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

0:00What if you can see what's happening inside your body? PreNuvo's whole body scan screens for hundreds of conditions, including many solid tumors, as early as stage 1, all in under an hour. And now, you can go beyond imaging, with 80-plus blood biomarkers that help complete the picture. This Labor Day, save$300 off your scan when you book at PreNuvo.com. That's P-R-E-N-U-V-O dot com. Save$300 now through September 8th at PreNuvo.com. Terms and conditions apply. summer's full of reasons to look your best Tecovis Western boots are handcrafted in over 200 steps with premium cowhide and exotic leathers and they're comfortable right out of the box no break in period just boots you can wear all summer long their performance shirting and premium denim keep you cool and put together wherever the season takes you and of course you can always stop by Tecovis.com Tecovis, forever west Dave Portnoy here the wait is over.

1:00Football is here and so is DraftKings. DraftKings is now live in all 50 states. One app, every sport nationwide. New DraftKings customers. Sign up with code SPOTIFY. Spend five bucks to get$200 in rewards within 21 days. Includes all markets. That's code SPOTIFY in partnership with DraftKings. The crown is yours. Gambling problem? Call 1-800-GAMBLER, 1-800-MY-RESET. Connecticut, call 888-789-7777 or visit ccpg.org. On behalf of Boot Hill Casino in Kansas, FedTax pass-through may apply in Illinois. 21 and over, void in Canada. Bet with DraftKings Sportsbook to get bonus bets that expire in seven days or trade with DraftKings Predictions to get predictions dollars that expire in one year.

1:42Event contract trading involves risk of loss. Predictions offer void in New York. Non-withdrawable rewards issued as$50. Click to claim every seven days for 21 days. Terms at dkng.co slash offer. Limited time offer. Nationwide based on sportsbook predictions and free-to-play sports contest availability varies by state. Starting a business can seem like a daunting task unless you have a partner like Shopify. They have the tools you need to start and grow your business. From designing a website to marketing to selling and beyond, Shopify can help with everything you need. There's a reason millions of companies like Mattel, Heinz, and Allbirds continue to trust and use them.

2:17With Shopify on your side, turn your big business idea into... Sign up for your$1 per month trial at shopify.com slash special offer. Hey, it's Ryan Reynolds here for Mint Mobile. Now, I was looking for fun ways to tell you that Mint's offer of unlimited premium wireless for$15 a month is back. So I thought it would be fun if we made$15 bills. But it turns out that's very illegal. So there goes my big idea for the commercial. Give it a try at mintmobile.com slash switch.

2:56Ben Meiselas:The former Supreme Allied Commander of NATO, a retired U.S. 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?

3:38Ben Meiselas:Well, they are hunting for leakers who inform 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.

4:22Ben Meiselas: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 U.S. Army, Chris Donahue, who himself was part of Delta Force. The leadership of the U.S. Army is being eviscerated right in the middle of the war with Iran.

5:09Ben Meiselas: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 two tours on the staffs of two different secretaries of the Navy, one from each party.

5:55Ben Meiselas:And he goes on to talk about the importance of these positions. And then he goes on to say, at the risk 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 Linev, the acting vice chairman, ordered the army unit in Europe to stop specializing in drone warfare.

6:40Ben Meiselas:The challenges are magnified by broader personnel problems with no Senate conferred 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.

7:26Ben Meiselas:And we know this is because they were black or women or Hispanic. And that was one of the main reasons why Hexit did not promote them. This damage to a major department in the middle of combat operations is stunning. Clearly, Hegsitt 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.

8:08Ben Meiselas: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, 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 seem to work with.

8:39Ben Meiselas: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.

9:19Ben Meiselas: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. The 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.

10:05It'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. minute. 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 going to 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.

10:45And 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 adopt in this situation. It's not good for the country.

11:01Ben Meiselas:More from Frank Kendall right here, who is 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, four 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 we have had traditionally. When we listen to Secretary Hexeth, I mean, he often has the same kind of mantra that he repeats. Some people might hear that and agree with it.

11:37Some 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 Triscoll himself is that it's impacting what he believes the military should be focused on, what he believes the Secretary Huxley should be focused on. Right now in our competition strategically, brain power 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 bro thing with the testosterone thing you mentioned, as well as many other things.

12:12That'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 will 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.

12:43And the other things that are kind of window dressing that Secretary Hagsah seems to be focused on are not things that a secretary of defense should 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. Life insurance. We all know we need it, but we keep putting it off because we think it's complicated or expensive or that we'll live forever.

13:17Stop telling yourself you'll handle it later and take care of it today with SelectQuote. In 15 minutes, you could have coverage that fits your life and budget. Here's what makes SelectQuote different. Their licensed insurance agents work for you, not for the insurance company. They compare options across multiple carriers to find you the right coverage at the lowest price. They've been doing this for nearly 40 years and have helped over 2 million people find coverage. Even if you have health issues, they can help. High blood pressure, diabetes, heart disease. Their agents know which carriers will give you the best rate for your specific situation.

13:54If you're healthy, they can get you the same day coverage with no medical exam. Other brokers push policies that pay them the most. SelectQuote's agents actually shop for you. SelectQuote, they shop, you save. Get the right life insurance for you for less at selectquote.com slash Midas. Go to selectquote.com slash Midas today to get started.

14:21Ben Meiselas: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 in 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.

14:58But 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 six 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.

15:34I thought we could get the streets 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 we're on 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.

16:08We'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.

16:15Ben Meiselas:Now that brings me to Delta Force. Here is what's being reported by the Daily Beast. Army hero's 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 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 feint tough guy that is Hegseth, who was sidelined in the National Guard.

17:04Ben Meiselas: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 Hegs' betrayal were manifest last Thursday at the retirement ceremony of General Christopher Donahue, which was held at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, inside the compound of the first special forces operational detachment, Delta, known to the public as Delta Force, but to those who serve simply as Delta or the unit.

17:55Ben Meiselas:This secret, determinately low-profile commando outfit has been called SEAL Team 6 without the 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 therein as well. 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 wanna show you as well this portion of a speech which seems very apt today from the retired US Navy Admiral, former Supreme Allied Commander of NATO, James Stavridis.

18:43Ben Meiselas: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.

19:34And 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 two 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.

20:30Where 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. 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 five 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, watched the real heroes of that day, the first responders show up.

21:24It occurred to me that walls are not going to protect us in this turbulent 21st century.

21:30Ben Meiselas: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 U.S. government investigators have taken the extraordinary step of subjecting roughly 50 members of the U.S. military's joint staff to polygraph tests over leaks to journalists, including about how the Iran 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 U.S.

22:19Ben Meiselas: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.

23:07Ben Meiselas: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 now. Pre-order it. It's the book I wrote with my brothers. We appreciate you so much. Have a good one. Hey, if you want the full story, how democracy got here and how we take it back, pre-order our new book, WTF America today. Just scan the QR code or click the link in the description. Let's do this.