'If You Can Keep It': The Pentagon And Transparency

0:00This week on Sources and Methods, something has shifted in Ukraine. Protests in the streets, a shakeup in military leadership. The two people you're kind of watching as they ran the war in Ukraine are now both out of a job. Plus how President Trump seems to be shifting when it comes to his tone on Russia. Listen this week to Sources and Methods, the National Security Podcast from NPR.

0:31At least 18 American service members have been killed and hundreds more wounded since the start of the Iran war. President Trump was asked directly about fallen troops on Tuesday. He made only a brief mention of them before he moved on to the Iranian regime. We feel very badly, but, you know, those great people, those great patriots are out there fighting that, Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon. Iran has been very, very badly damaged. They've lost everything almost militarily. They've got very little left. They've got some missiles. They've got some drones. They've got some manufacturing ability, not much.

1:11We control the strait. They don't control anything. So we'll see what happens. A quick fact check there. The United States does not control the Strait of Hormuz. Today on If You Can Keep It, our weekly politics series on the health of our democracy, we're talking about how the Trump administration is conducting its war in Iran and whether it's being honest with the public about how the war is going. We'll get into funding, whether Congress will exercise its power over the flow of money and the president's war powers, and the Pentagon shutting out the free press while downplaying and obfuscating American deaths and injuries.

1:48It's a stunning example here. Those four service members killed in Jordan and Iraq last weekend that the president called great patriots just a second ago. The Pentagon scrubbed them from the war casualty record less than a week later. The Trump administration said those deaths don't count toward the official Iran war death toll because they were killed after the president declared a ceasefire in April. Over the weekend, after facing a backlash from veterans and military families, the Pentagon restored those four soldiers' names killed in Iranian strikes last weekend to their casualty database.

2:21But in a separate category from the 14 other soldiers killed in this war, the Department of Defense also added more than 140 new wounded soldiers to the database. I'm Todd Zwillik. You're listening to the 1A podcast. What responsibility does the Pentagon have to communicate transparently with the media and the American public? And what's at stake when the administration misleads the public about the war? We'll be back with the answers to those questions and a lot more after this short break. Stay with us.

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3:33So we want to breathe from our belly area. This week on the Life Kit podcast, tips for those painful, stressful moments. Listen to Life Kit on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, it's Terry Gross, host of Fresh Air. Hey, take a break from the 24-hour news cycle with us and listen to long-form interviews with your favorite authors, actors, filmmakers, comedians, and musicians, the people making the art that nourishes us and speaks to our times. So listen to the Fresh Air podcast from NPR and WHYY. Welcome back to the 1A podcast. I'm Todd Zwillick. We're talking about the war in Iran and transparency in the Trump administration, all part of our weekly series, If You Can Keep It, where we talk about American politics and its impact on our democracy.

4:21With us from Washington is Tom Nichols, staff writer at The Atlantic. He's also a national security expert who taught military officers at the U.S. Naval War College for more than 25 years. Tom, thanks for being here. Thanks for having me. Great to have you. Well, Tom, tomorrow marks five months since the U.S. and Israel launched these attacks on Iran. In that time, the president and Secretary Hex, that Secretary of Defense, have shared – they've been very hard to pin down, I would say, in public and in front of Congress about the actual goals of going to war, even at times refusing to say whether we still are at war with Iran.

4:58What's going on here? All of this obfuscation, all of this dodging and verbal gymnastics all come from the same problem, which is that when the president launched this war of choice, he didn't expect that it would take longer than maybe a week or two, and that it was going to result very quickly in regime change. And so all of the things that they're dealing with now, they had no plans for dealing with. What happens if the war drags on? What happens if there are major casualties? What happens if Iran closes the strait? What happens if they attack their neighbors in the Gulf? They didn't want to think about any of those things because the president famously now said he had a gut feeling.

5:45And so they went to war. The president and his team went to war. Now, in fairness, not something I say often about the Trump team, but in fairness to at least a few of them, there were people, I think Marco Rubio, John Ratcliffe, a few others, who tried to warn him that this was not a likely outcome. But once regime change didn't happen, everything you're seeing now are basically emanations from that one flawed assumption at the beginning of this war. So now they're going to say it wasn't a war. It wasn't – we're being surprised by some things. We don't really want to topple the regime. We're just trying to get the straight open.

6:34It's almost like a bunch of dominoes of lies that were set up to fall one after another because of this one really dumb assumption at the beginning of it all. That's the political leadership, Tom, in the Oval Office and in advisors around the president. But every experienced warfighter, military officer and general, at least as far as I know, understands that the plan goes out the window when the shooting starts. In other words, as soon as somebody punches somebody, the plan goes sideways, and that's part of warfighting. If they know that and if the institutions know that, why this institutional confusion from the White House that they thought it would go smoothly, it didn't, and now everything is obfuscation and backpedal?

