Bulwark Takes - U.S. Intel: Russia Behind Explosive at German Airport | Command Post

Episode Date: August 12, 2026

Ben Parker and Lt. Gen. Mark Hertling (Ret.) discuss an alleged Russian explosive drone at a German airport and the potential implications for NATO, President Trump’s use of a decoy Air Force One amid an Iranian threat, and George W. Bush’s secret 2003 Thanksgiving trip to Iraq. They also answer viewer questions about drone warfare, munitions production, and rebuilding the military after the Trump administration.Upgrade your everyday. Download the Quince app for app-exclusive offers, or go to https://Quince.com/BULWARKTAKES. Get free shipping on your order and 365-day returns. Now available in Canada and the UK, too.

Hi, I'm Ben Parker from the Bullwork. Welcome to Command Post, joined as always by our very own Lieutenant General, Mark Hartling, General. Good morning. Good morning, Ben. How are you doing? I like the way you say our very own Lieutenant General. It's like Bullwork is starting to create an army of people. We do have an army of people.

If you want to join that army, you can go to bulwark.com. Sorry, the Bullwork.com. Look at that. I'm a Allwork Plus member. We'd appreciate your support. We've got a lot to talk about today. First, you have an article that's up on the Bullwark this morning about this really underreported story about how

what seems like a Russian explosive drone almost blew up a Ukrainian jet at a German airport and it only didn't because a bus driver at the German airport kicked it out of the sky so we're going to talk about that first and how we

may have averted a major war then we got to talk about this story of Trump using a decoy Air Force One when he was coming back from overseas because they were used afraid that there's a threat that the Iranians were going to try to shoot down his plane. He's finally responded to that story.

And what he said is wild, of course. So we'll get to that. And at the end, I think we promised this a couple weeks ago, we're going to do a Q&A. Because you saw you also did some really great questions and we are excited to answer them. But let's start. You saw this story out of Leipzig in Germany about a bus driver who kicked a Russian explosive drone out of the sky. And you sort of teased that out and gave it an example. It gave the counterfactual of what could have happened if that guy had called in sick.

It's kind of scary. Yeah. It's interesting because when I saw the story, it wasn't receiving a whole lot of coverage, as you know, Ben, early on. It wasn't. It since has gotten a little bit more because of what the Germans are doing with it. But it reminded me, I immediately thought to myself, oh, my gosh, this is exactly the kind of thing I used to need when I was a trainer at our national training center to develop a scenario. What if this happens? We were kidding before about saying this was almost like a Clancy novel,

but that's how the military prepares wargaming. They take unique circumstances and then expand them into the what-ifs, and then they train their forces to counter what happened. So I thought this was a perfect what-if scenario for some kind of NATO war game, where it starts off as a very minor thing at an airport in Germany that not many people know about. And I talk about this in the article. The Leipzig Halle Airport is actually a military hub for transport airplanes.

And the plane that this drone was circling around before the Ninja Warrior bus driver kicked it was an A.N. 124, which is one of the biggest transport planes in the world built by the Anatov Aircraft Company, which was at one point in Ukraine. So all of these huge airplanes, bigger than our C-5 aircraft in the U.S. Air Force, are at this airport during transportation for NATO forces. They're rental aircrafts. You know, the U.S. uses them sometimes to take big cargo pieces.

So the point was this was a potential attack on a Ukrainian aircraft at a German airport knocked aside by a German bus driver at a military transportation hub. And the immediate assessment is who could have done this? And most likely it was the Russians. And sure enough, that's what's been determined now from the German intelligence service. So the what if is what if the bus driver hadn't kicked it aside, luckily, and it hadn't exploded? What if it had hit the aircraft?

burn the aircraft down, killed a bunch of Germans, wounded a bunch of other Germans. You now have a potential Article 5 issue for NATO where Germany could go to Brussels and say, we've just been attacked and our citizens have been killed by the Russians inside of German territory. Let's pause there for just a second. Because as you point out, so American intelligence has now, it's according to reports, determined this is a Russian drone. This is not the first Russian drone that has been seen. And the Germans have too.

