Filmed August 6, 2026
BILL KRISTOL:
Hi, I’m Bill Kristol. Welcome back to Conversations. I’m very pleased to be joined again today by Eric Edelman to discuss the Defense Department. Eric served as a foreign service officer culminating in important post as ambassador to Finland and Turkey. Then actually after that, culminating in a very high position, the number three position in the Defense Department under Secretary of Defense for Policy. Eric had also served as Defense earlier when Dick Cheney was defense secretary and in the White House.
So very wide experience in the federal government, in the national security side of the federal government, and including very close, a very real experience at the Defense Department. You worked closely with Defense obviously when you were ambassador and so forth. So real understanding, I think, of that structure, how it was and how it is. I mean, since then you’ve been on the National Defense Strategy Commission, congressionally mandated and set up, which has had many access to the highest Defense Department officials for your reports. And on the Defense Policy Board, I think until January of 2025 maybe, something like that.
ERIC EDELMAN:
March, I think, but yes.
BILL KRISTOL:
Which is an advisory board to the Defense Department of distinguished, often former senior officials. And so you’re pretty up on things at Defense and a long time, I’d say it’s fair to say friend and ally of the Defense Department and the military and supporter of much that they’ve done. Supporter of increasing their budget over the decades and so forth. First of all, welcome back, Eric, and good to see you.
ERIC EDELMAN:
Thanks, Bill. It’s always great to be with you.
BILL KRISTOL:
And I though we’d just get an update on just, in a way, putting aside, to some degree, the particular policy decisions about this weapon system or that or this war or that. There’s a lot of coverage of what’s going on at, obviously, DHS under President Trump, at DOJ, at the Justice Department under President Trump, the FBI. Recently in the news was the intelligence community of DNI. Defense, as it should be in some ways, a little more of a black box there. Some stuff is classified, some stuff is sensitive. The military doesn’t talk that much about their internal procedures unless sort of encouraged to, as I guess one could say.
So, really curious what your judgment is of what’s going on there. I though we might begin with these recent stories about apparently running out of, or at least coming too close to running down on munitions that we’ve expanded in the war in Iran as an example of just the kind of management side of defense. And then I do want to get to other issues of personnel, politicization, process in general there, what are your sense is of how it’s been working, how it’s working, what might happen over the next, I guess two and a half years of this administration. But what about munitions? Something you’ve been working on a long time before, not a new problem, but what about the current moment?
ERIC EDELMAN:
Yeah, I mean, look, it’s a longstanding problem, but it’s become particularly acute in the last couple of years and particularly the past six months. So just this morning, The Washington Post is carrying a story that apparently the President has finally been apprised of some of these munitions shortfalls. So one of the things we’ve seen in the Iran war, particularly over the last few months, has been this cycle of the President issuing his blood curdling threats that he’s going to unleash the dogs of hell and war on the Iranians and perhaps wipe out their civilization, only to backtrack and say, “Well, we’re actually negotiating and making a deal.” And some of that, I think, is a factor of his being informed that there are limits to what the US military can do without running below the war stock reserves that the joint chiefs of staff and the combatant commanders want to maintain in case we have a conflict somewhere else that requires us to use these munitions.
So apparently this weekend at Camp David, when the President was with his national security team, he apparently got very angry at Secretary Hegseth for not keeping him sufficiently apprised of all this. Although this is no secret because you mentioned the two National Defense Strategy Commissions I co-chaired in 2018 and 2024, in both of those reports, we called attention to the shortfalls of munitions because it has been a longstanding problem. Hegseth—
BILL KRISTOL:
And there’s been media reporting on this for the last four, five, six months, right?
ERIC EDELMAN:
Yes, of course. Yes. And the President says those reports are treasonous and we’re going to find the leakers who are saying all this. I mean, the specific numbers of many of these munitions, particularly the high-end specialized munitions like Tomahawk land attack missiles or Patriot and THAAD—that’s the Terminal High Altitude Air Defense missile interceptors—the holdings are a specific number, classified. But you can discern from open source budget documents the numbers that have been procured over the number of years we’ve had, and you can count up the number of strikes we’ve executed with these munitions and come up with a pretty good rough estimate of how many we have left in the tank. And this is not something our adversaries don’t know, obviously. They’re doing the same kind of analysis.
So Secretary Hegseth interestingly sort of blamed two people, which was his deputy, Steve Feinberg. Which is really ironic because by all accounts, Feinberg is one of the few points of light in the Hegseth Defense Department and has been working very hard on the munitions problem, which is a twofold problem. It’s a problem of budget, but it’s also a problem of the ability of the defense industrial base to rapidly scale up to produce these things. And we could talk about some of the reasons that’s difficult and can’t be accomplished with a snap of the fingers. And the other thing he blamed was the Biden administration for using up a lot of these things.
Now, it is true that a number of systems have been used during the Ukraine war and were provided to Ukraine by the Biden administration during its term in office. And having said that, the Trump administration has not provided virtually anything to Ukraine. And a number of these high-end munitions, and in a second, I’d like to break down categories of munitions because it’s important to do that. A number of these munitions were expended in June of 2025 during the Twelve-Day War and Operation Midnight Hammer. So some of them were used to suppress enemy air defenses. We obviously used the MOP, the Massive Ordnance Penetrator, the 30,000 pound bombs that were used to go down the ventilation shafts of Iranian nuclear facilities. So a number of those munitions were used up in that campaign. And then defense interceptors to deal with the Iranian responses and protection of US allies and bases in the region.
But the biggest expenditure, or not the biggest, but a crucial expenditure has come during the current Operation Epic Fury. And I mean, apparently that’s no longer the term of art because the President stopped it. But the ongoing war with Iran starting on February 28th, in the early phases of which the United States fired over 800 TLAMs, Tomahawks, and expended about a thousand Patriot and THAAD interceptors.
