Bulwark Takes - We’re Running Low on Munitions—Just Seven Weeks Into the War

Episode Date: April 22, 2026

Lt. Gen. Mark Hertling (Ret.) and Ben Parker are discussing the week's major military and foreign policy news.The Bulwark is going to Southern California! Go to https://thebulwark.com/events to learn more.

Hi, I'm Ben Parker from the Bullwork. And hi, I'm Mark Hurtling from the Bullwork as a contributor. And we are here with another episode of Command Post, and both Ben and I are extremely excited. We've got a lot of topics to cover, some sublime, some ridiculous, but we're also going to do a deep dive into my old dead uncle, Carl Von Klauswitz. We have two different books that we're going to talk about and bring you up to speed on some. wartime theory. What do we got, Ben? If you were in the comments for last week's episode of command post on the bulwark.com,

you saw that there was a suggestion for a Klausovitz book club. I don't know that we're going to commit to that because I read it all the way through once and I don't know that we want to do it again. But we did get our copies down from the shelves and we'll do a little bit of Klauswitz at the end here. But first we have to talk about the major news, which, Matt, if we are ready to pull up the clip, we can let the Secretary of Defense announced for himself.

New policy is simple. If you, an American warrior, entrusted to defend this nation, believe that the flu vaccine is in your best interest, then you are free to take it. You shouldn't. But we will not force you because your body, your faith,

and your convictions are not negotiable, your health. It's common sense. It's the kind of common sense approach we're undertaking in this department. Rest assured that under President Trump, The war department will always honor our brave warriors and do everything we can to restore the American people's trust in their military for generations to come. So service members, I guess, don't have to get the flu vaccine now. He introduced that by talking about how there was such an infringement on service members' freedom when the terrible, awful Biden administration made all the service members get the COVID vaccine.

But no more. We're putting freedom back in the force, stuff like that. General, you wrote about this. and morning shots today. You're an item all about your reaction immediately to seeing this news. Why don't you explain that for us? Well, there are so many things that are coming out of the Department of Defense right now that seem to be important enough to go on a podcast or a feed, a stream from the Secretary

of Defense. This one was one of them. He seems to really talk about many of the culture wars on these kind of themes. When I saw this one yesterday, All of them have been, in my view, dangerous. This one is not only dangerous for the force, but it also is certainly going to affect readiness. I'm stating that from my view as a former commander of large bodies of formations of troops. You know, I'm all for individual freedom, but when you're talking about a team sport, which

is the U.S. military, you also have to talk about social responsibility and you're, and you're reliance on not only responsibility toward each other, but an understanding of what the team concepts are all about. And, you know, I'd also suggest that the Secretary of Defense take a look at the environmental factors involved in this. You know, if you're an average citizen going to work every day, sure, it's up to you to decide whether or not you're going to get a flu vaccine. and if you get the flu, whether or not you even stay home from work, which most of co-workers would say you ought to do. And that's part of freedom and liberty, too, because you have a requirement to protect yourself from others who are ill or sick. In the case of the military,

you're talking about really a closed environment. You have soldiers living in barracks. You have tank crews, four-person tank crews, 200 sailors on a submarine that are, are in close contact and they can't stay home from work. But if you expand it even beyond that, you've got military installations that when soldiers or sailors or airmen are sick and they take it home to their families, their families are using things like child care centers and church services and all that. So, you know, I'm glad Secretary HECSEP is making a big deal about this, but where there's other religious liberties that are involved, and I'll give an example, he is currently conducting actions against Sikhs, Sikh soldiers, relatively few in the military,

but there are some that are allowed to wear beards and turbans. It was an exception for religious matters. I'm wondering if they're going to get the same kind of respect in terms of these individual liberties versus team play that he's talking about for others. to be honest with you, Ben, this is a dangerous, an extremely dangerous policy saying, hey, you can decide whether or not you get vaccines. The military has a long history of understanding what preventive maintenance and health within a formation means from a readiness perspective.

And I think he's going to see very quickly that allowing individual soldiers to make their own decisions on whether or not to get a vaccination for something like, the flu is going to affect other things like, oh, perhaps anthrax vaccines when you go into combat or malaria vaccines when you go into those kind of areas that might have malaria. All of these things, I don't think, have been considered by the sec depth. Yeah, no. I mean, my friends who are in the service have gotten all sorts of shots for various things because, and I'm sure you did too, right?

