Command Post: Hegseth Takes an Axe to Generals, Admirals and Military Education

Bulwark Takes

The episode examines several controversial shifts within the Department of Defense under Secretary Pete Hegseth, specifically focusing on a

Key takeaways

• Secretary Pete Hegseth aims to reduce the number of general and flag officers by 20% by January 1, 2027.
• Concerns were raised regarding 'slapdash' curriculum changes in DoD schools that may include banning books like 'The Kite Runner'.

Main topics

• Military leadership reductions
• DoD school curriculum changes

Notable quotes

The way we's doing this seems to be a little bit slapdash.

Conclusion

The episode serves as a critique of perceived institutional dysfunctio

Transcript preview

Speaker 3 (0:00) Hi, I'm Ben Parker from the Bulwark. Welcome back to another episode of Command Post on your Bulwark Take Speed. I am joined, as always, by our very own Lieutenant General Mark Hertling. General, how are you this morning? Speaker 4 (0:10) Good morning, Ben. We have all sorts of things across a bevy of topics to talk to this morning, or talk about. I think it'll be an interesting show today if we can get to all of it. Speaker 3 (0:19) It really, I mean, it feels like every show is a lightning round lately. There's so much news to go through. And, you know, maybe one day we'll have a good news story to talk about. Yeah. Maybe we do, actually, at the end. maybe our very last news story is a good news story so we'll hold on that one but first let's Speaker 4 (0:34) cut Speaker 3 (0:34) through all the bad stuff uh we have to start with this um secretary of defense pete hegseth is giving his major state of the force address this is like the uh secretary of defense's equivalent of the state of the union he's giving that later today but already fox news has previewed one of his major announcements from the speech he plans to cut The number of general and flag officers across the American military by 20 % by a fifth. Now, there are a lot of details to get into here. Part of it is that this seems to be not that they're cutting the number of positions, but the actual number of officers of those ranks. It affects every one of the armed forces, or one of the military forces, I should say. They want this to be complete by January 1st of 2027, so that's pretty fast. And this doubles the previous 10 % reduction that they aimed for. last year, which was different because I think that was a reduction in the number of positions. This is a reduction in the number of actual officers. Am I getting that right? Speaker 4 (1:39) Yeah, that's the way I read it, although we haven't heard what Secretary Hexeth is going to say. But we can talk about what the implications of that are if you're interested in doing that. Absolutely, Speaker 3 (1:51) yes. I've Speaker 4 (1:51) got Speaker 3 (1:51) a Speaker 4 (1:51) little bit of details on that. All right. I'm going to look at this from two perspectives. One is active Army generals. which right now there are about 272 in the force. That's the number that's considered at end strength today. But across the forces, the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marine, Space Force, there are about 850 generals and admirals across the entire force. So if you're talking about 20 % of that, that's a proposed reduction of 170 general officers and flag officer positions. And as you said, what he wants to do is not look at managing the positions and not filling them in the future. He literally, from what we understand, wants those senior leaders gone by the 1st of January, 2027. That's going to be very difficult. Yeah, I'm going to go back to the Army real quick, Ben, and just talk about the numbers that we're discussing. In the Army right now, there are There are 274 general officers. That's a bit over what Congress mandates, but they've received an exception for it. 10 U.S. Code 526 caps Army generals at 219. We currently have... 272 but that does not include uh it's over and above when you talk about numbers in the joint force that's difficult to explain i'll try and explain it in just a second but if you break it down by specific ranks at the one star position there's 110 at the major general or two star position there's a hundred at the three star position the rank i held uh there are currently 52 And at the four-star position, there are currently 12 four-star Army generals in the Army. Now, those are the numbers that were the rank. When I talk about joint positions, those 274 officers aren't all serving within the Army. They are serving in joint billets. What do I mean by that? Well, the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the Pentagon. combatant commander position. So you might have an Air Force four star that's commanding a combatant command, but you've got a couple of, you know, Army generals, as well as Navy and Marine Corps generals in that organization. It's like European command. When I served in Europe, there were, there was an admiral in charge, a four star admiral, and there were a bunch of Air Force, Army, and Navy folks on his staff at different positions. Was that Stavridis Speaker 3 (4:30) who was in charge then? Speaker 4 (4:31) It was Admiral Stavridis who was in charge when I was in Europe, yes. So those are the kinds of positions these guys hold, guys and gals. When we talk about a 20 % reduction, which I'm skeptical about because there doesn't seem to have been an assessment of the different positions. It's mostly just a numerical value of 20 % instead of 10%, which he announced a couple of months ago. So again, you're talking about 170 senior ranking positions who mostly have 30 years or above worth of experience. Now you're going to get all kinds of people on the internet saying, well, during World War II, we had less generals than that. and that was because we had mostly infantry organizations and air force and navy positions. Today we have things like cyber command and we have space the space force which in and of itself has a lot of generals providing capabilities for wars in space and defense in space. We have a whole lot more on a joint staff which we didn't have during World War II. We have several more combatant commanders like Western Hemisphere command that we did not have during World War II. So you can see how there's been kind of an expansion in the general officer ranks, even though it hasn't really correlated to the number of soldiers we have in the force. So that's kind of an explainer, Ben. And truthfully, I'm not fighting. for more generals and I'm saying it's not a bad idea to check out how many we have because there is a little bit of a bloat. I'm just concerned that what Secretary Hegseth has not done is an analysis or an assessment of where these generals are and what they're doing. So again, I'm