Now, Secretary Hegseth, among others, I think helped persuade the President— who I don’t think he needed much persuading. I think he had already concluded that he could knock over the Iranian regime, I think. You know, Prime Minister Netanyahu also was making this argument to him, “very easily.” This is the “quick war illusion.” I mean, everybody goes to war thinking it’s going to be very, very quick. I remember talking a decade ago to a then vice chairman of the joint chiefs of staff who told me we’re never going to fight a war for more than 30 days. And I said, “Well, how do you know that?” And he said, “Well, that’s when the munitions run out.” And so this is the fact that the President’s run up against.
I do think it’s important to break down what we’re talking about when we talk about these munitions shortages. And Admiral Mark Montgomery, who was a retired Navy Rear Admiral, was John McCain’s policy director on the Senate Armed Services Committee, has done a very nice job of breaking it down into three baskets. So there’s long-range strike, that’s Tomahawk or JASSM, the Joint Attack Air Standoff Missile, or Air-to-Surface Standoff Missile. And those give you the ability obviously to reach deep into enemy territory, attack key targets. We’ve seen how important this is in both the Ukraine and the Iran wars. They’re your air and missile defense interceptors, that’s your Patriots and your THAADs. Again, the war in Ukraine and in Iran has underscored the importance of those munitions. And then there are short-range munitions, and those are basically gravity bombs with tail kits on them, JDAMs, Joint Direct Attack Munitions. We got a lot of that. We got a lot of that.
But to finish off, without going into the long, sordid history of how we got here, essentially the United States, for almost 25 years, had been fighting a low-end terrorist organization set of adversaries who used asymmetric means against the capabilities of the United States military. Times have changed. We’re still dealing with some of that problem, but we’re now in a world of great power competition and more traditional great power wars, and we’ve seen two of them just in the last four years. And it turns out that those are not short, they’re protracted, and they involve massive expenditures of munitions way above anything that people calculated.
BILL KRISTOL:
Interesting. So leave aside, in a way, almost this policy question of how many would we need for the Pacific? That’s, in a way, okay, maybe you’d say this war’s so important, you’re not going to worry for a while about China or you feel like your diplomacy will keep them at bay. But just in terms of this war, as a layman reading about it, it seems a little crazy. And I guess it raises a whole question about the decision-making process. I mean, you could think the war, hope the war might go two weeks or two months, but you couldn’t be confident. So of course you would stretch out your use or ramp up very, very quickly your production of some of these missiles. It takes a while to do so, but you could have begun incidentally ramping that up six months before the war, if you thought you might have to go back after the June attacks on the nuclear program. Or you would have a strategy that depended on using fewer of them.
And so I guess Hegseth spent the first few weeks of the war boasting about how, in a way, how much of this we were doing, how many of these weapons, our dominance were so high tech. And I guess maybe Trump liked that too. And so I just wonder what kind of decision-making process it was.
And also say a word, since you really understand this, and I don’t really, but I imagine most of us don’t, how does it work? I mean, Admiral Cooper is the combatant commander. He says, “I think it would be good if we could take out the following Iranian missile capabilities. It’d also be good to take out this industrial place. We also want to have the option of doing aviation. And this will require X of these advanced missiles or we’d prefer to use the advanced missiles.” It might be doable by much more old-fashioned means or much lower tech missiles. But obviously if you can use the better ones, why not? I suppose, especially if money is no constraint.
But there’s other people in the military, I would take it, the chief of staff, the various services, and then culminating with the chairman of the joint chiefs who says, “Well, that’s great. It’d be nice if you could do that, but here’s how many we have totally. And here’s what we want to think about in terms of having reserves for August 6th in case the war’s still going on. And here’s what we want to think about in terms of Asia. And so, we’re going to limit you to this number and you should adjust the war plan accordingly.” And I suppose that goes up to the chairman and then to the Secretary of Defense. But is that not the normal process? Am I oversimplifying it a lot?
ERIC EDELMAN:
Yeah. Well, no.
BILL KRISTOL:
And then did it happen this time, do you think?
ERIC EDELMAN:
So what—
BILL KRISTOL:
Or what went wrong? How could this not have… This is so obvious, if I could just say. Sort of elementary. It’d be like managing your own household budget. It’s like maybe you should think about the stock market won’t go up 45% in the next month, so maybe you should have enough to live off four months from now. So tell us a little about how it works.
ERIC EDELMAN:
Yeah, so look, you have a combatant commander for CENTCOM, that’s Admiral Brad Cooper, who by the way, is a very good innovative officer when he commanded Fifth Fleet of Bahrain. He did a lot of really interesting, innovative, experimental stuff. Very good officer. He has a task which is to develop a war plan to accomplish certain objectives. I mean, I’m sure in this case it was to degrade and destroy as much of Iranian ballistic missile capability as we could. It was to, along the way, if there are nuclear targets to be destroyed, destroy those. Destroy the pillars of the regime, go after the IRGC and the Basij, et cetera, and deal with… Of course the Iranian military is a little weird because you have the regular Navy, Air Force, and Army, and then you have the IRGC forces, so it’s like a parallel force. IRGC, for instance, has the area of responsibility for the Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz. The Iranian Navy is responsible for outside the Gulf.
He has, at his disposal, component commanders—CENTAFs, Air Force commander, a Navy commander, an army commander—and they work up a plan to accomplish all these objectives. But one of the misalignments in our process is it’s not governed by a budget. There’s not a CENTCOM budget. So you don’t really tell the CENTCOM commander, “Okay, here’s your task and you’ve got X billion to do it with.”