When they were sending you to fight Saddam Hussein's army, they were worried that he would use anthrax weapons, right? So I'm sure they made you get the antaracts vaccine. But you used a word there right at the very beginning that I think it's worth explaining a little bit because this is really the whole point of your piece. Could you explain when people hear the word readiness, what that means and how this flu shot policy impacts military readiness? Well, when you're talking about readiness on a weekly, monthly, yearly basis, a unit commander is responsible for posting his readiness figures. What that means is how is your organization, your command under your charge, prepared to fight? And it's evaluated in all sorts of things.

And what I'd suggest, I'll talk a little bit about being a tanker. So if I were a tank company commander with 15 or 14 tanks in my particular company, I would have to say, how ready are each one of my crews on things such as gunnery skills, maneuver skills, the basic warrior task and battle drills, which are individual skills that crews have to perform, whether or not they've gone through a gunnery skills test before they fire tank gunnery. So you can say, hey, Alpha-1-1, which designates a tank in a company, is prepared for combat because they've qualified on a range and all their crew members are sufficient. When you start losing crew members to disease or anything else for that matter, they get kicked out of the service for disciplinary action, the requirement for the crew to meet those readiness standards deteriorates.

So you no longer have Alpha 1-1 as a qualified crew. And as a commander, you have to say which crews are qualified on certain skills. That kind of training goes on all year long. The same is true for air crews, for ship crews, for Coast Guard crews, for Marine units. So commanders are really intense, not only on status of equipment, like does your tank run, does it need a new engine or a new transmission? You also are very concerned about the individual training of each crew member to contribute to that unit readiness. Yeah, I would highly recommend that people go read your article in Morning Shots today. all about this.

You know, it's, it's, one of the things you point out is that, you know, for units that are in training, if you have people missing days of work, and maybe that means going to the infirmary at the base, maybe that means just staying at home in the barracks where they're going to get everyone else sick, as you pointed out. If they have, if you have people missing days because they're sick, that means they're not getting trained as much, which means that if they are deployed somewhere, if they're called into action, they don't have that extra day of training, right? Which is a disadvantage.

And maybe they're not as ready to fight. readiness is lower. And if you're talking about units that are in combat or units are deployed, the possible consequences can be even worse. Let me give you a vignette to drive it home to our listeners. One of the jobs I had as a general officer was commanding all of basic training. What we found in terms of the fitness level of new recruits, individuals that came out of the civilian sector, was their dental care was not all that good. So we spent a lot of time fixing new recruits teeth. And the reason for that is, as soon as they finish with basic training, they go to their unit and they could potentially go to combat. Well, you don't want a guy in

combat who's having all kinds of tooth pains, you know, root canals or cavities that are driving them crazy, him or her crazy. So we fix them in basic training. And dental readiness, going back to the word we used a minute ago, is something also that commanders, believe it or not, pay attention. to because they don't want a soldier in combat having tooth issues. Well, you know, when we were putting them during that 10-week-long basic training to have multiple doctor's appointments to get their teeth fixed, it tended to delay their graduation from basic training until they could get the mandatory training, which is squeezed into that 10 weeks in. We saw some soldiers who would enter basic and because they had delayed in their civilian sector getting their teeth fixed,

that they would have to go through one cycle and perhaps two cycles of basic training just to get the mandatory training of a soldier in before they graduated from basic. So that's just a bizarre vignette on the kinds of many things that a commander has to consider when wondering about the readiness of their troops. And here's the important part. There aren't a whole lot of Secretary of Defense's who have been commanders in the Army or in any service, but when they're not, they tend to listen to those who are in charge and say, here's what's right for our troops. I think Secretary HECSeth did serve time in the military and some time in the National Guard.

He was never a commander. So he never had to worry about these kind of things. And yet he's making what I would call rash decisions in terms of these kinds of. kind of issues to please the base who are parts of the anti-vax movement. Hard to disagree with that. Now, the old saying says that amateurs talk about strategy, professionals talk about logistics. I think we really embody that here because I'm the amateur talking about strategy and

you're going to be the professional talking about logistics. So we wanted to move on because you and I were talking about a couple different things we saw that we put next to each other and went, oh, wow, that's scary. One was, Matt, if we can bring up the tweet from the defense reporter. This is a list of munitions CNN reported that we are running low on because of the war in Iran, because we've been using so many of these high importance but scarce munitions. For people who are listening or can't see that, I'll just read 50% of our thad missile interceptors, 50% of our Patriot air defense interceptors, 45% of our precision strike missiles, 30% of our

Tomahawk missiles, 20% of our joint air to surface standoff missiles, it's the Jasm, I believe, and 20% of our standard missiles, 3 and 6, those are air defense missiles fired from Navy ships. So it's a lot of interceptor missiles, it's a lot of precision strike missiles. That is according to an estimate reported by CNN. And then I also just wanted to read this, Matt, if we can pull up the next thing. the commander of U.S. Indo-Pacific command, the guy who would be in charge if there were a war between China and Taiwan of the American response, was testified before Congress yesterday in an open hearing. And he specified certain munitions where he said, basically, we got to get our act together and start making more of these. Tell me if these names sound familiar.

