Bulwark Takes - Retired General Warns Militarizing Minneapolis Would Be A Disaster | Command Post

Episode Date: January 29, 2026

In this edition of Command Post, Bill Kristol and Lt. Gen. Mark Hertling (Ret.) give their takes on the federal agents in Minneapolis following the killing of Alex Pretti, explain the dangers of militarizing U.S. cities, and what NATO allies are doing in the Arctic.Have a question that you'd like us to consider for a future episode of Command Post? Send an email to [e-mail]. Please include your name, how to pronounce it and where you're located.

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If you have questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact Connix Ontario at 1866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with Eye Gaming Ontario. Hi, I'm Bill Crystal, editor at large of the Bullwork. And I am Mark Hurtling, a bulwark contributor and a retired lieutenant general. And this is your fourth edition of Command Post, part of the Bullwork Fakes. This is where we go beyond the headlines and take a look at the military implications of some of the things that are going on in our country right now.

And really, the first episodes have been terrific, I think, Mark. So we can see if we can keep up to that level today. I hope I don't drag it down too much. It's Wednesday afternoon, January 28th, just so people know. there's stuff that happens the next 12 hours. You'll know when we're speaking. And I thought we'd talk about what's happening in Minneapolis, actually, from the point of view of someone who had many positions in the U.S. military,

but accommodating in a three-star general, who really has thought deeply about the questions of soldiers and keeping order and its relationship or comparison to some of the other things that are done to keep order in different societies. and I guess including ours now. But I will get to a little bit on Greenland and on Venezuela later, which you've written about,

both of which you've written about excellently. But I think this conversation was partly prompted by the fact that a friend of mine, I think I texted you this a couple of days ago, texted me and said, Bill, why is General Hurtling so, he's a big fan of yours, why is he so reluctant about the use of the military

in the situation? Surely they'd be better disciplined, better trained than these ICE and Border Patrol guys. is after the killing on Saturday and of Mr. Freddie. Wouldn't it be better, maybe, kind of just send some of the military in an emergency way? And I said, I think there are a good argument. I sort of sympathetic. I instinctively one sees that case, but I think there are good arguments against it.

But I'll let Mark Kirtling make those arguments if you wish to. Yeah, sure. Well, there's two parts of that, Bill, and we'll talk about both of them. The first is sending in the National Guard. The National Guard actually has a mission set called Supporting. for civilian authorities. When they do that, they can go into an area guard buildings, conduct administrative or logistics functions, but they can't arrest and they can't harm or approach fellow citizens in a policing type way. Even if you're a military, police man or woman within the military,

you can't do that. It's against the law. In order to do that, you have to be legalized through the Insurrection Act, and that's both Guard and active duty components of the military. So if I'm sitting in the Minnesota National Guard and I'm called out to do different functions, I can do relatively supportive functions to policing authorities, like I said, guard buildings, put up fences, do whatever, but I can't arrest somebody. If the president sees it in his mind to call out the Insurrection Act, that changes every And that means that both the National Guard and the active duty forces are then federalized, and they can do whatever the president wants them to do because there's a threat of insurrection.

That's what the insurrection acts all about. So at that point, you can actually ask the military to conduct the policing functions, arresting people, detaining people, putting them in jail, guarding jails. And you can also use them in a kinetic sense. And what I mean by that is they can fire on American citizens because of it's a potential insurrection. So you don't want the military, even though they are much better trained and much better led than some of the Yahoo's we've been seeing on the streets of Minneapolis over the last

couple of weeks. What I've seen in terms of the CPP and the ICE patrols is their leadership is terrible. They have very little training in what they're supposed to do. and yet they are dressing up as if they want to be soldiers with all the kit, with the arms, with the weapons. Now, certainly police forces need weapons at times to protect themselves, but the way they've been generating the threats using bear spray, pepper spray, and even pointing pistols at people, is contrary to what we believe a police force should do unless they are threatened.

