WarTalk: Out of Ammo + Polymarket
+ Phelan on the couch when it happens
The Iran war burned through America’s L-RASM, JASSM-ER, and Tomahawk stockpiles — weapons designed for a Pacific fight against the PLA Navy, not the Iranian corvette fleet. Now Pentagon insiders are leaking that we can’t win a war over Taiwan, and it’s a six-year pipeline to refill magazines.
Joining us: Bryan Clark of the Hudson Institute and former submariner; Justin Mc, former Green Beret now in defense tech; Eric Robinson, former OSC/NCTC analyst and 101st Airborne officer, now a lawyer; and Tony Stark.
We discuss…
Why on earth we fired L-RASMs at the Iranian Navy — and what that means for the Pacific
The case for modular weapons over exquisite Cold-War-era munitions
Why this admin is telling the press “We can’t win a war over Taiwan” — what leaking this that actually means
The Special Forces Romeo who made $400K on Polymarket betting against Maduro
The Phelan firing, the waffle bar, and Driscoll’s survival odds
This is a transcript of a podcast!
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Out of Ammo
Eric Robinson: Why is the Pentagon starting to scream to the press about war stocks? Something that countries should probably keep in their back pocket is how many precision weapons you still have available. And in an open society like the United States attempts to be, some of these secrets are difficult to conceal. The number of specific munitions gets published by Congress, the Pentagon speaks about it openly. You can assess the capability of the United States Navy to carry certain warheads into certain locations. You can look at the Air Force and determine what kind of ordnance can go over a target. So there is a baked-in ability to do informed speculation, and people are doing that.
When General Caine and the Secretary of Defense go on TV and talk about the number of targets that have been struck in the Iran war, you can start to take an X and do a bunch of minuses beneath it and reach some conclusions. But we’re starting to see incremental precision coming out informally from the Pentagon that’s indicating the American ability to fight a sophisticated war is substantially degraded because of this war with Iran.
Bryan Clark: I think this is a case where people in the Pentagon are trying to get the attention of the president via the press. It’s a time-honored tradition. Not honored, but — it works. So yeah, definitely people trying to get the attention of the president by leaking to the press how we’re low on munitions and maybe we need to wrap up this Iran war post-haste.
Justin: I wouldn’t say it’s honored, but, anyways. This is one of those natural tensions we’re starting to see bubble up. You have these OPLANs and CONPLANs that are supposed to be in place for contingency operations. They are predicated on certain availability of weapons systems in the first hour, first 12 hours, first 24 hours. To make it to 72 hours and beyond, we need to have certain things in place. And you’re probably starting to see people who have very vested interest looking at INDOPACOM and making sure that their CONPLANs are sufficiently funded and have a robust capability. Looking at what’s happening in CENTCOM — to no fault of CENTCOM, but because they were directed to do this — and saying, that thing over there seems to be taking away my ability to do the thing that you’ve told me to always be ready to do, the most dangerous. I think that has a lot to do with it as well.
Eric Robinson: Yeah, hyperpowers have constraints.
Tony Stark: And to lean into that — because I think where some people try to get around this is, but we’ve already ramped up production, we’ve ramped up production in the last few years after Ukraine. The problem is we were on minimal sustaining rates for way too long. It’s not like we just had a max capacity magazine and we decided to empty it out and we can get back to it in two years. We were already low. We’ve burned way too much, and now just to get back to that previous low standard, it’s going to take years.
Justin: We have over-indexed on exquisite technologies because we have the ability to produce them. The problem with exquisite technologies is they take a very long time, they have very tenuous supply chains, and you can’t really do exquisite in high capacity.
Wrong War, Wrong Weapons
Jordan Schneider: OK, so with Phelan gone now we’re not doing the Trump ship. Is this an opportunity to kind of reset in a potentially better direction?
Bryan Clark: What Justin just brought up — maybe this is a good chance to rethink the munitions portfolio and say, do we want to refill our munitions stocks with the exact same thing we just spent on Iran? Because maybe JASSM-ER is not the only weapon we want to have in the inventory for doing air-to-ground attack. Maybe we need some of these low-cost weapons. There’s a bunch of options out there that the Pentagon has been funding development of, but just never funded procurement of. This is a great chance to rethink what the portfolio should look like and rebalance it towards these more modular weapons — not even really lower-end, but more modular weapons that maybe don’t have quite the performance of the preferred munitions, but you can buy them at much higher volumes and the production is much easier because they’re modular and some even use commercial components, like this ERAM missile that the Air Force developed.
