Bulwark Takes - How Much Harm is Hegseth Doing? (w/ Col. Bree Fram)

Episode Date: August 9, 2026

Bill Kristol welcomes recently retired Col. Bree Fram to discuss Hegseth's leadership and the damage he's inflicting on the United States Military, as well as her own personal experience being forced out of the military after over 20 years of service.

Hi, Bill Crystal here. Welcome to a bulwark on Sunday. Before I introduce our guest, Brefram, I'm very much looking forward to this conversation. I should say that I've been told, instructed by the authorities at the bulwark to say that I'm off next week. I'll be at the beach for a week. So they either won't be a bulwark on Sunday or there'll be an upgrade to a different host. But meanwhile, I'll be around at all this week. I'll join Tim tomorrow on his podcast, Tim Miller, as usual. And then on Wednesday, I want to promote, if I could,

the Bullwork Book Club with Mona Charon. I think this is the third monthly episode, live Wednesday at 1.30 p.m. We'll discuss Mark Twain's Put-in-Head Wilson, a book I hadn't read before, which is very, very interesting, I'm going to say. And that'll be live at 1.30, and that will be on the website on the Motor Charon show. If you want to watch or listen to it later.

So Book Club Wednesday, and then off to the beach. But very pleased to be joined by Prefram today. retired U.S. Space Force Colonel, Air Force before that, before that was a space force, I guess, served for over two decades in the U.S. military, forced to retire in 2026 because of Trump's executive order barring transgender people, regardless of how honorable or distinguished their service was, from serving in the military. And so we discussed this almost, I looked it up. It seems like a little bit more recently. We just almost a year ago, you were my guest here. We had a very interesting discussion. I thought, and I want to thank you for joining me again and picking up the story and discussing both the fate of transgender service members, an unhappy story, but an important one, and then also sort of what's going on in the military and more broadly in your judgment. So, Bree, thanks for joining me again. Yeah, thanks for having me back. It's a pleasure to join you. So a year ago, I think you were sort of in that limbo exactly, but kind of on your way out, you know, on some pause on your way out of the military. Just describe what the situation was that and what's happened since, if you would. Yeah, at the time I was on administrative leave, which I spent nearly seven months on,

where I was paid to wait around until my retirement was official, with no official duties other than sending an email once a week that said, I'm still alive. Yet it came with all sorts of indignities. If I had put my uniform on, I could have been put. brought up on charges. And when I had my actual retirement ceremony with transgender service members from every branch there as well,

we had to set our dress uniforms and our boots up on a table on mannequins while we retired in civilian attire. And those were the uniforms we bled in, we sweat in. We fought for, but it was awful. And even then, a week before I formally retired, I was called into the Pentagon, had a three-star officer tell me that I was still subject to the Uniform Code of Military Justice even after I retired. And this was right when Hegset and others went after Senator Kelly.

And I just wondered, though I held my tongue, I'm like, are you threatening to mark Kelly me to put that into a verb? Because it was clear that what was being asked for was my silence. But that, this administration was absolutely not going to get. And two weeks after I retired, I launched a bid for Congress here in Northern Virginia, which unfortunately ended when our maps were ruled unconstitutional by the Virginia Supreme Court. So you retired as a colonel and after more than two decades of honorable service, and including, I think in Iraq, very early, I guess that would have been very early in your career in 2003 or something, and then obviously many other important positions since. I am sort of struck, why wouldn't, why can't you,

And you served in your uniform for the last, I don't know how many years, many years, it's not like this was, and then they wouldn't let you retire. Why, why the ban on your uniform? So part of the point of forcing us out was not acknowledging the existence of transgender people. So before I was pushed out against my will, the Department of Defense for me and for all the other service members

changed our records back to what they were when we joined the service. And so if I were to have worn my uniform without cutting my hair, without taking out my earrings, I could have been accused of being out of uniform, basically charged for failing to follow an order, failing to follow the standards that were assigned to me. And this was all done against our will. While to get a change in the first place, a massive process, all sorts of paperwork, prove this, prove that. And in this case, it was a unilateral, not anymore.

