Bulwark Takes - Trump Flip Flopped So Fast That Mark Hertling Had to Scrap an Article | Command Post

Episode Date: July 16, 2026

Lt. Gen. Mark Hertling (Ret.) and Ben Parker take on the Pentagon's bizarre new testosterone screening program for troops, a promotion list with zero women admirals, and China's quiet power grab as America's alliances crack under Trump.

Hi, I'm Ben Parker from the Bullwork, joined, as always, by our very own Lieutenant General, Mark Hurtling. General, this is the first time we're doing command posts. Well, not quite from the same room, but at least from the same building. Yeah, we're about, what, 100 feet apart in two different offices. And it's great to be here for the first time at the wonderful Bullwork headquarters, right, in downtown D.C. We're so excited to have you. But the fact that you just got off a plane means you did miss the first thing we have to talk about today, which is, This. At the Department of War, we have the most elite warriors on the face of the earth. Every single day, you are pushed to your absolute physical and mental limits to master the profession of arms. We demand your all, and you give it. But while we invest heavily in our weapon systems, platforms, and gear, our most decisive tactical advantage will always be

the individual warfighter. We have a sacred duty to maintain that. advantage, which is why we must constantly look for new ways to optimize your performance, your resilience, and your long-term health. And to meet that commitment today, I'm authorizing a new screening program for testosterone deficiency for our service members, ensuring you have the right testosterone levels to operate at your absolute best, because it's well-established science that as we age, testosterone levels often naturally drop. Under the supervision of our world-class medical professionals, warfighters, age 30 and older, are going to be tested annually as part of their periodic health assessment.

It's a health assessment that happens every year. We're just adding this test. Those under 30 can voluntarily choose to get the test as well. If treatment is recommended, it's entirely your choice to receive testosterone replacement therapy. This initiative, it's not about artificial enhancement. It's about restoring and optimizing your natural capabilities, protecting your longevity, and ensuring you have the biological foundation required to sustain the fight. We owe our warriors the absolute best medical care in the world, and this program delivers on that obligation.

Taking care of your long-term health means ensuring you remain strong, resilient, and capable, not just for your next deployment, but for the rest of your life, so you can thrive long after you take off the uniform. As we know, the modern battlefield is brutal and unrelenting. It requires and demands maximum psychological and mental readiness. And by addressing these health markers early, we're keeping you on the leading edge of lethality and giving you the same level of support

that you give this nation the absolute best. Godspeed, keep going, and God bless. So, yeah, it's sort of hard to know where to start. I am not going to travel anymore. I'm just going to stay glued to the news cycle because it's just amazing what you miss on a two-hour flight. I'm sure there's some other things that I've missed, too, but this is an interesting one.

Yeah, it's fascinating because I'm not sure where this is coming from. You know, soldiers, sailors, airmen, Marines do testing all the time for different things. They're medically fit. They have health risk assessments on a yearly basis normally. And I just don't know what the purpose of something like this is because, first of all, testosterone replacement treatment is interesting. And it has some good that comes with it, but it also has a whole lot of bad that comes with it. So I'm just not sure.

And I should tell you, you know this, but we'll tell the listening audience, one of the things that I experienced during my time in the Army was the Army sent me to graduate school to get a master's degree so I could go back on a teaching assignment at West Point, which happens to a lot of people. And my degree was not in the social sciences or history or math. It was in physical education. I got a master's in kinesiology and physiology from Indiana University. So I know a little bit about the human body. I know a lot about hormones did my master's thesis on fear in combat versus fatigue in athletic events at how they compare. And this is just beyond the pale in terms of a new dynamic. but I'd say it's especially interesting because there's a war on.

This should not be the topic du jour that the Secretary of Defense is making a film and posting it on social media accounts. So, yeah, we could discuss testosterone replacement treatment, talk about the good and the bad, but I don't think we should even give it that much credence. It's just more, I'm going to put it in the category of silliness. I generally agree, but specifically, I disagree. I think we should talk about it more right now. Just to spend another minute, it's too much fun. Okay.