He included heavyweight torpedoes, the joint air-to-surface standoff missile extended range, the Jass M.E.R., long-range anti-ship missiles, maritime strike Tomahawk missiles, the precision strike missile. and standard missiles three and six. A bunch of those are the same ones that CNN reported. We have used a fifth or up to half on the war in Iran so far. And this guy's looking at possibly what to do about a war with China over Taiwan. And in the public hearing, he's saying, we need to reinvigorate the defense industrial base. General, I want to ask you what your sense of this is. But also, I know you've testified before Congress before you did when you were in uniform.

If he's saying that in public, we can re-divigorate the defense industrialists or making more of these weapons, what do you think the message is when they go to the closed-door hearing? And he says, here's what's really going on. Yeah. Well, Ben, I'm going to use the word again, the R word again. This is strategic readiness. You know, I was talking about that company commander who's worried about dental work and crew qualifications on a tank. This is a commander, a combatant commander of Indo-Pacific Command.

which, by the way, is one of five combatant commanders that surround the world. And he has the largest area of operations. So China, Taiwan is just one part of Indo-Pacific command. And he's basically saying, from my requirements on all my contingency plans, I'm worried because there are so many pieces of equipment being used in this Iranian strike. and it seems like people aren't noticing, but I may be short if you ever asked me to go to war. And so if he's asked sometime to go in and protect the straits between China and Taiwan, there's going to be a red flag that goes up that he says, I'm not sure I can do this,

because my war plans are now affected, my contingency plans. When I was the J7 on the joint staff back in the early 2000s, this was one of my jobs. to compare and contrast different contingency plans when we were considering going into Iraq and Afghanistan, and we were already in Afghanistan, to say, how is it going to affect our plans against North Korea if they rise up or in Venezuela or if the Panama Canal is blocked or, you know, you can see so on and so on and so on. And there's a whole bunch of contingency plans. So there are staff officers in the Pentagon who are trying to determine, are we running low on things? And this This is something, Ben, that you and I have talked about months ago, that it seemed like

we were using a lot. Now, the supporters of the current administration will say, well, maybe we shouldn't have given as much as we gave to Ukraine. That's a whole different stockpile. That's a foreign military sales stockpile, and it's specifically for foreign military sales. What we're talking about is our wartime contingency resource logistics. And when you start seeing numbers like the CNN reporter had, and when you start hearing combatant commanders say, I'm not sure I can do my mission because the global stocks are being depleted,

it's time to raise a flag. Yeah, I think the excuse about, well, we shouldn't have given so much to Ukraine. It's silly for a number of reasons. One, a lot of those munitions that, that, that, you know, that, you know, that, you know, The CNN report included and that the Indo-Pacom commander talked about are not ones that we've given Ukraine. I want to double-check this, but I think only Patriot interceptors from that list are things we've given Ukraine. I don't think we've given any of the others to them. So have we got, I don't think we've given them that's.

I could be wrong about that. I'm not sure. There was a period of time where they were considering it and pulling some of the thad missile launchers, which is also an anti-aird, it's an air defense missile missile. ballistic missiles and other incoming rounds and aircraft. And there were some experimental units in the Pacific region in Japan and in South Korea. And I think some of them were being considered to move. I'm not sure if that ever happened. Yeah, I think that's right.

But most of these things that we're now running low on have nothing to do with Ukraine. And number two, you're in charge now, right? Like, yes, okay, maybe you disagreed with the policy before. but when this administration was in power, they had total access to all the information the Defense Department had and what weapons we had and what we didn't and all the war plans and everything. And they made their decisions.

And so to say, oh, well, we made this decision ignoring everything that had happened the previous four years, like take some responsibility. You're in charge now. You made these decisions, right? You can't blame it all because we gave so much of it to Ukraine. That's silly. It already happened.

