Transcript of NATO Commander Warns of Damage Trump Is Doing to U.S. Alliances New

The former Supreme Allied Commander of NATO, a retired US Navy admiral, is publicly warning about Donald Trump, Pete Hegseth, and the Trump regime destroying the United States military. The former Air Force Secretary publicly warning about Donald Trump, Pete Hegseth, and the rest of the Trump regime destroying the United States military. Delta Force leaders mocking Pete Hegseth for his behavior. Former top State Department officials publicly warning about Donald Trump, Pete Hegseth, and the Trump regime's destruction of the United States military. With all of that going on, what's happening inside the Pentagon? Well, they are hunting for leakers who informed the press that the United States military is being destroyed and that the military ran out of weapons in the catastrophic and unlawful war in Iran, including Patriot interceptors, THAAD interceptors, and other weapons. The New York Times reporting in major leak hunt, Pentagon gives polygraph tests to Joint Staff members. About 50 people were tested, an unparalleled inquiry that comes in the wake of news reports about the war with Iran and the U.S. military's diminished stocks of munitions. We'll get to that in a moment. But I want to start first with the former Supreme Allied Commander of NATO and retired U.S. Navy Admiral James Stavridis, his op-ed in Bloomberg.

Here's what he writes. Hegseth has turned the Army into a rudderless ship. The sudden departure of the Secretary of the Army, Dan Driscoll, Stavridis writes, following months of tensions with Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, is a serious blow to American security. Worse, his resignation follows the forcing out of several top Army generals, including Chief of Staff Randy George, Vice Chief James Mingus, and highly regarded combat commander of the US Army, Chris Donahue, who himself was part of Delta Force. The leadership of the US Army is being eviscerated right in the middle of the war with Iran. Driscoll was widely admired and supported by the top Army leadership. He had taken the leading role in efforts to modernize the service using the lessons learned on the battlefields of Ukraine, which Hegseth did not want to happen. Hegseth cared more about injecting testosterone and doing testosterone tests and his view of the warrior ethos than modernizing the United States military. Stavridis goes on to write, while positions are not highly visible to the general public, I know how vital their role is to maintaining a healthy Department of Defense. I spent 2 tours on the staffs of 2 different Secretaries of the Navy, one from each party.

And he goes on to talk about the importance of these positions. And then he goes on to say, at the risk of mis— of mixing a nautical metaphor, the Army is now effectively rudderless under Hegseth. While the uniformed deputies, political undersecretaries, and assistant secretaries will do their best and guide the massive 1.2 million person department— active duty, National Guard, Reserve, and civilian— with its $200 billion budget, the Army is going to drift in terms of purpose and effectiveness. There was a troubling report this week that Christopher Lenev, the acting vice chairman, ordered the Army unit in Europe to stop specializing in drone warfare. The challenges are magnified by broader personnel problems. With no Senate-confirmed permanent Army chief of staff or vice chief of staff, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Dan Cain doesn't have anyone at the war council table with the full authority and gravitas to contribute a ground combat perspective. Hegseth may have individual reasons for the departures of so many senior leaders across the services. He has also forced out the Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral Lisa Franchetti, and Secretary of the Navy John Phelan, among many others. And he has sapped morale by denying the investments of younger officers who have been selected for promotion to one-star admiral or general.

And we know this is because They were Black or women or Hispanic, and that was one of the main reasons why Hegseth did not promote them. This damage to a major department in the middle of combat operations is stunning. Clearly, Hegseth needs to nominate a stable team of new Army leaders, get them confirmed by Congress, and give them steady support. He simply cannot try to run the massive department himself. That is too heavy a lift for a Secretary of Defense, even in peacetime. In the military, big lessons can be learned from smaller examples. When I was a Commodore of a squadron of destroyers 25 years ago, I had a commanding officer working for me who kept firing people. First, it was a young division officer, then a senior department head, and then a seasoned Master Chief. He had reasons for each dismissal, but they seemed increasingly thin as the weeks went on. I was displeased but supported him, as I was expected to do within the Navy's personnel system. He eventually started laying the groundwork to fire his supply officer.

Supply officer.

someone I knew well and respected. I called the captain to my flagship and said, in a nutshell, this is a disturbing pattern that is unsustainable. You need to work with the team you are given, not simply fire the ones you can't seem to work with. The bottom line is that the next person leaving your ship will be you. He took the advice and went on to a successful tour. The same lesson applies to the Army. It deserves not just high-quality leadership, but also steady and consistent leadership. Our soldiers deserve it, And our nation needs it. And then you had a top State Department official, former Trump State Department official and GOP strategist, who said it's been absolutely shocking how the United States has been exposed for a lack of plan of engagement and a lack of a plan either to win or exit this war. We are paying the price for a cabinet of sycophants. The strategy has been rinse and repeat, whether it's rhetorical or kinetic action. Matthew Bartlett, a Republican strategist and former State Department appointee in the first Trump administration, said it's been absolutely shocking to watch. Then you had former Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall.