And as a result—and this is not a criticism of Admiral Cooper, this is really more an observation about the system—we have created this system with combatant commanders with insatiable appetites for munitions, technology, aircraft platforms, but not governed by budget. It’s the job of the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff who has global responsibilities to look at that and say, “Mr. President or Mr. Secretary, Mr. President, here’s what we can accomplish. And if we do this, here are the risks that are associated with it.” And one of them, in this instance, would be, “We’ve already been running down our munitions for several years because of Ukraine, because of the earlier need to defend Israel after the attacks on Hezbollah in Lebanon and Iranian assaults on Israel. We’ve had to defend our Gulf allies and friends, and then we’ve had Midnight Hammer. And so that’s the baseline we’re operating from.”
BILL KRISTOL:
But also, the chairman of the chiefs and the chiefs of staff have all the data, of course, of what we have. And before they go to the President, [inaudible]—
ERIC EDELMAN:
Oh, yeah. There’ll be meetings in the tank.
BILL KRISTOL:
There are exchanges with—
ERIC EDELMAN:
Yeah.
BILL KRISTOL:
And they are cognizant of the budget. I mean, they are cognizant of what’s—
ERIC EDELMAN:
Yes, yes.
BILL KRISTOL:
…of cost. They’re cognizant of risk of the war stretching out and stuff. Just to be clear, I mean, this internally should be happening. You played a role in all these conversations, I’m sure, in earlier moments when you were undersecretary for policy, and of course the military guys had to lead, and the civilians had oversight. So yeah, so this should happen, right?
ERIC EDELMAN:
Right. So it should happen. These are the secretaries and the chiefs of the services under Title X have the responsibility for manning, training and equipping their individual services. And this is why General Tommy Franks, one time, the CENTCOM commander famously referred to them as the “Title X mother effers” because they were constantly trying to reign him in.
So yes, there is this tension, it’s endemic, but it’s basically the chairman and the vice’s job to brief the SecDef, and then when they brief the president to outline the risks. And in this instance, all the reporting suggests that General Caine did do that, that he did suggest that there were risks of munition depletion and that it could affect our ability to deal with other crises down the line. But this is an issue of what the president heard as opposed to what was said to him.
BILL KRISTOL:
Yeah. And I guess the other thing is in a normal administration, if I could say, there would be a national security process more broadly, which the National Security Council would coordinate. So the intelligence guys would chime in and say, “Incidentally, we’re only 70% confident that the regime falls in three weeks and there’s a 30% chance it doesn’t, so you should factor that into your calculations.”
And the State Department says, “Incidentally, our allies in the region want to make sure they’re going to be defended.” I mean, I don’t have to make this up, but you know what I mean, right? And Treasury Department says, “If this goes on too long, oil prices go up.” What’s your sense?
ERIC EDELMAN:
Inflation’s going to be a problem.
BILL KRISTOL:
And defense is a key player in this, but they’re one of a group. What’s your sense of how that’s worked?
ERIC EDELMAN:
If you read the Maggie Haberman-Jonathan Swan book, it’s absolutely clear that the traditional processes of government in general are not operating, but in particular, the National Security Council processes are not working. I mean, we’ve got Marco Rubio as both Secretary of State and National Security Advisor. He’s rarely at State because he stays at the White House for most of the day because most of what goes on is going on in the Oval or in meetings in the vicinity of the Oval, the Roosevelt Room or other Cabinet Room, other areas right around the president.
It’s being made by a handful of people. He doesn’t apparently meet with the staff of the NSC very much either. And so the normal process in which you would have a series of meetings at lower levels at the interdepartmental level, let’s say the assistant secretary level, which is the tertiary level of the executive branch, then the deputy’s committee where I normally would be representing the Department of Defense, the principal’s committee where I would frequently be on the backbench supporting secretaries Rumsfeld or Gates, unless they were traveling, in which case I would frequently be sitting at the table.
And then this NSC meeting with the president himself. None of that is going on. This is a kind of rambling bull session with the president, and they moved over to Camp David over the weekend. The venue changes, but the mix of people stays relatively the same. And there is no check on the process to say, “Look, if you do this, here’s what the budget implication is. Here’s what you’re going to have to do with the Congress. Here’s what you’re going to have to do with public affairs. Here are the second and third order consequences for things like munitions and how it might affect other theaters besides the Middle East.”
None of that is operating in this administration. And I would argue there’s also kind of a cascade effect internally because by all accounts, and I think this latest instance of Hegseth throwing Feinberg under the bus saying, “He’s the one to blame for the lack of munitions.” When most knowledgeable people would say, “Oh, actually Feinberg is the guy who’s actually trying to fix this problem,” which is a serious one.
Again, decision-making in the Pentagon is not going through any kind of normal process. It’s very, a small group, again, around the secretary and around some of the undersecretaries and the deputy are all kind of off making policy, but you’re not getting, again, the full benefit of the normal bureaucratic process. Everyone hates bureaucracy, but it’s there for a reason and it has its benefits, one of which is to identify problems like this before the fact so that you don’t end up falling afoul of things.
One of the mysteries about the war in Iran, which I think we’ll only find out in the fullness of time, is given the fact that for years everybody has known that the one thing that the Iranians might do is close a Strait of Hormuz, and we’ve wrestled with that for years about how we would respond. Why this suddenly seemed to have taken people by surprise when it actually happened.
BILL KRISTOL:
Really startling. Yeah. What it gets is what’s happening in the Defense Department in terms of personnel and stuff, I think quite important, over…A neglected thing in a sense that Secretary Hegseth has been doing. But just one last point on this, your very interesting account here.
I mean, I guess some people would hear you and say, “Well, yeah, maybe it’s not optimal, but Silicon Valley companies work differently from Proctor & Gamble, and maybe this informal improvisational style could work some.” And there’s, I suppose, a little bit of truth to that. Maybe it was too bureaucratic in the past. But where are you on the spectrum of, oh, this is kind of not optimal, but sort of manageable or reasonable or not worth being really alarmed about, to the other end of the spectrum of, “This could really lead to bad decisions and bad outcomes and that it’s not just this one case of munitions in Iran, but it also would be a problem in other areas and in other factors of this war, but also in other conflicts and decisions we’re trying to make.”