So it was just one of the many indignities heaped on us. When we talked a year ago, you talked about both the indignities and the, I don't want to get back to this side of it, the degree to which senior officers seem to have gone along with this order. But how many of your peers and I guess superiors as well, including general officers, but also many inferiors. If I could use that term who weren't the rank of colonel, certainly spoke to you and discussed their reaction to this. I'm just curious, how did that go over those last few months and then since your retirement? Yeah, my last couple of days in uniform when I was still walking around the halls of the Pentagon, it was amazing that I would have people coming up to me every day who I didn't know,

saying, I see you, I support you, or even I love you, and keep up the fight. It was fist bumps, high fives, hugs. At the end, the people in the unit that I last served with, were not allowed to attend my retirement, even despite the fact that I had people that I had served with across my career who flew in to support me. The presiding officer at my retirement was General Stan McChrystal, who came in and said, the obvious,

I shouldn't even be here. But there were incredible people who threw their support behind us, who recognized what we had done and the value of our service. And in my retirement speech, I mentioned the fact that we were not being tossed away because we had failed in any way. It was because what we had done could not be hidden away if we remained in uniform, that we had done our job so well that we had won the respect of our friends, our colleagues, and the people that we worked for or led, that having us there continued to put to the torch the lie that they were saying about about our character and our capability.

And the lie, just to remind people, was that anyone who was a transgender service member was incapable of serving honorably, I can't remember with the, yeah, the executive order basically said that we were dishonorable, undisciplined liars who lack the humility required for military service. So that attack on our character,

on top of the attack that they made the claim that we were undeployable because of medication that we were taking long term. And I know we're going to get into this, but it's pretty crazy that now we have Secretary Hegseth in his quest for a high T department of war saying that long-term hormone replacement therapy is a lethality enhancer for some, but is a clear readiness crisis for others. The hypocrisy behind all of this is overwhelming. It is. I agree. Yeah. No, that's a very, it's a very compelling point. Well, it's not about any medical. It's not real. I mean, there might conceivably be

other medical questions or issues, but this certainly was not about any of that. And it's very clear in cases of people who've been serving for a long time, as you had, and totally, I should have I would just speak before as you. Honorably, but also unproblematically. It wasn't as if you, they were like, right, you were having, you know, you were serving like everyone else, so to speak. and no one was raising issues, people were having trouble with you. I mean, that's what's so astounding, I think, about this purge. Right. When the department had to go to court to defend against this policy, one of the judges asked them, who are these people? If there's such a problem, who are they? And the response from the Department of Justice defending it was, we don't know. We're going to have to search through their medical records to find them. And that's actually what's happening right now with an AI-powered search of medical records,

trying to identify and kick out the last remaining openly transgender folks before the Supreme Court can potentially rule on the action that's going on right now to make this a class action lawsuit and to still put an injunction against this policy to throw people out. So they're hurrying to do it before they might lose. Exactly. that they are racing as quickly as possible to get through this in made-up processes that were designed just to expel trans folks and searching far and wide for anything they can get to figure out who they are because there actually is no indication that they're a problem. And I was struck by this New York Times

article a few days ago, I guess, kind of a long, well-reported piece about the way it's happening. And I was really kind of horrified, honestly, by it. These special tribunals and court cases and I mean the amount of effort and time and also you know injustice that's going on in the uniformed military it got me rattled I mean not just on behalf of the those to whom the injustice is happening but sort of what does it say about what's happening more broadly but if we say a word about just that process how does it I mean you were I think the highest ranking a transgender person but this is happening throughout the services down through the officer ranks and the enlisted ranks, I suppose.

