Bill Kristol and John Heilemann: Taking a Wrecking Ball to the Military

**John Heilemann** (0:13)
Hey, everyone, welcome to The Bulwark Podcast. I'm Jon Heilemann. I have the great and extraordinary honor. Really, it's like the thrill of a lifetime in a lot of ways to be able to sit in the chair normally occupied. Not literally the chair, but a metaphorical chair. Bill, they're only occupied by Tim Miller, who's off gallivanting around Europe, having all kinds of fun and leaving us basically here. We're like home alone here. It's a little bit like we're the Culkin brothers here. I'll be Macaulay. You can be Kiernan and we'll have fun here on the show today. Til we back next week. So for all of you who are like, it's kind of sick of the replacements, the fill-ins, the subs, the red shirt team here.
He's back next week, so everyone can get excited about that. But Bill, I was delighted when I was asked by Tim to fill in for him. I was like, I want to do a Monday, because Mondays are Bill Kristol Day. And so here we are. Good to see you.

**Bill Kristol** (1:07)
It's nice for you to say, I wanted to do Monday when I heard you were pinch hitting for Tim. It's a big upgrade. I'm going to tell Tim that also next week.
We'll see if Tim's loyal fans out there, before I get now 72,000 text messages, emails, and posts on social media. How could you be so disrespectful of Tim? He goes away for one week and here you guys are jumping on. No, it's great to have you, John, and you can fill Tim's shoes.

**John Heilemann** (1:30)
They're big shoes, but I'll do my best.
I got to say, it was an eventful weekend. I also like the notion that it's a Monday podcast, which basically do a little bit of looking backward, because we don't have quiet weekends anymore in our politics. It used to be back in the day when you and I were younger men, we used to spend weekends in DC, you know, patting around the Tidal Basement, taking a bike ride now and then, you know, switching off, but every weekend now is another cavalcade of horrors. Before we jump into all the stuff, at the end of this weekend, we head into this week, what's the biggest thing you were fixated on over the weekend? What was really most front and center in your mind?

**Bill Kristol** (2:12)
I mean, one of the bad things about Trump era is when instead of being fixated on whatever your favorite baseball team is not doing too well, or thinking back still to Spain's fine victory in the World Cup, you do get fixated on the things that have to do with Trump. So I guess the military stuff, I guess we'll talk about this, but I mean, the degree to which one knows that Hegseth is a very bad secretary of defense, I'm now worried that he's doing much more damage to our military than I previously had thought, which is one of the institutions you think holds up best under adverse circumstances and it has many, many times. I had talked to a couple of people who've served in the military just sort of randomly, ran it, saw them or talked to them over the weekend, and they did not disabuse me of my fears.

**John Heilemann** (2:53)
So we headed into the weekend after, I would say all of last week, the question of, there's war plans now in front of Trump, he's backed into a corner, nothing he's doing is working, and might he under those circumstances just decide to finally go forward and do the thing he's been threatening to do basically for the last five months, essentially, which is like rain hellfire down on Iran and escalate the war in a really dramatic way. And the news of the weekend was, he was presented with those plans, there was a thoroughgoing debate, and he decided, no, he was not going to do that. Although the reasons for it are, I would say, to the extent the reporting suggests that the reasons are basically, we don't have enough bombs anymore.
The munitions stockpile is so low that General Cain was basically like, I don't think this is a great idea. Talk a little bit about that and how we've managed to find ourselves. You were just talking about Hegseth. There's a lot of things to criticize to Pete Hegseth, but one of them, it would seem to me, is it's the case that we've left ourselves in a situation now where we basically can't fight a major war. We used to need to want to fight two major wars in two different theaters at the same time. We can't even really fight one now, given the state of the munitions, according to a lot of this reporting.