I mean, how worried are you, I guess, about that side of things?
ERIC EDELMAN:
Well, one of the things during the time that I worked in the Pentagon, as you pointed out, two tours. So out of my 30-year foreign service career, basically seven-plus years were spent in it. So almost a quarter of my government career was in the Department of Defense. And when I would walk in, as I would walk to my office wherever it happened to be located in the Pentagon, there’s a lot of military art on the walls, and that art is all about US forces in combat.
And it’s hard to walk down those halls without remembering. And I think everybody who works there really is animated by this. And even Secretary Hegseth, by the fact that what you do in this building is really a matter of life and death potentially. And it’s a serious set of responsibilities.
Look, I’m a creature of the bureaucracy, a 30-year government civil servant. So, of course, I think that for all its flaws—and there are flaws, and there are things that can be reformed and things that could be streamlined, and there are processes that probably are more complicated than they need to be, many of which, by the way, are imposed by Congress; we shouldn’t forget that—but by and large, it’s a system that served us pretty well. And you can judge by the results. I mean, I think there are a lot of things that, whether it’s in DHS or in DOD, that when you don’t have these normal processes, things go wrong, and they can sometimes go catastrophically wrong.
BILL KRISTOL:
Yeah. That’s worrisome. And I do think just looking at it, again, leaving it in a way as the decision to go to war and the macro decision, some of the big diplomatic questions, even leaving aside the Strait of Hormuz, which is hard to understand how they couldn’t have though about that ahead of time, but maybe they thought about it and, “just going to have to gamble on that one.” But yeah, it seems like an awful lot of things just haven’t gone as well as you would.
And again, if this is going to be your big war and you know you got involved in the prequel to it a year ago, you’d think that you would spend quite a lot of time planning for the next few months, right? I mean, there would be a real… Whatever one thinks of the Silicon Valley firms, at least they presumably, if there’s some new product coming out in five months, everyone goes to focus on it.
And it is kind of astonishing that… Just think about that. I mean, Hegseth had that thing, and we discussed it, I believe, on an earlier conversation at Quantico in September where he spoke and all the general officers called in, many, a huge majority come, and Hegseth speaks, the president speaks. One has the sense that they were more focused on that kind of thing and that theater than actually really getting an awful lot of one stars and two stars and the colonels who work for them and the specialists who work for them to thinking hard about then logistics.
And then they scramble and, “Oh, let’s get those big ships to the Gulf.” But I don’t know, it does feel to me like slightly mysterious how you could know this huge… Sometimes you’re attacked and you’re not prepared, and then you scramble, right? I mean, Pearl Harbor, you know, “Well, you should have been prepared, but you’re not prepared.”
ERIC EDELMAN:
9/11.
BILL KRISTOL:
…or you just miscalculated, that might be a little more Rumsfeld in Iraq. But to be sort of, I don’t know, to be making it up on the fly on a war that you start. I mean, we started it, let’s be honest. I mean, no question about that. And that you trumpeted your responsibility for, that’s a little odd.
ERIC EDELMAN:
Yeah. Look, I mean, just to give you another example. So much of this ultimately goes to the issue of serving the audience of one. So again, if you read the Maggie Haberman-Jonathan Swan book, the whole campaign, as best I can tell, extra-legal campaign we’re waging in the Caribbean and the Eastern Pacific against alleged drug boats.
I mean, it’s not clear even how much evidence that they’re going on for these strikes that are killing people. It’s really kind of extrajudicial killing. But Hegseth, according to the reporting that Haberman and Swan did, loved to bring the president videos of this because the President loved to watch this. And even the president staff called these “Hegseth snuff” films. But on a more serious, even more serious, because that’s serious. But note, we have a nuclear modernization program going on.
It’s recapitalizing our nuclear force whose modernization has been deferred for decades. So we have a nuclear force that’s made up of intercontinental ballistic missiles that were developed in the 1960s and went into the field in the 1970s. We have a submarine force that went into the sea in the early 1980s. We have a bomber force that, again, 18 of them are from the early 1980s, but a lot of them are B-52s that go back to the ’50s. So it’s an old force that needs to be recapitalized.
Oh, by the way, our two nuclear peers… The Russians have now just completed essentially a decade and a half of nuclear modernization, and China’s engaged in the biggest nuclear buildup that we’ve seen in a long time since maybe the Russian buildup of the ’60s and ’70s. And we’ve had a commission, a strategic posture commission created by Congress two years ago said, “We must modernize our nuclear force. It’s absolutely crucial to maintain our nuclear deterrent. There’s probably nothing more important to the safety and security of the United States in maintaining a safe and reliable nuclear deterrent.”
Well, $400 million of nuclear modernization money was taken to upgrade the Qatari jet that is serving as Air Force One. In a normal well-run Department of Defense, that would not be happening.
BILL KRISTOL:
No. That’s so striking. It does get to the question, of course, of the commander-in-chief. The degree to which they seem to think money grows on trees, but also they can just slosh money from one place to another and have no effect is really, again, it’s one thing if you do it as a sudden crisis in the Middle East. Yes, you move some money from the Pacific theater to CENTCOM. No one would quarrel over that, or you go to Congress and say, “We need more money because this war is tougher than we thought, and we need to do more in Iraq or something.” But it is kind of startling.
ERIC EDELMAN:
Well, just on that point, Bill, for one second. So this is where, again, the chain of consequences from not having a process plays a role. Right? So there was no discussion before February 28th of how do we make the case to the American people? How do we brief Congress?
So now they’ve got this… They want to increase the budget essentially by 50%, $1.5 trillion. As you mentioned in the opening, I’ve been an advocate for increased defense spending for years. I still am. Our commission recommended three to 5% annual growth, ultimately building up to sustained spending at the level of 5% of GDP. So I’m not opposed to increased defense spending, but the failure to consult the Congress, the failure to make a case for this conflict, the failure to explain how even Republicans who support more defense spending are complaining that the department is not explaining how they’re going to spend all this money.