7:21Well, I taught for a lot of years at the Naval War College and taught hundreds and hundreds of officers. And I can tell you, I think what an American military officer would tell you is, look, we offer options and we explain risks. We don't make decisions. You know, when the president says, can you do X, Y, and Z, their answer is, well, yes, we can do this. Here's the cost. Here's the risk. Here's what would be involved. At the very top, you do have senior leaders like General Cain, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, who are supposed to say risky idea, bad idea, good idea, and so on. But in the end, the civilians make the decisions.

8:11And I think what you saw in the first weeks of this war is that the military had plans for doing lots of things. And remember, fighting with Iran and dealing with a war in the Gulf is probably one of the most studied and most war-gamed scenarios over the past 30, 35 years. I mean, I saw them at the War College. I mean, this is just something that the American defense establishment has been thinking about since the 1980s. but the president because the president didn't think this through no one was surprised by the the Iranians closing the Strait of Hormuz except for the president and his you know civilian team the military I doubt was surprised by this but there is a you know they're in a tough spot they They can, they, you know, can you destroy this set of targets in Iran?

9:14Yes, we can. But, dot, dot, dot, you know, other bad things will happen. And if the civilians don't listen to that, then, you know, the military, all the military can do is salute smartly and say, fine, we will execute the following, you know, plans. We've had something like 13 ,000 strikes. And I'm sure they were all sitting there on the books waiting to be executed, but without a strategic plan from the civilians, well, without that kind of a plan, here we are. So what's our best understanding right now then, Tom Nichols, about American strategic objectives in this war and how close the president is to actually accomplishing them?

9:56Oh, that's a great question because the strategic goals have changed. The initial strategic goal was destroy the regime, set up a statue of Donald Trump and Tehran, march across the rose petals and be greeted as liberators. I think that's pretty much all there was. Now we have multiple objectives. Reopen the strait, get a handle on what's happening with Iranian nuclear material, stop the attacks on other Gulf states. There's a laundry list of them. And the hard truth here, Todd, is we're close to achieving none of them. The Iranians are coming out of this much, I mean, they're damaged. I mean, on this, the president and his advisors are right.

10:44Iran has taken huge amounts of damage, but their pain tolerance is higher than ours. The regime is still there. They can still close the strait and inflict damage on their neighbors and on American forces and shipping in the region. So we're, you know, they're in a better, strategically speaking, they're in better shape than they were five months ago, which to me is just astonishing. But the kind of thing that happens when you lose a war. We're going to talk a lot more about the Pentagon obfuscating American casualties, deaths and injuries and their treatment of journalists and the public's right to know.

11:23Tom Nichols, we've covered in detail here on 1A with your Atlantic colleagues and with a lot of other people, how Secretary Hegseth has aggressively pushed journalists assigned to cover the Pentagon out of the building, insisting on new press restrictions that many in the Pentagon press corps would not accept. What strikes me is that that story predates this war. We're talking about a Pentagon that hasn't been honest about casualty figures. We'll talk more about it this hour, about death figures. We'll talk more about it, about strategy. But obfuscating the press and new press restrictions is an older story than this war.

11:58That tells me that the effort to obfuscate is older than just what you describe as unmet objectives. Absolutely. But again, I think it's important to point out how much of this is actually coming from the civilian leader, Pete Hegseth, at the top of the Pentagon. And Pete Hegseth and a small number of people around him. Hegseth, like the rest of the Trump administration, views the media as an enemy and says so. Um, you know, this is very much, I think, coming from Hegseth's Fox News mentality that, um, the, you know, the, the MSM, the mainstream media are, um, un -American. They're, you know, they're, they're out to get us.

12:47They're not here to report the truth. And so there was not just, it wasn't just about, um, trying to control narratives. There is this kind of weird social resentment thing going on that we're going to kick out journalists and bring in real journalists who are friendly to us. All right, Tom Nichols, let's take a pause there. Coming up, more on transparency and your right to know. Plus, how prepared is the U.S. for potential escalation in Iran? More to come. Stay with us.

13:18This week on Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me, we talked to Tyler James Williams, star of Abbott Elementary, about the special connection he has with real teachers. If there's a teacher within 100 yards of me, I'm going to know. I'm going to know. They're either going to tell me or I'll see it in their eyes. Don't miss our full conversation and the rest of our games. Listen to the Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me podcast in the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts. On the streets of Denver, 19 disabled protesters block buses to demand accessible transportation. The right to be in the world. That's what the movement was about.