Yeah, it is a process that is really just a kangaroo court where people are guilty before any evidence is shown if there is no other outcome. Because the orders have been passed down that if anyone ever had a diagnosis or symptoms of gender dysphoria, which is something the government required us to get in order to transition within the military, that they fall under this executive order and need to be kicked out, despite whatever evidence is offered. And just this morning, in fact, I got a message from a major saying, I just got identified, my board is coming up, will you write me a letter of support? And they're trying to get hundreds of these letters. But unfortunately, in every case just about the evidence doesn't matter.

The New York Times reported that just one of the cases that they examined, the board recommended to retain the officer. And that was an act of courage, because the ultimate decision is actually up to the Secretary of the Service. So the board, regardless of what they come up with, can be overruled. And the directive is clear from the top, from the political appointees. that these people must go, that somehow we are such a threat to the military that we have to be tossed out. And that includes, while there have been headlines in the past couple weeks of every service talking about what their retention bonus is for pilots.

In the Army, it was 250,000. In the Air Force, it was up to 600,000 because they need to keep pilots. Yet we are taking those same highly trained qualified pilots, just happen to be trans and saying you are the problem get out it is astonishing and just to be you made this point just to repeat it i guess yeah one's record actually in the military means nothing in these in these kangaroo courts it's not like you can show up and say i got here's my superior officer from this tour who speaks very highly of me or here i have no disciplinary problems or i was awarded these medals it's all irrelevant it's just if you've ever

if you've ever, I guess, sought this, this judgment, whatever the right term for that is, gender dysphoria, that you, which you had to do in order to transition, that that's just, that's it, you're out. Yeah, it is as simple as that. If that ever appears, you're done. And again, that hypocrisy is overwhelming. And they're searching for us to get everyone out as if it were, you know, I mean, it really is kind of a science. It's not as if, okay, if someone speaks up, so to speak on his or her own,

one might say, you know, and says, okay, that's one, it still will be pretty hard, totally hard to defend, it's justified, seems to me, but yeah, this kind of search through everyone's records is really a, you know, kind of astonishing. Are you, I mean, am I wrong to be rattled by, it's one thing, I guess I put it this right, it's bad enough, obviously when, Hex-Seth personally intervenes in promotion boards and personally fires general officers who serve with great distinction, and politicizes the military in that way, and it tries to intimidate people.

But we're beyond, this is different, and they want to go through the sort of sham version of military justice, right? I mean, they have these boards of other military officers, but it's not personally, ultimately the Secretary of the Civilian Secretary of the Service as the authority, but they sort of want to cloak this in,

I guess I would put it, in normal kind of military discipline. Yeah, and one of the, most important things about it, even though a lot of these processes have been created just for transgender service members, what the department is doing is establishing a mechanism. And once you've established the mechanism to throw out one group of people or to discredit their service, it can be used for others. So you alluding to what has been done to women, particularly senior officers, people of color, you know, there is nothing that protects their

service too. So if next the department wants to go after lesbians, gays, and bisexuals, or women, just as it's doing to do a sham study about women in combat, despite their proven performance, they can use these same mechanisms and the same cost. And that's one of the terrible things we don't even talk about, the cost and the time that is being taken to throw people out that instead of being invested in building our readiness and our future force. Yeah. No, it really is really is just reading that Times article brought it back to me, brought our conversation back to me, but just generally how, again,

sort of how gratuitous and cruel, but also, I don't know, systematic it is in a way, which makes it creepier, if I can put it that way, and more ominous, because they are getting a lot of military people to collude in this. Do you have a sense of how are people trying to not collude in it, to not cooperate, to stop it? Is that just not the culture of the military?