They’ve got to the point where it’s not clear what the path forward is to a defense budget increase or a supplemental to pay for the cost of this war that have already been expended and are anticipated to be expended in the future, to the point that Secretary Hegseth was testifying in front of the Armed Services Committee a few weeks ago that unless they get some money soon, they’re going to have trouble making payroll. And again, I mean, this was not unforeseeable. These were foreseeable consequences that just weren’t attended to.
BILL KRISTOL:
Yeah. That’s well said and well-explained. Well, let’s talk about the thing you and I have talked about certainly a lot privately personally, but also on, I think, this show and another fora, which is personnel, especially at the high level of defense, but then that trickles down, obviously.
I mean, Hegseth has, in an unprecedented way, fired not one or two or three—like some of his predecessors did for particular instances of misconduct, or perceived misconduct, or instances of just failure of policy in carrying out something, not being the best person to do this job—but he’s fired, I think over two dozen now, general officers, including the chairman of the Joint Chiefs when he came in.
Some of them fired before they had done anything really in the Trump-Hegseth regime. Some of them fired over particular disagreements, one assumes; not much explanation, a lot of these cases. Some of them sort of mysteriously fired. I’m using “generally” here to include pressure to take early resignation. Many of them, my sense is—but I’d like you to talk a little more about this—very well respected. I just have the striking, talking to people, including down at much lower levels than you were at, just talking about someone like CQ Brown, who was the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs; Randy George, who was Chief of Staff of the Army, who was left in the middle of a… Well, in the war, right? I mean, in a war, which the Army is kind of important job, Chief of Staff of the Army. There’s General Donahue, very well thought of, I believe, left suddenly from the command in Europe, having commanded special forces and having very, very highly thought of. And again, and in each of these cases, certainly in the case of the latter two, I mean, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, you have some political, you might say, exposure if you were chairman in the previous administration, though that’s never led to an early firing, to my knowledge, in the way the rotation has worked. But the others, genuinely career military guys who, so far as one knows, didn’t express opinions about Biden or Trump or whatever. And then that amazing New York Times story about the way in which Admiral Caudle became Chief of Naval Operations to replace someone else who was fired.
What do you make of all that? Again, you can make a case there should be more shakeups. You can make a case that the promotion process is a little ossified and all these things you’ve dealt with them over the years, but I don’t know, how much effect has it had? What’s the upshot of all of that? How much of it is a politicization? How much of it is a consolidation of power with the Secretary of Defense? And how worried are you about what it’s left us with and what these, as you say, the second order kind of knock-on effects are down through the military?
ERIC EDELMAN:
Well, first, I think it’s important… I mean, bear with me for a second because I do think there’s some history here that’s important. During World War II, General Marshall, on several occasions, replaced commanders in the field during war because sometimes not because they’d done anything wrong, but because they thought he had someone better who could prosecute the campaign more effectively. We’ve over the years fallen way away from that. And during the post-911 wars, there was a debate inside the military itself, and there were articles that appeared in professional journals raising the question of, are our commanders actually being held to account for success and failure? Or is there a kind of magician’s union coming together that protects the three and four stars and they’re not really being held accountable? One of the secretaries I worked for, Bob Gates, was very determined to hold people accountable, and he relieved the Chief of Staff of the Air Force at one point after some mishaps handling nuclear weapons among other things.
He relieved a commander in Afghanistan because he thought he had someone who could prosecute the war better. And then a couple of commanders got relieved because of political pratfalls, including Stan McChrystal, who had famously had… A great officer, terrific officer who unfortunately I think was not well-served by his staff. He had a Rolling Stone journalist on his aircraft traveling around. The journalist heard a lot of criticism of then Vice President Joe Biden being voiced by these officers in their private conversations, this was all reported. And Stan had to resign because that was a violation of the norms of civilian control of the military and appropriate military-civilian relations. What’s going on here is nothing like any of this. I mean, this is people being fired because they are alleged to have been DEI promotions. So General C.Q. Brown, who you mentioned, fantastic officer, former Chief of Staff of the Air Force who became chairman. I worked with him when we were doing the 2024 National Defense Strategy Commission.
He’s thoughtful, he’s reflective. He was trying to wrestle with many of the problems we’ve been talking about in terms of changing quality of warfare and how to adapt the large bureaucracy to deal with that, fired without any cause. Lisa Franchetti, you mentioned Admiral Caudle, Lisa Franchetti, Chief of Naval Operations, also relieved apparently because she was a woman. It’s not just that… And people who’ve been “involved in DEI in the military.” Of course, if a previous administration mandates this, people are carrying out orders. They should not be held responsible for executing the legitimate legal orders that a previous administration has provided. We also have in the press of Secretary Hegseth interfering with promotion lists and taking women and people of color off those lists, presumably on the presumption that they’re not there for merit, but only because of DEI. Now look, I’ve seen a president interfere in promotion lists before. President Bush and Vice President Cheney both during the surge in Iraq in 2007 were extremely unhappy, to say the least, upset that a number of the key officers who were involved in executing the surge in Iraq on the ground, making it actually happen, were passed over for promotion. One of them was H.R. McMaster.
And so they directed the Secretary of Defense to empanel a special promotion board to go back and look at people who had contributed to this, and a number of them were then promoted to general officer. That is more a responsible assertion of civilian authority against the institutional biases of the services. We were talking about the bureaucratic assertive impetus. That is a legitimate exertion, in my view, of civilian authority to correct a sort of bureaucratic impediment to the promotion system and the biases against, in that case in the US Army, against counterinsurgency warfare. And so this is something of a completely different color, and it’s been extremely demoralizing by all accounts. And it creates really perverse incentives because it creates a perverse incentive structure that suggests if you curry favor with the new political masters and tell them what they want to hear, you will get promoted.
