The Bulwark Podcast - Bill Kristol and Margaret Donovan: Hegseth Should Be Impeached

Episode Date: July 30, 2026

At the very least, Hegseth's refusal to acknowledge that it was our Tomahawk missile that killed 120 schoolchildren on the very first day of the war makes him unfit to serve as secretary of defense. Army JAG veteran Margaret Donovan says civilian casualties are a tragic reality in war and the public has the right to know what went wrong. The U.S. military prides itself on its excellence and precision, and that is what separates our fighting forces from those of our enemies. But Hegseth is also dragging this vital institution down because of the munition depletions, the lack of dignity being shown to fallen soldiers, his hare-brained schemes and war crimes in the Caribbean, and his undermining of military discipline by brushing off recent dangerous flyovers in civilian areas.Margaret Donovan joins guest host Bill Kristol.

There's no shortcut for saving time, but saving money is simple. Just combine your car and home insurance with Bel Air Direct and save. Get a quote at bellairdirect.com. Hi, Bill Crystal here. Welcome to the Bullwark podcast. I am not Tim Miller, as you've probably noticed, and I'm happy to be pinch hitting, however, for Tim Miller as he finishes up his little break. And he'll be back on Monday.

You'll be glad to hear. And I think the Bullwark podcast will be dark tomorrow. So this is our last non-Tim Miller podcast. The pressure's on. me and our terrific guest, Margaret Donovan. I think Margaret can live up to this. I'm not sure I can handle the pressure, but Margaret teaches the Yale Law School

and is in private practice there. Was an army captain in the Army and the Judge Advocate General's Corps in the 2010s. It was a jag in Iraq and Syria in 2016-17, I think. So it was right in the middle of the fighting there against ISIS and gave a lot of legal advice to people who were involved in that war, and not a lot, really, a ton, right, in day-to-day, every day, I think. And so has real familiarity with the Defense Department,

where you serve six years, but also with combat and its strains on the laws of how it interacts with wars and the laws of war. And you teach you about that and comment on that now, both in print and on other media. So thanks, thanks, Margaret, for joining me. Yeah, thank you so much for having me. Now, I'm really looking forward to this conversation. I've learned stuff from you over the last year and I will today.

So let's, I want to get to Iran, obviously, because there's a lot of issues on Iran. You've been, you've spoken on several of them. And also the drug war before, it was before Iran raises all kinds of issues of, but I want to talk more broadly about the Defense Department under Pete Hex-Seth, under in the second Trump term, because I've been a little, well, I'm very much an outsider looking at it, but I've talked to people who are there and have been there and are close to people who are there. And I'd say they're more alarmed than I think they expected to be by the state of politicization, professionalism, honesty even in terms of communicating to the public at DOD. And I'd like to get your thoughts on that.

Maybe use the begin, though, with this New York Times story from just a couple of days ago of how Admiral Caudill became Chief of Naval Operations, which happened a year ago. But pretty stunning account of how he got himself that job. And remember, HECSeth had come in and fired, right, the CNO. and as well as the chairman of the Joint Chiefs and many of the general officers. So I mean, you know how this works. You've been in, you've been close to it and still are in touch with people.

Give us a sense of what you thought reading that time story. Maybe you knew a lot of that already, but what does it tell us? I mean, the time story on Admiral Caudill and the sort of evolution of how he got to the position he's in, I just think is really fascinating because it's like this little microcosm of, you know, a lot of different problems.

that people are seeing in the military right now. You have these legal conflicts of interest. You have what appears to be not an entirely merits-based promotion. And then in the center of it all, you have a highly qualified officer who was ousted, Lisa Frankelly, who's a vice admiral in the Navy. And, you know, I think just like taking a step back, thinking about the context in which this particular chain of events happened, as the time story outlined, basically Admiral Franquette was like, you know, knew there was a political wave coming. And basically, as the reporting states, kind of gathered some of her subordinate leadership and her key players and was like, look, everybody, focus on the mission. There's going to be this political wave rolling through and like remember what's important. It's the people and the mission and, you know, making sure that we stay eyes forward and staying focus. And supposedly, according to the story, Admiral Cottle was actually in that group, in that audience. And the sort of, I guess, really sort of clever way maybe that the Times wrote that made you think that Caudill heard that and thought, wow, there's a political wave.