Really quick. First of all, I guess this means that when you go for your annual physical, if you're in the military, they'll say, would you like a flu shot? And you can say, no. And they'll say, would you like testosterone? And you can say, yes, please. Well, and if they test it and it's low, they're going to say you really need to do this.

Don't worry about the flu virus going around within the barracks that's going to affect everybody. But for you, we're going to give you a couple hundred buck treatment on testosterone replacement treatments. But I do think I should read off just in my handy little book of what testosterone therapy does. It increases the good things. it increases energy, it provides greater muscle mass and strength when it's combined with resistance training. It could improve bone density if the patient has a higher risk of osteoporosis. It sometimes gives, or it's shown to give some people better cognitive function.

But the last two good things are it improves sex drive and libido. And it provides for better erectile functions. Now, I'm betting most 18 to 24-year-old soldiers are going to say, give me some of that even if my testosterone is low. And as a commander of those 18-to-24-year-old that are already in the season of the rising sap, as Tom Wolf once called it, I'm not sure I want that, tongue-in-cheek. But here are the risk.

increased red blood cell count, which can raise the risk of blood clots, reduced sperm production and fertility. So even though you've got a greater libido, you have reduced sperm production, testicular shrinkage, enlargement of male breast tissue, worsening of untreated sleep apnea, fluid retention, and possible effects on the prostate requiring additional monitoring. monitoring. So the good and the bad of this, in listening to Secretary Hegsa's film, I'm not sure what we're trying to do in the military. You know, I'm not sure either. And we're going to talk later about more stories of what Hegsef has been up to, as you said, in the middle of a war.

But we got to ask some basic questions. You know, one of them, you know, as we were talking before we separated to our different recording rooms here, you asked me, are they going to do these tests for women? Because there are a lot of women in the services. Yeah, about 22% of the force are women. And are we going to test testosterone or estrogen? Yeah. I don't know. Are they going to get replacement therapies if they have low estrogen? I mean, like the whole thing is raises many questions. The other one, our producer, made this point that I thought was very funny, but also kind of profound. let's say some strapping young Marine, let's say, you know, 6-1, close-up crew cut, bulging with muscles, goes to the Secretary of Defense and says, I don't have low testosterone, but I would like the therapy anyway. Would Secretary Hegseth say yes? And if so, would that be gender affirming care?

And would it be provided through injection, which is something the anti-vaxxers would say they don't want strange things entering the body? There's some downsides to this, you know what? There are some downsides. If you can't tell if there are microchips in the vaccines, how are you supposed to tell if there are microchips? microchips than testosterone. Yeah. What the final thing I should say or the final thing I will say and I probably shouldn't is that the Secretary of Defense should probably have some testosterone reduction treatments because it appears to me he's got a little bit too much of it.

Yeah. Do you want to everything, everything in moderation, everything in balance. Okay. That's enough for the testosterone talk. As you said, it's very silly. This is a more serious story. It was just reported in last few days that for the first time in many years, years, the list of naval officers who are promoted going to be promoted to flag rank to admiral

has no women on it. Is that, I mean, obviously it's not normal. Does that seem like just a statistical fluke to you, General? Well, it's not a statistical flu, Ben, because there were women on the promotion list. They were pulled from both the one-star rear-admiral and the two-star rear-admiral upper half, as the Navy calls it, list. There's also a dynamic of a three-star female admiral who is currently or was the commander of a carrier strike group, the first woman to do that. And I know Secretary Higgseth doesn't like anyone saying first woman or first African-American or first anybody.