The other thing it makes me think of is why are we using JASSM-ERs against Iran? I get that you wanted to use PRSM to test it out and the Army guys like to show off their toys, fine — and we didn’t have that many so it wasn’t a big loss. But to go out there and burn through a bunch of our JASSM-ER stocks and our Tomahawk stocks — why are we launching Tomahawks into Iran? Supposedly they have no air defenses.
Eric Robinson: You’re referring to L-RASMs against the vaunted Iranian Navy. Bryan, you’re at the heart of the question. Was there an American strategic assumption — we would imagine this is an Obama issue, this is a Trump I, a Biden issue, there are numerous parents of this failure — but had the Pentagon ever baked into its war planning that we were going to conduct a military campaign of this style, where you’re going to just go after targets without a political objective and the expectation being that if you employ a sufficient amount of violence, if you do gunfight properly, all of a sudden strategy emerges? That there is this baked-in collective understanding that if the United States is going to go to war against one of the big four threats, there’s going to be a Clausewitzian strategic approach to it? We are not there.
Instead we’ve got people doing wheelies in Lamborghinis, and it looks really cool and it gives you your sizzle reels, but we are still at an impasse with an Iranian state that refuses to fundamentally break down — and using your entire inventory of L-RASMs, which for viewers that haven’t engaged with this before, is an advanced anti-ship missile almost expressly designed for the United States Air Force to employ against the People’s Liberation Army Navy in Pacific contingencies. Instead, we went after the Iranian Navy, which is sort of like expending L-RASMs on the Austrian Navy. It doesn’t matter. But here we are. We are disaggregated from strategy. And now we’ve got empty war stocks, so we’ve got a six-year pipeline to try and restore this, assuming Congress gets behind it and funds it.
Justin: Yeah, I mean, we sank the SS Minnow with an L-RASM, so we’ve done well.
Eric Robinson: Yep, we got the good ship Lollipop and the yellow submarine.
Justin: Even for the PRSMs — while I get that we wanted to showcase what PRSM could do, there’s a good argument that PRSM is most useful in the land war in Europe. It’s not super useful in an over-the-sea battle in the Pacific because 900 kilometers is a —
Tony Stark: The other thing about PRSM is it solved one problem. It still didn’t solve the mass problem, which was the actual Russian artillery problem. It is now for-purpose in the Pacific, which actually makes it effective. It still wouldn’t have been effective in a Europe fight because it doesn’t solve the close-in conventional artillery battle.
Justin: It solved the wrong problem in its development. Then they kind of came up with the potential to have a solution within the Pacific. But still, the place where it’s the most useful, it’s not useful. It’s not a great answer.
Eric Robinson: Ultimately, the LUCAS system is probably just as good and less expensive in certain environments for long-range strike.
Justin: I imagine PRSM still has the same anti-personnel capabilities that some of the marks of HIMARS have, which are very nice, which LUCAS won’t have, which do make it more formidable against mass formations.
Eric Robinson: For the audience, LUCAS is — I’ll give credit — the Department of Defense innovated and stole a model from the Iranians. They didn’t go and buy a turdcopter from Silicon Valley. They got something that they knew worked on the battlefields and copied it relentlessly. And maybe the IRGC will go to court in the Southern District and go after the United States for stealing its IP, but in this war, the United States tested what we effectively stole from the Iranians and repurposed.
Bryan Clark: My concern now going forward is we’ve got this big defense budget that we’re looking at. And you’ve got this lobbying campaign by people inside the Pentagon, over at INDOPACOM, to basically restock all these weapons that they’ve built their plans around — not new weapons, but existing weapons. That’s going to take up a huge chunk of the budget. And we want to make these long-term commitments on weapons production to try to get production capacity increased, because a company like Raytheon is not going to expand production capacity unless they have a long-term commitment from the government. So if you do a five- or seven-year multi-year procurement, they’re going to be willing to support that level of production.
But that means you’re locking in a huge chunk of investment over the next seven years that’s going to be devoted to weapons designed in the Cold War or the immediate aftermath, and designed primarily to go after the highest-capability threats posed by China. It just seems like we’re going to lock ourselves into a portfolio that’s going to have the same challenges as our existing portfolio. It’s never going to get big enough, and it’s never going to have the ability to surge in the way that maybe a new portfolio of weapons more modular or more focused on one-way attack drones might.