It's a fact. You can't undo it. Well, my concern is. is you started off by saying amateurs talk tactics and professionals talk logistics. I'm sorry, yeah. Yeah, well, basically that's it. Well, we haven't seen a whole lot of talking of tactics or strategies in this effort against Iran, and we certainly haven't seen a whole lot of discussion of logistics,

or we seem to be hand-waving it. And as a former military guy, that concerns me because I can see the implications of it. Right. And, you know, we can, I'm just getting back to the Indo-Pacom commander again, he doesn't just have to worry, as you said, about a possible China-Taiwan contingency. He's also got to worry about a North Korea, South Korea contingency. What if the North attacks South Korea? We have a bunch of American forces in Korea prepared for exactly that kind of battle. The Korean War is technically not ended.

It's just in a long-term ceasefire. And if the North Koreans decide to invade one day, actually probably won't, but you never know. They decide to start lobbying missiles at South Korea. That's one place we had these THAAD, these terminal high altitude air defense. I got some part of that wrong. Interceptors was for North Korean missiles. And the report was, yes, we've now moved some of those THAAD batteries from South Korea to the Middle East to deal with Iran, which means that South Korea is a little bit less protected now. So if I were the end of Pavecom commander, in public, I would be saying, this is an opportunity to reinvigorate a defense industrial base and create jobs for Americans.

In private, I'd be saying, you've given me a mission and not the means to accomplish it. I just, like, I don't know how I'm supposed to defend against these missiles without missile defense. Yeah, these kind of things, Ben, are called HDLD, high demand, low density pieces of equipment. And there's a whole lot more than just thad missiles. There's also unmanned aerial platforms, satellites for intelligence collection. I mean, I could go down a list without threatening our national security and say, we have a whole bunch of HD-L-D requirements through the various combatant commanders. And it seems when we talk about going into Venezuela, we've shifted a lot of forces there

and a lot of HD-LD equipment there. We also have done the same thing with Iran. And usually what you have is the calculators. is the calculation by people on the joint staff is how is this going to affect other theaters. You're now seeing a combatant commander testifying before Congress saying, I'm worried. That's not a good thing. That's something that should be going through the Secretary of Defense first. But it just seems like the Secretary of Defense is more worried about giving people freedom from influenza vaccines. Yeah, the freedom to get sick.

This brings us to another aspect of logistics. You mentioned the Venezuela, operation. We saw a huge naval buildup there for something like weeks, months. I forget what it was before that operation. And then we saw a month of naval buildup immediately after that before we attacked Iran on February 28th. So people, when they think about combat, tend to think about the kind of combat you were in ground combat. They don't tend to think of as much about the sailors on ships and submarines, about the pilots and the ground crews that keep the Air Force flying. But some the reports we've seen of what these repeat deployments, first to Venezuela, then to Iran, staying in Iran much longer than anticipated. We're starting to see reports of what that's,

of the effects that's having on some of the naval logistics. Matt, if we can pull up those pictures, these are from social media. These are allegedly pictures that sailors took on board the U.S. as Abraham Lincoln. If you're just listening, I'll try to describe it. It's a meal tray that you'd get in a cafeteria. Most of it is empty. And what is on it is a little bit of gray or brownish meat, a single tortilla, maybe some carrots. It looks like it totals, I'm rough guessing here, maybe 400 calories, which means if you're getting three of those a day, you're getting not enough food by a long shot. And I also, it looks, I'm not sure it looks safe to eat. Maybe it's delicious. I don't know. And I don't think these have been confirmed

by the Navy that these are true and actual photos. But, um, General, I mean, when you were a commander, how much of your time did you spend thinking about logistics and supply? And if you saw this kind of thing happening in, and say the First Armored Division, what would you have thought? Yeah, well, first of all, I can attest to the fact that those are definitely Navy cafeteria trays, because I've been on both an aircraft carrier and a submarine. And what I will also say is the cooks on board naval vessels are extremely good because they, produce some very good meals because truthfully, you're on a cruise, but it ain't the kind of cruise that you want to go on at times, you know, and the meals seem repetitive and you're out there for a very long time, anywhere from six months to nine months at a time, and you get as much food as you

can in different ships because the crew is operating continuously in a 24-hour or seven-day-a-week cycle. There's no off days. So, you know, the cooks are really busy on these ships and they're excellent in terms of what they do. But these are supplied by other ships. Supply ships bring the food to the aircraft carriers and the destroyers and the cruisers and the submarines. And when you're in a combat area, those supply ships have to get the food from somewhere because they start their deployment, you know, usually anticipating six to nine months at sea. So there is certainly on board supplies that they will train. transfer to the other vessels.