And what that does is over time, it strains out officers of character and integrity who are willing to tell political masters what they may not want to hear, like what the risks are to our munition stockpiles if you deplete them too quickly. And it’s a recipe… This is what happens in authoritarian governments. All the studies of political scientists about why authoritarian armies don’t work very well. It’s because who gets promoted are the people who are kissing up and kicking down. And that’s what we’re setting up in the Department of Defense right now.
BILL KRISTOL:
Yeah, that is really worrisome. And the fact that it can go down the ladder, and it does seem to be, at least by some anecdotal accounts. I am struck talking to people, as I said, who know some of these people that worked for them, often they’re at a second or third remove, how horrified they are that someone like General Randy George, the Army Chief of Staff, or General Donahue just aren’t there. I mean, these are people who I think everyone had a very high opinion of. And again, they’re not accused, unlike the surge issue where, okay, there’s a disagreement about if you want to call it military tactics or strategy. And there the bias in the institution is one way and you want to correct it some. But there’s no evidence, I don’t believe, in these cases of anything like that or not thinking that the war was even a good idea or whatever.
So really kind of astonishing, I think. I mean, the first firings I always thought were meant to send a political signal, which they did send, and you’ve just referred to of kind of you’ve got to be on board here. We don’t want any dissent going forward. But these people weren’t, they’d been there for a year and a half in the Trump administration, Trump-Hegseth regime, and they hadn’t so far as one knows, they hadn’t given interviews like Stan McChrystal unfortunately did or whatever. They were just doing their job.
ERIC EDELMAN:
Right. Yeah. No, that’s absolutely right. And what begins to happen over time, I think, is you’re going to see people with integrity leaving. They’re going to decide, I don’t want to hang around for this. They can wait a while to see if this is just going to be a passing thing. But the longer this goes on, the more people have to make personal and career decisions. The more the people who you would like to see being promoted into senior positions are going to leave. And the more opportunists, lick-spittles you’re going to see rising up. And it’s going to have a compounding effect obviously, because the more people like that who are in positions of leadership, the more good people are going to want to leave. And so it’s going to compound over time. And the president likes to brag that we have the greatest, most powerful military of all time, and there’s a lot of truth in that.
We have a very, very capable military. It’s got issues and there are problems about how it adapts to the future of warfare. That’s a whole different set of questions. But we’re not going to have the greatest military in the world for very long if we let this keep going because we’ll end up having a military going to look more from a moral point of view like Saddam’s rather than what we’ve been traditionally used to in the United States.
BILL KRISTOL:
No, and the operations that he’s touted, and they do seem very impressive, both whether it’s Venezuela or the rescue in Iran of the pilot who was shot down. I mean, those are not done by people who Pete Hegseth discovered or anyone currently put in charge discover. They were done by people who had come up through this military that is half the time being praised by the president and the other half of the time derided especially by Secretary Hegseth as a DEI, woke, terribly damaged military that he took over. But who’s exactly doing these operations at the level of every level of lieutenant and captain? The enlisted guy’s obviously been lieutenant and captain and major and colonel. These are people who were trained in that military. And so it is a little astounding.
I’m curious about, I think there’s been a certain amount, maybe more than usual, of lack of full candor about in reporting on the war. Certainly a lack of transparency, I would say. A lot of announcement of, “We used 152 missiles and destroyed a ton of stuff,” but somehow a little bit less of a comprehensive view. And certainly in the last couple of months, three months as things got tougher, the briefings suddenly stopped. It’s kind of amazing. Every two times a week, Hegseth really pounding his chest, General Kane giving more workman-like briefings, and then suddenly no more. And then we start the war up again, and what, about three weeks ago, the president went back for what, 10 days of bombing. There’s literally no briefing. A little bit of press releases about how many munitions were expended, I guess.
ERIC EDELMAN:
Not even that. I mean, basically CENTCOM has been just putting out statements saying what platforms were used.
BILL KRISTOL:
Is that right? Okay. Yeah. Yeah. So really—
ERIC EDELMAN:
I mean, we used to get less sorty numbers or anything like that. It’s just basically we used this bomber, that bomber, this Navy ship, that other capability, but it’s much less information than we used to get.
BILL KRISTOL:
And I do feel like, don’t you think, and also in terms of the attacks on some of the bases and the casualties and stuff, a certain amount of…Military’s never thrilled to talk about that stuff. But I mean less candor than one had. I’m just curious, let’s just say a word about that in general, but also I do feel like it’s an outside-inside thing. Lack of candor and honesty. Outside, maybe a lack of candor. Does that reflect a lack of candor inside, a kind of intimidation?
ERIC EDELMAN:
It can. I mean, I would say this, look, it’s understandable that you don’t want to allow your adversary to have a lot of detailed information about how much damage they’ve inflicted on your bases. I can live with a certain amount of obfuscation publicly on that point if there were an effort to be candid with the Congress of the United States, which there has not been. And therein I think lies the problem because then you start also getting people… You start lying to yourself inside the bureaucracy. And that is very dangerous because then you get leadership that really doesn’t know. I mean, you get the situation that the president complained about over the weekend, which is, how come no one told me about this problem? Now in this instance, as you and I have just discussed, just a de minimis level of interest on the part of the president would’ve alerted him to the fact that there was a problem here.
But on other issues, you’re going to start to see this replicating itself in other areas, and senior leaders are not going to really know whether they can rely on what they’re being told or will rely at their peril on what they’re being told. Then there are also other instances here of the impact that these people have had in a deleterious way on the functioning of the department. So when they came in, there is an office that was dedicated to reducing collateral damage and harm to civilians in warfare. “Ah, that’s really woke. We want to be lethal. We want to be agile. We’re warrior ethos. We’re about killing people in the department. We’re not the Department of Defense, we’re the Department of War.” So they got rid of that office for all intents and purposes. Well, now as they’ve been investigating the accidental strike on the girls’ school at the beginning of the war, which was a pretty horrific incident, they’re realizing, well, maybe we actually need some of this capability.