Like, how can I ride that? And then sort of separately tried to coordinate with Hagseth's people as he was getting ready for his nomination hearing. So the backdrop to all of this is that Secretary Hegsef has been firing people, summarily firing military officers, very senior, very experienced military officers, or otherwise kind of forcing them into retirement in situations where they were normally advanced into leadership positions. and he's doing so not based on merit, not based on the entire body of their life's career and their life's work, not based on their officer evaluation reports, something called an OER,

which is basically an annual review that allows you to advance in the military, not based on their combat records, not based on their command time, not based on the schools they've been to the awards that they've earned, but instead based on as near as anybody can tell this like internal judgment that he has

that their politics don't align with his. And the irony of that from a guy who has really campaigned for this job by saying that the military is filled with woke promotions and people who don't deserve to be where they're going to be and women don't meet standards and standards are lowered for women going to combat and we've got to just make one standard for all

and that's how the military should be. The irony of the guy who has, been pushing that to then fire people not based on merit or not based on their careers, based on something entirely political is just kind of astounding. The other sort of like culturally offensive part of this, which I don't really even think you have to have served in the military to understand, the people that are getting fired are true leaders, like completely respected, battle tested. They have, you know, dust on their boots, so to speak. They have seen action. They have experienced far more in their military careers than Pete Hexsef could ever

have dreamed of in his. And there are, you know, some striking differences. I think people chalk up Secretary Hexsaint's career, you know, as like he's a National Guard major. And, you know, I think his sort of defenders will say, well, he's, you know, he knows what the average Joe is thinking. And there's some like value to that. I, you know, I don't, I don't want to really denigrate anybody's military career because at the end of the day, everybody who served raised their hands to do so. But you have to understand that he has never been in command. He has never planned it like an operation in a combat environment. He has never managed a major budget. And he certainly hasn't been planning for like logistical, um, preparations for major operations. And so you have somebody who like,

yes, he served in the military, like I served in the military. You know, it doesn't really qualify him. You want to be looking for something else within his professional background that would make him ready for the job that he has. And so by contrast, you have these very senior people getting jettisoned who could be there to help him. He could turn to C.D. Donahue, who was sort of famed and completely, you know, adored and really revered Special Forces senior officer. He commended Delta. He committed the 82nd Airborne, 18th Airborne Corps. So he's been in command in all of the sort of major story military units. Randy George, of course, the JAG officers, the top military judge advocates right off the bat.

He fired all of these people. And so you can be inexperienced and be the Secretary of Defense. I actually truly believe that. As long as you are surrounding yourself with people who have experience and you're listening to those people and you know how to take advice and sift through different recommendations, Secretary Hexathe's basically not doing that. He's surrounding himself with people who aren't going to push him on anything and aren't going to challenge anything he's thinking and basically kind of building a little cadre of yes men. So with Admiral Caudall, you have this scenario where Lisa Frankeady gets pushed out. Lisa Franquette, you could read her bio on any random website. This is an extremely qualified military officer who had been a deputy chief of naval operations,

which means like she was completely primed for the gig that she had as the chief of naval operations. And, you know, the other thing that I alluded to this a few moments ago, but the idea that your secretary Hexeth can come in and say, like, you only got that job because you're a woman. You only got that job because you're a minority. So I'm going to take you out and level the playing field. That ignores the fact that these people are wearing multiple stars by the time he fires them. So we're talking about multiple administrations throughout their decades-long careers that people have objectively looked at them, not just the Biden administration,

not just the Obama administration. We're going through Trump One, where Admiral Franketti held, again, leadership positions. We're talking about George W. Bush. And in some cases, we're talking about people whose experience goes back, you know, to Clinton. And so it's just a very short-sighted view. And it's the tell to me of like why these aren't actually merit-based. It's because he's just ignoring the fact that in order to get your third or fourth star, you had to have first gotten your first or your second or pinned full bird or, you know, done the entire, you know, promotion before getting there.

So that is sort of, you know, the odd part of Admiral Caudill's sort of elbowing his way into his position into Lisa Frankelly, Admiral Franketti's old position. One thing I love about summer is how easy everything feels. The days, they're just, you know, they're a little bit more relaxed, find myself reaching for some comfortable go-anywhere pieces again and again. That's why I keep coming back to Quince. They focus on well-made essentials and naturally become those everyday staples that you actually live in all season long. Quince is 100% European linen pants and shirts are breathable, easy to throw on.

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Make your summer wardrobe easier. Go to quince.com slash the bulwark for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. It's now available in Canada, too. That's Q-U-I-N-C-E. dot com slash the bulwark for free shipping and 365 day returns quince.com slash the bulwark. Just more broadly, just a minute on the firing of General Brown right at the beginning, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of later on of, as you say, Randy George, the very well-respected Chief of Staff for the Army. I mean, George, he had intersected with heckstaff and clashed with them. Brown hadn't.

These people were not, in my impression from talking to people, a lot of them were not regarded as particularly political. There probably are individual generals who would have been war unhappy about a Trump administration or a Hexseth Defense Secretary or America First Doctrine. And, you know, maybe then you have a talk with them and say, look, I think it's probably not going to work great and you should, you know, leave after the end of this tour or at the end of a few months or something like that and take retirement. But that wasn't the way it was done. I do feel like there was a lot there of just pure intimidation. I mean, it was somewhat random almost too. I mean, they happened to be disproportionately minorities and women. So that that part isn't random.

