But he's making it very clear that he's not going to do it before then, as it appears clear that he plans to do so after.

I think it's both, Peter.

There's some politics in there and there's some actual declaration of, I think, perhaps intent.

I'm not sure we can believe what the president said.

He said a lot of things that are not true.

He has, you know, I think, tried to deceive Iran in the past about when an attack might occur and then attacked earlier.

So I don't know what's actually going to happen here.

Is this just more proof of the lack of planning, the lack of expectation of what would happen next?

And even for someone like you, I'm guessing there was a significant learning curve to be, what does it mean to operate in that role and to pick up all the things you needed? And so now as we see political appointees with far less experience being put in these senior roles, How might those challenges of learning what's needed and how to run a force of this size be amplified? Or what are some of the risks in what we're seeing today?

The service secretary is an interesting position.

You're running a department whose job is to organize, train, and equip forces and provide to operational commanders for use.

You're not an operational leader.

You're more about the...

the back office, you will, of creating the force that somebody else is going to use and keeping it healthy and ready to be used.

And you're in a situation that's pretty unique.

But to get there, where do you invest that first dollar? You had an opportunity to do some of this, but looking forward, where does that go? And what are the critical interdependencies to making this kind of force happen?

Secretary Kendall, I wonder if I could get your take on this, that Secretary Hegseth himself, well, he's saying, look, his issue is that he just thinks that there's weakness in the leadership ranks of the military.

Yeah, Secretary Hegseth seems to imagine that the military was very different than it actually was.

The problem that he basically articulated there actually doesn't exist.

The culture was just fine, and it wasn't woke.

Were we concerned about diversity and were we concerned about disparate results between different genders and races? Yes.

There were two studies that I relied on heavily as Secretary of the Air Force that were conducted, started during the first Trump administration.

They were both on disparity within the ranks of the Air Force and the Space Force.

Are you saying that you're not confident that General Kane would say no?

And there's no doubt about his meritocracy, and he's written, uh, not naming Trump or Hegseth or the conditions of his firing, but he has said that he's very concerned that, um, the military is being politicized.

I, I read that piece by General Brown, and I think he understated the situation, quite frankly.

It's being politicized in a very dramatic way.

Uh, there are the purges at the top, you know, 25 roughly senior officers.

Uh, there are also a lot of people being pulled off of promotion lists, and what's happening to that now is that, uh, the, the military services are, are tailoring the people they send forward so that they get through.

'Cause they want to get people through to go in and take, take various jobs.

The damage that's being done today will take at least a decade, I think, to repair.

T- tell me how you read that.

Yes, of course.

Um, the, the missiles that were used were reported to be hypersonic ballistic missiles.

Um, anti-ship missiles.

If you wanna hit a ship underway, you've gotta have something on that missile that can look out and see the target, and then you have to maneuver the missile to actually hit the thing you're trying to hit.

You're not just going to a point on the ground.

Uh, and that's a fairly sophisticated set of capabilities, particularly a hypersonic missile.

Um, it leads me to believe that China very, very well, very well may be helping Iran with this technology.

... and on an already strained leadership that they're being subjected to polygraph tests by their boss?

What do you mean by that?

I've always been incredibly impressed with the apolitical professionalism of our military.

And I've served a total of 20 years, as you said, in the Pentagon.

Been through a number of transitions.

Different parties come in.

People just continue to do their jobs.

They support whatever the policies are of the current party in power.

But do you think he's fulfilling his obligation to give the president his best military advice?

control or—

Arms control, et cetera, right? A few years ago, a hundred very prominent people, not military people, wrote a letter saying we should ban autonomous weapons basically.

I don't think that's possible.

I go into quite a bit of detail why I don't think that's possible.

But I do think we have to somehow find a way to implement the laws of armed conflict.

Those already exist.

They're generally agreed to and generally not followed perfectly by any means.

How do you think about maybe there's a positive spin on it for peace?

now.

I've been through many administrations.

I've been through a number of transitions in the Pentagon, served under maybe a dozen secretaries of defense, both parties.

We are in an extraordinary period right now, and people are being asked to do things that offend the conscience.