And the Germans have as well. Yeah, thank you. This is not the first Russian drone that's been seen over Europe. And you talk in the article in detail about what Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty, the treaty that created NATO, actually says. And we tend to think of it as like this automatic mechanism. Someone's attacked where it war. It happens just like that.

But that's not really how it works. That's not how it works at all. You know, a country can go to NATO or other countries that see an attack like the NATO Alliance did when we were attacked on 9-11 and said, this is an attack against one, therefore it is an attack against all. But at that point, it turns into negotiations. Who's going to send forces to fight this attack? Who is going to be involved at the civilian government level? How many of the 32 nations now are going to join into countering this attack and going against the person or the government that did it? So it isn't automatic. And there have been many countries in the

passed. In fact, the 9-11 portrayal of the Article 5 adherents had everyone voting for it, but about five or six, as I recall, nations provided nothing. They said, hey, yeah, we support attack against one, is attack against all, but yeah, we're not going to give you any forces or do anything for you. So have fun, you guys. That's the part of Article 5 that a lot of people don't know. Yeah, that's really. interesting. So in this counterfactual, you say, Germany says, we have an attack, sponsored by a foreign government, killed a bunch of Germans. So we're going to Article 5. And then you have 31 other countries sitting there at the table and what happens? Well, and some may say, as I point out in the

article, some may say, yeah, we don't think this is enough to put our nation at risk. So we're not going to join in in terms of condemning Russia. Or you might have another country say, yes, this is a critical instance. And we've seen other countries in Europe already, excuse me, Poland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, all say they anticipate the Russians doing more to press NATO countries since the war in Ukraine started. In other words, entering another country's border. But when we talk about that, Ben, as you so rightly pointed out when we were editing this piece, you know, that doesn't necessarily mean a bunch of tanks, Russian tanks rolling across the border. It can be something like this in terms of a hybrid attack, a drone attack on an

airport, a cutting of a telecommunication cable, a cyber attack against banks in a country. Those are all hybrid attacks, which could certainly cause major effects in an enemy that Russia could do, but sometimes you don't really know who's doing it. And until they pointed out that this was a Russian drone with demolitions on board, you don't really know that it's a Russian drone. If it had exploded, could they have determined from the pieces that it was a Russian drone? We don't know. Yeah. You know, sometimes it's residue from the explosives, but if it burns with the airplane,

I don't know if that's really possible. So there's one last part of this article that I thought was super interesting that I wanted to talk about because one of the themes we have on this show is that the world is round. it's all connected to every other part. So you draw out, you have an ongoing war in Ukraine, and then you have this Article 5 crisis in NATO. You also have an ongoing war in Iran, and you have a very tense situation across the Strait of Taiwan.

So how do all these things sort of fit together in the scenario you spell out? Well, you talk about the intelligence agencies and perhaps the militaries of those different countries you just named coming together and saying, hey, we've been trying to defeat the United States for years. And they are currently in a precarious position. They are not supporting Ukraine as much as they should. They are deeply involved in a war in Iran. They have forces all over the world based to execute contingency plans like the defense of Taiwan,

essentially. So the three nation states, Russia, Iran, and China are somewhat compatico. They are partners. They are not allies per se, but they certainly share a lot of information. And you could see potentially, and this is where it gets into the Tom Clancy novel, the three nations talking each other and say, let's use these attacks to our advantage. And Iran says, hey, I've got a good idea. I'm going to have one of our proxy forces, as an example, the Houthis, attack another NATO ship.

So in the article, I piece together that they attack a French ship and French sailors are killed. So now you have German citizens, French sailors, Americans in the port, potentially China doing an exercise in the Taiwan straits that closes the sea routes. All of those things could come together at once and it could certainly stretch American defense and American intelligence. The other thing you pointed out was this is real news. This is not kind of factual. Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan have just signed a mutual defense agreement. Pakistan is, of course, a nuclear power. They have nuclear weapons.

