Command Post: Hegseth Takes Secret Meeting with Netanyahu

Hi, I'm Ben Parker from the bulwark welcome back to another episode of command posts of the bulwark takes feed I'm joined as always by our very only tenant general marker at link general. How are you good morning Ben? It's good to be with you on Thursday morning as opposed to Wednesday morning I hope we don't throw our listeners off too much by having it a day late, but some of us were down in Atlanta for the bulwark Confab down there and it was a great time. So we postponed a day Yeah, we're gonna talk about that more But no, let's get into it because we got a lot to talk about as usual First thing we have to start with is the Secretary of Defense is in Israel He's meeting with the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu just before these really elections, which are just a few days away and this is a person familiar with the Prime Minister said the Netanyahu met with Hexeth at an Air Force base in Israel's negative desert region They were discussing threats in the region to US and Israeli interests and the American Israeli partnership None of that sounds that weird to me, but the timing is a little curious Yeah, you have to do all of this in terms of context, I think and I'm I'm suspicious of this departure of Secretary of Hexeth to Israel and it's because as you said Prime Minister Netanyahu is facing an election on Tuesday the 27th five days from now You normally don't have members of cabinets interacting with people seeking primacy and election especially given the fact that right now the Prime Minister is Underwater a little bit to his opponent guy named Eisenstadt who is a former chief of the Israeli military He's he's trailing him a bit and yet at the same time Netanyahu He's stated that he has the opportunity with the US's help to complete the operation against Iran and You would think that it's a little suspicious that our Secretary of Defense who I don't think has had any kind of Relationships or engagements with present Prime Minister Netanyahu has been there before I may be wrong in that But certainly talking military stuff is a secretary of defense's Requirement to different nations, but usually not with a Prime Minister it's usually done with the defense minister or the chief of the general staff and it's usually not a couple days before the election. So I would suggest Maybe that Prime Minister Netanyahu may have some political incentives to demonstrate In this particular action and the President of the United States President Trump certainly seems to be supporting Prime Minister Netanyahu Because he said he is yeah, he's supporting him for election So all of these things raise the hairs on the back of a mind hack and to end this conversation I'd say you know our military relationship and alliance with Israel should be based more on shared security interest Not on political survival of any individual leader totally agree with that That's what all of our relationships should be based on it's right, you know about what's the best interest of Countries working together not about political parties or particular leader as they come and go we should I should have been more clear that He's back in DC he was it was a quick visit stopped over was not announced. I don't think ahead of time We just sort of showed up in Israel And you know, I think you make a good point which is the optics of these things really matter and he's said could have Chosen to send someone for a lower level meeting with the Israelis. He could have you under secretary defense for policy perhaps Yeah, I know. Yeah, I could have met with someone at a lower level in the Israeli government instead of our secretary of defense and their prime minister Meeting and a surprise meeting just a few days before the election. It's a little sensitive there Okay, I'm gonna cut to the chase Ben. It's flaky as hell I'll just say it and this this is not the way businesses normally conducted and it seems to be Being driven more by political purposes than military operations The other thing I'd say it this comes to add to the context We've heard rumors within the the Washington press corps about the potential for a strike immediately after our midterm Elections so if if all of these things are so important Why are we conducting more strikes which may not have a political end state after the midterms When the vote is main, you know, there's a very a variety of things that are influencing the vote But one of those things is the fact that we have an undeclared war a war that the American people don't support and the war and a war that the American Congress the U.S. Congress has not voted upon so again I'll reinforce flaky as hell by all counts Flaky as hell and we should just just to get a clearer idea of the other chaos that's going on As you said President Trump endorsed BB Netanyahu for re-election and Then when they asked Vice President Vance a few would endorse he said no, I'm not gonna get involved in other countries internal politics Which he has done repeatedly already It was only in this case he said no, no, I'm not gonna get involved and then we have Hankseth going so the administration isn't sure if it's gonna If it's on the same page about endorsing Netanyahu and the Iranians also are for recently also are just trying to string things along to The midterms because they think Trump