The drug strikes are particularly egregious.

Going into a major conflict like this with no consultation with or approval or authorization by Congress, Some of the strikes you talked about earlier, those things happen.

People are trying hard not to let them happen, but they do anyway, whenever there's a conflict like this.

When that's not what we're seeing.

What makes China the United States' most significant threat, especially over, say, Russia or any other country or terrorist organization? How would our more focused development of lethal autonomy help us? you know, if not stay ahead of China, at least keep level with it.

Now, that was the motivation for the Third Offset Strategy.

It was what motivated me in almost everything I did from 2010 till the present.

What China's been doing, and they've been doing for decades now, is building a force that is purpose-built to defeat the United States' ability to protect power.

I was in the Pentagon, as I mentioned, for the first Gulf War in 1991.

And I wrote a piece at the time about the military technical revolution that we demonstrated.

We went into that conflict expecting 10 or 20,000 casualties and had a couple hundred.

And is that, you know, bedrock, you know, comfort something that's going to help us gear up with lethal autonomy where it's like maybe we're not putting as many men in the field or and in danger of putting these systems and these uncrewed systems into the field?

And, I mean, just reading your op-ed and the challenges you believe the military is facing, with that, with Secretary Driscoll, why he resigned, what is your assessment of what's happening inside the Pentagon right now?

In a word, it's dysfunctional.

This secretary, and I've worked with and had a chance to work for maybe a dozen secretaries of defense, he's doing active harm to the Department of Defense.

It's not passive, it's active harm.

You mentioned some of the things.

All the firings of general officers, about 25 now I think.

Removing people from promotion lists.

The concerns though that we seem to be hearing in our reporting and from Secretary Driscoll himself is that it's impacting what he believes the military should be focused on, what he believes the Secretary Huxeth should be focused on.

But just tell me what brought you to, to, to write those words.

Uh, it was a long journey, but um, my career, I'm a West Point graduate, served as an army officer for active duty for about 11 years, and then retired from the reserves eventually.

I've been a senior executive in the civil service in the Pentagon for several years, and then on multiple occasions, a political appointee.

Um, I've never seen anything like this.

Uh, you heard earlier about some of the dysfunction we're seeing.

Uh, the u- the removal of senior officers without cause is completely unprecedented.

Taking people off of promotion lists for whatever reason, uh, but that appears to be associated highly with, you know, gender and, and uh, uh, racial, uh, identity and so on.

What is your sense of, of what awaits these men and women when they finally make it home?

Why do you think that military leaders are struggling with this?

I think they're struggling.

I think they're being asked to do things that they know in some cases are wrong.

and that they shouldn't do them.

And it's a sort of defense mechanism.

These are not bad people.

I know a number of them.

What do you think is the legacy of these last 250 days?

What does it say to you that the four star that we started with 10, we're down to what, four, five?

What's going on? In waging what appear to be cultural wars, I guess, and also purging people he views as DEI people, the Secretary has really decimated the top ranks.

He's particularly gone after the Army, and there's a concern that association with General Mark Milley may have been part of that.

Randy George may have fallen victim to that.

A lot of Air Force officers went as well.

I'm not aware of any Space Force officers.

I was responsible for both.

Anybody but Pete Hickson.

They have a lot of power on the one hand, and a negligible amount of power on the other hand.

hand.And that's because of the Supreme Court.

Uh, the Supreme Court ruled earlier this summer that the president can remove independent agency boards w- frankly, without a lot of cause.

These postal officials would fall under that ruling, and so they could be in office one day, and if the president's crossed with them, out of office the next.

At the same time, they do control this agency that anchors a $1.7 trillion economy, uh, that employs 650,000 people, that mails hundreds of thousands of ballots out, that small and medium-sized businesses rely on.

These are very influential positions.

Um, and they have expressed skepticism, uh, in some cases, kind of baseless skepticism about the safety of mail-in voting.

And, and what's that mean down the chain of command for combatant commanders, for instance? If they get an order that is, uh, advised to be legal, but they have concerns about whether it's the right thing to do, what should they do?