Justin: The other thing worth thinking about is the consternation we had even in the Biden administration over giving HIMARS to the Ukrainians. If we’re really talking about enabling partners in the Pacific, the next question is: do we build these high-end systems that we’re going to instantly have concerns about giving to partners — the Philippines, the Japanese, the South Koreans? Because if that’s the case, then it’s not really a capability if it isn’t in theater and controlled by people who can use it. The department really has to come to grips with this and go to Congress and say, we need weapon stocks that we can actually give to our allies that allow them to present a credible deterrence or response capability.
Bryan Clark: Another aspect of this is adaptability. In Ukraine, they found that the Excalibur rounds we sent were quickly obviated by Russian electronic warfare against GPS, and same with GMLRS.
Eric Robinson: Excalibur is a 155-millimeter round that can be guided by GPS. In the global war on terrorism, Excalibur came out because the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were uncontested electronic warfare environments. It enabled individual battalion commanders to effectively choose a 10-digit grid — a one-meter spot on a battlefield — and say, I’m going to blow that up. So Excalibur revolutionized precision strike. To Bryan’s point, when it got to Ukraine and the Russians — a far more sophisticated adversary — jammed global positioning satellites, those rounds were dumb rounds and were not particularly helpful.
Tony Stark: GPS is this wonderful invention that we’ve had around for over 40 years. The problem is, because of the way it functions, it’s incredibly easy to jam. If your entire targeting package is built around being able to find that 10-digit grid, that’s a massive complication, and the US still hasn’t quite gotten around it.
Bryan Clark: All these weapons we’re talking about — L-RASM, JASSM, SM-6 — they all use GPS to some degree as part of the guidance solution. Even if it has a seeker, even if it’s getting a guidance update via the radio, it’s still using GPS to orient itself in the world. If it loses that, it’s very difficult to orient itself. You now have to either adapt the inertial navigation units onboard to make them more capable, or provide a constant radio signal to tell it where it is, or have other sensors onboard that allow it to predict its location based on star shots — there are companies doing that — or detecting emissions from cell towers or TV and radio antennas, which you can use to geolocate yourself.
The problem we have with these legacy weapons — these kind of high-end weapons that are highly integrated, like Excalibur — is they’re too hard to modify. We still haven’t really fixed Excalibur to address this GPS jamming issue. And they’re desperately trying to fix GMLRS to make it able to use other sources of navigation, like radio emissions. So we’re going to invest a bunch of money and make long-term commitments in weapons that are difficult to adapt, because we don’t know what the next countermeasure from the opponent is going to be. It’s GPS jamming today, but it could be something else tomorrow that goes after their seeker mechanism or their ability to orient because we’re going after something else in the electromagnetic spectrum. There’s all these opportunities for move–countermove competitions that these weapons don’t give you the ability to respond to.
Leaking for $$ From Congress and OMB
Eric Robinson: One point I want to build on that Bryan really helpfully said earlier: these stories are coming out in the press because somebody is trying to signal to the White House. It is arguably stakeholders inside the Pentagon. It is probably also the primes for these dastardly-six companies who are trying to communicate — one to Congress, two to the White House — hey, pay us money, let’s get reconciliation through, let’s get the president’s budget through so we can start ramping this process up.
It reflects an interesting communication mechanism in Washington right now. Because there’s really not a whole lot of value in going to Pete Hegseth and talking about munitions stocks — it’s just not something he cares about. You can go to the deputy, and the deputy absolutely cares about this, but he’s not necessarily going up to glad-hand on Capitol Hill. So you do the scattershot communication strategy to raise the profile of vital issues. Then you can go to OMB, to Senator Wicker at SASC, to Representative Rogers, and say, OK, we do have a crisis, let’s start to solve it. We’re witnessing the creation of an information environment where once you get past the official bluster from the Secretary of Defense, there is an authentic problem now that has to be resolved.
Jordan Schneider: Here’s the problem. You know who else uses remove-paywalls on the Washington Post? Our allies in the Pacific and the Chinese government. So this is not ideal the way you’re going about this, if we’re trying to preserve deterrence capacity. One of the quotes from a senior administration official was, we can’t win a war today over Taiwan. If you’re a Taiwanese politician and you read that, what do you feel like? It is a signal of the breakdown of this administration and how they’re trying to rebuild.
