General Hartling, did I miss anything?

I would say there's a couple of things you did miss, Nicole.

And I'm going to say, first of all, that Pete Hegseth came into this job, you know, no one goes into the Secretary of Defense's job completely prepared, but he came into it remarkably unqualified.

And it could be argued by some, and I would be one of them, more so than any other secretary of defense in our history.

But to make it even worse, he brought many others of the same ilk into the job with him, to include his public operations folks, the people in his outer office, and the ones that have been attacking others.

He's been terrible at congressional hearings.

He's been, you know, I'll add hubris to one of his failures.

I mean, just talk about the kind of investigations that are possible if Democrats have to do this work and Trump doesn't replace him ahead of January.

So there you go.

Well, I first want to comment on that final still where our great producer Matt stopped it.

The reporter was just smiling as if he had just said everything that was so dramatic and true.

And none of the things he was just said was correct.

The Vietnam War did not last 21 years.

Trump should know that since he avoided it.

Secondly, there weren't hundreds of thousands of soldiers killed.

But I'm not sure he knows exactly what he's talking about here.

But how do we stop this bullshit, you know, blasted, fake media propaganda by the Russian state-owned media?

Well, you know, first of all, I'll state so far there are indicators through intelligence that about 7000 protesters have been jailed in Russia.

And as you said, Michael, when you're jailed in Russia, it's not like being jailed in New York City for disturbing the peace.

They're going to be there for a very long time and they're going to be treated very poorly if that or they may be sent off to other places like Mr. Navalny has that has occurred with him.

But in terms of the type of information that's coming out and you pointed to it, very well.

I'm going to introduce you to a new phrase that people are using, not many people know about.

It's called MDM, misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation, which is a new category of purposely lying to the people to get political results.

Can you unpack what you meant from this, both the Russians and on behalf of the Ukrainians?

And I wonder what this firing does.

Well, I'm going to reinforce what Missy just said, because the J-5, it's a letter in a number, is probably the most important three-star general in the military.

This is a guy who's not only a strategist, but as Missy says, he coordinates the combatant commander's war plans with the secretary of defense and the president.

This is a kingmaker job.

It is the most important job for a three star because they have a view.

This J5 has a view of the world and a view of the strategies that are being executed and also connection with the combatant commanders.

So I'll put it in that importance, Nicole, and it's critically bizarre.

Has that changed? And if not, what is the escalation in service of?

Tell us more about that.

Well, there's been a couple of fascinating articles in Foreign Policy, and you and I exchanged those articles before the show, where basically it gets to the point that we've been trying to discuss on Command Post over the last couple of months, and that is you not only look at uh campaigns and conflict and objectives from your own personal perspective but you try and look at it from the standpoint of what the enemy is thinking what are they doing in terms of this and from the very beginning of this war with iran you have to consider when you as the united states put down your objectives and say this is what we're going to do there is that requirement for red teaming as we call it in the military of okay if we do this then what do they do And these two articles that we were discussing before the show had to do an October article, and I think the earlier one was in June, about two individuals who know the culture of Iran, who were basically saying that Iran right now is in a position where they realize that they are suffering from a potential existential threat, the ability of their nation to survive.

So they're pulling out all stops, which is something we would do if we were facing an existential threat.

You know, for the last several decades, our country has been able to deploy forces to another location and fight on other people's soil.

But if someone was attacking us inside of the United States, it would be a different ballgame.

I mean, the president, Any normal president would be saying, hey, pull your rifles from underneath the bed.

It's kind of a Red Scare sort of situation.

yeah

Thanks,

Jonathan.

And good morning, gang.

It's fascinating to me.

I've been taking a whole a very strong look at our Constitution lately because of some of the issues that we've been having with the current administration.

And when you talk about America's ideology, the things we believe in, the values, it seems to me as you list them down, you know, from protecting liberty and freedom to.

to ensuring equality for all citizens, and then to values democracy and self-government, not only in our own nation, but in other nations.

I mean, is that a genie that he can suddenly put back in the bottle?

And what are these evacuations, the possibility that more and more of these Americans want to leave their posts or think they need to?

Yeah, that tells me that, OK, we're going to conduct strikes, but we're also still fearful that Iran is going to conduct counter operations like they have done against different facilities, not just military facilities, but they've struck a bunch of embassies as well.

And is that part of the problem that the Trump administration is incorporating into this kinetic option for this package? Are they concerned about striking the embassy and the U.S.

embassy in Baghdad? In Saudi Arabia, in UAE, in Qatar, in Kuwait are other locations.

It seems like the Iranians and their proxies have been able to strike at will different targets that were unexpected through the first tranche of these strikes.