What responsibility do the most senior military officials have when advising the president or defense secretary? Is it their job to explain what the military can do, or should they be explaining what the military should do in their best

judgment? At the most senior levels, they should be doing both.

As you go down the ranks, it becomes more about what you're capable of doing.

There's always an element of what they should do, because what they do should be legal.

It also should be moral and ethical and consistent with our values.

Senior officers in particular who directly advise political appointees like the Secretary of Defense or the President, they owe them candid advice that is their best overall estimate of the situation and what should be done.

The president does need, and so does the Secretary of Defense, honest, objective advice from people who are not trying to please them, who are just trying to tell them the truth about what the consequences of any decision they might make would be.

And what's that mean down the chain of command for combatant commanders, for instance? If they get an order that is advised to be legal, but they have concerns about whether it's the right thing to do, what should they do? This

What responsibility do the most senior military officials have when advising the president or defense secretary? Is it their job to explain what the military can do, or should they be explaining what the military should do in their best

judgment? At the most senior levels, they should be doing both.

As you go down the ranks, it becomes more about what you're capable of doing.

There's always an element of what they should do, because what they do should be legal.

It also should be moral and ethical and consistent with our values.

Senior officers in particular who directly advise political appointees like the Secretary of Defense or the President, they owe them candid advice that is their best overall estimate of the situation and what should be done.

The president does need, and so does the Secretary of Defense, honest, objective advice from people who are not trying to please them, who are just trying to tell them the truth about what the consequences of any decision they might make would be.

And what's that mean down the chain of command for combatant commanders, for instance? If they get an order that is advised to be legal, but they have concerns about whether it's the right thing to do, what should they do? This

Are those concerns you share as well?

Uh, absolutely.

Uh, Jacob, the, the overarching goal, I think, was regime change here.

And there was an illusion for some reason that by decapitating the government, killing the Supreme Leader, that they would achieve that.

Um, that hasn't happened.

And, uh, the, the Iranian-covering, uh, uh, government had basically shown just before this that they were ready to be very brutal to their people, uh, killed tens of thousands of people apparently, uh, suppressing re- you know, uh, dissent and, and resistance.

So I don't know why we thought that this was gonna be successful.

Mm-hmm

So if you would just talk about that for a bit.

Sure.

My life has been about the intersection of technology and its application to military forces in some form or another.

I've served as an operator as well as in the research and development side of things.

And I've worked with all the services.

So I have a pretty unusual and broad background in what works and what doesn't work in a military context from the point of view of technology.

And a very common error is to take a interesting new technology and think you can just stick it into a force and use it.

Well, actually, maybe if you could address that one, then let me ask one more question and I'll throw it back to Eric.

I was gonna ask you something that you started to address there, which is do you think they stripped you of your security clearances because you've been a critic of Trump administration policies? Uh, do you have any, um, any suggestion or indication from anyone involved in this that that was the case?

Nobody's ever spoken to me at all about this.

The only thing I've heard is the tweet that came out that announced that, uh, the revocation of my s- of my clearance.

I did get an email the next day from a, a, a organization I was a consultant to, to do, do some classified work telling me that they've been told that my clearance had been revoked, and that's it.

That's, that's all I've heard.

Uh, so I'm speculating.

Uh, the two obvious speculations again are that they needed, you know, somebody.

Yeah

When you first see the post from the Pentagon that states that you, former Air Force secretary, uh, have, have lost your classified informa- your classified status, it's been revoked effective immediately, what did you think, and did you find out from that post?

Well, Erin, uh, it certainly made my weekend more interesting.

Um, I found out about it, my wife and I were at a cooking class I'd given her for a, couples cooking class I'd given her as a gift for her birthday, so our phones were off.

And about 9:30 at night, we walked out, I turned them on, and there was this tweet, uh, that, that had come out of the, uh, Department of Defense.

Uh, I, I was initially mystified, 'cause I couldn't think of anything [laughs] I'd ever said that was classified.

And I had tried very hard not to say anything classified, and was quite sure I had not.

So the first question on my mind was, what the heck could they possibly be thinking I said that was classified? Um, there are some other explanations for why they did this, of course.

You're gonna sue them.