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14:46Welcome back to 1A. I'm Todd Zwilich. It's the latest installment of our weekly politics series, If You Can Keep It, talking about lack of transparency from the Pentagon in the Iran war and what it means for our democracy. We reached out to the Pentagon for a statement, and we got this from Chief Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell. He said this to 1A in an email on the question of transparency around casualties, deaths, and American strategy. He said this, the Department of War and the U.S. Central Command has consistently provided comprehensive updates to the world on the United States strikes and operations in Iran.

15:22President Trump and Secretary Hegseth have been constantly providing updates directly to the media and the American people online, delivering clear, unfiltered insight into our objectives and our decisive actions. End quote. That's from Chief Pentagon Spokesman Sean Parnell. Tom Nichols, you wrote in a recent piece in The Atlantic where you argue that the Pentagon is now doing more than just operations and a lack of transparency. It's a deliberate effort to impede journalists from getting timely and accurate facts about this war and how it's being conducted. What do you mean? How are they doing that?

16:01What's going on? Well, again, it's not just the Pentagon. And I think when we talk about this, we have to always remember that what's happening with the Pentagon is part of what's happening with the Oval Office and the Secretary of Defense's office together. And what's happening is that the, again, because this wasn't supposed to be a war, it wasn't supposed to drag on, there weren't supposed to be a lot of injuries. He's the civilian leadership is basically telling the military leadership to play to kind of play games with these numbers in part. And this is, you know, just shows you how complicated this whole business gets in part because the White House is playing games with Congress about whether or not it's time to invoke the War Powers Act.

16:54And so the president keeps saying, you know, the war's on, the war's off. That resets the clock. The War Powers Act has this 60-day clock where the president can act, and then he has to withdraw troops. So the president keeps saying, oh, clock's on, clock's off. Timer's begun, timer's stopped. And so they're trying to divvy up casualties to say these casualties didn't happen during a, you know, air quotes, war. They happened after the ceasefire. Now, this is all just nonsense, of course. This has been a war from the minute the president launched it. The ceasefire was not a ceasefire because, as I keep saying, no one would cease firing.

17:42And so this is all the same, you know, mess. And the president's arbitrary distinctions don't matter. Tom, Americans have experience with this kind of thing. Korea is not a war. It's a UN police action. Vietnam's not really a war. It's preventing an anti-communist insurgency. I mean, this type of – the details change, but not really a war is an old one. yeah but i i mean in this the president i mean the korea we call the korean war a war um we were at war and we acted like we were at war the vietnam war we drafted people we were we called it a war it was it was a war i mean there were times of course you know that the the presidents didn't want to do that this president says i mean he's tried it's an excursion like you know like it was a boat cruise because it wasn't supposed to be this and it wasn't supposed to turn into this.

18:40So the uniformed military, and again, you know, they just don't have a whole lot of choice in this, have to play these games as well. But the civilians are, the original sin here rests with the civilians who are giving these orders and talking about hiding these casualties difficulties in computer systems that aren't meant for what they're doing. The old days of them coming out and just saying, here's our daily briefing, those are gone. All right. Let's bring in a couple more voices to this discussion now. Joining us from Washington is Leo Shane III. He's a defense reporter for Politico. Leo, welcome back to the show.

19:16I appreciate the invite. Yeah. Also with us is Mona Yakubian. She's director and senior advisor of the Middle East program at the Center for Strategic International Studies. Mona, thank you for joining us. Good to be with you. Well, Leo Shane, part of your job, your entire job maybe right now, is reporting from the Pentagon on the progress of the war, strategy, casualties, American cost. Tom Nichols is describing a strategy of obfuscation from the reporter's perspective. How easy has it been to get an honest accounting of the human and the financial cost of this war from your perspective? Look, there's always been tension between the press and the Pentagon and the information that we want released to the public versus what the military will say is classified or sensitive information or key to operations.

20:07But as Tom laid out, this is a time of particular hostility from the Pentagon to the press. And, you know, I think you referenced it earlier, most of the regulars have been kicked out of the Pentagon. You know, we've got a crew of folks who are pre-approved media who have signed on to not release things that the DOD doesn't sign off on. It's a time where it really is difficult to get any straight answers. And I think this casualty situation that you've been talking about as a perfect example, you know, the Defense Department did come out over the weekend and say, hey, the reason that some of these changes happened was because of mistakes in the system and because of problems we've been having.

20:52But given the hostilities, given all the confusion over how they're categorizing things, given that they are moving things around, it's hard to put any faith in when they say that this was an oversight or something they meant to correct. So it really is just a frustrating time to get any information out of the Pentagon. Mona Yakubian, you're not a journalist, but you're an analyst, and you rely on transparent information as well. And I'm sure you have many, many colleagues in the field and contacts inside the Pentagon of your own. What has it been like for you? Do you feel like you and your analyst colleagues in that industry have an honest assessment of what's really going on in this war?