I was going to say. I think some people would think it was not random. Individual, so to speak, it was a lot of it was, this is different. This is not the deference to the system that it used to prevail really in all administrations. And there were times when people reached in, Bob Gates reached in and others and thought that the military was being too conventional in some of its promotions. They fought for Traus back, I think, to provide presides over one of these promotion boards for one stars and stuff like that. But even that was done very carefully and systematically in terms of preserving the military standards and having you know, here, you know, having meetings,

would I gather gone a long time where you discuss who's going to be promoted. Once or twice, Dick Cheney and others fired people who were not doing well or were not obeying orders. And obviously that's happened and that should happen for the civilian control. But, yeah, I think just bringing home to people how much, how wildly different this is from anything we've seen and how wildly different it is from World War II of, you know, skipping over general is to find the best person to find Marshall or Eisenhower or, you know, or someone to put them in command in the middle.

of a war, which no one expected, and therefore, presumably the 1939 army did not have necessarily the best warfighters at the right top of it. But this is very different, right? These people have been in charge of really important combat in the wars we had fought, and some had not done well in those situations, and they had mostly left or gone or been, you know, and these people had, as you say, are the ones who were rewarded by administrations of both parties. So I guess just at the time it happened, and people thought, oh, well, he's different and firing some of the holdovers. And I don't think people really understood how much of a shock that was to the system, but not just to the system, but to the whole notion that the military should not be politicized in the way that it does when you think you to get promoted. You have to be on board with a particular political agenda of the secretary.

So I'm sorry to go on, but I just think that's so striking. And people I know who were, some of whom incidentally were pretty conservative and somewhat more sympathetic to Trump that I was. We're still rattled, I think, by that. Oh, completely. I mean, it is completely unusual for the Secretary of Defense to go by name down a list of potential promotions and decide, you know, I'm just going to pick a few people that maybe he read about on his X feed or God knows what else and pull them off. It undermines the entire system that the military is built on, which is that you are promoted based on merit, based on your experience and based on your capabilities.

and not because, you know, who knows what's informing Secretary Highseman in most of the rest of the cabinet. It's whatever they see on their X feed that day. So, you know, it is very disruptive, I think, all the way down the line, because particularly when you see these officers that, you know, people owe their lives to, quite literally, you know, who have been to combat with these men and women and seeing them get sort of picked off because the strong implication is that the secretary has deemed them politically dislikable. And there's just virtually no evidence of that in their military careers. It's extremely disruptive. Yeah, I know. I think it would be demoralizing. And so then the politicization, of course, then can go down all the way down to the ranks. If people can be fired from being four stars or not promoted to be one stars, why not have the same standards for promotions

to lieutenant colonel or to captain, I suppose, right? At some level of how worried are you more broadly about that in the military these days? I mean, extremely. I'm as worried as any other military veteran who's looking at this and is just kind of horrified by what is going on and hoping that everybody that is still in uniform is holding the line and, you know, standing up for the principles and remembering the oath they took, whether they were an officer or enlisted. I mean, the other troubling piece to that, and I know we don't have to go into detail about this now, but I worry about the promotions. I also worry about the military justice as a form.

I was a, when I wasn't overseas doing strike cell stuff, I was in military. prosecutor back in the United States when I was domestic. And, you know, what I have seen, especially with the sort of aviation misconduct over the past couple months, is if you are doing something that is deemed, you know, MAGA or you are doing a flyover past Kid Rock's house, then you're fine. You're not going to get in trouble and there's no military discipline for you. But there's a different standard for everybody else. And that is, again, it's just the hypocrisy of what Secretary Hegsep has sort of trumpeted as his vision for the military is it just really kind of knows no bounds there because what we're seeing is a different disciplinary and justice

standard for people who do something that again, Hegseh reads on acts as being politically aligned with his politics and he'll make an announcement or one of his secretaries will make an announcement saying no investigation, you know, no punishment, carry on patriots. I cannot overstate how damaging that is to the subordinate commanders' authorities in those scenarios. You look at these flyovers and the kid rock thing and the flyover that beach wherever that was in Florida, I think. And, you know, that's kind of amusing or maybe they shouldn't do it. But on the other hand, you can see why HECS thinks it's nice to do it. But yeah, but the actual head of those units were concerned and thought things were not happening properly.