And, and it does raise some questions about the nature of the leadership that the United States military is providing, or doesn't it? Are they just following orders and they don't have a choice?

Uh, you've raised a very fundamental issue.

Um, the current chairman of the Joint Chiefs, the person that Donald Trump brought back from retirement as a three-star general to make into a four-star general and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, uh, General Dan Cain, whom I know reasonably well, um, uh, gave a speech recently in which he, he talked about how it was his duty and the duty of senior officers to give abi- advice about what the military could do, but not about what it should do.

I think this is a fundamental misreading and misunderstanding of the role, and frankly, it's a cop-out.

It, it's a way to insulate yourself, uh, from the consequences of the things that you've given advice about.

The, the major blunder that was made here, uh, appears to have been that this will be a short, easy, quick war, that we could do a decapitation attack on the Iranian leadership, that the regime would fall, there would be people in power who would be more friendly to the United States, and it would be all over after, you know, a, a few days.

Um, that was incredibly naive.

So I, I find all of this concerning and, you, you know, I was wondering what your view is, Frank.

But normally before that dignified ceremony occurs, the senior officials will meet with the families and talk to them and try to console them.

them.Doing that is, uh, is incredibly difficult 'cause you're confronted directly with the grief and the loss that these people are experiencing.

And I've seen the full range of people who are in shock, people who are just deeply saddened, people who try to appear normal, and people who are very angry.

And there's not much you can say about them, but you do internalize, you try to internalize a small piece of their grief and their loss.

Uh, and that makes war, as you said, incredibly real.

It makes the cost of war real.

So I hope the president had that experience today.

Do you have faith that they are either ready or even trust Trump to make a deal?

Can you give us a sense of what that could look like?

Uh, what seems to be going on, Alisha, is that the president's trying to escalate, to put coercive pressure on Iran, and there's no sign at all that that's working.

Uh, what Iran is doing is broadening the war by creating, uh, causing attacks into Bahrain, Kuwait, and Jordan.

Uh, the straits, uh, in, uh, the, that Saudi Arabia depends upon to move oil, uh, outside the Straits of Hormuz to the west are, are under threat from the Houthis now.

So this is going in exactly the wrong direction from [laughs] where it should be going.

Um, you know, you can't overstate the scale of the strategic blunder by President Trump at this quest.

You know, on his own, without consulting the American people, without going to the Congress, he initiated this conflict on the frankly very naive idea that there'd be an immediate regime change, uh, and some of the images that T- Tom talked about would, would come true.

We do not have enough to safely sustain operations," and this is the part I want you to respond to, Secretary, " 'and I don't think the White House is aware of that,' the official said." MS now has reached out to the Pentagon for comment, but could they really be planning for a wider war with a dwindling supply of munitions, and at the same time it is not clear if the White House knows any of that? Secretary Kendall, I don't understand how that is possible.

Is that specifically because of the lack of defensive countermeasures, or do you have additional concerns?

concerns?No, there are other concerns.

Uh, the, the time that was provided to modify the airplane wasn't adequate to do all the things to make an Air Force One an Air Force One.

Now, it's a combination of support for the president, uh, things like medical support, uh, the amount of provisions that are carried to support him and the staff, et cetera.

Uh, but also all the things that allow him to be the commander-in-chief, uh, and execute those duties from the airplane, the battle management and command and control systems that go on board.

And then there are the security measures, the protective measures that, uh, we can't really say very much about because they're classified.

So given the amount of time that there was, uh, allowed to modify this airplane, I would expect there are shortfalls in all three of those categories.

I mean, are these things that could be added in in the next, you know, several months so that this plane is able to go overseas in the future?

Yeah, the

CCAs put us on the path towards what the Air Force is going to be built around.

And I would envision future increments to become more capable.

But you can do it in a way which doesn't...

What a fighter plane design basically tries to put into one platform, everything you would want to make that fighter successful.

You know, sensors, weapons, electronic warfare capabilities, survivability features of various types, maneuverability, etc., When you start talking about CCAs, you can disaggregate some of that stuff.

Each platform doesn't have to be as expensive as the other ones.

But in the few minutes we have