I think that the dictate of getting people out of the area, both non-essential personnel from a civilian perspective and de-manning some of the bases in the areas because they have been damaged significantly, will avoid the kinds of criticism that the Trump administration gained over the last couple of weeks when we saw the damages conducted against U.S. bases in the region and we didn't pull forces out of there before the Iranians struck.

And what does it tell you that Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth met with Netanyahu just a few days before Israel holds their election?

Yeah, hey, look, the Secretary of Defense can be a good interlocutor for the administration.

Yes.

yeah you have to do all of this in terms of context i think and i'm i'm suspicious of this uh departure of secretary hexes to israel and it's because as you said uh prime minister netanyahu is uh facing an election on tuesday the 27th five days from now uh you normally don't have uh members of cabinets interacting with people seeking primacy in an election, especially given the fact that right now the prime minister is underwater a little bit to his opponent, a guy named Eisenstadt, who is a former chief of the Israeli military.

He's trailing him a bit.

And yet at the same time, Netanyahu has stated that he has the opportunity with the US's help to complete the operation against Iran.

and you would think that it's a little suspicious that our secretary of defense who i don't think has had any kind of relationships or engagements with president prime minister netanyahu has been there before i may be wrong in that but certainly talking military stuff is a secretary of defense's requirement to different nations but usually not with a prime minister it's usually done with the defense minister or the chief of the general staff and it's usually not a couple days before the election so I would suggest maybe that Prime Minister Netanyahu may have some political incentives to demonstrate in this particular action.

And the President of the United States, President Trump, certainly seems to be supporting Prime Minister Netanyahu because he said he is.

He's supporting him for election.

Seems like they were really unprepared for the idea that this base might be under threat from Iran.

General Hertling, a humanitarian.

Yeah, Katie, you gave a pretty good summary to open this segment.

And what I would say is that's about 20 percent of the kinds of things that Mr. Putin has done.

If we go outside of the war in Ukraine, he's also created five different frozen conflicts throughout Europe.

He continues to fix elections on his behalf.

A humanitarian would not be the word I would use anywhere close to describing Mr. Putin.

It is antithetical to who he is as an individual.

But it appears the person still at the controls is Elon Musk.

Like you and Sam, me and Sarah, we have a gay bunk.

And it's Sam's duty to clean the room tomorrow.

Anyway...

What they said to me, and I've never had this happen before, we're breaking news right now.

We can't tell you what it is.

Our reporter Priya, who many of you know, who has just been awesome, has broken a news story.

And you'll hear it when we go on air.

analyze what you think the soldiers, sailors, airmen think about their makeup leader.

And if there is, that would be a good thing to make public.

Yeah, he said that on Saturday, Nicole.

That's what's amazing to me.

I mean, I think all of us who are monitoring the situation in the Middle East and around the world have known about some of these things for a very long time.

And there have been failures across the board in terms of the defenses on most of the bases in the Middle East that have all been struck.

The Priya's reporting, again, she's dogged on this, but it just shocks me because any kind of military plan that assumes an attack in a region where there are headquarters that have what the military calls occupied or accompanied personnel, which means the spouses and the children go with the war fighters, usually say, as she reported, They get them out of there before the conflict begins.

So if we had someone in a base, if we had multiple people that were dependents, as we call them in the military, at bases, they should have been withdrawn long before.

You don't need anything else to wonder about this, about another quid pro quo with Russia.

General Hertling, it is, in fact, incomprehensible what the president is doing here, right?

It is most certainly incomprehensible.

And it's also just plain evil.

He's dealing with a guy who is known for the last two decades to be a dictator.

He's fixed election elections in Russia.

He has invaded other countries and he has created five frozen conflicts in Europe alone.

And he is also contributing to the efforts.

What kind of global realignment would that signal if the United States agreed to that summit without Zelensky there?

Mm-hmm

... about all this.

He has done it before.

This is a trend line.

Uh, but I think we also have to look beyond what was happening, uh, with a little bit of context before the, the Starsh- shield, uh, the, which is the military application of Starlink, uh, was, uh, reportedly throttled back.

On October 8th, Ukraine struck two significant refineries in Gasprom and the Omsk facilities, which were over, in one case 700 miles away, in the other case about 1,400 miles.

On the evening of October 13th, before it was shut down, Ukraine struck an oil depot in Belgorod, and later on, Ukraine struck two Yandex data centers, which are kind of the equivalent of Russia's Google commercial services.

Mm-hmm

I feel, uh, uh, the, the announcement by Hegseth, especially in such a callous and almost boastful way, has damaged our country's standing, not only domestically amongst ourselves as Americans, amongst veterans, but also internationally.