and there was real danger, I guess, in the case of the demonstration in Florida. And they wanted to investigate and hexed sort of, oh, no, I like that. So we're not even going to, I mean, how much does that undercut this authority of the? Immensely. That's like I cannot, like I said, I can't overstate this how problematic this is for commander. So in the military, the authority to implement the uniform code of military justice, the UCMJ and military discipline that vests with a commander. That's very different than a civilian job if you're going to get charged with a crime,

a DA charges you, not your boss. But in the military, that's one and the same. Your boss can bring a charge against a criminal charge against you. And the reason for that is because good order and discipline is central to how the military must operate. And I think, you know, I don't think I have to explain why that's that's so important to the military. I want to qualify my statements here a little bit because I'm not saying that every time this happens, and I don't think anybody's saying every time this happens, it should result in a court martial or these people should have the book thrown at them. But what I am saying is that that should be a commander's disarmamenters to decision, the commander of the Blue Angels, the 101st Airborne commander, which was the aviation

that was mild, the aviation unit that did the flyover by Pitt Rock's house. There are very, very good reasons that a commander would want to investigate what he or she suspects is aviation misconduct because they may have a really serious downed aircraft incident, as we saw just a few years ago in the 101st airborne. And it happens, unfortunately, all the time in training and in war. And so aviation incidents or deviations from aviation standards, are one of the most aggressively investigated types of events in military training or combat. For that very reason, they're extremely fatal if something goes wrong. And even if a commander, you know, was not inclined to punish everybody and not everybody gets punished,

really the goal of the investigation is just to figure out what went wrong. Who in that chain decided, like, let's not follow the training book today. Let's do something different because you want to identify that person. and make sure that you can prevent a worse event from happening in the future. So a point that General Hurtling made the other day I was on, we were doing some media together, is the question I would be asking as a commander

in those incidents is when there is an aviation accident because there always is going to be. It's very sad. It will happen. Maybe not this year, maybe next year, but they happen. Who's going to take responsibility? Will the Secretary of Defense say like, oh, that's on me, you guys?

I told you you couldn't investigate the last instance of misconduct or the last suspected, you know, deviation from the standard. I'll take the fall for this downed aircraft. Of course not. That's going to fall on the unit commander. So it is really problematic to just kind of swoop in as a higher level authority and basically divest that subordinate commander of the ability to run his own unit or her own unit. There's no shortcut for saving time. But saving money is simply. Just combine your car and home insurance with Bel Air Direct and save. Get a quote at bellair direct.com. So the politicization, people like me see first and sort of worry about, and I think that's worth worrying about, but it's also the not so much of politicization, but what, undercutting

of professionalism and of accountability, I guess. It's kind of both. Like, you know, you can see a very clear pathway where, like, if somebody gets in trouble on post and they want to get out of it somehow. they just need to generate enough ex-followers to tweet that they're a Magra Patriot and get the Secretary's attention. And then they can probably trust that the Secretary is going to swoop in and save them somehow. Well, and more seriously, if people commit war crimes, and we've seen this, unfortunately, in Trump one and Trump two, right? I mean, and HECF personally is very much opined in this direction that, you know, you get off if it's in the service of, if it sounds good to Maga World or to Trump personally.

And then you really talk about serious crimes, not just, you know, misjudgment. about using the aircraft. Let's talk about that because that comes up in the context of Iran. I mean, when we were talking beforehand, a couple of days ago, you made the point about how unusual, I mean, there's so much to talk about with Iran and, again, worrisome both politicization but also lack of professionalism at times, perhaps lack of candor or transparency about certain things

that the military has been reasonably transparent about in the past. But say a word about the beginning of the war. I think you were very interesting on that when we were chatting, and then also just about ongoing, what has it been, we're now in the six months of the war. So what strikes you as someone who served in combat and those challenges that face every administration in such circumstances?

Yeah, well, I'll actually take you a few months before the beginning of the war to September 2nd because that was the opening strike of Southern Sphere, which is a campaign that this administration invented to basically summarily execute people who are drug meals, people that we wouldn't even prosecute. If they showed up on American soil, we would probably, maybe we'd flip them. Again, you mentioned I'm a former JAG. I'm also a former federal prosecutor. Maybe we flip those people, try to get up the chain, but they're usually not even going to be worth the resources of a federal

prosecution because they're just taking cash and moving product for people. They have more intelligence value, really, than anything else for the government. But so they started a campaign using basically hellfire missiles and SEAL Team 6 to take out these drug fuels. these fishermen in the Caribbean Sea. And on the opening strike of that campaign of Southern Spear, we have what was widely regarded in my opinion as well, based on the facts as I know them, to be a war crime. So you had a shipwrecked survivors after that first strike. And as we all know, this was, you know, huge news several months ago. Somebody in the chain of command made the decision to engage again and fire on shipwrecked survivors. It was the first strike.

that was the very first strike of Southern Spiro. That was September 2nd. In fact, the legal opinion wasn't even written until, or at least published, it's dated September 5th, three days later. So I just offer that, you know, you get somebody like Secretary Huggseth in charge of the Department of Defense. And that's what you get. You get this hairbrained operation and the very first strike, something that like nearly every former military lawyer, probably current military lawyers, if they could speak freely, would consider a war crime or otherwise unauthorized under the law of armed conflict. So lest you thought that was a fluke, that sort of rushing into an operation ill-prepared and not fully thought out in terms of your legal basis, we have February 28th. And so that's the

opening of the Iran War. And the strike that everybody, thankfully, in my opinion, is still talking about, and it has not washed away with the new cycle, and I am grateful to many media outlets for that, is the strike on the Menab Elementary School. That has been reported to have killed over 100 children. The horrific nature of it is, frankly, hard to even comprehend, to really articulate correctly. And while I will stop short of saying that that is a war crime,

because you actually really don't know what type of information people had, if it was not intentional, that's going to factor into it, civilians were not the intended target. They are not by the U.S. military. And we just don't have enough information about the strike in general.