She was the first. And she came up commanding various ships in the Navy and then commanded a carrier's strike group and the Navy feels like she deserves promotion to potentially four-star, which is a huge accomplishment. I remember the first Army female four-star was a woman by the name of Anne Dunwoody, who we were majors together in the same seminar at Command and General Staff College. And she was tough back then and even tougher as a four-star general in the Army. And everyone cheered when she was promoted a four-star. So again, the secretary seems to be focused on this exclusively. You can't tell me this is not misogyny or in some cases racism for the African-Americans

that are being pulled off the list because it goes beyond the trend line. When you talk about no women admirals being promoted this year, it just tells me there's something wrong. And beyond that, here's the point that I would like to make is what is this doing to the young women who are lieutenants or captains or ensigns or lieutenant commanders or colonels in the army when they see this happening and there's no rationale given for it that's the important part it seems incredibly arbitrary and biased and just a smack against the contributions that young women and men make in the military and how it's a meritocracy, not a biased partisanship where because you've said something that the secretary doesn't like or you've done something in the past or just because

of your gender or your race, you get basically pulled from a list that having sat on various flag officer promotion boards, I can tell you it's incredibly fair and incredibly tough to make that cut. Yeah, I think there's another, I mean, that's all true. And unfortunately, it's a thing that we have to keep saying over and over because it keeps happening. And you're right, it's absolutely a pattern at this point. No one can question why it's happening or that it is happening. There is another aspect of this too, though, which is not just the effect it has on women all around the service who are questioning, you know, how to, how to manage their careers, whether they want careers in the military, whether there's a

future for them in the military. Also, there are a lot of young men in the military who want to be part of a meritocracy. Pete Hexeth likes to pretend that everyone in the military, or at least all of the enlisted, or at least all the infantry, it's unclear, think just like he does, talk, just like he does, act just like he does. But there are a lot of men in the military who, You're going to be looking at this and saying, well, this isn't the kind of institution I think I want to serve. This isn't the kind of institution I want to dedicate myself to and sacrifice for. So yeah, I'm sure it's having a huge effect in the military in terms of in terms of the morale of people who thought they were joining a real meritocracy. And maybe you're not questioning that.

Yeah. And it's it's not a question of this might happen. Ben, what I will tell you in conversations with both active duty and reserve component officers and soldiers, by the way, senior enlisted soldiers, they are having many of them, not all of them, many of them are asking these questions. Is it worth it to stay in? Is it worth it to work hard and serve my country in a very selfless way for someday having an arbitrary action that causes me to either retire or resign or leave.

Here's the other thing, Ben, that I'm going to say. You know, I was, I entered the service in 1975. I know that was very long ago. It was not, we were suffering from the effects of Vietnam, and it was not a professional force. There were a lot of race issues. There were a lot of drug problems. There was a lot of disciplinary actions.

Starting in the mid-80s, the military really started to transform. and become a professional force because of the introduction of the volunteer military. For the last four decades, the military has become the best fighting force in the world. The president and the Secretary of Defense continue to tout that, yet claim it's only happened within the last year. What I would suggest is the military, the profession I was a part of was the best military in the world because I saw the other ones. There were a lot of good militaries, but we were, we could do things that other militaries

could not. But to state that this is all because of President Trump's policies or Secretary Hegas' emphasis on lethality is just, and I'm going to say this word purposely, it is a lie. And in fact, what I would say is actually potentially going in the other direction with these kind of policies, with this kind of focus on ridiculous things, and with a reduction in our understanding of our oath to the Constitution and not to a partisan act. Well, maybe it's no surprise that people who think that their mere presence in the halls of power will accomplish all of their hopes and dreams that we've seen the course of the Iran War

go as it's gone. We are now, once again, back in active. combat. You know, I want to get your take on this because I know you follow the announcements, the tweets, really, that the Central Command puts out every time we do a tit for tat strike. And to me, when you see some of this wording, it's like, you know, we, you know, we are punishing the Iranians for violating the terms of the MOU, or we're degrading their ability to attack shipping. You have been degrading it for a while and they can still do it. it doesn't seem like the people who are at Suncom headquarters who are putting out these announcements of why we're doing these, why we're committing these combat actions, why we're doing

these strikes, have a sense of like we are planning towards something. Like we've thought this through. There is an end goal. They're saying like, oh, we're doing it to slap around on the wrist because we don't like what they're doing. And that's kind of it. Is that your sense? It is partly, Ben.