an old retired general. I'm not trying to defend general officer numbers in our ranks. I'm just saying The way we're doing this seems to be a little bit slapdash. So General, explain to me what happens. This is why Speaker 3 (6:39) I started out with the distinction between getting rid of the people and getting rid of the roles or the billets, right? Like it can happen that you say, hey, this whole organization that we have that's led by a general or an admiral, this doesn't need to exist anymore. So we're getting rid of it. And therefore, there's one less slot for a general to take. Go ahead. Yeah, you have something to add there. No, I mean, it's a great Speaker 4 (7:00) point because what we've seen, and I'm going to go back to Elon Musk, Doge's actions, we've seen governmental institutions across the board literally slashed with all kinds of people. And there is an attempt to create a more effective bureaucracy. But in cutting some of these positions, Ben, what we're beginning to see. and I think all of us Speaker 3 (7:27) are noticing it Speaker 4 (7:28) now, is there have been a lot of slashes in organizations that are really necessary across the board in various institutions. And I'll name one that's happening today. Cyber defense. Either the FBI or the CIA or the organization that you and I wrote an article about, CISA, the Cyber Infrastructure Security Agency, that has almost been completely diluted. And what we're now seeing now is the potential for multiple cyber attacks in government installations, because these people that sometimes are considered, you know, over and above what we need actually do a pretty important job. I'll say one more thing about the slashing of the generals. In 2010, when I was asked to go command U.S. Army Europe, it was a four star position. Speaker 1 (8:22) When Speaker 4 (8:23) I was brought in to talk to the chief of staff about what we were doing because we were downsizing Europe, he said to me, he said, Mark, we're going to put you over there as a three star because we want to decrease the rank structure in Europe. And I said, I'm good with that. I'll command the organization as a lieutenant if you want to make me a lieutenant. Well, there was also additional elements of that force. that were decreased in rank. As an example, we had a one-star general at Grafenwoehr, our major multinational training site where other nations come to train as well as the US Army. That was decreased from a one-star to a colonel position. The G4 of Europe, the logistics guy, was reduced from a one-star to a two-star. I had no deputies as a deputy commander except one, a one-star that used to be a two-star, excuse me, a three-star that was reduced to a two-star and a one-star. All of those officers did phenomenally well, but they did not have the experience, the additional credentials to deal with multinational organizations because they were facing off against Russians and Polish and German four and three star generals, and they were a one star. So rank does matter not only from observation, but also from credentials. I was a three star. Truthfully, it didn't bother me the whole time I was there. I still had the largest force in Europe, which had 90,000 soldiers at the time. I was a three star with my counterpart in the Air Force, Mark Welsh, who was a four star general. He had about 20,000 airmen under his command. And my Navy counterpart, who had about 10,000 under his command, but he was a four-star. You can see where this is. And the Marine Corps was a three-star, and he had about, oh, less than 500 people under his command. So you can see where the dynamics of slashing and burning these ranks really sometimes make a difference, and there's more devil in the details than just slicing numbers. Speaker 3 (10:33) Yeah, the other thing I wanted to ask about, since they're doing, they're not getting rid of the positions, but they are getting rid of the people. So that just means you're going to have, as you described, lower ranking officers filling these positions. So instead of, we talked a little bit before, and you wrote about in the Bulwark just recently, the kind of special... like line items on a resume that a general officer needs to have not only education but also you need to have experience working with people in the other services that you're not you don't just have a navy mindset or an air force mindset and an army mindset you have a whole military mindset and you are capable of thinking more broadly you know you need to usually have gone to one of the war colleges and studied not just tactics and how to win a battle but things like national security policy and strategy and you know larger scale warfare things like that so What happens when you still have all these positions, you still have all these commands, you still have all these responsibilities that need to be done, but you have lower ranking officers filling those positions? Speaker 4 (11:30) Well, I'm going to add one thing to what you said, too. You're not only working with other services and other ranked positions, but as you increase through the chain of command and you get to the higher strategic ranks. Part of your responsibility is also working with governmental officials. I mean, I work as much with ambassadors and heads of state as I did with soldiers at times as a three star in Europe. You also are working with our government, going back to testify before people and giving them military advice when you testify before Congress. You're working with other U.S. agencies that you're working with on the battlefield and you're. actually synchronizing all that different elements of national power into an operational sense. So, you know, there are a lot of people are saying, oh, these are all just a bunch of political generals. Yes, they are because they have to be. That's part of the job. You know, you have to work within politics and bring your culture to bear with others. But in terms of your question, what does it do? It just. It just lessens the capability and the experiences that these officers would have done. Was as a three-star commander in a former position, was I stretched? You bet your ass I was. I mean, it was hard catching up to the kinds of things my predecessor, a four-star general, had done because he got in more doors a four-star. he was in more meetings than I could go into as a four-star, both in governmental agencies, but also within the Department of Defense. I mean, Pete Hexeth is not going to pay a whole lot of attention to two and one-star generals as he is to three and four-star generals. So that's kind of another indicator of what we're talking about. Speaker 3 (13:18) Yeah, so two more questions on this before we move on to the rest of our litany of bad news, and then our good news at the end. So one of them is