

I think we're going to have a long winter. Great. I can't wait for that. We should, I mean, speaking of long winters, we should, one of these episodes at some point talk a little bit more about Ukraine because they are also buckling up for a long winter. And, you know, it's right now it's a sprint to the midterms and we'll see what happens. A lot of things could change in America, but the rest of the world has its own momentum and these things aren't going to be flipped like a switch back, which by the way, if I can just say, we did an ad for the bulwark before. But this is why the bulwark exists because the world is getting more chaotic and scarier and more complicated,

and the old rules seem not to apply. And we're seeing that, we talk about that every week internationally. And we see that at home too. The old rules that we sort of assumed about how this country worked and what it was about seemed not to apply. And so that's what the bulwark is about. It is a community, not just a news source,

where we're trying to figure this all out together and make sense of it and build something better. So if you like command post, you should check out what we're doing at the bulwark.com, and you should become a bulwark plus member to really get the most out of it, especially between now and the midterms. I think it's the best time to join. And we have great people like General Mark Hurtling who really help us see around corners and see the future before it comes, and that's a huge advantage.

Well, yeah, and it's, I will say it's actually invigorating and provocative working for the bulwark, provocative in a good way. because it provokes thought. And I think that's when you read the articles that all of the great staff, right, or watch the pods and streaming that some really smart people do, like Catherine Rampel and Sonny Bunch and JVL and all the others. It is a fascinating composition of people who see the world from very different views and different angles. But what we're seeing, Ben, I think, is the interesting fact that all of them are kind of

clinging together right now to show the challenges we're going to face as a country in the next couple of months and years. Yep. And if we get through it, it'll be because we get through it together. Okay. So this is a really interesting story. It's going to sound boring at first. And I promise it's not. Just bear with us. Where are you going with this one? Okay. The congressional budget office. Not usually three words that get people really riled up. But the Congressional Budget Office is a bunch of, I don't think they'd be offended if I called them eggheads. We love eggheads here. They're a bunch of really smart people, economists and accountants, I imagine, and researchers who work for Congress.

So Congress can say, how much does X cost or would X cost? And they're able to figure it out, okay, round numbers, you want to do X? You want to figure out what we spent on Y? Here's the number. So a member of Congress asked the Congressional Budget Office, how much have we spent? this is just the financial cost. This is just in dollar terms. How much have we spent on the war in Iran so far?

And the Congressional Budget Office said, okay, estimating this, trying to figure out that, $38 billion. That's between February 28th, the first day of the war, and August 1st. So the meter's still running. That does not include the amount that we've spent since August 1st. Interestingly, they also ran the numbers on how much. inflation the Iran war had caused. And I believe that what they came up with was that by the beginning of 2027, inflation would be basically half a percent higher because of the war in Iran

than if the war had never started. And that makes it harder for the government to sell debt. So it makes interest rates rise, which makes interest rates rise for the rest of us if you're trying to get a loan or a mortgage. And this is the most interesting part of it for me, because this is something else we had talked about on command post and the cost of oil started rising, they found that of the $38 billion we've spent, about $3 billion of it was just on gas, meaning just depending on buying fuel. And the reasons were twofold. One, in wartime, the Pentagon bought more fuel than they were expecting that they had budgeted for.

But also, they had to buy the higher price of fuel. And so just those two effects together ended up being $3 billion beyond what the Defense Department had planned to spend. Now, a couple caveats here. One, the commercial budget office got no information from the Department of Defense to complete this report. They used all other sources from other places.

Two, most of the cost was driven by precision munitions expenditure, like especially interceptor missiles. And so the future costs are very dependent on how frequently we're using those interceptor missiles. And three, they did not account for what we saw at the beginning of command post, the damage to those bases, because they couldn't get the information from the Defense Department. And they didn't account for future VA costs, a future care for veterans who are injured, that kind of thing.

Okay, that's the whole spiel. I promise the numbers heavy part is done. General, $38 billion, what do you make of that number? It's large, first of all, for a six-month war. but I'll add to what you just said. One of the other things the CBO mentioned was that if this war continues, it will cost between two and three billion each month that the war continues. And the reason there's a span is because they don't know what kind of operational tempo

the forces in the region are going to be. They're saying just the fact that we have people deployed is going to cost that amount of money, notwithstanding the kind of kinetic activity we have. The point I'd like to make on this, Ben, is this is a snapshot of what has happened. The CBO was asked the cost of this because this $38 billion, like any war we enter, is not planned in the Pentagon budget. So this is over and above the close to $900 billion that the Pentagon was allocated in this year's budget, close to a trillion dollars. So this may seem like budget dust compared to that $900 billion that is part of the Pentagon budget. But you can see as this starts ticking up, what the CBO tries to do is make a prediction of what next year's budget should be.