But what's remarkable to me about that strike is that we still don't have any information on it. That was now, as you said, nearly we're going on to the sixth month mark. We just finished five months since the war started. And when I was in, there were two civilian casualty events that I can compare that to in my mind. just for, I guess, context and reference and what is making me feel like it is such an unusual chain of events

after a civilian casualty event. But just at the outset, I just, I want to be clear, you know, I worked in a strike cell in both of my deployments. I did back-to-back deployments in Baghdad in 2016 and then outside of Raqa in 2017. And I did well over a thousand-air strikes. I was advising when I say I did, I was advising the chain of command and the target engagement authority

on whether or not we could strike a target. in Iraq it was in Al-Ambar province and in Syria it was pretty much all over northeastern Syria and Raka province. And, you know, in those instances, things happen. Our enemy at that point was the Islamic State. But it is kind of unavoidable that you're going to have civilian casualty events. The military has a requirement that we investigate it. Congress has standards, laws that we report it to Congress, the amount of civilian casualties that are incurred. And we followed all of those requirements.

And it's a very, of course, a tragic and unfortunate and frankly, you know, really unsavory part of being in combat and being deployed. But it's why you really shouldn't take going to war lightly. It's because civilians are going to die even if you don't intend for that to happen. And so I say that just to say, you know, the idea that there are civilian casualties in war is not itself like completely. shocking to me. That's why war is bad and we should avoid it. But the idea that we've had a civilian casualty event of this magnitude and we have heard nothing from the Department of Defense on it, the two other strikes that I mentioned that I sort of thought of when I read about the Menop School Strike was in 2015, the United States Army in a C-130 gunship opened fire on a Doctors

of Abarters Hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan. And within days, The SentCom commander was in front of Congress testifying about it. He, General Campbell at the time, he, you know, didn't have all of the information himself, of course, nobody really does. You have to assign what's called an I.O. an investigating officer, do an internal investigation, figure out, you know, everything's recorded. The military is very good at recording, you know, radio transmissions and chat logs and strike information and logistical data.

And so it takes some time to gather that information. And so whenever there's a strike like the Doctors Without Border Strike, I think it was really crucial for the United States military to say that was us. We're going to investigate it. Obviously, that was not the intended target, you know, that we did not mean to strike up a Doctors Without Border Hospital. We're going to figure out what happened here. And I promise you Congress that I will do so.

And, you know, the actual investigative report was finished, I think, a month later. It was like November of that year. It was released to the public. shortly after that, heavily redacted, but an unclassified version was released to the public. So that was like flash to bang, as they say, very a quick and, you know, kind of standard timeline for those things. The next strike that I'm thinking about was in 2017 in Mosul. It was right after I had just gotten back from, I was in a little further south in Baghdad. But I had a lot of friends who were or up in the strikes, Allen Mosul, in Urbiel.

And it was a strike that was intended to be on basically a high-value target, and it ended up having a lot of what are called secondary explosions, which means that there's explosive material in the target or on the target. And so as a result for the secondary explosions, there's been estimates I've read anywhere between 100 and 500 civilian casualties, dead or wounded. So it was another really significant event. But again, the commander that had responsibility for that strike within weeks had an investigation commissioned.

And I think even quicker than the Kunduz on strike had a report readily accessible to the public. So all of that is to say, like, terrible strikes happen in war. And it is a really unfortunate thing. It heavily affects the people involved in the strike. It's to say nothing of the people who were killed and the families of the people who were killed in the strike. But what is so appalling to me about the Monop School Strike is that we don't even have an admission, a formal acknowledgement from the United States, that that was our Tomahawk, that that was, you know, that was our strike.