But if they stay longer, they have to get them from some kinds of ports. There's not a whole lot of ports in the areas where they can get them from in some of these combat situations. So supply chains are reduced. And their effects are not just food, but also petroleum products, weapons, ammunition for weapons. And those are that take priorities when you're talking about steaming in a combat zone. I don't know if those pictures accurately portray what's going on in the ships. I suspect they're closer to the truth than not.

But again, I've been in a situation like this, Ben, in ground combat. In 2003 and four, when the Sotter uprising occurred in Iraq, all of our supply chains from Baghdad to the south to the ports where we were getting our food, our water, our petroleum, our ammunition were all blocked because it was running through a Shia area where Mr. Sada, Mukta Der Satter, had told his forces to interdict our supplies. So they were strangling us. So for a while, we were very concerned. About a month, we were very concerned about even having water and MREs. I understand what's going on in these ships, I think, to a degree, because they have a couple of supply ships, not the ships that shoot the missiles or launch the aircraft,

but ones that are only worried about getting logistics to the warfighters. And they have a tough mission. So I'm concerned they're probably very constrained right now, especially in a couple of the carrier strike groups that have been, have taken out what was supposed to be a nine-month deployment. They're now well over a year. And they haven't returned to a whole lot of ports and they haven't had a whole bunch of port calls. So it's not only affecting the sailors on board,

I would suspect it's also affecting the maintenance and the readiness, again, using that word of the ship itself. Yeah, Napoleon said an army marches on its stomach. I assume a Navy also sails on its stomach. And in your book, which I think maybe it's definitely on the shelf behind me. I don't know if you can see it from this angle. Yeah, that's right. There. Oh, great.

Yeah, there you go. It's on the shelf behind you too. That's even better. In your book, you have a great chapter that is basically all. all about food and the old rations that you had at the beginning of your time in the army. But it's really about where morale comes from. And that's what I was thinking of when I saw these pictures. If you could talk a little bit about what it means to feed the troops well. Yeah, there's a couple factors that really either drive up or drive down morale. Number one is the

food. You've got to produce good food. And as a military, we produce, our cooks produce some of the best food in the world for any militaries. And I've experienced quite a few of them in some of my jobs. The second thing is contact with families. In the old days, it was letters, and you're always waiting on mail call. Today, it's computer contact, cell phone contact. Those pictures probably came off of a Facebook page from some sailor, you know, writing home on Facebook or Twitter or whatever to his or her spouse and saying, here's what is going on and here's what we're eating. Now, sometimes those are elaborate photos to make people feel sorry for you, but the connection between families is also critical. And the third thing, truthfully, is what's the

mission? What are we doing out here? I mean, I can imagine there's a whole bunch of people in the military who are prepared to do whatever they're asked to do, but at the same time, there's a lot of WTS going around. What are we doing and how long are we going to be here? Again, an experience I had in 2004, we were all getting ready to come home. And in fact, we had already deployed about a third of a 20,000 division task force, home back to home station when the Secretary of Defense extended the first armored division in Iraq. We were the first unit to be extended. So we had already been there 12 months and we got a message saying because of the solder uprising, you're going to stay there longer. And we didn't know how long. I got to tell you,

that was a morale factor. How do you talk soldiers who were thinking they were about to be going home into staying a little bit longer? But more importantly, what do you say to the family members? And there's a great story. General Dempsey, who was our division commander, grabbed me and said, hey, I'm sending you back to Germany to go to all the bases in Germany for three days and tell them what the heck we're doing here because the families are pissed. And that's what I did for three days. And I got to tell you that I didn't not get a whole lot of warm receptions at each base I went to. There were a whole lot of upset spouses and children. And in fact, in one case, we tell this story, there was one aviation battalion commander who had already arrived home. He had greeted his wife. They were given big hugs. Someone took a

picture of it. It was in the Monday morning paper in Germany, the Stars and Stripes. And before that paper came out, he was back in Iraq, as we called him and his unit back. You can imagine what what that does for morale. These sailors and these forces have been there for a very long time. Yeah, I can only imagine the downstream effects on things like recruitment, right? If the morale and the force isn't good, is that the kind of thing that you want to join and think that, you know, you're making a difference in the world? I remember when I was younger, the Navy's recruiting slogan was the U.S. Navy, a global force

for good. They were trying to get people to join up by saying, you know, basically see the world and do good things And now, I don't know, that's probably maybe a tougher sell. But, okay, before we run out of time here, we have to get to our friend Carl. Okay. So for those of you who don't know, there are very few people who have written really successful works of sort of military philosophy or philosophy of war. One of them, the most ancient, was Sunsson, Master's Son, in China.