What's your sense of that? Well, I think you got a piece of that from the Times article when it talked about the fact that these officers on the boards couldn't even look at the person, you know, can't make eye contact. And that says something right away about how they're feeling. Because what we're seeing, not just in this issue, but in so many others, is the moral injury being done to our service members, where they're being asked to do something that is not. explicitly illegal. And even if they were unsure if it's illegal, the question they would have to ask themselves is, what do I do? And normally it would be go ask a jag, but this department has fired enough jags that you just get compliant people. So these officers are asking, what now? I have to carry out this order, or I might be risking my career. It's not explicitly illegal in the way we have defined our laws, but it sure is immoral. It puts me in a great

zone? And is this the thing where I want to throw away my retirement, my career, my potential for advancement over this one person in front of me, if it's an officer sitting on the board? Or if we're talking boat strikes and the illegality of those where it is straight up murder. But there are so many other things in between where a lot of people are in that position of, do I act now? Or do I try and protect others, do I stick around until something really bad happens? And it's the classic frog in the boiling pot. The time to act was the first time, not by the time it's far too late. Yeah, and how late is it, I guess. Let's broaden the conversation. I did have a conversation with Mark Adonovan who serves as a JAG decade, well, for six years, I believe, in the 2010s.

It was in Iraq and in Syria, actually, and so very active duty as a JAG, authorizing strikes occasionally, I suppose, telling people they shouldn't do it this way or that way, but she had seen it up close. And she was much more alarmed, not than I expected, but I think that most people would, and she's not an alarmist type, and she's very proud of her service in the military and many, many friends. I was still there, more alarmed than maybe I expected by just what's the broad effects of this in the military. Certainly in the Jaguar, which you say has been, I guess, they've culled out or the ones who won't go along and others have left themselves. But then more broadly among the office of court, I just wonder how much, how worried should we be about this?

And I don't know. I mean, what you served, you were proud, you served your really entire adult life, right? I mean, so, and goes to colonel. So, I mean, how worried, this institution that has so much respect and well-deserved respect, and which was hard won after Vietnam and all the problems in the 70s and early 80s and you know built up as a really impressive and admirable American institution unifying what I say for the country. How worried should we be about that? I think we should be incredibly worried about the professionalism, the capability of our

future force. You're right that I was honored to serve in an alternate universe I would have served for another 10 years or more. I loved what I did, the people that I would worked with the technology I got to work on, but more than anything, I felt we were putting good into the world. And so that moral injury we were talking about, there are a lot of people out there right now that are not sure if that's what they are doing, or they know that it is not what they are doing, particularly in something like the Iran War. So what I think we have is not just a looming retention crisis, where when people's commitments come up, they say, I can no longer be a part of this.

But we're also going to get a recruiting issue where only a certain group of people join and or a certain group of people stay. And we have built a professional force that takes decades to build the capability that we need in our people. And if we have a force that turns over a significant portion of it,

as we go back and forth from one administration to the next, that's a problem. You cannot sustain a professional nonpartisan force on that model. So we should be very concerned about what we're seeing right now and what we're going to see in the future. There are a lot of people sticking it out as best they can because of that pension at the end of the road or because they think they are going to protect their people. But that doesn't last forever. And so we have a lot of incredibly dedicated people right now that are questioning if the military is still the place.

for them. No, that's really where people haven't really, I think, internalized just how dangerous that can get over an additional two years or that kind of people leaving, choosing to leave, other people being, of course, weeded out or not promoted, and then, you know, sort of serving out their, you know, running out the clock, so they get there, you know, understandably, they get the pension or they don't have a job right away and they have families and so forth. But, yeah, what it can do to the quality professionalism but also on the other side the kind of willingness to speak truth to power and the degree of honesty i was struck when i had my i never served but you know got to know people in military quite a lot in the 2000s and then our son served i mean there was a

real it's the military so it's not quite like being on a university campus let's just simply like that for better and worse but mostly better probably but anyway but there was really a lot of speaking truth to power i felt like in the military i saw not just at the very fancy see high levels of, you know, Dave Petraeus saying we should do counter-insurgency instead of what General Casey went. But at the kind of routine, if I can say, put it that way, Lieutenant Captain Major level in the, at least in places that I had some visibility into. And I don't know. I mean, is that, am I wrong with that did exist? No, you are absolutely not wrong. Not only is the science clear, but the military had embraced this, that it takes multiple perspectives. Yes, there are certain