We used to have this in an article that should be coming out in the bulwark that I wrote. And when you say, why is it general writing stuff about money? It's because, you know, this was a point of my life for the last 10 years as a general officer when we had to submit budgets for our forces. What you realize is when you don't have this kind of money included in the budget, you're using money that's already there to purchase this kind of stuff until the CBO can catch up with the budgeting process. And we used to call those during the days of Iraq and Afghanistan. OCO funds, oversee contingency operations.

So OCO was kind of a dirty three-letter word coming out at OCO because it wasn't budgeted and the budget we were stealing from Peter to pay Paul. And that's what happens. But again, Ben, what I want to point out, not from a budgeteers perspective, but from a military guy's perspective is this is a snapshot of today. It is not a snapshot of what we're going to look like a year from now, five years from now, 10 years from now, because as we've seen, equipment's been damaged, bases have been destroyed. We've seen ships coming back from deployments rusted up and needing repair, missiles that have been expanded.

Those are not things you can just put money on the table and suddenly they're fixed. Those things affect readiness, personnel, maintenance, and maintenance. and the kinds of things that allow us to be a global force and have forces in all areas, which after this war, we're gonna be stretched in probably for the next three to five years in some areas where we can't meet our contingencies. And I'm gonna stamp my foot on this

because two of our combatant commanders, according to articles that came out with pretty good sourcing, said that they are, They non-concur with continued shipment of goods to the Centcom commander who on 60 minutes on Sunday night said, hey, I'm good. Everything I need is there. That's because everybody's giving him stuff. He's good.

But the U-Com commander, the Indo-Pacific command commander is saying, I non-concure because you're threatening my ability to conduct contingency operations here in my area. So that's the risk to strategy that the Department of Defense and the president are taking. Yeah, no, you're totally right that compared to the, you know, 800, whatever, 150, whatever it was, billion dollar annual pending on budget, $38 billion is not huge. But when you've already allocated all of those $800 billion, and the majority goes to personnel costs, right, paying people's salaries, benefits. Yeah, let me make a point on that. Yeah. Greater than 50% of the.

Department of Defense budget goes to personnel costs. Continue. Yeah. So you've already allocated, right? You've already allocated 400 odd billion to personnel costs. Now you have 400 billion to spend on everything else. You've already allocated all that money. And suddenly you have another $38 billion bill.

You're taking it out of training. Okay, we'll save money by training less. We'll save money by eliminating the construction budget, which is we're not building new facilities, which could be communication facilities, it could be intelligence facilities. They could be schools for the, children of people who are deployed overseas. They could be hospitals to treat soldiers who get wounded. It means that we're going to, I don't know, buy less of one thing so we can buy more of another and hope that we get the mixed right. It significantly affects the acquisition

budget for future war fighting. And that's kind of critical right now as we're talking about AI and drones and unmanned vehicles. It's a critical point in time to get that as part of our readiness equation. Very. Now we have another, uh, story to talk about it involves Pete Hague Seth we're going to talk about that after we take a little break this message is brought to by Casper so you know what becomes more important the busier life gets your bed your bed becomes exceptionally important when you're working long days and juggling everything else life throws at you there's nothing better than finally getting to the end of the day and knowing that you're going to get in to a comfortable bed which is a great place

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so you can actually find out what works for you. Remember, the day always ends well with Casper. Right now, save up to 30% on mattresses and up to 30% on everything else when you go to Casper.com. One last time, that's C-A-E-A-E. S-P-E-R.com and save up to 30% on the mattress you deserve. Hey, Ben, can I just comment on Sam's hat and your hat? Yeah, sure. I'm not sure which one I like better. I'm kind of a baseball hat guy, but my wife says I can't order anymore because we have

already too many in the house. But the bulwark merch is pretty cool. And if you're a bulwark subscriber or even not a subscriber, you can go to the website and get merch. I just bought a sweatshirt because I needed something when I go to Atlanta in October to be with the team because they called me up from the minor legs. First of all, great job, Matt, getting the link there, the bulwark.com slash store. He wouldn't even tell him we were going to talk about the store. He just improvised that.

That's great. Yeah, bulwark store is great. You can buy this hat. I love this hat. I love all my bulwark hats. This one is particularly popular, though. People in the comments talk about the green hat a lot. Okay, sorry, say that again.

What are you doing on October 20th? Oh, yeah, I got I got called up by Sam and JBL and Sarah to join them at one of their events. This one in Atlanta and I'm drawing a blank on the date. I think it's the 20th. It's October 20th. It's October 20th. It's the Good Fight Tour this fall. You can go to the bulwark.com slash events to get your tickets.

I think there are still seats available for the one in Atlanta. So you should go check that out now. Tickets for the Good Fight Tour this fall. are available at the bulwark.com slash events. Again, it's Sarah, JVL, Tim and Sam, plus special guests from the bulwark. As we said, General Mark Hurtling will be there in Atlanta on the 20th. I know different places they're going to have Will Summer.

If you like Falls Flag, we're going to have Andrew Eager. If you're an Andrew Eager fan, which I know I am, we're going to be in Columbia, South Carolina on October 16th and Charlotte, North Carolina on October 18th. So if you're anywhere in the SEC neighborhood, you've got three chances to come to a bulwark event this fall. That's just next month. It's in October.

tickets now before they run out because these things do tend to sell out so i would get your tickets now at the bulwark.com slash events be sure to get your tickets and come hang with us and now we get to talk about impeachment let's do because if i if i told you that someone had filed impeachment articles in the house against pete higsef honestly i'm not going to speak for you but i guess you'd say yeah i bet someone did. If I told you it was a Republican, you'd probably say, oh, oh, that's unexpected. But that's exactly what happened. Robert Thomas Massey, sorry, not Robert. Thomas Massey filed an impeachment motion against Pete Hexeth in the House. It's privileged. So under the rules of the House, they have to vote on it unless they go into recess. They have to vote on it soon, like today or

tomorrow. It's nine articles of impeachment. So nine different, or eight or nine, I might have gotten that wrong. I think it's eight, at least eight. It is a at least eight articles of impeachment that alleged that HECSeth violated the law in various ways, abused his power, specifically defying the War Powers Act by waging a war that Congress disapproved, by avoiding or breaking laws that are designed to minimize the killing of civilians by extrajudicial killings, by killings of people that are outside of a legal process or of an actual war. If you want to read it, you can go read the whole thing for yourself.

It is a remarkable document. I will just say personally that I don't understand why it's aimed at the Secretary of Defense, but not at the commander-in-chief who is the president. That's a question, I guess, for Thomas Massey. My question for you, General, is, does this have any effect on the mood of things inside the Pentagon. Do people see this and think, eh, I don't care. It's not going anywhere. Do people think, oh, that's that's serious. I should, I don't know. What effect does this have on people who work? Yeah, you know, we were talking about the Yemeni Civil War earlier. I'm sure this

is going to cause a minor civil war inside the building. Wow. The Pentagon itself. And the reason I say that is because there are some who are certainly Secretary-Hex-S supporters inside the military establishment. There are also many who are some. I won't give my bias. There are some as well who are not very strong supporters of the Secretary of Defense and have seen some of the things he is doing and are disagreeing with the legality of them and the fact that they could be unlawful orders to various commanders in the force. So you're going to see that tension and having served one singular tour in the Pentagon over a two-year period is in a joint job, meaning Air Force Navy Marines Army. This kind of stuff is hallway chatter. It certainly is something that's discussed in the dining

facility and the cafeterias of the Pentagon. And it's certainly something that's discussed inside of offices, especially when you have the civil military divide that you sometimes have. You know, the military has to salute for any orders that are legal that they deem as legal and do things that they might not want to do, but as long as they're legal, that's your requirement as a senior or any kind of officer in the military. But to see the person who's issuing those orders being attacked by a member of Congress and saying we want to impeach that individual, I'm sure it's going to cause a whole lot of, as I said, hallway chat. So let's talk a little bit about the relationship the military has with Congress directly. Because you and your previous jobs have testified in front of Congress. You go to Congress to explain policy. You go to Congress to give them information.

You go to Congress to ask for money. If Congress has articles of impeachment before it, and we'll see in the next day or so, how many votes this gets in the House, how many Democratic votes, how many Republican votes, we'll see what happens. happens. How does that change? If you're, say, a combatant commander or the head of a service or something like that, and you have to go and testify in front of Congress, does it change the way you think about how you approach Congress, that your boss is in hot water? Or do you just think I'm representing my command and I'm doing to do my best? No, when you represent your command, you represent the people who are under you, but you also

represent the military writ large. And that includes the civilian leadership of the military. But I will tell you, Ben, and most Americans don't know this, when you become either a three or a four-star general, you literally have to sign a letter to the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee. I signed one of those, and it basically says something about what your expectations are in terms of your remaining time and service in terms of the number of jobs you have or potential for promotion. But there's a paragraph in that letter that says if you were ever called to testify before members of Congress, in order for us to approve your nomination for this rank, you have to basically declare the fact that you will tell the truth, the whole truth,

and nothing but the truth about your services. So there is that requirement. The most vivid example from my career was when General Rick Shinseki, who was the chief of staff of the Army, was called to testify prior to the deployment of forces for the Iraq War in 2003. And Secretary Rumsfeld and all of his civilian leaders were basically saying, we don't need a large force to go into Iraq. We only need a much smaller force than what went in in a desert storm. And the Army leadership, General Shenzegi, did not agree with that. But it took some really convincing questions from members of the legislative body to General Shinsuki to finally get him to admit, no, I don't agree with the analysis of the civilian leaders. I think we need

many more forces than what are currently being deployed for this operation or what is planned for this operation. And that caused about a one-page headline in the New York Times. But it turned out, John Schenzecki was absolutely right. But he did testify to that point. And he was a hero to everybody in the force because we all knew it. The guys and gals wearing the uniform understood what it would take to conduct that kind of operation. And Secretary Rumsfeld at the time had this idea about the transformation of war and we're so much better that we can do it. And it turned out in the first couple of days of the invasion of Iraq for anybody that wants to go back to it.

2003, there were some pretty sporty moments when forces were not moving very quickly. And then when they got to Baghdad and finally declared victory, there were forces that were not present like civil affairs, engineers, military policemen that could not stop an insurgency with the military thought was going to happen. That's a long explanation. But yes, if military members are called to testify, they will have to tell the truth about, what they saw if they're given good questions by members of the committee. Well, this is a relatively new story. So we will check back in and see if it has, what ripple effects it has.

Before we go, we wanted to talk about this story. The Trump administration has approved a sale of some 40,000, 20, sorry, some 40,000, that is a number of 40,000 of bombs, each weighing 2,000 pounds. we had previously under the Biden administration sold lots of arms to Israel of all kinds but withheld 2,000 pound bombs we sold them bombs of a smaller weight a smaller explosive charge

you've actually experienced these things in combat used them, seen them what do you make of this decision why would the Israelis need it how many really is 40,000 is that a big number or a small number because I know in a big war.

That's a big number. Yeah. Okay. That's a pretty big number. What I'd say is when you talk about bombs that are being derog from aircraft with precision measures, a 200 pounder or a 500 pounder will hit a target, cause the destruction of it, but limit the damage to the area around it. A 2,000 pound bomb will not.

I mean, if you're using 2,000 palm bombs, you're going to take out an entire. city block. Those are big weapon systems. So I'm not sure when you're talking about that number, I'm not sure what Israel is going to use them for unless we're talking about the potential of going outside of Israel, the kinds of things in Gaza and Lebanon that they, southern Lebanon, that they've been doing and talking about the potential for attacking other areas like Iran. I don't know, Ben. I mean, and the thing is, too, what I don't think the article really drives home is the point of, is this foreign military sales, which comes with a caveat because it's taxpayer dollars, or is it Israel actually just buying these weapon systems over the counter? There are two different ways to look at this.

Yeah, it looks from what I'm seeing like this, this is an aid package. it is American paid for. So it may come with caveats on their use. I don't know if they, I don't know how those would be enforced under this administration. It's a tricky, it's a tricky question. Yeah. So that's sort of what I was thinking,

which is if you're buying those kinds of weapons, I guess you're planning more for bombing Iran again or bombing the Houthis in Yemen, perhaps. I don't know that they'd be super useful. But then again, the Israelis have talked a lot about these tunnel complexes they're facing. that was their explanation for using heavy ordnance like this in the past that we're not just thinking in terms of the diameter of the blast we're thinking about how deep it can go

because some of the tunnels that Hamas and Hezbov built are, you know, I don't want to exaggerate, but you know, hundreds of feet underground, like multiple stories underground. But I mean, I sort of don't know what to make of it apart from I hope there's some restriction on it. Yeah, what is not clear is, what type of bombs these are. Are these bunker busters that will go subsurface before they explode? Are these things that when they hit a point detonation, they will explode? I mean, if you've got a

point detonation on a building, it will take out the building and the block around it. If it's a subsurface munition, then it goes deeper and explodes underground. And yes, there's quite a few tunnels, but that's a hell of a way to clear it by using this number of 2,000 pound bombs. It's going to spill a lot of coffee wherever they're going to drop it. Yeah, well, let's hope that they never have to. As we said, the world gets more complicated, more chaotic, and more dangerous. And so we will be back with another command post. General, thank you for joining me.

Always a pleasure. Thank you, Ben. Appreciate it.