And we're going to do something about it. We've heard rumors. I've heard probably the same as you. I mean, there's been reports saying it was based on decade-old DIA, Defense Intelligence Agency reporting that was not properly verified. We've heard rumors that they're, you know, there's. an investigation and it's finished and they're trying to release it. But the lack of transparency and really the lack of acknowledgement of that strike is, to me, I mean, that is like impeachment level

offense for Secretary Hegsef because you are going to start a war, which we can talk about in a few minutes, why this is just, we're beyond unconstitutional at this point. But you're going to start a war by yourself on a whim in the executive branch and blow up a school on your very first strike. and you're not even going to face the public over it. You're not even going to acknowledge, you know, fine. You don't want to have, you know, sympathy for the civilians of your enemy country. Like, that's unwise and unchristian, I think, but fine. But at least think about the effect this has on the U.S. military strategically as a fighting force,

as somebody who wants allies, who is begging allies to help us, as somebody who wants to prevent anti-American sentiment for decades, generations to come, who wants to, as they say, not wage a war that creates more terrorists than it kills. It is a failure on so many levels of leadership, of the actual logistics of the strike, of any semblance of taking responsibility for that. I hope that tomorrow after this podcast there's a full report and we can all kind of digest it and understand what happens. But the fact that, you know, the secretary would probably, in his best world, just move on and not acknowledge that is, is unacceptable to me. That is, you cannot be in that position if you are not going to acknowledge civilian casualties in war.

I guess that's been reporting that the group of people at the EOD who had the responsibility to look over to review the strike plans and to make sure that the information was up to date and try to make sure this kind of accident didn't. happen. A lot of them had been removed or transferred because Hexeth wasn't interested or someone under Hexeth wasn't interested that much. And so that was not important. And so why we're going to save manpower or just not want to know certain things, I guess? I mean, it's pretty bad. I mean, don't you think in terms of you authorize a awful lot of strikes that kill people? And unfortunately, you say, you had to kill sometimes, you know, civilians got killed in different ways. It's never been U.S. military doctrine that you can't ever kill a civilian, even knowingly if it's a high value target,

and that's the only way to get to, gets complicated if the U.S. forces are being threatened immediately and so forth. So, I mean, I don't think we're on the super dovish side here of how to conduct wars, but you want people to come in who will want to lift up to high standards and fight wars as honorably as they can be fought. You don't really want to be recruiting people who kind of think, oh, yeah, this is great.

And if we make a mistake, there's no, nothing ever. No one's accountable for anything. You know, and if we fire people who, as we think it's boring, to go over these lists and make sure we're not hitting a girl school. And then maybe that comes out later and it hurts your career that you fired those people. No, not under, you don't really want those kinds of people to be, you know, coming in or rising in the military, you know. We're not the Wagner group.

We're the U.S. military. And we fight with precision and excellence. And it is what separates us and has separated us from our enemies for all of our existence. And the Boatstrike campaign is sort of almost. like an easy comparison because, you know, I was deployed under when we were fighting the Islamic state was the declared hostile force. And so that was one of the most horrific and inhumane and unforgiving enemies. And even fighting the Islamic state, we still held ourselves to the standards of the law of armed conflict. And as you say, one of those principles of the law of armed conflict

is preventing unnecessary human suffering, civilian suffering. But that implies that there's some amount of necessary suffering. And so it is true, like these things happen, but I'm telling you, as somebody who has investigated these, has been on one side of civilian casualties on more than one occasion in these combat environments, this is unusual, and in my opinion, it's unacceptable. Give us your sense of more broadly the kind of professionalism, if I can put it that way, with which the war has been conducted. The most obvious thing has been the apparent using up of expenditure of a very high percentage of kind of important munitions.

I mean, who knows? Maybe they just miscalculated, right? The military is pretty good of keeping track of these things. You know much better than I that, you know, there are people who keep track of how many whatever, Thads and Patriots and Anteater whatever batteries you have. And they tell you, they tell, the combatant commander might say, hey, you know, it would be great if we could use a couple hundred

of these and they tell the event, well, actually, we can't now, but this is the total number we have. And so we can, we should be careful about how many we expand. It should be use them for high value targets, but not all the time, blah, blah. And it's pretty clear in this case, isn't it, that Trump and Hexler just wanted to, you know, do everything very fast and maybe they were just wildly confident the war would last only a week or two. Maybe they just thought the initial shock at all was worth it and who cared about later on. But I don't know, I feel like it's pretty

shocking that our military, which is so good at this kind of planning logistics, just, you know, seems to have been caught short of very important. And people are dying. Missiles are hitting U.S. bases and drones are hitting U.S. bases. Maybe as a result that now we can't do as much as people want to do. I don't know. Maybe I'm overstating that. But tell me what your sense is reading these stories about the munitions and so forth.

Yeah, I don't think you are at all. And I get the sense both from talking to people who are still in and who are involved in the conflict. And just from, you know, reading open source information on this, there's saying infantry wins battles, logistics wins wars. And that I think is very true. And that requires higher level long-term strategic thinking. I don't know if you remember this, but way back in February or March, the president was declaring that the Iranian people will rise up and take their country back. And then we can just wash our hands of this and everything will just work itself

out. All we had to do was just drop a few bombs for a week. And that is obvious. completely insane. So, you know, we are in this position now where, as you said, I think most military officers, again, who have like eons more of command experience than the secretary does, and obviously of the president, are probably seeing these problems, are probably identifying, like, whoa, we're going to need some Patriot Interceptors, like in the Middle East, like in general for the Indo-Pacific threat. And we're burning through those, sir. My impression is that the leadership in the administration doesn't want to hear it, that they're just, they don't want to be told that what they're doing is, you know, possibly creating vulnerabilities for us. And by the way, it's not just the United States.