situations where we know an order is important to be carried out immediately because lives are on the line or we need a snap decision. But in most cases, we're planning for the future. We are building the force and our readiness, and we need to consider all the options. And if people are not willing to speak up, you get these hollow armies that look amazing, but will collapse at the first sign of adversity. And I certainly experienced this throughout my career where I got to make the case for something that I thought was better. And sometimes my superior officers agreed with me. Sometimes they didn't. But that changed dramatically in this administration and the first couple of months. And not only do we just see that freezing effect of people being

unwilling to speak out, but even when you do, it can get shut down. And my experience was with the Golden Dome proposal, which was originally Iron Dome, but of course anything that Trump touches has to be gilded. So it immediately turns, turned a Golden Dome. And as this proposal came over for this worldwide missile shield, I with 23 years of service as an astronautical engineer, I thought, hey, maybe my input would be valued on this. But when I said that this was the least technologically feasible, highest cost way of accomplishing this mission, and I said, have we told the political appointees this? one of my bosses up the chain said, we can only tell them yes.

That was the breakdown of providing best military advice. And so not only will they not even listen, but we can't get to that better solution. So in the end, it just again hits on building this hollow force, a force that looks strong, but we're weakening it out from the inside. No, that's really terrible. There's an article just yesterday, I think, about, about the Trump battleships. My favorite example.

Well, talk about it. You know so much more about it than I would. So what are they and what's going on there? Yeah, the Trump class battleship. This is a ship that is all about aesthetics. It is about looking good. It is Trump, again, calling something his golden fleet. We retired our last battleship in the early 90s

because they were obsolete. And yes, a ship that may have energy weapons, and may have large storage capacity, could have uses. But what we're really proposing to build is a floating target. And the Chinese, the Russians know this. They won't be impressed by this gleaming ship on the horizon.

They'll be tracking its signature from space and counting the number of missiles it takes to disarm it and to sink it. And that's what this is. It is a monument, just like the arch that's going up across the Potomac from Washington as a monument to Trump. and a monument at sea will sink, and it will be a terrible disaster.

You know, our Navy knew that spectacle may have a play. We can go back to the great white fleet of the early 20th century, where we sailed around the world with a gleamingly white fleet to show off American power. But as soon as it came home, mission accomplished, we stripped off that paint, painted it gray and prepared for battle. That is not what's being done. here. We are simply wasting dollars and some of the Congressional Defense committees are saying hold up and thank goodness they are and I hope they hold that line because this is the example that

we are just paying for the appearance of strength instead of thinking, oh, we actually don't have a shipyard that can build it and real strength is having welders at multiple shipyards that can actually put together the fleet that we do need. And this isn't just some little bubble that's a you know, a little rounding era on the military budget. I mean, these things would cost, at least our plan to cost, I don't know. Yeah. Billions and billions of dollars. The lead ship, according to one recent estimate, is $34 billion.

And this is something that will then likely be sunk by million-dollar missiles. It's a problem we're experiencing all over with Iran and with the hoodies in the Red Sea, where we are spending million-dollar interceptors to counter $10,000 attacks. So the cost curve is just wrong, and we need to be planning for how do we actually build the force that can sustain itself in a long fight, just like we're seeing reporting right now about our draining of munitions in the fight against Iran, where we have gone through our stockpile while there is a long time and a whole lot of dollars to replenish it, Iran can just keep building cheap drones.

The munitions thing, maybe just ask about that about drones, just as we're participants against them involved in these kinds of decisions. I mean, how does that happen? It's not like the military is not full of intelligent people who will say, I mean, I guess Admiral Cooper is the combatant commander, so he would love to have as much ability to put on target as possible, as much ordinance. And so we have come to use 200 of these here.

But in the normal situation, I take it. The service, the chiefs of staff of the different services, and ultimately the chairman of the chiefs of the joint chiefs says, well, actually, we have X number of them. And it's imprudent to use up, you know, quarter of them in the first two weeks of this conflict. It could go on longer. We have other responsibilities.