So I guess that means that in a situation where Saudi Arabia felt like it was under threat or under attack from Iran, Turkey could be pulled into two possibly conflicting mutual defense arrangements. How do you involve nuclear powers? How does that happen? Well, Saudi Arabia and Turkey are now part of this. consortium. So the Houthis in Yemen, who have been fighting the Saudi Arabians for decades now, attack a French ship. NATO claims it's Article 5. Saudi Arabia says, hey, we need to get the

Houthis once and for all. So Turkey come and help us. Oh, by the way, Pakistan, you could set up some things too. And like you said, Pakistan is also a nuclear nation. So it could get pretty sporty real quick. That's how global war start right there. Yeah. That's what I thought was the real value of this piece, is that, you know, it's a little bit Tom Clancy-ish, but it's plausible. I mean, it is, it is not ridiculous to see a situation playing out like this, and it's very scary. Well, first of all, can I say, as my editor on this piece, for you to say it's not ridiculous is a great compliment to me. So thank you very much. Yeah. I mean, I mean, it's serious. No, as you said, it is the

kind of war game that people use to think, okay, what would we actually do if these things happen? Not like a, you know, sci-fi, you know, aliens to sit down Earth or something. I don't know. That might actually be helpful at this point. And the good news is when all this is happening, we have Donald Trump as president and Pete Hackseth as Secretary of Defense. And we have to play a short ad. But we will talk about them more when we come back on the other side. Message is sponsored by Quince.

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Get free shipping on your order in 365-day returns. now available in Canada and the UK 2. That's Q-U-I-N-C-E.com slash bulwartix. So we got to talk about this Air Force One story, just to summarize for those who missed it. When the president was flying back from the NATO summit last month in Ankara, Turkey, there was what was deemed to be a credible threat from the Iranians, that they were going to try to shoot down his airplane. So they had Trump get on the normal Air Force One jet,

the one that says, you notice it's America on the side, to make 747, and then secretly get into a catering truck that was pulled up next to the jet, that then drove to a different jet that he then rode on with Secretary of Defense Pete Heggseth, while most of the White House staff and the White House press corps and secretary's Rubio and Bessent all rode on the normal Air Force one, which I guess was still under threat of Iranian attack, kind of a bait-and-switch operation, pretty clever. you want to hear more about the details of this, our friends Michael Weiss and Mark Polymeropolis just recorded a bulwark take about that, so you can find that on this channel. I highly recommend

watching that. And just yesterday, someone finally asked President Trump about this decoy operation, and here's what he had to say. One still flew out a person with the press and with white alcohol officials on it. Well, this one went over to England where it was shown to the soldiers. No, I know, but this one went over to England because the soldiers wanted to see it. Right. And it stopped and they showed it to the soldiers and we did a switch over there. And it was really as for the military and I just have to do what they say. They go for safety and I have to do what they said.

Why was it too dangerous for you to fly on Air Force One but not too dangerous for the breath? I think actually the plane that I flew on was at greater risk. Why do you say that? Because that would be the plane, I think, that we, that we, that was at risk. that they would be more likely to go for it. Makes no sense. Makes no sense. He appears not to understand the concept of a decoy.

Right? Yeah. Yeah. Makes no sense. Is there anything else to say about this? There's so much to say about this, Ben. You know, it, first of all, if the Secret Service is going through this kind of drill to get the president to another.

aircraft using a airport catering truck that has the forklift that lists the thing up to the aircraft. He walks on and then walks into the container and then goes down to the truck and takes off to another airplane. Then that's pretty good planning, actually, by the Secret Service, I would say. But the background to it is what were the threats that they were receiving? And from what we're hearing so far, a New York Times report said this morning that they knew exactly what hotel rooms that all the cabinet members and the president were staying in and the hotel where they were staying. They knew exactly when the airplane was going to take off.