I read a statistic, and this is now two months ago, so God knows what it is now, but that the Gulf states had burned through something like 2,200 Patriot Interceptors already, that they themselves have been stockpiling for this Indo-Pacific threat. And in doing so, you know, to give you some context to that, there's about 600 manufactured. year at the current rate. So that's a long time to replace those really key air defense assets. And you can imagine, you know, how important it is to the U.S. government to have those. In fact, we declined to provide support to Ukraine earlier on in this administration, specifically before Iran started, specific citing depleted stockpiles and that we needed to basically build up our own defenses back to where we were comfortable again. So, again, infantry can win battles, but logistics wins wars.

It's just a way of saying, like, it's not just about dropping bombs. It's not just about, you know, knocking off key leaders within their own government or military structure. You have to think, if you're going into a war, you need to know how to exist long term. The other kind of part that I noticed, I know we talked about this the other day, but in Secretary Hexsv's testimony the other week, he kind of, his go-to pivot was, you know, well, I inherited this completely ill-maintenanced and neglected and awful military, and Biden did so much that set us back years, and I had to correct all of that.

And I just kept thinking to myself, like, why in God's name did you start a war then? Like, why was that your first go-to instead of, like, maybe another week of whatever, asking Kushner and Whitkoff to, like, I don't know, do whatever it is that they're doing that's obviously so effective? Why was your first instinct? Like, let me take this extremely ill-prepared and neglected military to, you know, two war and then like ask for Congress for permission to do that later. None of it makes any sense. And I just hate to say it, but like this is what you get. You have a secretary who, at his confirmation

hearing the reports, that he was financially irresponsible at his two veterans charities. He obviously had discipline, discipline problems. I'll put it that way. And this is how this plays out. Like it does make a difference if you have a secretary of defense who has military experience or who surrounds themselves with people with military experience. Or if you have. we have now. So it's really disappointing. And I do just want to make one final point that this is precisely, like the scenario that we are in right now. You can read the context. You can read the letters surrounding the constitutional convention in Philadelphia. This is precisely the scenario that the framers wanted to avoid. This is why they vested not one, but two war powers

in the first article of the Constitution. The Article 1, of course, establishes the legislator. Article 2 establishes the executive article 3, establishes the judiciary. War powers are shared across Article 1 and 2. The framers not only put the declare war clause in Article 1, but also the clause to fund the militaries in Article 1, thinking, okay, if we're going to start a war, it's going to be a runaway train, and you're going to lose American lives, you're going to lose American supplies, American assets. And we are not going to stand for one person dragging our sons and daughters into a war that

only one person decided of, decided to enter. Instead, we the people, through our elected representatives, are going to decide when the country goes to war. And that is why declaring war, and that verb declare was a very intentional addition to that clause in Article I should rest with Congress. That lies with Congress. Once you're in war, Article 2, the commander-in-chief, or if you have to very quickly respond to a national invasion in their minds, but a national security threat today, the commander-in-chief is the commander-in-chief. You can imagine that they, you know, envisioned what type of person would inhabit that role, beginning with George Washington. That's not quite who we have today. But, you know, I just, I want to, I guess, close with that point,

that this is why it is so important, all of the consequences, the stockpile depletions, that harmed the military's reputation, the, you know, just, just this sort of loss of dignity that we're seeing for soldiers who are being killed in this war. This is why this needs to be a decision that the people make. And I just think that people, through their elected representatives, need to demand that Hexeth is either removed or we somehow find a way to extricate ourselves from this or both. And I said one more point. This is my final point. I promise. Fine, fine.

I get, you know, the response to that and the response to a lot of the criticism that I've been giving on media about this is, you know, you don't support the troops and like, how could you say this? We have people at war and you're not being supportive enough of the military by criticizing how we're going to war. I'm a two-time combat veteran. I'm telling you, like, it is not not supporting the troops to demand that there is a coherent plan in place. It is not not supporting the troops to say we need some type of aim to the service. war. We need real leaders in charge of them. I think it is entirely unsupportive of the troops to treat their lives as transactional and to trust their safety and us using them to their greatest ability to people without a plan and who are acting as if they will never see repercussions. So anyway,

I just offer that to say if people are feeling that they're not supporting the troops or they can't criticize what's going on because they're not supporting the troops, I strongly disagree with that. I think finding a way to maintain the dignity of the United States military and bring troops home safely with a decisive victory that we can all agree on. That is supporting the troops. Yeah, and accountability for mistakes. And then correcting mistakes. Everyone makes mistakes, God knows more, and things don't go the way you expect. And some of that's certainly meant much of that's understandable.