I don't even know how many thousands of years ago who wrote in a sort of more aphoristic like little sort of pithy or clever quips that clever is not the right word they're deep they're insightful quips about war and then in the 19th century a Prussian German officer named Carl von Klausovitz

wrote a very thick, dense, classically sort of German treatise on war which if you can make your way through it, is very rewarding for understanding how war works in a sort of theoretical, sociological, philosophical kind of way. And that's why all the nerds who actually read Klausvitz end up quoting him for the rest of their lives.

And you just. And yes, we are one of those, and we are two of those nerds, right? Absolutely. 100%. And this came up in the comments section. If you're a Bulwark Plus member, you can go to the bulwark.com and you can get in the comments and talk about Klausivitz and other things. with us after we post these videos.

But you wrote a piece for the bulwark about how Will wins wars. And that's a very Klausovitsi an argument that it's not just about all the things we've been talking about, the bean counting and the who has supplies and where and how do they move and all that. It's also about the force of will and who, as the coaches always say, right, who wants it more? What made you think about that point looking at the world recently? And then maybe we can go through some of what Klausovitz says and apply it to the present

day. Yeah, well, it's a, yeah, first of all, if I can, if I can add to your comments, so Ben, during the School of Advanced Military Studies, a one year course I did when I was a major, we studied all theoreticians. So it wasn't just Sonsa and Clausewitz. It was also Jolmeni and Duhay for Air and Mahan for Naval. And I mean, there are literally hundreds of these guys. But Clausewood seems to be the one, it sort of is like the Bible, if you will. I mean, People keep coming back to this. And unfortunately, just like the Bible, they cherry-pick things if they really don't understand how this goes through. But within on war, his treaties, he says a lot of things about a lot of things.

You know, politics is war by or war is politics by other means. He talks about fog and friction and chance. But one of the things he talks about is the combination of resources and will. that create power in conflict. And he talks about how they level each other off, and units should really take a look at one of the two of them or both of them combined in terms of how powerful you might be on the battlefield and with your politics.

So there's an equation that bounces around the military that simplifies clauseweds. in the equation of p equals w times r, and its power equals will times resources. And that just struck me as I was looking at some of the things in this current conflict in Iran, because it relates to so many other conflicts. And I was on the battlefield of Gettysburg doing a staff ride a few weeks ago, and that equation came up. I was having a conversation with a Vietnam vet, and that conversation came up.

because it was really an issue of how one side or the other influences will or resources to win a fight. And both of them are as important. But the thing is, if you go in with a whole lot of will and you really want to beat somebody up on the battlefield and you don't have the resources to do it, you're going to lose. If you go in with the best army in the world or the best military in the world, and you don't have the will of not only the soldiers, but also the politicians and the citizenry to support you, which is what Clausewitz calls the Golden Triangle, you're going to lose too. So you've got to have both of them in some measure and means compared to what the enemy is doing.

And we can take any war that's going on today or anyone that's gone through history, and you can see those two factors being the determinant of success or failure. Yeah, so let's do that because you do a little bit of this in the piece you're up for the bulwark. One great example, Russia, Ukraine, right? Russia, Ukraine. Fourth largest army in the world, Russia attacks a small little country. Unfortunately, that small little country has a lot of will internally. Unfortunately for the Russians.

Yeah. Yeah, unfortunately for the Russians, that small little country of Ukraine has a lot of will internally because they have a president that people support. They have a citizenry that wants their freedom and liberty and their territorial and sovereignty. And I'll add to that, that small little country has the will of a lot of allies who are also providing the resources that that small little country didn't have at the beginning. So that both of those factors come in when the NATO forces said, we're going to supply Ukraine with the means to fight to defend against this onslaught from this criminal. nation that's committing crimes against their society. So that's an example and a good one. Yeah, and I think on the other side, you can start to see some indications, and you

reference this piece we had on the bulwark from Brent Tannahill, as a military and foreign policy analyst, pointing some indications that the will in Russia is diminishing. They are now losing more people than they're recruiting for the first time. The amounts they're having to pay to get people to sign up are just absolutely ballooning to the point that they can't really raise them anymore. And some of the people they're sending into combat are people who have already come back with terrible wounds. They're multiple amputees.

Or they're people who are not really able-bodied and able to walk on their own. They're sending these people into combat. So it's not like the will of the Russian population to see this thing through to victory is anywhere close to what it appears to be in Ukraine, where yes, they have a manpower issue, but people are focused on winning.