So that's the difference between what we have in policing and even the ICE and CBP, even though their mission is much smaller than what you might have in a militarized, deployed, and federalized force that would go in under the purview of Northern command. Yeah, so let's just take a second on that distinction, but it's so important that it does get elided. And there are some distinctions. It's a complicated matter of whether the National Guard. I mean, normally the National Guard is activated by a governor, and there's a crisis, there's floods or something. The normal authorities are very busy doing the many, million other things, and they help the authorities do things. And that's always been the way I've seen it. The National Guard helps

existing law enforcement or rescue or emergency service service providers to do what they're doing. And often the way they help, as you said, is they guard the buildings, you know, so the police can go out and take care of whatever the problem on the streets is whatever. They're not allowed because of the Pussy Kappa Tadas Act to independently arrest people or being involved in law enforcement. So that's reasonably non-problematic, I suppose. I mean, it can go awry, obviously, but, and usually done at the request of the governor. Now, obviously under President Trump this past year, he has activated the guard contrary to the wishes of governors, which I think does get more problematic. But even so, they've at least claimed that, and I think it's true, mostly,

that they were restricted in what they were doing more the guarding of federal facilities, and they weren't out. They did some patrolling in L.A. and then in D.C., but much less, I think, than we're seeing from ICE and the Border Patrol. So that's part of, that's established the National Guard trains for that, right? I mean, that's not a, it's not something they're not unfamiliar with the notion that they would have to go someplace and guards and federal facilities. Yeah, not at all.

In fact, that's one of their missions. And they train on things like riot control as well. So they're prepared using batons and shields. and helmets and things like that to prevent the destruction of equipment or cars or whatever you happen to see. But again, what we're talking about is something very different. Yeah, so let's talk, explain. So then the Interaction Act legalizes using the military as police, in effect, or as as, as. No, it actually uses them as soldiers against any kind of interaction. So, okay, fair enough. So explain that. That's a good way of putting it. That's a good calculation.

So, you know, the difference is when you have police forces, they usually fall under the moniker. of protect and serve the people. When you have the military, they do things like attack, destroy, defend, kill. I mean, it is used as a kinetic force. So deploying the military into action by proclaiming the Insurrection Act says basically, like it did during the Civil War, we have fellow citizens who are trying to overthrow the government so you can use deadly force against them. That's the difference.

And now, certainly, like we saw in Los Angeles, military units can be deployed, active duty military units, even the Marines in Los Angeles, which was somewhat odd, because they almost never do that mission. But they were limited in what they could do to the same thing the National Guard can do. They can't police. They can't arrest. They can't detain. They can only guard different things. So, again, it's a very slippery slope. And I personally think that the president was attempting to instigate riots where it appeared that the citizens of Minneapolis were rebelling against the government through violent actions.

So therefore, they would have to be put down. And in order to do that, you would declare the Insurrection Act because it was an attempt to overthrow a legally projected government. So those are the kind of differences you're talking about whenever you use the most. military and tell them you are now facing your fellow citizens and you can prevent them from doing actions through any force possible. And it's controlled a little bit by what the military would be given from their commanders called rules of engagement. But that harkens back to some things we've heard Secretary Hedcess say when he's proclaimed, we're not going to mess with rules of engagements. Those things just tie our hands. We're going to go in and be lethal.

and, you know, hooah, hooah, and all the things that military guys do. And that's where you begin to misunderstand the role of active service members in terms of policing their fellow citizens. And truthfully, but it really boils down to that American public has trust in the military to fight our nation's war and do the things we're asked to do. but that trust will become broken if you're facing military against all those citizens, how do you react to that? And it puts both sides in a very difficult situation because the military then has to counter any citizens that might be rebelling. And this is why you've been so adamant about how dangerous it would be,

and what a mistake it would be, to invoke the Insurrection Act. I guess I was in the White House in 1992, Vice President Quayle, Chief of Staff, so I had no role in this, but I was there. in the meetings where they decided to do it. They did invoke the Interaction Act because the L.A. riots were really out of control. Governor Wilson and the mayor were very alarmed that they could get further and further out of control. And I see the quickest thing to do is to get, I think it was active duty, actually, military from nearby. It was.

Out there on the streets. But again, this was done by a president or H.W. Bush who had no interest in using the military anything in any other way than to stabilize it. situation, the Secretary of Defense, Dick Cheney, I think, I guess Colin Powell would have been chairman of the chiefs. I mean, there was no interest in causing trouble, if I can put it this way. They really was just a sense of this is a very unusually bad situation and the military got up. And they were there briefly. And I think we sent home pretty quickly, actually. Yeah, they were. The other difference in the 92 riots in Los Angeles was the fact that the rioters were using deadly force against fellow citizens. So that's when you call in a bigger force that is

prepared to use weapons against people who are shooting at people and burning things down and that kind of stuff. So that's another key difference between 92 and today. And LEPD, obviously, since the riots were partly about an action of LAPD a year before, were, you know, they were both a little swamped, but also not trusted by major parts of the community. So I think it was, you know, it was an exceptional thing to do. It went fine. It went well in the sense I think it did help calm the situation and it was resolved. But I think you're, the point you're getting to also about the kinds of things Secretary Hicketts said about the military. And President Trump himself in that speech to the generals of Quantico, right, about this will be, like, what do you say?

This will be your training ground or something in the U.S. cities? I mean, that's a very different vision, right? And that must really have sent chill. I mean, what did people think when they heard that senior officers like yourself? Yeah, that, I was going to use that exact, I was going to use that exact word, it's done a chill. When you start saying we're going to train on the streets of America, that is not what we do. There are training grounds for the military, which are very well controlled. And when you're talking about putting the military, which again is a high rating of respect among our fellow citizens against the citizens in the streets, that's going to cause nothing but problems. And going back to, you know, the deployment of soldiers, there's only been one time that

that I know of in the history of the United States other than the Civil War, where soldiers were deployed into an area that the governor didn't want them. It was against the desegregation Act, and the governor wasn't obeying a federal mandate. I remember vividly, I was as a kid, and then later, obviously, when I was in school

and college and so forth, the photos, but it's clear the military is there defending little kids, basically, and their families who are going to school as the courts had ordered over against massive citizen resistance. But citizen resistance is being helped, honestly, by local law enforcement types, right? And so that's where you sort of need to get an independent force in. But they didn't go around shooting at, you know, citizens, even if the citizens were

segregationists with disasteful views on race matters, right? There was no thought that they were going to, they were there to protect and to try to keep peace as best as they could. So, again, very, very different from the image that I'd say President Trump and But really, what's sad is all throughout the administration, the vice president, secretary of defense, Christine Ome, what they projected is they want to use everyone, whether it's ICE and Border Patrol, obviously, but also other elements of the federal law enforcement apparatus and then the military itself as part of this effort to deport many, many people, but also to intimidate many, many people,

it seems, you know? Yeah, and I think that's been their mantra from the very beginning. They not only want to intimidate people on the streets, but they want to, it, a peers to me, they want to instigate violence. And that's why we've seen so many governors and mayors say to their citizens, don't take the bait. Because as soon as they take the bait and there is violence, that gives the president the option to call the Insurrection Act. It's literally true just as, again, an empirical matter. Minnesota, Minneapolis, I'm the expert on the place. I'm sure it had some problems. The amount of chaos and violence in Minneapolis today, after sending in

the Border Patrol and ICE is infinitely greater than it was before, you know? And I mean, if they needed some help with actual criminal justice policy, there are many ways the U.S. government has to provide that kind of support. But that has not been what obviously the ICE is doing. And of course, the Border Patrol, what are they, they trained to do things at the border, which is a complicated task and different actually from policing in cities. But again, they're there. This is not something, to my knowledge, that they are trained for at all.

I mean, ICE isn't really trained for this either. ICE is trained to mostly to take people who have been arrested, actually, often by local police forces. And then to, if they're, for example, they serve their term, but they're undocumented immigrants. And they're convicted of not going to be released back on the streets of the U.S. And ICE flies them to, in the old days, to a country that they had come from and tells them not to come back, you know. And that's someone's got to do that. And ICE did it. And that's part of immigration enforcement.

And they did some other things as well, obviously. and Border Patrol, again, at the border. So I do think people should appreciate how it doesn't excuse obviously the individual behavior, not at all. In fact, some of these people have been recruited now because they want to do this, I suppose. But this was not what they were supposed to be doing. Yeah. In terms of deporting, absolutely not.

Again, it goes back to intimidating and instigating those who aren't illegal immigrants. And the behavior, I've got to say, I know what you think about this, You haven't, well, you've watched police departments pretty close up. Military has a certain interest in, you know, it is a kind of, it's not the same thing, but it's a cousin, you might say, and you have interacted with them, I'm sure, and you've dealt with them abroad quite a lot. I know in central east of Europe and other places, Iraq, for that matter. The degree of just unprofessional behavior is really shocking, you know.

I mean, from the masks to the taunting of people, I mean, whatever. I mean, God knows we've had bad apples and we've had subunits of, police departments that have acted badly in the south and the 30s and 40s and 50s. It's a whole different story. But still, basically in modern America, police departments are trained pretty rigorously and with real accountability and real penalty if they don't do it to behave in an appropriate way, I would say legal way, really, and body camps and so forth. And the names, you see their names.

And they have to report if something, if there's a, if a firearms discharge, certainly if someone's hurt or killed, there's an investigation automatically. And the investigation, at least allegedly, is done by an impartial reviewer. And often they put the person on leave who discharged the firearm to make sure that, you know, there was no, nothing, nothing was wrong was done. Police departments are pretty used to dealing with this stuff. And the, I've just struck by the contrast with ICE and the Border Patrol. And you can see why the police departments are upset about this.

Yeah. Well, and that's the thing. The police, good police departments walk a very fine line between defending their citizens and protecting them and garnering the support of the citizenry. And that's what I think, you know, both Governor Walls and Mayor Frye have been concerned about because they've worked very hard over the last couple of years to regain trust of the citizens in their local police departments. And because of the combination of policing and what the Border Patrol and the ICE agents are doing, it's generating a lack of trust in any kind of security forces that's roaming the streets. And I think that's where the police who are very highly trained in this, one of the things you mentioned, my time in Iraq, we generated, helped the Iraqi government generate a police force. And we were turning policemen out in about three weeks at a training academy. That's way short of what you need.

Most police academies take, you know, 10 months to a year to train a good police officer. And it has to do with these kinds of things, gaining trust from the citizens. And it's important because you get tips. You can get a feel for the culture and the environment that you're working in. People don't get hurt. But it seems that in the last couple weeks, that's exactly what these other agencies are not trying to do. You know, an important point came up today. Again, we're recording on Wednesday, so people will be listening on Thursday. But this shooting happened on Saturday.

And when I first saw the film of it, it went beyond just watching someone being killed. It went to the fact that you just said, these were untrained people. These were six guys trying to pull down one individual after pushing a woman to the ground. There was no leadership there trying to direct the charge. It was just a gang, a piling on of a gang of thugs. It's now five days later. And today was the day that the Border Patrol and ICE have said they are pulling the people off duty that conducted this attack and actually shot the guy. Five days after it happened. I mean, my take from a military perspective, you get a guy in a tough shooting or a violent contact with some kind of enemy that you want to kill. And even if they have shot someone and conducted a violent attack and it's resulted

in a death, you still pull those people offline because human beings have to adjust to that. Beyond that, though, it's the leadership of the entire organization. How did it take five days to finally pull these officers who pulled the trigger off of the force? And they were, in fact, it appeared to most of us as if they were actually hiding those individuals who shot the weapon, you know, trying to get them out of there and put them in another place and not even naming that an investigation was going on. All of that is contrary to the way a democracy works. How worried are you that it gets worse before it gets better, both in terms of what's happening on the streets, but also in terms of the Insurrection Act?

It's a great question because on Thursday and Friday of last week, I was concerned that there was going to be a calling in the Insurrection Act. As much as not. a whole lot of good things came out of this event. One of the good things is I think the administration has pulled back from thinking about doing that because they see how dangerous it is. And the American public has seen how dangerous this force is. So it better get under control. Now, they're sending Tom Holman in. I don't know how much he's going to improve the conduct and the discipline of this force in a short period of times because as you mentioned earlier, they have recruited a bunch of people that would normally not be in law enforcement in this conglomeration of these two

agencies. So it's real hard stepping in as a new leader, even if you're a hardcore leader like Holman is and changing the culture of an organization to get them to stop these kind of things. And we're all, we're still seeing it today. Again, it's Wednesday. There are still reports going on that they are approaching citizens the same way they've been doing for the last couple weeks. Yeah, I found that particularly disheartening that over the last 48, 72 hours, there's many, many reports in Minneapolis and actually elsewhere in Maine and other cities of ICE and Border Patrol and maybe others, most of those too. Yeah, officers behaving as they have been behaving, there's no sense of, this is a wake-up call. We've got to really change our way. And that's partly, of course, was they were encouraged, I would say, by senior leadership in Washington to keep on going. You know, you guys have nothing to apologize for or to worry about.

Well, interesting on that point, I guess it was a report today that Christy Noem stated that she was told by Stephen Miller how to project what happened on Saturday to talk about that he was brandishing a gun. And this is a danger to officials. And when the films came out, all of those messaging and marketing of something that didn't happen was an additional lack of trust that the American people will put in the government personified, but what happened. So again, how do you get away from what we've seen over the last couple months? It takes a major culture shift to change that. I know because I've been in cultures like this. And it just doesn't, you can't just flip the switch and make a change overnight. Yep.

That's not, yeah, well, it's hard-headed and important, though. And important for people in Congress to think about as they possibly legislate new rules and new oversight and so forth. A week ago, it's hard to believe. President Trump was in Davos, and we were talking about NATO and Greenland and very important topics. You talked about it a length last week, really excellent analysis. but what happened do you think? I mean, Trump seems to have pulled back. Is there some reason we don't, well, what do you know?

You've talked to, you've talked to an awful lot of people over here. Mark Rudy is the NATO sect. General. Charge of NATO. He's kind of the civilian leader of the NATO alliance in Brussels. And he has been very adamant about fluffing, if you will, if you'll allow me to use that term, President Trump. He has been one of those individuals that has attempted to gain insight and trying to influence President Trump in certain ways, mostly by reinforcing some great things that the president has done and how he's contributed so much and helped NATO grow and all this other stuff that some might say is a little bit hyperbolic.

But Rudy had a conversation with Trump after the conference at Davos. And evidently right after that, President Trump started saying, well, maybe NATO can handle this. And maybe they do have a plan. And maybe it's a good idea for us to do some additional coordination with them. Well, the fact of the matter is, Bill, the issues with the Greenland, Iceland, UK gap, which is a northern defensive line in NATO, has been a topic of conversation at all NATO ministries, what they call the ministerials and all NATO meetings for the last probably 15 to 20 years. It's a critical element of the NATO Defense Alliance because of primarily climate change

and how the Arctic, the Great North is melting faster than the rest of the planet, and it's opening some sea lines of communication with the Russians. And there's a great, many larger powers, particularly Russia and China, going into the Arctic to try and garner some of the advantages that it may have. It's also a defensive location because there are radar spots on Greenland and Iceland and in the UK for anything that comes over the pole that might be unexpected. So a combination of changing threats to NATO has caused the 32. member alliance to really focus in all of their conversations and then they're planning on what to do about the high north, as it's called. What has contributed much to that is the fact that Sweden and Finland have now entered the alliance. And they have formed a block of individuals called the Nordic

Baltic 8. And it consists of the five northern European countries plus the three Baltic countries. and it's become a powerhouse. And they are really forcing their agenda on the headquarters in Bup and Brussels to show them how important some of these Arctic issues are. So perhaps Trump said nobody can defend a Greenland or Iceland the way we can. You know, Iceland probably would have been next. But Greenland was the topic du jour because it's in our hemisphere. And I think Secjan Rudi probably told them, hey, look, you don't have the capability to do. defend it as well as the alliance would together. Because there's not a whole lot of ice breakers

in the U.S. military. There's not a whole lot of troops that have been trained in that kind of Arctic warfare. And that's a specialty of nations like Norway, Sweden, and Finland. So it's a combination of probably influencing President Trump to realize that a lot of his bluster probably should be pulled back a little bit and see how important this 32 nation alliances in NATO. Yeah, so interesting. And my impression is there weren't big fights that had been NATO on this. There were questions, as always, about how best to coordinate and what exactly the right things to do are. But it's not as if Canada or the UK or certainly Norway, Sweden, Finland, or Denmark, were balking at doing things that we want to done. Right. I mean, that was one of the

craziest things, I thought about the rhetoric that Trump, and this seems to have been maybe spurred by Vance and others who don't like NATO in Europe, I mean, you know, making it seem like the mighty U.S. was being held back by these wimpy NATO nations. But I don't, in this, that might be, you know, in theory, true in some other areas. They don't spend it off on this or that. But it was certainly not, I don't, is there any reason to think this was true in this area? No. Quickly, no. You know, what's interesting is you didn't mention Canada, too. I mean, all the countries that control to the alliance and have a great deal of interest in the Great North, the High North, as they call it, are some of the ones that President Trump has tried to push aside and say they don't know what they're doing,

let us take control. And I think he will quickly find if he does the analysis or if his Department of Defense and State do the analysis, they will say, boy, it's a whole lot easier to manage this situation in the high north if you rely on the NATO partners as opposed to push them away. Venezuela, I think you're planning to talk about that quite a lot next week, and you can explain that a little more. But Marker Rubio, the Secretary of State, did testify on the Hill today, and a lot of the conversation focused on Venezuela. Any quick reactions or particular things you noticed? That's true. Yeah. Secretary Rubio's comments, his written comments, he didn't speak this at his introduction to the people he was testifying before. But it basically appeared to me that he was reinforcing what has happened almost a month ago. It was January 3rd when the attack against Maduro occurred that captured him and brought him to a U.S. prison. But in the three plus weeks, since that January 3rd strike and the capture of Maduro, Venezuela hasn't changed a whole lot.

There's still a contested, unstable, and still deeply dysfunctional strategic space because of corruption, because of the oligarchs and the criminals in the area, and because the oil hasn't been tapped the way President Trump thinks it has. Now, I think Secretary Rubio mentioned that, you know, people are quickly looking at it from the short term where President Trump is playing 3D chess and he's looking at it from the long term. But from what I've seen in the reported remarks from Secretary Rubio, there is still no clean endpoint or clear objective in terms of what's going to happen in Venezuela. And just like it occurred on January 3rd, Bill, when the president was asked who's in charge and he turned around and said, the guys behind me are, I don't think there's anybody still in charge. Rubio made a great deal of talking to the new president of Venezuela and saying we've got a great relationship. And she evidently backed that up by saying they have a great relationship. But there's not a whole lot of devils in the detail on what's going on.

Yeah, we'll see how this all works out, right? So far, at least not exactly a wonderful democracy, or not even the expelling of Cubans. Well, anyway, it's not worth getting into. You'll talk more about it. Next week, what are your plans on this excellent show? Next week, we'll probably be discussing the one-month anniversary of Venezuela, whatever happens on the scene and the streets. What is going on with the military? You know, just at the end of last week, Secretary Hegsa contributed. to the space, the National Defense Strategy, which emanates out of the National Security Strategy, which we and the Bullwark reported on a couple of weeks ago. But the National Defense Strategy I've reviewed an article online today about that, and it has some disconnects between ends, ways, and means that I think will not be beneficial for the military. But again, we're going to ask for some input, and we have, I'm going to read it, the email address to, submit your questions is command post at the bulwark.com. Those are all one long word. And if you're

enjoying these episodes, folks have asked me to please let us know in the remarks comments on substack. And if you listen on YouTube or Spotify, do the same thing. And if you're listening to Apple Podcasts, please consider leaving a review with your five-star ratings and appreciate it. And you. Command post at the bulwark.com is very, that's clear. And actually it would be great to have people ask you questions directly. And obviously, you all will sift through them and figure out which ones you have time to answer and are the most important and most interesting. But, you know, because I get questions after we do one of these shows or even when I'm not on

by people, and I think it began the show with the one that I passed on. So I really look forward to that. Thanks, Bill. And thanks for being with me today. It's always fun talking to you. And there's a lot going on. And that's why we started this command post to give a little bit of insight into the military and national security. Thanks, Mark.