They had the potential or they had seen the Secret Service had either seen pictures or had informants of individuals with a shoulder-fired missile like a Sam 7 or Estrella or one of those techniques to hit an aircraft. And, you know, it's interesting, all of those things, when you get one piece of information in the Secret Service, because they get literally hundreds, if not thousands of threats against any president or officials on a daily basis. But when you start matching it up with a bunch of other things, then you say, hey, we've got a real threat here. We've got to take action. And they don't play games when there's at least a chance of a risk to their primary. So all of these things happening were pretty fascinating and kudos to the Secret Service and the intelligence community for finding them. But you also have to ask the question about a concept called the duty to warn. The fact that when you're a primary and you see other people under threat, you're going to make sure that they're not in the area too.

So if there was a threat against Air Force One and they had a credible knowledge of a crime, a team with an air defense weapon probably around the airport that could shoot at Air Force One. You know, the uninformed will say, hey, Air Force One has these capabilities like chaff and threads to throw out to protect them against incoming air defense virus. And all of that is true. But at the same time, there's still a danger to the aircraft. There are so many things that we could talk about. We could do a whole show on this as Michael Weiss and Mark Polymeropolis did yesterday.

But I watched that show, and there were even some more things that I had in terms of questions about what occurred. And the fact that the president says something like, hey, the plane I was on was the one that was really a threat. Not true. He was allegedly getting to a plane that didn't have the threat. And that's what the Secret Service actually put his point. part of their plan. So yeah. Yeah, that was the whole point. Also, he said something that I don't think is technically true. You probably know more about this than I do. But he said, you know, I got to, I got to, you know, do whatever the military says. I don't think that's true. And also, I don't think it was the

military. It was the secret service. And that's another thing I would say that piqued my interest is if the secret service comes up with this very unique plan of having them walk up the stairs, go into a cargo container, go down, go to another plane, you would think he would sometime during that conversation say something like, and why are we doing this? What do you want me to do? And what's the reason? Right. This is, you know, you're not going to get a guy like Trump to get into a cargo container just because you tell them to do it. I don't know. That's just me, but that's my supposition. Yeah, it's also just, I mean, it's more of what we've talked about, which is this, the administration's sort of knee-jerk reaction to just

whatever anyone questions anything they do to say, oh, military, oh, troops. The Secret Service does by law have to protect the president. So they my understanding is that if the president says, no, I don't know what you, what I don't

want to do what you want me to do. The Secret Service says we are bound by law. The law says we have to protect the president. And there's always for a lot of presidents, there's always a bit of attention there. The military, there is no one superior to Trump, right? Like, he gives them an order and says, I want to take this plane. I don't think that's an order they can countermand.

So it's, again, like, actually, it's a tiny thing. He said, oh, I got to do what the military says. But specifically, it's wrong. And it's wrong in a way that we've seen from this administration so much, which is just whenever they get criticized or you have no answer. They just throw up, ah, the military, all the troops. And help that ends the conversation. Well, I'll go one step further.

And I know this is getting into crazy town. But I would say a normal person might say if the Secret Service presented this plan to them and told them, we got to get you on another plane because there's a threat against Air Force One, the normal person might say, well, what about these other people who were on here? And what about my Secretary of State? The question is, did Marco Rubio know that there was a threat against the aircraft or a threat against the president's life? That's the key question. And you would think that a person with even just a smidgen of empathy would say, Hey, I've got a, you know, I don't know how many people they had on Air Force One for the flight, but I've got two dozen, three dozen, a hundred on this flight. What's going to happen to them? And imagine, Ben, if we want to play the what if game again, imagine if Air Force One had taken off with all those people and without the president.

And it had been shot down and crashed and X number of people died. And the president survives the amount of scrutiny that would be, wait a minute. You knew this was going to happen. You took another plane and left everybody, all these other people to die. I mean, that would have been the scandal of the millennium, in my view. Yeah, probably would have lasted all of 15 minutes. Sorry, I'm just cynical. You mentioned before we get to Arcuna, you mentioned you wanted to tell the story of President Bush visiting Iraq.