So you have up to X number to use. I'm going to take it. That's something like, I've simplified a lot, but something like that inter-service and inter-agency process is kind of normal. And I mean, what kind of break? I feel like the musicians think it's sort of an interesting story. So people are paying attention to it. It's an important story and practical challenges for the military going forward

and an important window into how the war on Iran was conducted. But I also just the implications of the sort of kind of decision-making that's going on in the Pentagon under the pressure, I suppose, of Trump and Hexas saying, we want to blow everything up. You have huge, you know, huge things blow, huge number. of things being blown up as soon as possible in this war. It's worrisome, I mean, isn't it? Yeah, high tea does not substitute for low strategy.

And that's the problem that we're getting at, that there was no strategy. With Iran in particular, there were eminently foreseeable consequences. And we don't know whether that was just never mentioned to the president, what level that was squashed, or if the president simply said, I don't care, I don't care, we're going to do this anyways because I want to show off my swagger.

But that the Strait of Hormuz would be closed was an obvious repercussion of going to war with Iran. And the challenge in engaging the regime with, as you mentioned, the stockpile that was limited, in a sense, is problematic. So we talk all the time in professional military education that logistics is what what wins wars. We have a military out there doing everything it can to the best of its ability

to do the mission it's been given under the constraints that it has. But you cannot win when there is no strategy of how to win or even an understanding of what does winning look like. Because so many of the things that have come out of this make it look like winning is just enriching people or using announcements of peace to play off the stock market or some other engagement that is going to make people rich off of this. We're in a lose, lose, lose situation for the American public, for our military and for the relationship we have with friends and allies around the world. Yeah, you know, I feel maybe concluded this,

that both on the first topic we were discussing, the treatment of transgender service members and other service members, for that matter, and the corruption, if I can put it that way, of the culture of the services. And then on these practical logistical questions of the use of munitions and not thinking through the consequences of going to war and something like the strait that was as you say certainly war-gamed out many many in many ways many times in the pentagon it's you know one sort of the certain tendency I think among people out there out here just sort of well Trump says these things but you know the government's

very professional and the military certainly very professional and things will go on and this is this sort of annoying and you know somewhat not just irritating but a little bit damaging, you know, talk, sort of like having some boss who's an eccentric and says stupid things and offensive things occasionally. But ultimately, the whole corporation underneath is chugging along and, you know, middle managers, not from middle managers are doing their job and we shouldn't be too worried. I guess I do feel like the munitions thing has brought home to people sort of that, no, these things have real consequences, but so should, in fact, what's happened to transgender service members. Yeah, what we're seeing is what we have always laughed at.

that in autocracies where the leader can't ever be shown dissenting information that doesn't confirm his worldview or say that, yes, we can. Because if you do, then the person that brings that information is the one that gets fired. So everything that we're doing is for his benefit or pleasure to see what's going on. And it is not that the people in between can't actually cause damage. We saw the gutting of the National Security Council. We saw what Bill Pulte did at the DNI of sending a bunch of people back to their home agencies or firing them in other ways, you are taking that intelligence piece out of it. You are destroying careers. You are seeing a brain drain from the federal government. And these are public servants who could be

getting paid a lot more in other fields of endeavor that have chosen to serve. So the damage is being done. And it's funny because for decades in a way, we would laugh at the parades that occurred in Moscow or Pyongyang as they showed off their missiles and their tanks going down Red Square. But we did the same last year along Constitution Avenue for the president's birthday. It's all to make him feel good. And it is incredibly problematic what it does for the long-term success of our military and our nation. It's awfully well said. Well, look, thanks, Bree, for this really a sovering, but I think important conversation. And really, thanks for joining me. Thank you for your service and thank you for your courage, really. It's really an admirable example, I think, for all of us. So thanks. Thanks for having me on again. And thank you all for joining us on Bullwork on Sunday. And again, Book Club with Motor Charon, Wednesday, 1.30 p.m.

And have a great week, all.