21:35Well, I'll be honest. I think any good Middle East analyst has a wide range of contacts in the field, in the region. And that's really, those are the contacts I largely rely on. Of course, understanding, you know, how the war is progressing, what are the issues that the U.S. is facing? Those are critical to understanding where things might go. But honestly, there's nothing better than hearing directly from those in the region in terms of how this war is evolving and playing out. Well, we got this from Mark in Cincinnati who says, the Pentagon keeps asking Congress for more money for this war. Is it to fund the current war?

22:17Is it to pay for depleted arsenals? Are we now – are arsenals now depleted? Well, let's talk about Congress and funding for the war because information and lack of information, Tom Nichols has already pointed out efforts by the secretary of defense to sort of fudge numbers with Congress as well. Last week, the secretary and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Dan Cain, came up to Capitol Hill to request more than$87 billion in supplemental funding, most of which would be used for the war in Iran. During that hearing in front of the Senate Appropriations Committee, Michigan Democratic Senator Gary Peters, he attacked excess leadership.

22:53You, sir, are the failure. Not the men and women who are on that front line. Not the men and women who hold up their honor with distinction. But if there's a lack of a winning strategy, they're in harm's way. Their leaders have failed them. And that's what's happening. We have political leadership. You. You don't have a strategy. You don't have a long-term plan to actually win this war. Tom Nichols, let's talk about Congress. They still have the purse strings. They control the money. I think we can stipulate that they handed over a lot of their war powers many decades ago. They didn't do it yesterday on this war.

23:30Hegseth is on the Hill with the ask. $87 billion for starters,$1.5 trillion beyond that for larger Pentagon budgets. What levers has Congress given itself? What power do they have now to hem in this war? And are they going to do it? What's the attitude there? Well, as you say, they've bargained away and abandoned a lot of their ability to rein in almost any president. And so really all they have left is the law, assuming the president would observe it if they decided to invoke the War Powers Act, and purse strings. But that's a complicated thing to do because, of course, then, you know, members of Congress are – face the charge that they're starving the troops of money while we have people in the field fighting.

24:19And a lot of that money – I mean, you know, going overseas and fighting is an expensive business. food, fuel, you know, the tail, the logistics tail that is involved with moving people halfway around the world, and as well as replacing all of these expensive munitions that we're going to need again down the line somewhere. So really, at this point, other than passing a resolution that says this war is over and bring the boys home, Congress doesn't have a lot of good options at this point. Right. Leo Shane, the third, what's your take on Congress now? We saw a war powers resolution ordering Trump out of the war past the House last week.

25:03It went nowhere in the Senate. The House and Senate disagree over mechanisms for war funding. A lot of it is quite procedural and detailed, but there's tens of billions of dollars at stake. And refusing to fund the war is, of course, the one big way, the one weird trick Congress could use to hem in this war. So what's your take on Congress's posture right now? And Democrats have said that's really what they're left at at this point. As you said, there's been a series of war powers votes. There have been several successful ones in the House. There's a successful one in the Senate. But they don't essentially do anything.

25:39These are messaging votes. And while there's some legal fights to be had about whether or not they can be enforced, and what, that's still sort of off in the future. The thing that Democrats have been able to do is slow down this supplemental money. And I think Tom laid it out nicely. There's, you know, the money that you're actually spending on operations over there, but, you know, those operations are done, you know, ongoing. That money's already spent. That money's out the door. To pay for that, they've pulled things from, you know, personnel accounts, from training accounts. And if that money doesn't go back, you are punishing troops in other areas.

26:16So it's a tricky situation for Democrats who say that they don't want to fund any part of the war to hold this off. The money situation is incredibly complicated at this point. There are two competing different supplemental ideas and that hearing that you spoke of, a bunch of the Democrats referenced the fact that the Pentagon still has about$75 billion that was approved last year that hasn't been spent for anything. So are they sitting on a slush fund, but they say they need more? A lot of confusion. And to that point, you know, both Republicans and Democrats have been saying, hey, we just don't have enough transparency into how you're spending the money, what you need the money for, what your munition stockpiles are, any of this stuff to move it along.

27:02So there is some bipartisan frustration even among the – even with the Republicans who support this war saying, we just don't have enough information as to where this money is going and what you actually need as opposed to what you just might want. But Mona Yakubian, what's your view on the true cost of this war? There was an ask earlier for something in the 20 billions of dollars. The White House and the Pentagon at one point floated$200 billion unofficially to see how people would react. Now we're sort of at 87 with room to grow. What do you know about the true cost of this war? Well, I think as with any war, oftentimes what the public sees is the tip of the iceberg.