Yeah, you don't know this story. So I was in Iraq in Baghdad with the first Army Division in 2003 and 4. And on the morning of the 22nd November 2003, we were, by the way, our headquarters was at the biap, the Baghdad International Airport. We had taken over a terminal for our division headquarters. And we had troops, 30,000 troops all over the city of Baghdad. But on the morning of 22nd December, we were actually in a battle update briefing. And we heard an explosion after we heard an airplane take off because we were right near the runway. We heard an airplane take off.

We heard an explosion. We kind of all said, what was that? And then we started hearing airplane engine screaming back and forth. And there was this bizarre noise of an airplane, obviously fighting, having been hit. And in fact, a D-HL Airbus A-300 cargo plane who had been lifting off from Baghdad International on a routine flight with goods to Bahrain at a. about 8,000 feet, they were engaged with the surface-to-air missile, slammed into its left wing, knocked out all the hydraulic system. Three-man crew in this very large airplane had no conventional

means of controlling the airplane other than by measuring the two engines to get it back to the line. They brought it around and landed it at Baghdad International. And for the next couple months while we were in Baghdad, that airplane was parked on the tarmac. They closed down all flights, all non-military flights into the Baghdad airport and all three pilots survived or the crew survived, but the aircraft was damaged and it sat there for the rest of the time we were in Baghdad with a tarp over where the left wing had been damaged. Okay, that was on 22 November. Fast forward to Thanksgiving Day, five days later, 27 November, President Bush decides to come into Baghdad to have Thanksgiving dinner with the troops. He lands with Air Force One in Baghdad Airport

in the middle of the night five days after this airplane had been shot down. Air Force One does the corkscrew drill of landing as opposed to a, you know, when a plane comes in like this, you have to kind of corkscrew into an airport. You know, he had Thanksgiving and someone asked him, why did he do that and he said if the troops are going to you know have the suffering and the dangers that they have in bagdad i want to be with him for thanksgiving and there's pictures and i was there at the mess hall when he came in and started serving soldiers food from behind the counter something that good leaders do so that's kind of a different approach to danger in air force one interestingly enough though over the next couple of weeks a c5 aircraft

and a C-17 aircraft coming out of Baghdad in December were also shot down from that airport. So there was a cell of people with, you know, shoulder-fired missiles on the approach and on the runway out of the airport that were shooting at aircraft. Bush knew that. The last thing I did, when I did my book interview with Nicole Wallace of MS Now, the subject of the Baghdad Airport came in. And I said, yeah, I was there at the time. And she said, President Bush would not allow me to come with him on that trip, although I was the communication advisor because he wanted to take as few people as possible because it was dangerous. And I got to tell you, we did coordination with the Secret Service, the First Army Division did.

And I got to tell you, every single Secret Servant agent we talked to who said they did not want the president making this trip, but he did it anyway. A little bit different from the current situation, don't you? Yeah, a little bit different indeed. How much warning did they give you as the division commander that he was coming in? Was it like, get ready 20 minutes? No, I wasn't the division commander. I was the assistant division commander.

General Dempsey was the division commander. And there were four of us that knew in the division that he was coming in. And we had meetings with the Secret Service a couple of times to talk about how this was going to happen. They came in in the dead of nights, no lights on the aircraft, all the windows closed. so they didn't have inside lights showing out. But it was one of those kind of things that it was very well planned by the Secret Service. He got in at Thanksgiving dinner later in the day and then got out that night. I've always wondered a little bit what it's like being one of the Air Force One pilots

because those guys are very specially chosen. They are incredibly skilled. And mostly what they do is like fly in and out of big international airports and like, you know, pretty pretty quiet like Andrews Air Force Base with a nice long, flat runway. But it's times like this and I think, oh, that's why they choose the really good pilots for Air Force one. Oh, yeah. Because when you need them, you really need them. Yeah, it's interesting because most of them grow up in the transport world. They're flying C-5s or C-17s, but there's a few of the crew that are always fighter pilots, from what I've been told by the Air Force.