Here's how he described it on CNN. The Hegseth Trump, Trump regime sycophants here, play this clip.

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. Both of these are totally unprecedented. The climate of fear that's been created is very palpable. It's affecting everybody and how they work. It's affecting the quality of advice that's being given. People are afraid to say something that's not gonna be approved of. The witch hunt, if you will, for people who are supposedly woke, I think has got a lot of people scared. Even in the first Trump administration, when emphasizing DEI was part of the policy, people would make speeches about it, and now they're being punished for that. So it's a very tough climate to work in. I don't think senior leaders are getting good advice and people are coping as best they can. And the things I mentioned in the op-ed are some of the coping mechanisms that they're using to try to adapt to this situation.

It's not good for the country.

More from Frank Kendall right here, who was the Air Force Secretary in the Biden administration on Secretary Driscoll's resignation. Here, play this clip.

I spent 20 years in the Pentagon. It has always been that way until this administration.

Do you worry about the impact it has long-term?

Oh, absolutely. Caitlin, 4 years of this is going to do enormous damage. It's going to take several years or a decade to go repair this and restore the type of system that, that we have had traditionally.

When we listen to Secretary Hegseth, I mean, he often has the same kind of mantra that he repeats. Some people might hear that and agree with it. Some people might say, well, I like that he's doing that. 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 of Defense should be focused on.

Right now, in our competition strategically, brainpower is just as important as how big somebody's biceps are. We need people with intellectual capital just as much as we need people who are physically capable. He's overemphasizing this kind of, you know, bro thing with the testosterone thing you mentioned, as well as many other things. That's not what the Secretary of Defense should be worrying about. What he should be worrying about is not getting us into a conflict that we have no obvious way out of and isn't going to accomplish the things that we got into. And we're thinking of an absolute disaster in Iran right now. We went into this thing with very poor assumptions about how it would play out, risks that were well understood and prevented any other prior Secretary of Defense or president from doing this. Were ignored. And we went into this conflict, we now have no way out. We need leadership that doesn't do that sort of thing. And the other things that are kind of window dressing that Secretary Hegseth seems to be focused on are not things that a Secretary of Defense should even be worrying about. The professional military will take care of standards of grooming, physical fitness, and all those things.

They're very good at that. And they always have been. He doesn't need to worry about that. But frankly, in this case, I don't think he knows how to do anything else. So he's doing the things that he understands and thinks he can do something about.

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And then more from Kendall right here. Here's what he had to say. Again, this is the former Air Force Secretary. Here, play this clip.

The president is getting an honest assessment of what is going on in Iran right now?

That's a great question. I don't know. There are reports that when Secretary Driscoll was leaving, he went to the president and he told him about the situation in the Army. Service secretaries like myself and now Secretary Driscoll are responsible for organizing training and equipping the services they're responsible for. They don't do operational things. They're more about providing forces to other people who do operations. But in this case, the president probably had no idea what the status of his army was until Secretary Driscoll came in and informed him. If that's an indicator, it may well be that the president doesn't understand how this war is going. That's hard for me to believe because we've been at it for 6 months now, and some things are blatantly obvious from the way it has all played out.

Yeah. Do you see an ending to it in sight in this moment?

I don't right now. I was a little more optimistic a month or so ago. I thought we might work out of the MOU that we had. And I didn't think we were going to resolve the nuclear program thing very easily. I thought we could get the straits open and go into protracted negotiations from there. That fell apart. So now we're in a situation where Iran, quite frankly, seems to be closed controlling the timeline. We're doing intermittent engagements, skirmishes, kind of lower levels of violence, which is better than the massive things we were doing before. But nobody seems to be ready to sit down at the negotiating table and get this thing resolved. That's what we need. And Iran, to a very large extent right now, it seems to be— they've already taken enormous economic hit. They seem to be able to absorb that. We've pulled back on how much we're doing militarily. We don't have great options there. I don't see an easy way out at this point.