So you can see the importance of will, even a much larger country, against a much smaller country, just the size of your population or the size of your GDP doesn't necessarily matter as much as what's in people's hearts and minds. Yep, exactly.

Okay, so another example of, well, before we move on to our other example, it's going to be the United States and Iran, because you talked about that too. I'd just say that, you know, think about any fight. The question is always, how do you get the other side to stop fighting? This is actually something our friend Carl von Klausovitz talks about in chapter one.

He says the goal of wars to throw your opponent like a wrestling match, right? But if you think about getting into a physical fist fight with someone, right? How do you get them to stop fighting? In some cases, they might just want to keep fighting, right? And so it's a, you know, we think about winning militarily. is applying more bombs and more destructive power. But it's a much more difficult question to think, like, how do you actually get someone to stop fighting you?

And if they want to, they can keep fighting you forever. Like the Taliban did with us, like the Vietnamese did with us. Like we did with the British Empire back in the day, if we just want to keep fighting, we'll keep fighting, right? I mean, so this seems to be getting back to the United States and Iran. Sort of the Iranian strategy, too, is you can keep bombing us. You can keep your blockade or whatever. We're just not going to give up what we don't want to give up because we think that we will outwill you.

We think our institutions are what we want for our nation. Our institutions of the Ayatollahs, the IRGC, the population being repressed, that's what Iran believes in. We believe, well, we've got the best army in the world, so we're going to make you give up. And as we've seen from the will versus resources implications, that isn't always the case. And besides, what you also have in terms of the will of a nation, it doesn't just include their military force. It is their citizenry. It is their systems. And it is their economics and their information and their diplomacy.

So when those things aren't considered in a whole of government approach in combat, you're putting your yourself at a disadvantage. But I'll add one more thing to that, Ben, and this is where it becomes critical. Iran doesn't have a whole lot of allies except for Russia and China. We used to have a whole lot of allies, and right now, in this fight, we don't have any. And as much as the president can bluster about not needing allies, as I've said before on this command post show, yes, you do. You need allies to give you the kinds of things that are not only the resources but also the will that's encased in support for your operation and right now we don't seem to have that yeah when we uh i forget exactly the numbers but in um the first goal for that you served in there was a very large dozens

of countries participated in some way right um in uh in our war in afghanistan that eventually was the The ISAF operation was taken over by NATO. So it was a few dozen countries helping out with that operation. The number of countries that at some point or another contributed to the war in Iraq, I think, is 40 or north of 40 somewhere. It was north of 40. These big coalitions, including Ukraine and Georgia and some others, these big coalitions contributing to these wars. We attacked Iran with Israel. And we didn't tell any more.

Yeah, no, that was it. Not anymore? We apparently maybe told our NATO allies, who are, by the way, the ones who are, by the way, the ones who actually, you know, like need Middle Eastern oil more than we do. Like just before the bomb started dropping, we gave them very little notice. We didn't give them an opportunity to participate. So why would they support us? Why would they add their will to ours?

And as for our Gulf allies and partners, like the UAE and Jordan and Saudi Arabia, they're, I mean, correct me if you disagree, but it looks to me like they're thinking, we're going to squeeze every drop of use we can out of the. Americans right now while they're pummeling Iran. And then we are looking elsewhere because their missile defense didn't work that well for us. And the way it looks to us is they prioritize defending their bases over defending our populations. And now they're not even getting rid of the the theocracy in Iran. We're going to have to live with them for a long time. So it doesn't even do us any good to be allied with the United States against Iran. We're going to have to make our peace with

the new leaders in Tehran. Yeah. What's interesting. I'll comment on one thing that struck me when it occurred in the early days of the war when Iran sent a missile and some drones at a hotel in UAE. And everybody's like, oh my gosh, they're attacking, you know, a civilian infrastructure. No, they're doing the same thing that Russia did in Ukraine is they're spreading out the air defenses because you can't defend everywhere. And pretty soon, the leadership of the UAE is going to go to the president of the United States and say, hey, dude, you know, what's going on here? Our hotels are getting bombed. How about a little bit more air defense? And you can't provide the defenses to everywhere. So you have to make some tough decisions.

This brings us back to a point, though, Ben, where we're talking about an administration that right now doesn't have a national security advisor or a national security council that's supposed to think long term about those elements of strategy, the what if drills, what happens when this happens or what happens if this occurs. And there's been millions of analysts on TV who have all said, and I'll reinforce this, that the war game with Iran has been going on for decades. And the first thing happens is that the straight of Hormuz is closed. I mean, it was going to happen.

It did happen. And yet we have a president said, ooh, I didn't know that was going to happen. That surprised everyone. Well, is that because there's unilateral decision making? Or is it because you're just not smart enough to have people around you that are going to look at what has been built within the defense establishment and some of the red teaming and war gaming that we've done? Yeah, our current national security advisor is Marco Rubio, who is also Secretary of State, who has also archivist in the United States, who for a while was also running USAID. But here I think it was also the envoy to.

Russia and all the other places with a couple of real estate advisors. Yeah, with Steve Woodcock. Here's the other point that I guess is a bonus for people who listen this far into the show. It's been reported that the way the administration actually works is that there's not a person doing the job of the National Security Advisor and a person doing the job of the Secretary of the State and a person doing the job of Secretary of Defense. It's that actually these people sort of divided up the world to different roles. And so, like Marco Rubio is in charge of policy for the America.

and Pete Hegseth is in charge of the war in Iran, and someone else, maybe Steve Wittkoff is in charge of Russia, Ukraine, that's not exactly clear. And weirdly, that is kind of also how Putin's government works. You have people who are very personally close in a lot of cases to the president, and they have these titles like Minister of Defense or Chairman of the National Security Council or foreign minister or whatever, head of the security service. But actually, they're just responsible for like different pieces of the world. And it doesn't really work well for them. It is one of the reasons that their invasion of Ukraine went so badly is that they didn't have the foreign ministry and the military and the intelligence services all talking to and the economic advisors all talking together about Ukraine.

It was just the basically the spies and the FSB who were in charge of Ukraine. And they said, we can do it. Easy. No problem. and they didn't talk to anyone else. And so look what happened. So I'm afraid that we're going down that same kind of road where Marco Rubio says,

okay, I'm focused entirely in Venezuela and Cuba and I'm not going to think about what our allies need to be told before we attack Iran. And Pete Heckseth is thinking, I really want to attack Iran and I'm not going to worry about what's going on in the Pacific because that's someone else's problem. Right. Yeah. And that's where we see the logistics starting to fall apart as well.

So all of these things are combining to make some really, dangerous times. There is not a, the decision making seems to be more episodic and ad hoc. And when you have that instead of a long-term strategy, and again, we've talked about this, the national security strategy,

if anyone were to read that right now, they would just be amazed because there's no discussion at all about either Iran or even Venezuela in that. So I haven't seen the classified version of it, but if there's something about Iran or going into decapitated government alongside Israel, it's not in there that I saw. Yeah, there definitely wasn't anything in there about starting a new war in the Middle East, that's for sure. I know we wanted to get into talking more about China and Taiwan, but I think we'll have

to save that for later and maybe invite a special guest is really an expert. Yeah, I think that would be a great idea. got a few people in mind that know that part of the world really well. Excellent. Well, that's something to look forward to on the next command post. I'll say it again before we leave. One, if you're not reading all the things we're talking about on the bulwark online, on the bulwark.com, if you're not reading them online at the bulwark.com, you're missing a whole bunch of what we do. And if you're not a bulwark plus member, then you're also missing a bunch of what we do because we were in the comments last week.

Both you and I were talking to people, sharing our favorite strategists, answering people's questions, And there's a whole bunch else you get. It's a membership you can sign up for. And I will add this. If you see the price and it doesn't work for you, our pledges, send us an email. We'll work it out. The price of a subscription is just to help us grow and spread the word, but it shouldn't be a barrier to anyone joining our community.

So go to the bulwark.com and sign up for Bulwark Plus. There was another proud moment that I should mention, Ben, where you and I were slapping high fives because we had written an article on the moral high ground. and that very next day, someone asked the press secretary in the White House about what's the moral high ground in terms of Iran. And I think that resonated. That article probably created that question. And what I'm seeing as I travel around and I'm getting a whole lot of attention because I work for the bulwark now and I give you a lot of the credit for what we're doing. But it seems like the bulwark is becoming the new thing within media.

we're producing a whole lot of great products. We're on things very quickly, and we're given some very good factually based pieces within the online versions. Yeah, well, I know people are always excited to hear from you, General, and they, as am I. I'm very lucky that I get to ask you all my questions throughout the week.

For those who don't work at the bulwark and have that privilege, again, you can go to the bulwark.com become a member and ask your questions in the comments, or you can join us for next week's command post. Yeah, or instead of us being self-congratulatory like we're doing right now, tell us what you want us to talk about and we'll try and put some things together that satisfy your urges and your request, okay? We'll see you next time.