And, of course, the crew itself, the so-called flight attendants are all pretty well trained as well in terms of not just aircraft safety, but also very good cooks, although I've never been on Air Force. force one other than on a tour. So it's kind of interesting. That is cool. All right, we should get to this Q&A. I think we had to have to have three questions. And you also did some really good ones. Please keep sending them to command post at the bulwark.com. I also got to say, sorry, I forgot to write this down. But after we had that episode about how the military was reclassifying the fatalities as not being part of Operation Epic Fury. They were trying to sort of funge the numbers. Someone sent it. He was a former mortuary affairs specialist who had served in Iraq. I don't know if he was technically in Iraq.

He might have been in Kuwait. And he sent in a personal essay about what he had experienced just in the course of his job. I forgot to write down his name. And I think he's since taking the essay down. But if you're listening, I just want you to know that I read it, it was very moving. And it was just about the care that people are. the military go to when someone in uniform dies to make sure that their remains are respected and you know and sent home and as good quality as you know a good condition as possible

that all their affairs are collected and given to the next skin so if they add you know half a pack of cigarettes and a CD collection they find who to send those to just all the respect they had and how important they took anyway I just want to thank you something I get in okay you got you got to let me time to tell another story. Yeah, yeah, yeah, please. Before I was commander of U.S. Army Europe, my last, my second and last job was commanding all of basic training. And I used to go around not only basic training, but what the Army calls advanced individual training to meet soldiers that were going through their different specialties. And I was at Fort Lee, Virginia, one time, and I was having lunch with a group of recruits who were now in their advanced phases of training.

And I went around the table and I asked them what MOS, their occupation they were going to go into. And a couple of them were truck drivers, a couple of them were fuelers. And one woman, one young woman in the group said her MOS and she gave me the code for it. And I didn't know what the code meant. And I said, what is that? She says, I'm a mortuary affairs specialist. And she did not, and I hate to be sexist on this, but she did not look like someone who was going into mortuary affairs. So I asked her the question.

I said, why did you choose that as your MOS? her name was private Jennifer Prowl. I'll still remember that name. And she's out there somewhere today. But she said, well, sir, she said, I watched a movie called Taking Chance with Kevin Bacon. If anyone hasn't seen it, be careful watching it because it'll bring you to tears. And it's about bringing soldiers home from combat to their final resting place. And it's a great movie. Didn't receive a whole lot of kudos. Maybe Sunny Bunch can take a look at it and see what he says. But she says, and I thought that was the most honorable thing I could ever do. So she eventually went out in the Army, became a mortuary affairs specialist, and I got a call from her Sergeant Major one day because he knew I had talked to her at lunch. And he told me that as a young private,

she had volunteered to go to Haiti after the earthquake and exhumed bodies. And she was there leading as a private, leading a State Department team of mortuary affairs people, exhuming bodies. And she, as I understand it, assumed over 400 bodies during that crisis. This is a young 19-year-old private, Jennifer Prahl. I don't know where she is now.

She's out of the Army, I think. But I had some opportunities to connect with her as a young soldier. And yes, you're absolutely right. The care of these mortuary affairs assistance in the military take of killed soldiers is just incredible. It is. It is. All right. So now we turn to our first question from the sublime. to the very technical. Tina asks, after the last few years of watching the Russian-Ukrainian war,

why were slash are we so unprepared for drone warfare? Why didn't we learn from our allies on this topic? Well, we are learning from our allies, first of all. And I answer this question a lot. How can we don't have more drones? Well, as the Ukrainians found out, when they didn't have the big missile systems, they developed these. But I got to tell you, the military has been looking at drone warfare for a couple of decades at least. We used small drones in Baghdad in 2004, the same story. We had something called a Raven drone, which was just a handheld thing for intelligence collection.