Now that brings me to Delta Force. Here is what's being reported by the Daily Beast. Army heroes' humiliating nickname for Pete Hegseth is leaked. In his effort to transform himself from a misogynistic loser boozer into the man running the world's most powerful military, Hegseth wrote the 2024 book The War on Warriors. The 46-year-old Secretary of War is now waging a war on America's most distinct— distinguished warriors as he seeks to create a cult within a cult at the Pentagon. Generals who want to remain in Hegseth's military must be blindly loyal to Donald Trump and also be a sycophant to the preening, feigning tough guy that is Hegseth, who was sidelined in the National Guard. Hegseth's nickname in the Pentagon is No Tab Pete because while in uniform, he had none of the patches such as Ranger that signify special combat skills. And as he fires one senior military leader after another who actually is what he pretends to be, the former Fox News co-host makes clear the full irony of his book subtitle, Behind the Betrayal of the Men Who Keep Us Free. And it goes on to talk about how the disgraceful dimension of Hegseth's betrayal were confessed last Thursday at the retirement ceremony of General Christopher Donahue, which was held at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, inside the compound of the 1st Special Forces Operational Detachment-Delta, known to the public as Delta Force, but to those who serve simply as Delta or the unit.

This secret, determinedly low-profile commando outfit has been called SEAL Team 6 without book deal. That compares to a defense secretary who had a book deal but scant actual combat experience to write about. And the article goes on to talk about how within Delta Force, one, you had Donahue, who comes from a stint in Delta Force and was a commander, uh, therein as well. Um, but they're out there mocking Pete Hegseth's behavior, and they have nicknames for him, and they know that Hegseth is an absolute loser. Now, with that said, I do want to show you as well this portion of a speech which seems very apt today from the retired U.S. Navy Admiral, former Supreme Allied Commander of NATO, James Stavridis. He gave this speech in 2016 before the United States Naval Institute. This was his keynote that he gave right here.

Watch it.

I think this is so critical as he talks about The cause of World War I and World War II. Mind you, this speech was in 2016, but we're seeing Trump and Hegseth do the exact things he warned about back in 2016, which were the lessons that we should have learned from World War I and World War II. Let's play it.

So this collapse, this failure of security goes on and on, and we ought to think about other battles from that war. This, of course, is Midway, Iwo Jima. As we look back on the 20th century, World War I, World War II are the salient events for the people in this hall here. And as security professionals, which is what we all are, we ought to ask ourselves, what went wrong? Why did we fail to deliver security? Why were 60 million people killed? in these 2 world wars? My argument is that we tried to create security by building walls. Think about it. Maginot Line, Schlieffen Plan, Iron Curtain, Bamboo Curtain, most iconically, the Berlin Wall. The 20th century was about building security through building walls. Won't work. Will not work in the 21st century. In this world, we need to build bridges, connections, and think about how to move around walls, which I would argue navies, Marine Corps, Coast Guards can be very, very effective at doing. Where did I develop this theory? A lot of it came out of this terrible day. I would imagine a handful of people here shared that day with me in the Pentagon.

Pentagon. This was my office, that little red circle. I was a newly selected one-star in N81. And the irony of that moment has always struck me. Here I was, behind every wall you can imagine. I was guarded by the 5 massive walls of the Pentagon, by the strongest military on earth, in the capital of the richest country on the planet. Was I safe behind all those walls? Obviously not. And as I kind of stumbled out that day onto that grassy area in the front of the photograph, tried to help in a small way, watch the real heroes of that day, the first responders show up, it occurred to me that walls are not going to protect us in this turbulent 21st century.

And that brings me to what Pete Hegseth is focused on right now. Hunting for leakers within the Pentagon. The New York Times reporting, in major leak hunt, Pentagon gives polygraph tests to Joint Staff members. This New York Times article describes how US government investigators have taken the extraordinary step of subjecting roughly 50 members of the US military's Joint Staff to polygraph tests over leaks to journalists, including about how the war has created a shortage of critical munitions, according to officials briefed on the move. The investigators asked military officers and civilian employees on the Joint Staff if they disclosed classified information to members of the press and about whether they provided information about diminished US munition stocks. The polygraph tests were conducted in August after a flurry of news reports that detailed the diminished stocks of crucial munitions. Between 1,500 and 2,000 officers and officials work for the Joint Staff, which coordinates operations, policy, and war plans with combatant commanders around the world. Then the article goes on to say Rear Admiral Donald J. Grutter, a retired top judge advocate general for the Navy from 2000 to 2002, says I've never seen polygraphs employed this broadly or at this seniority level.

In my experience, it is unprecedented. Yeah, that's the Pete Hegseth way, engaging in this despicable behavior. Anyway, thank you everybody for watching. We appreciate you. Hit subscribe. Let's get to 7 million subscribers and get your copy of WTF America. Preorder it. It's the book I wrote with my brothers. We appreciate you so much.

Have a good one.

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