And so they’re bringing it back. But one of the things I’ve learned, and this goes to the broader question we’ve been discussing of people leaving and the wrong people staying, it takes a lot of time and effort to build the kind of military that we have had, that we’ve grown used to having since I would say the 1980s, 1990s. The military went through a very bad period after Vietnam. It was the period of so-called hollow military. The military in some ways in those days was as troubled or maybe in some areas more troubled. Drug use, other racial tensions in society at large. Since the 1980s or ’90s, it’s been, I would argue, an organization who was doing much better than society at large in many, many ways. It takes a lot to build that up over a period of years. Doesn’t take long to tear it down, but building it back will also take a long period of time and a lot of concentrated effort.
It won’t just happen naturally. Things will not just spring back to the status quo ante once all of this other stuff stops.
BILL KRISTOL:
No, that’s a very important point. And you’re right. I mean, I remember the ’70s, I was in college and grad school, and one had to sense it was real problems and people internally said there were real problems and externally as well. And that yeah, there was a huge effort to set it right and rethink certain things and develop. And yeah, we take for granted then by 2015, military’s highly respected through two very difficult wars, including controversial wars. It wasn’t like they were popular, right? In that sense.
ERIC EDELMAN:
Right.
BILL KRISTOL:
And some mistakes by military leaders. You mentioned Bush and Cheney being frustrated by them, but still a sense that the institution was… And then some scandals, of course, and all that. I don’t mean to minimize those too occasionally, but still, yes, an institution that was genuinely and legitimately, I think, and correctly respected.
ERIC EDELMAN:
And it’s bad for—
BILL KRISTOL:
Yeah, and it’s bad for a country not to have a military that’s… Because then you get all kinds of other second order effects. Right? The military’s doubted, and then it says, “No, no, we did this right.” “Oh, well, how do we know? Maybe you’re lying.” And then you get a whole other cycle, you can get a cycle of distrust, which is bad on both sides, really. The civilians like Congress, I’m glad you mentioned that, because that is an important part of it. Right? If one had the sense that Congress was getting straight information, then you as a citizen could think, okay, look, I can’t judge this stuff. And some of it is classified or it shouldn’t—
ERIC EDELMAN:
Appropriately classified. Right?
BILL KRISTOL:
Or shouldn’t be shared too much, and therefore it’s okay. But if members of both parties and critical members of the same party, that John McCains and Lindsey Grahams in the case of Bush and Rumsfeld are getting this information, we at least understand there’ll be a real debate.
I think just one thing I’ll add, and then very curious to what you have to say. I mean, it’s also a reason why there are people outside, think tanks and former military, and academics at military institutions, but also obviously just regular universities. And they were part of this, I don’t know what you want to call it, ecosystem in an important way because you want to have external checks, right? I mean, you want someone to say, “Wait, we’ve studied this here. And thank you Mr. Military for giving us access to the stuff that we were supposed to have access to. And we think you’re doing this wrong.” And I don’t have the sense that there’s that kind of back and forth with outsiders—which you’re now one—that there once was. So anyway, address.
ERIC EDELMAN:
Yes, no, I mean it’s a very good point, Bill. And we have a professional military education system, which has its flaws like anything, but has generally done an excellent job of preparing and training senior officers. And a part of that system was getting some of them out of the military system into universities around the country. A lot of that has been cut back, and it’s been cut back again in the same spirit that the assault on universities in general has gone on. I mean, there’s this notion that these institutions are woke and maybe anti-military, just as the excuse of antisemitism is being… I mean, it’s not that there hasn’t been a problem on college campuses of dealing with antisemitism. There has been, but it’s being used as a battering ram for a different agenda with a different purpose. Same here. This is rupturing the connections between the military…
You talk to most people who’ve had a year at Harvard, oh, by the way, where Secretary Hegseth got a master’s degree, they will tell you that it was a great year. It’s good to get outside to have what I used to call the out-of-body experience where you leave your institutional setting and then go see how the rest of the world sees your institution when you’re not just cocooned in it. And that’s a very healthy thing and a good thing, but it’s all being, again, disrupted and in some sense, elements of it destroyed by this administration.
BILL KRISTOL:
Yeah. And do you find that in dealing—you talk to people there still, many of them worked for you 10, 15 years ago, and certainly have been colleagues and worked with you on some of these panels and commissions and so forth—I mean, how different is it in talking to them?
ERIC EDELMAN:
I think there’s a real climate of fear that’s been instilled. People are afraid that their phones are going to be examined to see who they’ve been talking to. And did they talk to this journalist? I mean, there’s been this whole, we’re going to root out all these leakers who’ve leaked about the munition shortages. I mean, the President and the Secretary seem to think that somehow our adversaries are stupid and they don’t understand these things without us having a candid discussion of them. And so, there’s a real climate of fear. People are afraid to talk. They’re not able to, again, go outside the institution and go to panels or conferences or what have you, a lot of that’s been cut back. And it’s bad for everyone. It’s bad for the institutions that are getting to have military folks in them. I’ll give you one example.
When I was still teaching at Johns Hopkins SAIS, I taught a course on the Iraq wars. And actually, one of my students was Scott Hertling, son of your and my Bulwark colleague, Mark Hertling. Terrific young man, but he’d been executing the surge. He came to me and said, “Okay, instead of doing a paper, could I do this project on my unit during the surge for the students?” He did a fantastic job. And the students benefited so much from understanding what it was like to be on the streets of a city or a town in Iraq, working with Iraqi security partners to provide security, to defeat Al-Qaeda. That’s something that I couldn’t teach without that kind of presence. So, this is bad for everybody that this is not happening anymore.