And there was a thought that drone warfare was going to become ubiquitous. But you're measuring the development of drones, which we did in the big drones like the Reaper and some of the other ones that we used in combat, but nothing like the drone swarms with the quadcopters that we're seeing Ukraine use. It's now starting to pick up. And in fact, the military has a couple of organizations that's testing different types of drones to counter drone warfare, but also to conduct it.

But truthfully, you know, Ben, you know, the acquisition process in the Army is slow. And we are slow sometimes to adapt. But it's not because we don't want to. It's because there's other dynamics causing us to buy. other systems and we have a certain pot of money. We got a real feel for drone warfare for the first time in the Azerbaijan, Armenia, were in the late 2020s or late 2020, yeah, in 2020. And until then we didn't have a really good feel for it. Ukraine has adapted very well. We are now adapting, but Iran has been having these kind of missiles

and drone warfare capabilities for a very long time. And we thought we would have the capability to knock all those downs, but we're finding out very quickly we don't. And we just can't swap on a dime in terms of changing our approach to warfare. Totally. This came up in the comments of one of our previous episodes. If you're not in the comments, by the way, they're great. The people who listen to this show, watch the show are so smart.

And I love sharing reading recommendations and talking about these things. So definitely a great place to be if you're not in the comments already. This came up in the comments. And I pointed out, we were talking about how at the time that the German army

defeated France in the summer of 1940, using their Panzer divisions, which are armored divisions, or tank-led divisions, they had already conquered Czechoslovakia and Poland, and they defeated France in six. weeks, which they hadn't been able to do in four years of World War I, at that time,

there was not a single armored division in the U.S. Army. Your old unit, the first Army division was stood up later that fall. So it's like, yeah, like we learned. Here's an anniversary mug of the 50 years for freedom. And it shows how the first armored division started to be stood up in 20, in 1940. Yeah, and so it was after we saw what happened that we decided to stand up at Armored Division. And then, you know, luckily, over the course of World War I, sorry, World War II, we had the time to stand up a whole bunch more divisions before we got into combat. But there is a repeated pattern that adaptation and peace time is really hard.

And then when war comes, all the red tape gets cut through. You just hope you have enough time. But it also takes a lot of scar tissue. That first Armored Division, which I'm proud to have served in combat with for three different combat tours, was also the first tank division that went into combat in North Africa. And they suffered humiliating defeats at Cdibiz and LLM. Let's just say they suffered some very bad defeats. As you see – Were they at Cassarine?

They were at Casserine Pass. Yeah, Caterin Pass Cid Bizzid. And as you see in the opening scenes of Patton, all those tanks that were destroyed were American tanks. They didn't know how to use them very well until some really smart people came and adjusted the tactics and the operations. Second question is from a friend of the show Marcy. There was a discussion, and this actually gets something you've talked about last week with Andrew Eger when all was out. There was a discussion about our munitions supply being low. Can you talk about the production process?

Because my question is, why aren't we producing more or increasing the production rate? And Admiral Kirby mentioned this, too, how difficult that is. So just give a broad overview. What's the problem? Why don't we make more? Well, we've made our process of developing these systems are such that they complement other pieces of equipment. So a Tackham's missile or a Tomahawk would,

be part of a campaign plan also using naval gunfire, aircraft overhead. We wouldn't be using them singularly as missiles to attack targets. Now, you can do that for a while, but if you do it for a long time, like five months, they run out. And it's partly because of casualty rates. You can shoot a missile, a prism missile more than 300 miles. And when you do that, you don't have soldiers in direct contact with the enemy. So by shooting those precision weapons long distances, you save lives. That's not how we fight wars. We fight wars with a combination of ground forces, air forces, Navy forces,

and rocket forces, et cetera. To get to the point, I think, of the questioner, though, these missiles are extremely expensive and extremely difficult to produce. because they require a long supply chain of rocket motors, GPS, unique parts that are found in different countries. So I'll give you the perfect example. The THAAD missile, the air defense missile that we've been using to strike cruise missile targets coming out of Iran, $15 million per copy, $15 million per missile. the Patriot missile that everybody wants $3 million per missile.