And some of it is more understandable than other parts, depending on how foolish the mistake was or how predictable it was. But the idea that you don't correct it and don't acknowledge, as you say, the, the really bad things that happened, the bombing of the girl school, but also just don't correct other things. And that was a problem in Iraq. And people like me were very critical of Rumsfeld. And this was when you were in high school or something. And, you know, we got attacked for not supporting the troops, you know, and how can you be so critical? And McCain, of all people, was attacked. Luckily, McCain was the leader of this faction of the Republican Party. And no one criticized, well, they did nonetheless, but you could pretty hard to criticize them for not caring

about the troops and stuff. And the late Lindsey Graham was very involved in this. And also who served obviously as a JAG. So and so what did I? People like me had no standing really to do this. But it was very clear. And Roeustold was, I think, did not do what he should have done. It didn't correct things. He was very dug in on his plan and eventually Bush removed him.

Would have been better to have done so sooner, in my opinion, and changed military strategy in Iraq. But even so, I mean, even there, the principle that one, that he had to defend what he was doing, that he had to testify to Congress, that Congress could see things, that we all could get a lot of information, about what was going wrong.

There were embedded reporters. Why did we know that Iraq was going? So why did I, editing the weekly standard who was not served in the military? Why did I know that Iraq was going badly? Because we could say Steve Hayes was over there and reporting and, of course, many, many other people as well. And there was testimony to Congress

and other people spoke up. The whole shutdown of information, dishonesty, honestly, in terms of presenting information, which I don't think was the case under Rumsfeld. He was just stubborn, but he was the facts. what was happening. We're not really masked mostly. I mean, just one last point,

just because I want to go to Iraq, it was my own, but, you know, when Abu Gray broke, that was a huge, it was broken by the military, I think really more than by reporters, or maybe it was little of both I can't remember, but anyway, they didn't deny.

They denied it for like two days. And then they exceeded. They, there was a huge scandal. Yep, we knew the names of the people. We knew the names. People were disciplined, removed from, you know, and stuff. I have no view and no knowledge about whether it was perfectly handled, or, you know, but at least no one pretended we didn't have to acknowledge that this was a terrible

stain on the U.S. military and all the way up to the level of President Bush. Yeah, so at least the principle of accountability and honesty, I think, was honored there even if occasionally it wasn't fully lived up to. We just seem to have abandoned the principle now, which is really bad. Yeah, I would say it's kind of unforgivable. And from a constitutional sense as well, like this theory of accountability, the framers envisioned that the people's closest connections to their government, their elected representatives, that is how you see accountability. And so that's how if the war goes bad, it's not just the president and his chain of command and all of his military officers that made a mistake. All of us together decided that we were going to go to war. And all of us together as a country will, you know, kind of work through and try to course correct if things aren't going the way that we want it to. We don't have that here. You know, we're not implementing. how the framers intended us to engage in wars. It's really a good point that I really, I myself and focus so much on what's happening inside DOD,

but in a way, that's important, very important. And there are things people, military and civilians shouldn't do and so forth. But really, it is Congress, isn't it, at the end, as you said? That's why you come back to that constitutional issue, which sometimes seems abstract, but it really is not abstract, right? Without the congressional core of accountability, the rest of it becomes much harder to sustain, I guess, is one way to say it. It's the executive branch, you know, checking itself, basically, which is not the way that's not the check of balance.

It should happen. And incidentally did happen when you were a JAG and Congress trusted it to happen. But it also partly happened because you all testified before Congress and Congress did it, made sure that it would, that it was happening or at least, you know. Our reports were released. You know, I had to prepare statistics to send up to Congress on a quarterly basis when I was deployed. And yeah, that was very much in place. This has been really helpful and not entirely cheerful, but important, I think really important. Sorry. No, no, important. And I do think very important to get, look, there are many policy mistakes and those need to be argued about.

And I think you and I are probably both pretty big critics of the policies in many ways. But there's also, this is in a way beyond policy mistakes. This is a question of the character of our government and its honesty and what's happening to one of the most valued institutions in America, the military. and civilians do, honestly, at the Defense Department and associated agencies, intelligence community and stuff. I really appreciate your taking the time to do this. It's such an important topic. Thank you for having me.

And thank you all for being with us. I really appreciate your taking the time and being as thoughtful about it. So thanks, thanks, Margaret. And thank you all. And Tim Miller comes back on Monday. You must say that I'm young. You might say I'm unlearned. But there's the one thing I know

I'm younger than you that even Jesus would never forgive what you do. The Borg podcast is brought to you thanks to the work of lead producer Katie Cooper, Associate producer Ansela Skipper, and with video editing by Katie Lutz, and audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown.