Bulwark Takes - Female Heroes vs. Trump’s War on “Woke”

Episode Date: May 2, 2025

Ben Parker sits down with Lt. Gen. Mark Hertling to talk about the real-world impact of the Women, Peace, and Security program and why gutting it could be a dangerous mistake.

Hey, everybody. Welcome back to The Bulwark. I am Ben Parker from The Bulwark, joined again by Lieutenant General Mark Hertling. We're just going to get right into it because just before we hit record, you were telling me that the up until today National Security Advisor, Mike Waltz, was your congressman. And that your local newspaper once reported on a difference of views you two had, on a disagreement you had. So why don't you just start telling us about that? Well, you know, we're meant to talk about something else today, but this is all popping up. Mike Waltz was the congressman in the Florida 1st District, and we had moved from Orlando to Flagler Beach. And after a couple months there, you know, because we had such a great congresswoman here in Stephanie Murphy in Orlando, where I lived last, I was looking to go to one of his town hall meetings. And what I found

out is he hadn't conducted a town hall in quite some time. So there was a back and forth on something. And I truthfully, Ben, don't recall the issue that I made a comment about in terms of something he had said regarding national security. And he took great issue with what I said and came back at me and his public affairs folks kind of came back at me with a little bit of a vengeance. And in fact, at one point suggested I should just in retirement, relax and go to the beach and quit being so contrarian in terms of the connection between Congressman Waltz and the former president at the time. This was in, I think, President Trump had just left office in 2020 when we moved up there.

Anyway, it turned to a little bit of a hubbub. You know, I admire Mike Waltz. He's a smart guy. He's a veteran. He served many years in combat as a Green beret. What I didn't like was the fact that he was violating Department of Defense regulation by proclaiming that he was a green beret on all his congressional signs that he had around the area for election. And I suggested that he might want to focus more on what he did in Congress as opposed to what he did in the Army as a National Guardsman. And I think he took issue

with that. But he you know, he knows national security. We have different views on the way it's conducted, for sure. But it's just interesting that he has been relieved as the national security advisor and nominated to be the UN ambassador, which I find very interesting. Yeah, very interesting indeed. He left his seat in Congress to take that role, and he's only been there a few months, and now he's maybe going to be heading up to New York. He also came up in the most recent article you wrote for The Bulwark. This was a commander's case for the Women, Peace, and Security Program. Why don't we start off? The reason you wrote this is because Secretary of Defense Hegseth,

who may shortly follow Mike Waltz into the category of former Trump administration officials, we'll see. That's my comment, not yours. But he recently announced that he was canceling the Women, Peace and Security Initiative in the Pentagon, sort of had to walk it back. He said, no, he's not actually fully canceling it because it's required by law, but was canceling the Biden administration implementation of it. Whatever. Why don't you start off by sort of explaining to us what that initiative was and why it mattered? Well, it was an initiative that was generated by the United Nations, but it had the support not only of President Trump, but of former Senator Marco Rubio, of former first daughter Ivanka Trump, of former Congress and the president

in terms of continuing this program, which really centers around four different things in terms of women's security. And we point this out in the article in terms of the security of women in combat zones, the contributions of their safety and security, the ability to ensure that their thoughts in terms of security in the area of combat activity is heard. And what was interesting to me and the reason I wrote the article is because there was an incident in Iraq when I was there as a commander during the surge in 2007 and 8, where we actually did a mission that prior to the U.S. basically saying we were going to support the Women's Peace and Security Initiative was exactly in line with all of those things that had to do with understanding the women's feeling in a combat zone.

And we can talk about that if you'd like. But it was fascinating to me that not only was this something that Trump had signed into law when the Congress reported it under Marco Rubio and others, and was really driven primarily to her father by Ivanka Trump. But the Biden administration also supported it, and it is the law of the land right now, too. That's right. It's the law of the land. Marco Rubio, when he was in the Senate, was a big supporter of it. Now, Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem,

when she was in the House, was a big supporter of it. And also was Mike Walh, of course. Of course. For those who are interested. And by the way, if I can say this, as a Green Beret who served time in combat, Mike Walsh used the efforts of the Women's Peace and Security program in the combat zone, when there were certainly a lot of women in the U.S. military who were conducting various operations that were connecting with the population in Afghanistan, very different than what we were doing in Iraq.

Yeah, definitely. For those of you who are interested in sort of the crumblingology of the Trump administration, it is interesting that taking over as, at least on an interim basis, national security advisor will be, according to what the president said today, Marco Rubio, who is now Secretary of State, acting archivist of the United States, head of USAID, and national security advisor. He's got a lot on his plate. But let's get back to what you mentioned, because you told this really interesting story about what happened in northern Iraq in 2007-8. So what was the problem you were facing? Yeah, I'll try and make this as short as possible. But what we were seeing is as we were having effects against al-Qaeda in northern Iraq,

and they were ubiquitous in various cities, in the four Arab provinces and the three Kurdish provinces that were part of my area of operations. We started to see some activity by women conducting basically suicide vest attacks. We had an instance, the first instances we thought was an anomaly. And then when the second, third, fourth, and it got up to 19 incidents where women would wear suicide vests under their abaya, the black dress, and walk into a marketplace, touch the vest off and kill literally dozens, if not hundreds of people. We couldn't figure it out. Our intelligence folks said we've never seen women conducting these attacks before. We've seen al-Qaeda terrorists and insurgents conduct suicide attacks against the infidels, the U.S., and then later on they were conducting it against the numbers that we were seeing it in early 2008. Coincidentally, as part of the counterinsurgency program where we were connecting with health officials, lawyers, judicial officials, business people to try and improve the economy and the governance of those seven Iraqi provinces in the north. I had a young soldier come up to me one day and she said, you know, sir, and this was in the hallway of our headquarters building. She just

tagged me and she said, hey, sir, you know, we've been doing a lot of conferences for the key players. We haven't done anything for the women. And what was interesting about this, Ben, is we were toward the end of our tour. And I thought, oh, my gosh, we got to plan another conference based on this suggestion by the soldier. I went to my chief, my chief of staff, a guy named Colonel Brian Watson. And he said, sir, we don't have time to do that. We're trying to get out of here. And I said, let's do it. So we arranged a conference in Erbil, Kurdistan, and the Kurdish region. And we were surprised when about 400 to 500 women showed up. They drove from all over northern Iraq to get to this to this conference in northern Iraq that we were sponsoring. We advertised it and I left it up to the women of the division, all of our female soldiers to run this conference. There were only two males at this conference, myself and our G5 or our director of engagements were there. During the conference, my wife video teleconferenced in

from Germany because I asked her to. She didn't want to do it at first. And then she said, this is a great idea. But she did a video teleconference in this huge auditorium for these 400 Iraqi women and basically gave a speech about how it was up to the women to bring peace to the country because the men, and I'll paraphrase a little bit, she didn't quite say this, but I will, the men have screwed this up so much that the women need to take over and bring peace to the country. When she said that, the crowd of Iraqi women, mostly in Abayas, stood up and cheered. They were crying. It was really an emotional event, and I was quite proud

of my wife for doing this. Later on that morning at lunch, I had one of our soldiers come up to me and she said, hey, sir, this one young woman who's on the Diyala province committee wants to talk to you. So we sat down and had lunch together. And we had been creating a couple of police academies where we were training Iraqi men to be police officers because we were lacking in that region in terms of security. And this woman came up and said, you know, all these suicide vests are happening because the Iraqi policemen aren't checking the women. And I did a facepalm and said, exactly. You know, women walk right into the marketplace. And because Iraqi males won't search them, they were walking past the Iraqi police while the men were being searched.

So it's unthinkable in Iraqi society. You'd have a man like pat down a woman, right? Especially in public. That would be that would be a scandal. Yeah, it's just not done. So it struck me that that's how these women were getting in. So this woman who represented the Diyala province said, I have a name, I have names of 200 women, that if you want to put them in the police academy,

we'll get them there tomorrow and get a job for them. And, you know, when you're used to the Iraqi culture, everyone wants a job. So they're giving you these names and all him. And, you know, when you're used to the Iraqi culture, everyone wants a job. So they're giving you these names and all that. And I said, OK, we'll see what we can do. Well, I went to the police chief of Diyala province and said, hey, how about we start a women's academy for police women? He thought I was friggin nuts. And he said, sir, there is no way we're going to do that. This is against our culture. So I went to the minister of the interior in Baghdad and said, what do you think about this? I think I can stop. So I let the two of them hash it out. And finally, they came around to wanting to do this. So our military police battalion commander, a guy named Brian Bissinger, set up a women's academy, had his

female military policemen as the trainers. And within a couple of weeks, we produced the first iteration, I think was 27, I think I said in the article. And then the second iteration, we had 60 women police academy graduates. They started being stationed at the various marketplaces where we were concerned about security. And within weeks, they found a young woman by the name of Rania, who was walking into a she had a suicide vest, she was so drugged up she didn't punch it off. She was waiting to get into the middle of the square-Qaeda terrorist, was running a cell of other widows of terrorists to, you know, once their husbands were dead, they were kind of persona non grata in Iraqi society. You know, no benefits, no way to live, no way to get food. So Al-Qaeda was talking them into blowing themselves up after giving them some drugs. So it really broke the network because we were able to find where they were building the vest, where the mother was recruiting the other females that were wearing the vest, and it tamped down that suicide vest threat for a short period

of time until we left. I don't know what happened after that, but I think it was hugely successful just by the fact that we instituted something that is wildly connected to what the Women's Peace and Security Program advocates. Yeah. And, you know, there's even more to the story that you tell in the article because you said part of why this was so successful, again, as a counterinsurgency tactic, not just for killing the bad guys, but for destroying the ability for the insurgency to succeed, is that this became a topic of discussion in Iraq. It became a huge story that everyone was talking about.

Yeah. There was this, it was a radio host, a female radio host. Yeah. That was an interesting thing as part of our civil affairs program, which by the way, brings up another subject. The civil affairs program was, was very well funded by USAID. Of course. was very well funded by USAID, we established a radio station in Diyala province, run by Iraqis. It was our messaging, but it was coming from the voice of Iraqis. So there was a woman who

started telling the story of Rania, and she called her a dove of peace, that she had created this environment where they were going to tamp down the suicide vests. But what was interesting, we found out later from reflections in terms of monitoring the media messages that we do in the military, we were just seeing what the Iraqis were saying in local newspapers and television stations and all that, we found out this woman who was the head of the radio station, this Iraqi woman, was kind of turning into the Iraqi Oprah Winfrey. And she was gaining quite a bit of audience from this radio station that was in the middle of Diyala province in southern Iraq, or in the southern part of the northern portion of Iraq. Right. Yeah. No wonder it became so popular if you had the Iraqi Oprah on your side. That's

some serious firepower. And truthfully, Ben, you know, this story was told. I had somewhat forgotten about it. And, you know, when I left there, it was just one of the many things we were dealing with in this very complex environment. But Tom Shanker of The New York Times, who was one of our embedded reporters at the time, wrote the story in The New York Times and then later on put it in a book that he wrote that's been, I think, echoed by a bunch of other authors. Yeah, so let's just take this forward a little bit. So that was 2007 2008 eventually you're in charge of the first armor division then you rotate out you come home the congress uh with a bunch of future members of the trump administration passes this women

peace and security act which then requires the department of defense the state department a whole bunch of agencies of the federal government to implement plans for women, peace and security. Right. And Donald Trump signs it as president. So what happens now? Hegseth has said he's going to undo it. Do you have any idea what he means by that or any indication of what that could look like? Yeah, again, this may be just part of the administration's messaging that they're going to get rid of the so-called woke and diversity issues, which they have not defined. And in fact, after Secretary Higginseth announced that he was going to get rid of this so-called woke program, another administration official stepped forward and said, yeah, not so fast. This is a law. And oh, by the way, the president supported it during his last term.

So I think we're going to see sort of a pullback and a lack of messaging about this great initiative that Secretary Hegseth had in terms of eliminating this program, which he doesn't have the power to eliminate. But even the after effects, the second order effects after another administration official who remained nameless said, not so fast, even at that point, they tried to cover it up with, oh, well, we're keeping the good part of the program, but just eliminating the Biden part of the program. And truthfully, Ben, I've looked at it. I don't know what the hell they mean by the Biden part of the program, because this is a UN suggestion, and it's been put into law by the US Congress. Yeah, that's right. And I thought you put it really well in the piece that I'm paraphrasing you here, but half the population isn't just going to go away. And, you know, for all Secretary Hentze talks about supporting the warfighter and they were in combat and did improve our ability

to defeat the insurgency there. So why you would just decide that half the population isn't relevant to military operations, frankly, it boggles me. I don't know. I don't know if there's a good reason for that. It boggles me a little bit too, because it's tough for me to say this, but I think our current Secretary of Defense is troublingly narrow in his view toward what constitutes lethality. I think there have been others who have said he has a major's view of warfighting. Lethality takes on a lot of different meanings in the joint force, at the operational level, at the strategic level. And it really has to do with alliances, partnership, understanding what different things contribute to the effectiveness and the efficiency of the military. And, you know, it's great that the Secretary of Defense is doing PT with the troops, but I think, you know, he may need to take a look at some other things within the Department of Defense that make up this three and a half million person organization with a lot of things on their plate. Once again, the article is a commander's case for the Women, Peace, and Security Program. Thank you so much for joining

me, General Hertling. I'll talk to you again soon. Good to be with you, Ben. Thanks. Thanks for watching The Bulwark. If you like this video, we've got tons of others. Please like the page, like the video, subscribe, leave a comment. And if you really like what we're doing and you want to read General Hertling's article, go to thebulwark.com, become a Bulwark Plus member. We'll see you back here next time.