Yeah, there was a whole lot of swagger and not a whole lot of thought put into this, was there? I, I mean, and, and not only that, but as Secretary Hegseth announced it and allegedly talked to the president about it, and the president as the chief executive has the responsibility to say, uh, when a military prisoner is going to be executed, just kind of went right along with it without giving it a second thought, and you're talking about killing a human being in what some would say is an inhuman way.

Um, so yeah, it, it, it...

I just keep going back to the words too much swagger, not enough thought.

Uh, and it, it, it...

You know, Major Hasan committed a heinous crime.

There's no doubt about that.

Mm

That's not what we call a coincidence, uh, Nicole, and e- especially when you see the kind of pressure that the president is putting on

onUh, allegedly both sides, but it's mostly, I mean, a- almost completely on the Ukrainian side, when he's telling them to quit firing at oil reserves within Russia because it's hurting his oil market, and he can't...

And he's getting heat be- before the midterms.

Well, Ukraine is also getting heat right now, and they're not concerned about the midterms because Russian forces are really pushing the envelope when both sides are told to conduct a ceasefire, and Russia is not doing it.

They're still striking targets, and Ukraine wants to hit those targets within Russia that are not only supplying oil and get- providing [laughs] money for Mr. Putin, but they're also filling the tanks of much of the equipment that Russia uses to continue with attacks.

So if, if I were the military commander in Ukraine, I would be saying, "Keep hitting those doggone things." Uh, it, it is slowing them down.

It is giving us an advantage.

Um, I don't know how many like levers there are anymore to influence something he does, but if you could influence him, what would you say?

Your reaction to the president's announcement just this morning.

Well, at least it's a step in the right direction, Peter.

It, it was so horrific in terms of suggesting that we were gonna live stream, uh, the k- the execution of a prisoner.

Uh, it's still, uh, has some doubts in terms of what we should be doing, which, uh, there is a, a context for, and that's death by lethal injection at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas at the disciplinary barracks.

But at least the president has stepped in and thwarted, uh, the Secretary of Defan- Defense's plan for, uh, a public execution, which would have brought us back to the Dark Ages and certainly does not, uh, appeal to, uh, most of American citizens.

But the other thing I'd say, Peter, is you still have a firing squad.

Uh, that usually means 12 individuals shooting at a target, uh, which is the prisoner, and it puts people on the line to do that.

In your view, what does this say about President Trump's leadership?

General Hertling, you had a former military chaplain who pushed back on the Pentagon's framing saying, quote, "This nation was not founded as a Christian nation, but Hegseth wants to see society go toward a national Christian identity." How much does this go against how the military has operated in the past? What impact does it have on our troops?

I, I'm just confused by the words, Alicia.

I've commanded soldiers of every l- religious background, including those with no b- religious beliefs at all.

And one of the most important things a leader has responsibilities to do was to make sure every single soldier, uh, sailor, airman, marine feels respected and valued as members of the team.

Faith is important to soldiers, and so is if they don't have any faith at all, and it's particularly true in combat.

The military has always protected their right to practice the faith of their choosing, but there's a profound difference between religious freedom and religious favoritism, and that's what the Secretary of Defense seems to be doing right now.

He has a way of worshiping, and God bless him for it.

You write, "Restraint is not weakness, and displaying violence for an audience does not represent strength." Um, it does, however, seem to fit into Pete Hegseth's vision of the US military.

Um, so what's your assessment of the impact of giving $4.5 billion to Vladimir Putin and to this energy ceasefire, which is not an energy ceasefire because Putin is still attacking energy targets inside of Ukraine? What could be the impact on a war where Ukraine has held its own, to put it mildly?

Well, the effects are huge, Willie, first of all, but it gets to the article that Senator King and I wrote together, and it has to do with the will of this, of the government, of what we're doing, why we're doing it.

Are we doing it for the right reasons? And are our allies, and our partners, and our friends around the world understanding that? Are we doing it to make business deals, which is- ...

confusing other heads of states, uh, and it's causing more crises to exist.

Uh, you know, we've, a- a- as we've talked about so many times before, the will of, of President Zelenskyy remains strong, so do the will of his people.

The military is doing extremely well in Ukraine.

In fact, last night, more issues came up where Ukrainian, uh, uh, forces struck several compounds in Russia.

[laughs]

Do the soldiers involved with this movement, act have any ability to opt out of it? And what do you think ordering them to actually do that does to a soldier?

Well, I'm going to go back first, Jackie, to what you said.

What's the point? And I can't figure out what the point is other than Secretary Hegseth doing performance again.