is going to be weaker after the midterms, which he very well may be so everyone's waiting for the midterms to see what's gonna happen It is kind of ridiculous Yeah, I got a reinforce which he said about vice president Vance Not getting involved in other nations politics because I think is this the same vice president or is this is evil twin brother that has stood up at Various rallies in different countries supporting the Extreme conservative people who well, I don't know like Orban and Le Pen and maybe a few others that vice president Vance has said that he is supportive of and am I wrong in that no same guy Same exact same guy All right, it'd be hard to keep track of where he is at any given moment. Yeah Okay, we should talk getting down to nuts and bolts here a little bit It does seem like we are sending a third aircraft carrier to the Middle East the Theodore Roosevelt strike group is on route the The strike group left Japan on Monday the Theodore Roosevelt and the USS make-in left San Diego In late September they are taking a slow route they will join the George W. Bush strike group I'm sorry the George H. W. Bush strike group and the George Washington strike group which are both currently in the Arabian sea So we're gonna have three carrier strike groups all in the Arabian sea You were just talking about the possibilities of strikes right after the midterms And this would seem to signal something like that Well, you know this this is a complex issue and we'll talk about deployments and What the Navy calls in shops and outchops of Various ships that's their term they use for deployments When you were talking about the Washington that was had already been on a semi long deployment Certainly not as long as the Lincoln in the Pacific and they were redirected to the Middle East so they were already on a deployment and We're rushed to the Middle East to relieve the Lincoln So I'm thinking the Roosevelt and again, I'm not a naval expert But I'm thinking the Roosevelt is the replacement for the Washington that has already been at sea So though so the Navy doesn't have the same kind of challenges with the Washington that they had with the Lincoln I'm not as convinced that there's a build-up of military forces with three carrier strike groups in the Middle East that would be highly unusual even for this administration when you have three of the 11 carrier strike groups in any given time in one area And you also have to consider you know for our listeners who think well three out of 11 that's not bad We can do that. But when you look at how the Navy Parses their aircraft carrier strike groups. They usually have a third in port a third conducting sea trials and a third In operational environments like the Middle East the South China Sea those kind of places So when you have three in one place that basically means the rest of your carriers are not where they should be Because some of them are still in dry docs some of them are still in maintenance and training Uh, we're using all the carriers we have that are capable right now Yeah, and as we talked about before that puts serious pressure on the crews and on their families and on the maintenance of the ship So the maintenance of the aircraft that it really does have a cost that's what people talk about when they talk about readiness is like All right, you know, you've used the ship for months and months and months on end you've used the day these aircraft for many hours Do they need to be serviced before they're able to go out again and the answer for a long time seems like it's going to be yes Yeah, well what I'd say Ben I'm going to compare it to the army a little bit if you don't mind During the early stages of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan we were turning and burning people Using them for the ground campaigns There were some units that were Spending 15 months in combat and 12 months back at home station and immediately going out again after conducting training and being ready So those families and their soldiers in the army's case really for a couple of years were really getting burned out And the army addressed it as a problem. I think we're seeing the and Navy trying to figure out the same kind of techniques to address this issue with the long deployments of their sailors. But the difference is when you send a soldier home, all they have to do is clean up their rucksack and, you know, longer they're sleeping bag and maybe get some training in. When you're talking about sending carrier strike groups that have been in salt water for a long period of time, that's a whole different problem altogether. The Navy has it a lot tougher than the Army when they're doing long deployments like this and that's why normal Navy deployments are much shorter. - Yeah, as you said, you basically have to take the total number of ships you have and cut it into a third and that's the actual number you can deploy at any one time. Okay, I want to spend a lot of time on this next story. - What do you got? - I think it's fascinating. So it turns out that sitting in some Pentagon closet for the last 80 odd years were some of the globes like the actual globes. - I know where you're going with this now. Okay, I didn't know where you were going. Go ahead. - The actual globes that Dwight Eisenhower used during World War II. Like these were his floor globes. They're big, fancy things in wooden cases. That, you know, he could look at the earth and point to different spots and it's very cool. So Pete Hankseth got word of this and he decided he wanted them. And instead of contacting this, this is so funny. Instead of contacting the team of people that the Pentagon has for handling the artifacts that are stored there and, you know, the white glove kind of service for the delicate historical objects. He just sent some of the people from his office to go get the globes and they broke at least one of them. Matt, we have pictures here and we could put those up. They kind of dropped it. And so the bottom of the holder for the globe went straight up through Antarctica and you can see the, yeah, you can see the debris there on the carpet. So this is a globe that is used by Dwight Eisenhower during World War II that has been safe in the Pentagon for 80 years but didn't last one day with Pete Hankseth before they broke it and dates from the 1930s. I don't know how you're going to fix that. General, I mean, I do actually have a somewhat deeper question than I want to get into about this, but just first off, what, I mean, it's a chaos, right? - Yeah, it's careless and this is a historical and important artifact. It's something that I think would be certainly if it was in the Secretary of Defense's office an item he could point to is, as visitors came in and said this was President General Eisenhower's globe during World War II and it would be an oh wow moment for anyone who saw it, but again, these kind of artifacts are taken care of by historians and there is great care whenever you move those. And Ben, I hate to say this, but I have a similar experience from my time in Europe at our NCO Academy in Grafenbeer, Germany. We had the desk of Erwin Rommel and another desk and another desk of George Patton. So it was in the middle of the NCO Academy, right as you enter the door, it's still there. I hope at least it was there when I left. It had been there for like 50 years. And you know, we used to have visitors come in and sit behind the desk and take a picture and they signed the book and all that, but they would sit behind George Patton's desk which was really cool. Okay, we had a visitor while I was commanding that base as a one-star general who really, really liked that desk and I got a message later on, a higher ranking government official than me saying they wanted to box up that desk and ship it back to the United States to have in their office. And it was like, oh man, this is not good. So we throughout all kind of bureaucratic requirements got the German government involved saying we couldn't loot them of these kind of things. I mean, it was awful, but finally, the person on the other end that wanted this thing gave up or forgot about it or something. But you know, sometimes in high level places, you like things in your office and Eisenhower's blobs, you know, could be one of them if you wanted, but if you're gonna do that, you might wanna take good care of it when you do it. I can probably bet that the guys that were told to go move it were the couple of lieutenant colonels in Higgs Souther Office who were doing nothing but posting trash on ex all day long and attacking people. I bet it's the same guy. I'm gonna see if Kalshi would take me up on that. - Yeah, it is the symbolism of Higgs S. destroying a piece of American military history because he wanted to decorate his office and didn't want to bother to consult the people whose job it is to actually handle these things with the proper degree of care. - I mean, that really does sort of capture his statement. - Wait a minute, Ben, you're not suggesting this. This is a coincidence along with cutting down trees in the Potomac golf course or golf course or destroying the East Wing of the White House or building a giant arch. - Yeah, exactly. - Are you suggesting, well, if that was the case, to really, you know, the damage wouldn't have been done that Antarctica, the whole would have been placed probably somewhere in Europe if they were really trying to do something nasty, you know? - I look, that's all I'm saying. Okay, so here's the deeper question I wanted to ask you. Which is, why is it that, from what I can tell all military organizations throughout the whole world and all of time, take this kind of historical sort of, tradition and heritage so seriously? Why is it that military organizations are so given to holding on to these strong connections with the past, even if it's like something that Eisenhower happened to have in his office back in the day? Like it's not, it's not like, you know, the final order he signed, it's just like a thing he had. What is it that makes military organizations so traditional like that? - Oh, I think it's heraldry wanted to be connected with the past in one way or another. It's having neat things around you. I mean, it's why the president has the resolute desk, you know, in the oval office. It's just something where you can say, I'm now, and truthfully, it's kind of a good reminder, too, saying I am part of history. This is what it's all about. It's interesting, again, I'm going back to my day in Europe back in the old Heidelberg buildings before we left that base. In my office behind one of the walls was a secret panel with, because it used to be an SS headquarters. There was a secret panel that had map panels that you could flip across the board. And the maps from World War II were still there that the German Jews, and it was very cool, but it was behind a closet door. So I wouldn't show those to everybody, but there were some people that would come into my office and I'd open up the closet door and show these sliding map doors of all these German World War II maps. It's just an element of coolness, I guess, that's kind of neat. But when you were in charge of initial military training for the Army, and you were thinking about bringing people in and turning civilians into soldiers, how did you think about, you know, your joining, or when you were at West Point, right, the institution of the Long Gray Line, right? How did you think about communicating to people, like, here's why our history and tradition matters. Here's why it's important to look back to the people who came before you. Like, what would you try? What lesson are you trying to get across there? - Well, you'd wanna portray the standards, first of all, you wanna portray the professionalism of the force, but you also wanted to use examples of others who represented the military in the right way, who lived by the values who did what was right for the country, who stood up for the Constitution. I mean, I could cite a bunch of really interesting dynamics. You mentioned, I didn't know we were gonna go there, but you mentioned when I was commanding a initial military training, when we were trying to help reestablish the standards that had kind of deteriorated during two wars, what we decided to do over our five basic training faces was to develop a standard book that we could give every single soldier as they came into basic training. And a command sergeant major gave me a copy of Baron von Stoyben's biography, and what I realized is he wrote the original blue book for the military, and it was called the blue book during Washington's time. So I said, okay, well, let's call this new standards book, the blue book, and we published it, and it's now given to every single soldier, but it's an evaluation of what the standards are for the military and the metrics. At West Point, you mentioned the military academy has statues all over the place of different US heroes, but it has one particular Polish hero, Kuskiusko, who was an engineer under Washington, and his statue, Polish statue, is on one part of the plane, but while everyone else, all the other statues, like Patton and Grant and Washington, are all looking in, Kuskiusko is on the eastern side of the campus looking back toward Poland. So there's heraldry in that, and there's a lot of neat things there. it that go on in terms of that. That's really interesting. I think Koshisko is also one of the statues in Lafayette Square right outside the White House. Yes, absolutely is. Not a name that a lot of people remember from American history, but a very important contributor to our revolution. As was on Stoitan, who was a general who worked for I think Frederick the Great and came over to help just sort of like Lafayette came over to help teach the Americans how to actually fight. Right. One more thing about Koshisko, when the US forces established a base inside of Poland during the contributions to the Russian Ukraine War of recently, the name of the base is Fort Koshisko. That's great. Our camp Koshisko, I guess. That's cool. Any other symbolism you want to draw from this? Oh, man. Oobar with the globe. Yeah. Well, here's one more thing I'll tell you. You know, when we're talking, well, I'll tell one more story. I'll tell one more story. Go ahead. Yeah, please. When you're a cavalryman like I was, you have two things that they call you or things that you do. One of the things is a new brand new, secondly, tenant. You're sometimes called a shave tail. And I never knew where that expression came from. But then later on, you prove yourself by doing tests when you're a new cavalryman in today's force. And you earn your spurs. And they literally at spur dinners, and I could show you my spurs or in my office across the way, along with my Stetson hat, which was very different. And the blue, the set of blue uniforms that we have. But the reason the blue uniform pants are a different shade of blue than the jacket for the army uniform is because cavalrymen would take their jackets off when they were riding through the planes. And the pants would become, you know, faded from the from the sun. The reason you earn your spurs and you're no longer called a shave tail is because when a new lieutenant reported to a horse cavalry unit, they would cut off the tail of the horse that that lieutenant was issued. And they wouldn't issue him any, the supply sergeant wouldn't issue him any spurs. Because he had not proven himself in equitation in riding his horse. So as the tail grew back and he proved himself with the standards of horsemanship, then they would issue him spurs. So he had earned his spurs, and he was no longer called a shave tail. Is that like a watch out for this guy? He might not know what he's doing. That is exactly what it is. That's exactly what watch out for those new second lieutenants. That's the plan. What did they do? Is now they paint a big red X on the back of your tank or something? Yeah, yeah, it's more dangerous now with a tank than it was with a horse, I guess. I don't know. Okay, those are some historical lessons for today. All right, I love it. All right, this is a little more serious. This is the topic and I really wouldn't want it to talk about. So when Secretary Hegseth announced his plans to construct a giant new military base somewhere in the United States, one of your first reactions, and we talked about this in command post, and he wrote about it for the whole work, was we have so many problems already with the bases we currently have, especially with military housing, with the military facilities we have being safe and up to date, and clean, and basically habitable. And just recently, President Trump said just on Tuesday of this week, at a rally, that if Democrats win the midterms, the Department of Justice will have, quote, no money for the victims of contaminated water at Camp Lejeun, the big Marine Corps base. Yeah. This is, you know, because they're, it's the Department of Justice because there are lawsuits, the Department of Justice has funds for paying out people who win lawsuits against the government or settle with the government. This is from a CNN story. A 2024 government studies found that the drinking water at Camp Lejeun was heavily contaminated with a number of cancer causing industrial chemicals. I'm not going to try to pronounce them, but the contamination lasted from 1953 to 1985. And hundreds of thousands of Marines and sailors and civilians and their families were exposed to these cancer causing chemicals all the time because it was in the water. And it's associated with all kinds of terrible diseases. And so, Donald Trump says, well, if you don't vote for my party, maybe you're not going to get any settlement from the government. There'll be no money available. Well, this, this actually is a class action suit that has been in place for, I think, about 10 years now. And it has, as you mentioned, there are all kinds of cancers associated with living and working at Camp Lejeun. So, I don't understand how the president can just say, well, we're not going to pay off these class action suits that have already been, as I understand it, decided that these people should be paid. And their relatives should be as well for the damage that have been caused. This is kind of like, it's sort of like ancient orange or the fire pits in Iraq and Afghanistan that have caused all kinds of cancerous issues. And yeah, the government is responsible for paying people off on that. For the president to say, oh, well, if I don't get elected, we're just not going to pay it. That's extortion. And it's wrong. And it would, he would be criminally negligible in terms of that. But, man, is it so much like all the other things the president has been saying in terms of using extortion-like techniques to suggest that people should vote for him or else? And I just find it despicable that he would, again, use soldiers and their family members to make a point like this. Well, it gets even worse. So, let's play the clip. And I want to point out the other thing he said. So, let's listen to it real quick. So, if we don't win, there's no money. If we do win, you're getting it. It's going to be finally over with that nightmare that's been going on for so many years. We will never abandon the heroes who served America. And that's what that's all about. So, did you catch that? We will never abandon the heroes. Unless you vote for the other party. In which case, we're going to abandon the heroes. We don't have any money. And I don't understand the connection between voting for the other party and having the money. The United States government has a budget. And that's what's been interesting. It seems like, you know, we elected, many people voted for this president because he was a great businessman. And I got to tell you, having been associated in the private sector with many successful businesses, you just don't move money around to meet your own wins and wills. And by the way, this great businessman that we elected seems to be running the government the same way he ran many of his businesses, which a lot of them, I think 11 of them had to declare bankruptcy. You can't do that with a government. You can't declare bankruptcy with a government. Yeah, no, you can't. I would also point out that it seems that if he, if he really does follow through on this threat, this could be another thing where it's heading toward a major, I don't want to say constitutional crisis, but a moment of constitutional friction that goes something like this. There's an ongoing lawsuit. It's in the courts. The courts say, okay, federal government, you owe these people this money. The Trump administration comes back and says, sorry, the Democrats won. So there's no money to give out. We're not going to do it. The courts say you have to. The Trump administration says, make us. And then where are we again, right? It's the old line that Jackson never said of, you know, they've made their ruling now, let them enforce it. The thing in this case, so, Ben, I would think by this point, with the number of congressmen and senators who say they support the military, that they would finally step in as the holders of the purse strings of the government. One would think that even the president saying, we're not going to pay this off, wouldn't work very well when you're talking about sick and dead, Marines and their family members, because of what's been going on for multiple decades at Camp LeJune. Yeah, I would hope so. But I'm not sure. I'm not sure. And the fact that Trump would, I don't even know if he's aware that he's doing it, but on some level, maybe he is. The fact that he would even possibly tee up playing this kind of constitutional hardball instead of just giving these service members and their families what they deserve. I mean, it's just, it's sickening. All right. But here's the other sickening point about that. If you were to play that tape again, and I'm not suggesting we do it, everybody in the background of his speech are either similar to a dog looking at a ceiling fan, or they're applauding. So I mean, it just goes to show you the kind of individuals who don't really understand the implications of government actions, and that are continuing to root for a guy that says absolutely ludicrous things, like he just said, in that part of the speech, and there were several other parts of those speeches that were pretty ludicrous as well. Yeah, well, I wouldn't exactly characterize it as a rapturous applause, but it also wasn't the stunned silence that we would prefer. So, you know, not great. Speaking of stunned, we have to talk about the story from the military families describing their experience in Bahrain or the Around War. I think this is from NBC, but Matt can correct me if I'm wrong about that. It was. Yeah, it's from NBC. This is military families describing, sorry, it's from MS now. Military families describing their evacuation from a Navy base in Bahrain. I was terrified. I laid really close to my kids because I was like, at least if we die, we'll die and one person won't be left. One spouse said, this is before the, some of the families were relocated out of Bahrain before the beginning of the Around War in February 28th. I'm sorry, the service members were relocated, meaning the families were alone in the base once the war started. This is the base that was hit by Iranian missiles and drones. Another quote are spouses who weren't there. They're sitting there like, my family's in a war zone and I can't help them because I'm not there. Why weren't we out? They knew something was going on and they literally left us there as sitting ducks said one spouse whose husband had evacuated before the war. We've talked about how the administration and, you know, frankly, the senior leadership of the military does not seem to have planned for days two, three, four of the war in the Iranian response very clearly in some ways. Seems like they were really unprepared for the idea that this base might be under threat from our own. Yeah, I believe Ben and I can sort of understand why we've been using these bases for at least three decades and they've never been threatened before. There were, there probably was not any what-if drills conducted by those who occupy these bases and the commanders of those bases. And the what-if drills are usually driven by the civilian leadership saying, should we literally de-occupy and conduct what's called a non-combatant evacuation operation, where you get the non-combatants i.e., not just the American citizens, but also the family members and the dogs and the parakeets and the cats of all the people that live on these bases. The young reporter that did this story, Prius Rdor, has really been breaking some unbelievable stories because she's a former, I think part of the reason is because she's a formal naval officer. She was in the Navy. So she has contacts inside the Navy saying, this is what's happening and more than that, she has contacts with as this article states, the family members. The Department of Defense is not real happy with her reporting. And in fact, I won't go into details but she and I have become friends and she's told me some of the deeper stories about this and I'm just appalled because she's doing what a reporter does. That's one issue. The second issue is the comment about sailors in this case being concerned about their family members who are suddenly caught inside of a war zone. When you have that kind of contention between a military personnel thinking about is my, while I'm trying to do my job of fighting is my family safe and secure. And in this case, they were not. And that's why you evacuate. I'm going to go back because I'm an old guy and I can tell these stories during my days in the Cold War. In the hot stages of the Cold War, when the Soviet Union was still there up until 1990, we used to have plans for non combat and evacuations of all of the people that lived in Germany and Italy. And things like, you always have to, the spouses always have to have bags packed for them and their children in the car with a separate set of, you know, hygiene articles. You always have to have at least a half a tank of gas in your car. So when your soldiers are heading toward the East German, West German border, you can be heading toward Frankfurt to get on an airplane that will take you out of the country. Now, if the balloon goes up as we used to say, so there were plans, they were rehearsed, they were part of exercises. And I can only suggest that what happened in Bahrain and Bahrain and some of the other bases is we didn't do the what if drills because we weren't expecting the kinds of things that Iran did to the US military bases in different countries. Why we didn't expect that, it's a common disease sometimes in the government and in the military and it's called a lack of imagination. What could happen and what should we prevent? I also want to ask you about timing because doing things like, you know, planning and evacuation as we know from the experience of the, it takes time. It takes time to plan it all out. Logistics take, you know, a lot of thought beforehand and a lot of moving parts. Yeah. Is it could this just be a matter of there wasn't enough warning given for the commanders these bases? Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. When you're talking about a conflict that suddenly bubbles up because one night the commander in chief, the president, talks with the prime minister of Israel and says, let's go after him and start the attack and then it starts snowballing. So those kind of things, yeah, you've got to be prepared in terms of the flight, the flight line and the missile launches, but you also have to be prepared in terms of protecting American citizens and military dependence. Yeah, 100%. Okay, our last topic is our best topic. Or at least our happiest topic. I'll put it that way. You were just at your first bulwark event in Atlanta. How was it? It was kind of awesome. We were in a facility with about 900 people at Lantons and others. The bulwark put on this presentation where they had all the key players and I put, you know, JBL, Tim Miller, Sam Stein, Sarah, Andrew Ager, Bill Crystal. And they invited me as a strap hanger that I got to come out for a couple of things, but it was fun just sitting around on a couch talking to Tim Miller in front of this audience, talking about the same things we talk about here on command post. And what I'll tell you, Ben, is there's a little reception beforehand where they open up to subscribers and allow them to have a couple of drinks and mingle with the people on the bulwark. And the number of people that came up to me and said they really enjoyed command post was just amazing to me. I mean, we think we're doing some good things on here and putting military and national security stuff into living room language that people understand. But the amount of thank yous that I got from our great listeners in our audience was just off the charts. And that was, truthfully, well, I'll say that our lawyer was there. And I kept wanting to get out and, you know, talk with the people and kind of mingle and shake hands and all that based on what I learned in the military. And she kept saying, no, no, no, we may have threats. So you got to get back in the green room, you know, wow. So, you know, I kind of pissed off Amy a couple of times because I kept going, I kept leaving and trying to engage with the audience. But it was really a lot of fun and a lot of good people were there. And, and by the way, they weren't just from Atlanta. I met a couple from Montana that had flown in. I had a young woman, Renee Bates from Orlando that flew in for the event and that I know. And so it was kind of fun seeing all these people that like the bulwark and like what we're doing. That's great. Now, those events are so wonderful. And highly recommend the next time we do a tour of people to try to show up because they are really great events to hang out with bulwark people, both, you know, those of us who actually work here and those of us who are just part of the community. And I'm so glad you said that because that has been my experience too since we started doing this show. Yeah. Is that, you know, frankly, it was a little more comfortable for me when issues of national security and military affairs and stuff. We're sort of like, you know, a weird club for nerds. And now people are paying much more attention to it, which is, you know, a good thing and a bad thing. Like I think a lot, you know, a lot of people got used to sort of not having to think about it that much or that hard. But now we have to because the world's getting more dangerous and the relationship of this country to its military is changing. So, you know, I am glad to see that people are getting engaged and the only way we're going to fix it is if we have really engaged citizens and, you know, we close the military, severely and divide from both directions. Yeah. And I'll add to that. And I think in the past, it was mostly, you know, it was mostly national security nerds that talked about this. People that were involved in it and like to discuss it. But now everyone else is saying they're not asking the deep questions. All they want is an answer to the question of what the hell is going on. And, you know, that is a deep question. It is a deep question. But it's so, it's so contrary. Some of the things our government is doing are so contrary to common sense and logic and reason. People want to know that it isn't just them saying, what the hell are we doing? It's all of us, even the folks who have spent their life in national security in the military like you and I. Yeah. So I don't know that we have any good answers. But, you know, we try to get closer. I don't know if there are any good answers. - Yeah, there are no good answers to any of this, but it's fun to talk about it. - And we will do so again next week, probably closer to the normal time, since we're done with all of our travel for now. And people, thank you for joining us on Command Post. We'll see you again next week and general. Thank you for joining me as always. - Thanks Ben, always a pleasure to be with you.