And I think that's, I read those social media. postings with a little bit of disfavor, to be honest with you, because I was always taught be more than you appear to be. You know, the old army adage of be more, be all you can be. We changed that inside the force informally to say be more than you appear to be. You don't have to brag if you're good. You just do. And what I'm seeing coming out of Central Command right now is unlike anything I've ever seen from postings from any combatant headquarters. They will tell you what is happening factually with precise words. They won't use a lot of hyperbole, a lot of adjectives or adverbs.

They will say, this is what Central Command is doing, period. And it's not, we're blowing them to smithereens and, you know, regaining the initiative and all that. That's for commanders and their teams to figure out. out if it's going well or going poorly. One of the lessons I learned in combat is as soon as you think you've completely defeated or destroyed an enemy or as soon as you start indicating that you have the upper hand, that's when karma comes up and smacks you right in the face because combat can shift very quickly.

I experienced that one time in Iraq when a lot of us were saying we had Mukta de Sotter's forces defeated, destroyed. And then the next day, there were 20 car bombs that went off. And that's what we're seeing in Iran right now. It is an enemy that is resilient. And in an article recently, I compared Russia with the United States. Russia has been at war and doing a lot of damage and striking a lot of targets. There was one day this week where they launched 400 drones and missiles. You Crane's still standing and still hanging on. So again, it gets to the point of military activity is only part of the equation, not the whole thing. Yeah, you wrote that article for our Morning Shots newsletter, where people can sign up for it's totally free every morning. Yeah,

destruction alone does not win war, as you said, which is sort of blatantly true. We also, we have to talk about, you and I were talking about this a lot offline. This plan Trump had for imposing a 20% toll on the street of four moves. And like, what kind of insanity that is? I mean, like, what, are we going to have, like, are we going to have destroyers in the Strait of Hormuz, like, pulling over ships? You know, hey, you got to pay the toll of where you go through. Or, you know, what, if they don't pay, we're going to, we're going to sink them.

We're going to be sinking international shipping. Like, if it's a, you know, Dutch flagged ship going through the Strait of Hormuz and they don't pay the toll, we're going to fire a missile at them. Or like, what, they're going to have a running bill. Put it on my tab. I'll pay you like this is just, it's insanity. Yeah. Can I tell the backstory to that, Ben?

for all our listeners. So the great Sam Stein, who's our managing editor, as soon as the president announced that he was going to put a 20% tariff, Sam said, let's get hurtling and rampel on this to look at it from the military and the economic perspective. So truthfully, I don't know about Catherine. She's much smarter than I am. But I worked my ass off for about four hours writing what it looks like to do a mission analysis when you get that kind of an order as a military commander.

Before we could publish the piece, which I think would have been great, we ought to publish it anyway, the president changed his mind. Or reports are saying, and Caitlin Collins from CNN said this last night, that there was a massive chaos in the White House from his advisors when he announced that single-handedly. And there was a blowback from all of Middle-Earrow. Eastern allies as well as a couple of European allies saying, what in the heck are you doing? You can't do this. It is the equivalent of the invasion of Normandy during a time when budgets

would have spiraled out of control for what it would have cost us to do this. Yeah, it certainly would not have paid for itself, that's for sure. And, you know, the fact that you were scrambling in four hours to come up with like a rough outline of what it would take means that so were hundreds and hundreds of people in the Defense Department, the State Department, the, you know, probably the Commerce Department in the White House. Sent-Con planning staff, the Navy planning staff. They were all going through, as the military calls it, cheetah flips at that point. Yeah.

And then, you know, okay, we won't do it. That's fine. I have to say, I thought the, you know, the stupidest, the most entertaining part was when the Iranian foreign minister, Arachee tweeted at Trump. and he said, absolutely right, there should be a toll on the Strait of Hormuz, but we won't charge 20%. We're much more reasonable. Listen, there are some things the Iranians are bad at. One thing the Iranians are known for is haggling.

You don't want to get to haggling. And they're becoming known for trolling, too. They're doing a pretty good job of trolling. Oh, God, this whole thing is a mess. I'm so glad we can laugh about it because the alternative is just too bleak to contemplate. Speaking of which, our last topic before we maybe go grab a beer out of the fridge or something is you wrote this great article for us about an aspect of what's going on in the world that does not get enough attention. You asked the question watching the NATO summit in Ankara Turkey last week with Trump and Mark Ruta

and all the different NATO leaders. You asked the question, when the Chinese look at this, the Chinese military, the Chinese government, what do they see? And your answer was really interesting, not very hopeful, but really important. So why don't you walk us through how you thought about this? Yeah, what I talked about, Ben, was it started off by explaining what I would get every morning when I was still the commander of U.S. Army Europe. And it's what every senior commander gets. It's a black book. It's called a black book because it comes in a black minder, but it's all the intelligence from overnight. And it literally, list categories of things. Now, as a commander in Europe, the primary category I was getting information on was what Russia was doing and what the countries, the 49 countries in Europe were going on. And intelligence analysts would put that together. But in every single black book I always got, there was something, and this was in 2012 and 2013, there was always something

about China and how they were making inroads in Africa and in Eastern Europe and in Western Europe and in the Nordic region and some of the other countries. And they were doing it in a very nuanced and deliberate way. It was basically running under the radar. But the intelligence analyst that put this book together for me and others would say, hey, just so you know, this is also happening. And you've got to be wary of it. Well, that evolved into something that the world now knows as brick.

Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa, the four major nations of the BRICs. Now, this isn't equal to NATO. It certainly isn't a security alliance or something where they agree. And in fact, most of these countries disagree with each other. I mean, having India and China in the same organization in and of itself is interesting. But since about 2010, this organization has expanded as China has attempted to influence through business deals, visits, diplomacy, other countries. A lot of infrastructure projects, port projects, other countries throughout the world.

And taken each by themselves, they are not either military or even country-related issues. But it shows how, whereas Russia is very overt in what they're doing on the border of NATO, China was very covert in terms of its actions. And over the years they have seen, I think, when they watched the Ankara NATO conference a few weeks ago, they were reinforced by saying, hey, you know, the United States is giving up their alliances and pretty much either disrespecting or outright punishing

some of their allies both verbally and in documents and in actions. So it just leaves them open for us to influence more. And it's truly soft power at its finest. And in my view, I think they've made inroads within the last couple of years that they had not made before. They were always making inroads, but it was on. stair rides over the last couple of years. Yeah, I think it's absolutely clear that they look around and they say the United States with all of its allies in Europe and Asia is economically bigger and more stable and much more powerful

than we are. Diplomatically, they carry a lot more weight with third countries that are not in either camp than we do militarily. There's really no match for the American alliance system with the United States. States at its center. There's, you know, this is, this is not something we can go up against and take lightly. But just the United States, we are not as big an economy, but getting there and growing. And there, you know, our economy isn't doing exactly so hot recently.

Militarily, it's a much more even fight if it's just one-on-one, especially considering we have interests all around the world to defend and they have just their region, diplomatically. as the United States fractures its alliances, China has a lot more relative weight when there's not, you know, a united alliance system. So, you know, as they try to make China sort of the center of gravity of the world politically and diplomatically, the end of the American alliance system is doing their work for them. Yeah. Well, it gets to the point, and I didn't use this line in the piece. I almost did.

What China was doing early on was nibbling around the edges. Now they're taking big bites. and they're saying, you know, this is a pretty good long-term strategy because the value of alliances. I mean, I think it was Churchill that said there's only one thing worse than fighting with alliance. It's fighting without them. We have wagered and basically broken the trust that others have in us, many others, not all others. but we are being questioned. And it's not so much that we have lost all of our alliances, but we're being questioned.

That's the important point. And China sees that. And they're looking for the long. I mean, this is a country that's a couple of thousand years old going against a rookie that's 250 years old this year. Right? Yeah. All right. Well, that's a lovely and hopeful way to end this episode of Command Post.

General, so nice to have you with us in person. We'll do it next week again from our usual spots. And everyone, thanks for watching Command Post. Thanks for watching Bullwork Dakes. Subscribe, like the video. And to help support what we're doing and to get even more of what we do, go to the bulwark.com, become a Bullwork Plus member.