And that doesn't include the unit that's around it, the launchers, the radar devices, the command and control headquarters. So we recently sold a Patriot Battalion to Poland. And I think it was over $3 billion for that one battalion that would only consist of about 100 people, but a whole lot of potential to fire missiles. if you have the $3 million missiles at your disposal. So when people are saying, oh, we've depleted our ammunition,

we haven't depleted all our ammunition. We've depleted some key ones. Tomahawks, Patriots, Thads, the Atacom missile, which travels about 300 kilometers, the PRISM missile, which travels more, it's the newer attack of missile. It travels longer distance than 300 miles. All of those things.

Things are upwards of a million dollars apiece, take a long time to build. It's sort of like a building a Lamborghini. It takes a long time on a production line. And truthfully, there's only one or two organizations that are building it. When the president also says that these defense contractors are building new headquarters and building new construction, they're not. I've checked the defense industries. There's no new construction facilities going up.

They're trying to increase the number of missiles by going 24-hour shifts, seven days a week. But it still takes a long time to build these missiles. We ran an article by Bryn Tannahill after Trump suggested, which he then later walked back, that he might allow the Ukrainians to build their own Patriot missiles. And just for that one weapon, the Patriot Missile Interceptor, Bryn gave some details. The components for that missile come from over 400 different companies around the world. Yeah. So even if you say, I want to be able to be.

to build more missiles, like they have to build more inputs. And some of those inputs are very materials that are very hard to get. There's also the issue of labor. Like I know this is a big deal in the shipbuilding world, like for people who, you know, the Navy's trying to make more submarines, but it's really hard right now to find welders who are skilled enough to make, for example, the parts that need to go into a nuclear reactor on a submarine. That has to be, a really, really perfect weld every time. And there's aren't enough welders in America, especially, you know, if you have a company

that can only hire American citizens, et cetera, et cetera. So, you know, it's not like in World War II where we can say, you know, here's how to operate a rivet gun and you're going to build a ship. These are high-skilled jobs now that we need people to do, even if we had the money, even if we had the materials, even if we had the supply chains. It's a very complicated problem.

Yeah, the supply chains and the technology involved is incredible. And you're right. It's not like the production lines you see the movies of during World War II where all these pieces of ammunition are flowing out. Those are dumb bombs. They're relatively easy to make, but these missiles are very different. Our last question is from Andrew.

Let's say we actually get a chance to pick up the pieces and start repairing our institutions after this administration. Is there anything we will be able to do for the countless senior officers, bearded soldiers, trans troops, et cetera, who have been cast aside under this version of the Department of Defense. Yeah, I would suggest there may be some that you could say, hey, would you like to come back? And there will be some that will say, yeah. But truthfully, Ben, I think most of them have probably gone off to do other jobs, found other employment. The ones that love it that are young

enough to come back might. But you're talking about policies that could be in place for up to two more years, two plus more years. I believe firmly that those are all going to be overturned when potentially a new administration comes in because it just doesn't comport with who we are as a military or as a government. You know, the respect and dignity applied toward all just isn't in some of these things. So it could all change with new policies, but the question then becomes is how do you seek a new generation or even some of the ones that left to join this operation? Now, Secretary HECSeth continues to proclaim recruitment is off the chart and they're getting all kinds of people. I'm skeptical about his numbers and the way that they're recruiting soldiers because from what I'm hearing from a lot of sources is morale is not a.

as good as it was just a few years ago in the military. I am shocked that you would suggest that any member of this administration would be misleading with numbers or any other kinds of facts. But I think on that bombshell, it's time to end. Thank you, General. I can't wait to do this again next week. But hope springs eternal, Ben. Hope is a method in some of these things, and we will rebuild.

Hope is not a strategy, but it's a good place to start. I know, exactly. Thanks, Ben. It's great being with you. Thanks, General.