BILL KRISTOL:
Yeah, no, I think one takes things for granted. And if you’re younger than we are, you take for granted that we have a professional military, that it obeys lawful civilian command, certainly that it behaves 98% of the time in an appropriate way and doesn’t go around abusing its authority, but also stands up for itself as it should, and internal councils of government tries to resist politicization a little bit.
I mean, I was just… On the Harvard thing. I taught at the Kennedy School often just one course, one term a year, so not a full-time thing, in the 2000s. And the military students, I think the courses were more on government in general, leadership in general, politics and culture and a mishmash of things, honestly. But the military students were excellent, and I think they did benefit a lot. Incidentally, this thing about Hegseth and them being disconnected is just false.
I mean, that is to say it may be that I’m sure the Harvard faculty is to the left of the country and to the left of the military and there may be courses in history that don’t, I don’t know, appreciate the US military well enough or whatever, but the actual day-to-day experience of these students, they were looked up to by the non-military civil servants and others who were studying for master’s of public policy or just taking courses. The undergraduates I think respected them. Often they got invited to speak, to come into the dining halls and do an informal talk because people weren’t curious just like you were saying, “What was it like?” And stuff. These are typically what, majors, lieutenant colonels, I would say, people in their mid 30s to 40-ish, maybe as I recall, the students. So, young enough to talk to these undergrads and grad students. Right? They weren’t super four-star generals, not that they couldn’t talk either. And it was really a positive experience all around.
And I think it helped also the students understand a little bit about the military and cutting that off is crazy. Also having some professors at West Point, there was a big article about this one guy who was kind of a curmudgeon and a critic of the military and of the wars, but whatever. I guess I think he was teaching on the legal side more, but it doesn’t hurt them even as undergraduates to hear a little bit of a maybe different point of view and a controversial point of view, or have a guest speaker who’s critical of this or that. I mean, I just feel like, is it really going to work out well to have a military that’s just been cosseted? And in that way treated as snowflakes almost, that they can’t deal? The idea that military who fought Iraq or Afghanistan can’t deal with the Harvard campus for a year and that they’re going to be brainwashed is so—
ERIC EDELMAN:
Ludicrous.
BILL KRISTOL:
Ludicrous and condescending to the military, right? I mean—
ERIC EDELMAN:
Yes, I agree. And look, I mean, we already have a situation which is that because we have moved to a volunteer army, a professional volunteer army, which was something that was of concern, by the way, to the founders, that we would have a standing army. I mean, that was something that they, I mean, as you know from your study of the founding and political philosophy, they were very well aware of the history of republics, that militaries had previously and frequently been the author of the end of republics of republican government, republican government with a small R. They read Molesworth’s history of Denmark and all these other things that talked about the danger of standing armies. And we are now, because we have this very powerful, capable military, there is a tendency for people in government, not just this administration, this is across the board, but when there’s some urgent need in the United States for something, if it’s Hurricane Katrina or some other natural disaster, there’s really a tendency to reach for the military.
Actually, General Brown and Peter Feaver wrote an article about this recently in Foreign Affairs, which is very good, I recommend to people. But there’s danger in that. And you see it now with the president reaching for the military instrument for the purpose of law enforcement, whether it’s on the southern border. So, I mean, there’s a lot of money that’s bled out of the DOD budget to go send these guys to the border, even though they technically are not supposed to be performing law enforcement role. And on the streets of Washington DC where you’ve got the National Guard, which are now going to be there until 2029 at the cost of several billion dollars. And it’s not good for the military, frankly, and it’s not good for American society to become inured to seeing Humvees or other military vehicles parked near Memorial Bridge, which a bunch of National Guard men wandering around, not doing much of anything, but just being present. That’s, I think, inimical to what we are as a nation and what the founders intended.
BILL KRISTOL:
Yeah, and it begins to normalize stuff that then could be used in bad ways, even if a lot of it is harmless, you might say. But also, it is taking money, as you say, that’s not going to other things. I mean, these National Guard could be being trained back home instead of wandering around. I see the whole time—
ERIC EDELMAN:
It’s actually very disruptive to training cycles. If you talk to people in the National Guard Bureau, they’ll tell you, these deployments are very disruptive to the regular training cycle. And so, they actually harm readiness overall in the long run, and it’s just not a good thing.
BILL KRISTOL:
And if citizens resent them being there, it doesn’t help civil military relations. Now, the whole thing is worrisome.
Any final words? I guess some of the culture of the military, which I do think has been so impressive to civilians like me when I worked with them in government, I was in government and subsequently having dealt with them a fair amount. How much do you think… I mean, that’s pretty strong. I’ve always thought that would be harder to change than some other parts of the federal government, in a good way harder to change. Is that still the case, you think? I mean, or how much do you worry though that it can get eroded over another couple of years of this kind of politicization and discouragement of people being candid and driving away good people and so forth?
ERIC EDELMAN:
Well, I think it’s a kind of good news-bad news story. And as you just said, the good news is, it’s a very robust culture and it’s deeply ingrained, and I don’t think it’s going to disappear overnight. But the longer this goes on and the more the perverse incentives that I described earlier have their intended effect and self-select senior officers who then can implement more and more policies that chip away at that kind of culture, the more damage will be done and the longer and harder it will be to build back and reconstitute.
BILL KRISTOL:
That’s a very judicious but sobering answer. And really, a sobering but I think very important and very, for me, enlightening conversation. So Eric, thank you for taking the time and really giving the thought to this that you have. And thank you for everything you’ve been doing to do your best to keep our foreign policy and our national security policy at a as sound of footing as possible in these tricky years. So, no, really.
ERIC EDELMAN:
Thank you, Bill. It’s been great being with you, great discussion.
BILL KRISTOL:
Yeah, I really thought it was illuminating, as to say not entirely cheering, but you got to be honest. One has to be open-eyed about what’s happening. Right? So anyway, Eric, thank you for joining me, and thank you all for joining us on Conversations.