This is ludicrous.

It's crazy.

There are manuals that describe how criminals, heinous criminals like Major Hassan should be executed.

And it's basically lethal injection.

Can you speak to what our possible involvement could look like here as we are fighting kind of a couple of different fronts or assisting a couple of different fronts in wars in the planet? Yeah.

This is a president and secretary of defense who seem to love a spectacle, but in your view, how did we get here?

here?Uh, I'm t- I'm gonna say something, I hesitate to say this, but it was in Secretary Hegseth's opening statement.

It is a no-brainer.

Uh, that means he hasn't thought about it.

He hasn't considered the moral implications.

He has not considered how it's going to affect allies.

He doesn't want to reach beyond the, the v- the, the heinous crime that Major Hasan committed.

When it comes to this, um, this potential execution, I guess, set for December, I'm wondering if you can speak to the concept of moral injury and what happens to a, a service member when they're asked to take part in, to make something like that happen

[laughs]

... he's almost as excited as Mr. Dieter about proclaiming a, a, a, a snuff film.

You know, he's talking about doing something we haven't done since World War II.

We did it in World War II because it was inside of a combat theater, and Private Eddie Slovik was tried and convicted of basically running away from his unit when they were in combat.

And they did it because we didn't have the opportunity to do lethal injection in war.

But I, I gotta tell ya, the questions about how, how would the Army do this, first of all? There, you know, in 1944, there was actually a, a guidance on how to do executions for capital crimes like murder or rape or, or, uh, basically running away from your unit.

Uh, today we're talking about, uh, we also have a regulation, believe it or not, Sam.

[laughs]

What do you think?

Uh, it's not something, uh, that I would do or, or would support, Katy.

I mean, you can have a whole lot of discussions about whether or not you believe in capital punishment for extreme and heinous crimes like Major, uh, uh, Hasan did, but this is not something the military should do, and it's not something they ever planned to do.

Yes, there was an execution of a soldier during World War II.

There was a manual for that, believe it or not.

I've looked up that manual, Manual for Military Execution, dated 1944, and it was used in combat when you had deserters or when you had rapists or murderers, and they would be shot because we didn't have more, uh, appropriate methods of execution, like lethal injection.

There's another manual today, dated 2006.

What is that delight about? Is that shared by others in the military, General Hertling?

And what's, General, what's your response to Trump's comments this week on San Diego and Los Angeles?

Yeah, you know, Jonathan, I tell you, I watched the first, uh, time he mentioned it, uh, and it was obviously a communications flub.

When he tried to clean it up the next day, it was not as bad, but still pretty bad.

When a president names American cities as potential targets, he should be prepared to explain the intelligence behind the warning, and he should never do it in the first place.

The- these kinds of assessments are serious business, and we shouldn't turn them into political talking points, particularly when we're asking Ameri- American families to support another escalation, and when most of America, and even the Congress of the United States, doesn't support the war.

Uh, he's using these things as political talking points or attempting to scare people, and it's just not the right approach when you send American sons and daughters into harm's way.

What's your reaction to that?

Jonathan, I knew you were gonna ask this and, and I'm usually trying to give you military analysis, and this one takes a different turn.

You never had to walk or anything, right?

No.

Uh, well, I, I did get quite a few actually.

Uh, I was, I was a swimmer and a water polo player, so I was a division one athlete, and they allow athletes to not walk the area.

They allow them to sit in their room for a couple hours, uh, to work off their demerits.

But, uh, what it was like, truthfully, you know, you, y- having kinda grown up in a very, uh- ... singular environment, I guess.

You know, you knew the kids that were in your grade school and your high school, and not much else.

So what was your transitioning like, and the people that y- the, the veterans that you talk to now, what is their transitioning like from the story that you heard?

General, does it sound like someone got in the president's ear and explained to him that threatening to use US troops as political pawns is bad policy and bad politics?

I would certainly hope so, Alicia.

You know, military forces serve a strategic objective, not a political calendar.

Uh, you know, the, uh, w- we've all, everybody on your panel, has served under both Republican and Democratic presidents, and the first questions are always, "What's the mission? What's the objective? What's the end state?" I've never heard any serious military planner ask how an operation will affect the next election, and that's not strategy, that's politics.

And when you confuse the two, American service members pay the price.

How would you characterize the damage that has been done, uh, both for the US on the world stage, for these specific negotiations, and then what you heard there from service members and their families?

Yeah, uh, you know, there's so many things that I can connect to, Alicia.

There, there's a certain irony in, uh, that's the same aircraft carrier, as you said, that President Bush made his speech on.