Eric Robinson: It is not new. In the late 1950s, when you had giants of the Senate like Jack Kennedy and Arthur Vandenberg, they would go to the floor and talk about weapon systems. You had carrier generals and missile generals and bomber generals — or senators. They all had their pet members of Congress, and they would basically dump the national secrets into the Congressional Record. And the Soviets were monitoring that.
So Congress, through its position of supervising the executive — which is the core function of the American Republic — has this habit and maybe even a responsibility of conducting aggressive due diligence on what the executive is doing. And we’re witnessing that now. It’s ugly, and I don’t mean to minimize it, but it’s not new.
Can We Actually Lose?
Justin: I will push back a little bit, Jordan. I don’t see this as demonstratively different than the purges that occurred with the PLA Rocket Force when Xi found out there was a lot of corruption within the Rocket Force. The difference is that this comes from multi-facets, and it’s not like people like Bill Bishop pulling out reporting and figuring out what’s happened. So it’s slightly different in the volume and the tenor, but it’s not indifferent. I don’t think we think China is in the best spot either. That being said, saying we’re not in a position to win a war is different than saying we’re in a position to lose a war.
Bryan Clark: Obviously this guy tried to grab attention with what he’s saying, but I feel like what he means is we’re not able to win a war on the terms we want to win it on, using the things we want to use to win it. There’s lots of ways that a war over Taiwan could play out. We’ve wargamed a lot of them. And usually it results in the Chinese losing. The main differentiator is how much do we lose in the process? So when they say we’re not in a position to win a war, normally it means the losses we’re going to incur don’t seem attractive. And it may be enough to cause a president to be reticent about intervening on Taiwan’s behalf. So it’s a lot more about how well does it go rather than are we able to stop an invasion of Taiwan by China.
Tony Stark: It’s a pretty good bet that the best description for that fight is a drunken bar fight. As nice as you want to make it, it’s going to be ugly just by the geography, by the munitions burned. There was reporting this week that some of the most recent purges in the PRC are due to skepticism over whether the weapon systems actually work — going beyond the Rocket Force. Xi Jinping has to have some concerns if he’s watching all these Russian SAM systems, which the Chinese cloned, just getting burned around the world. We might be out of ammo; their ammo might not work. It’s a great time all around.
Bryan Clark: At least our stuff works…
The Special Forces Gambler
Eric Robinson: Speaking of opponents — this is a good opportunity to talk about a perhaps lesser opponent in the Maduro regime and their Cuban personal security detachment, and Polymarket being a vehicle for not informed speculation but direct knowledge of events being used to generate financial rewards. Yesterday, the Department of Justice revealed an indictment of a Special Operations soldier at Fort Bragg with knowledge of pending action against the Maduro regime, who elected to speculate on Polymarket and apparently got, according to DOJ, $400,000.
We are in a world that the president has described as a casino, and he’s not particularly concerned. But this incident — a master sergeant in Army Special Operations — is now being held to account for insider trading.
Tony Stark: I want to play this through. You’re going to place this bet, you win all this money. You’ve got to file that on your taxes, right? Especially when you have a security clearance — people notice the sudden windfall, which is a literal insider threat mechanism: $400,000 to an enlisted man.
Jordan Schneider: But it’s in crypto in some account. That’s the thing — the taxable earning — presumably if you want to repatriate it into a US account, someone’s going to start asking some questions.
Jordan Schneider: The weird thing about Polymarket is it’s just this crypto setup. A month ago they started saying they were going to deal with insider trading — that it wasn’t cool anymore. And presumably the Department of Justice gave them a call at some point between February and now.
Eric Robinson: It’s not like an American sports book.
Jordan Schneider: It is wild that they thought this would be a sustainable thing. And it’s also so predictable. How many people knew this was going to happen? Probably thousands, right? And you only need one, and they’re not going to bet 50 bucks. Though Kalshi just did catch a handful of people in their primaries betting on whether they were going to run or not, which —
Justin: I bet you that’s how it started. This is that slippery ethical dilemma. We had been already talking about it with other actions — Midnight Hammer, we had been talking about Boots on the Ground, we had been talking about the strikes on the drug boats.
Eric Robinson: There’s a substantial American presence. There was obviously something coiling in the Caribbean. It was not lightning.
Justin: That’s the pernicious effect, and where it’s going to get super regulated. To caveat what I’ve seen about the guy — he was a Special Forces guy, but he was a Romeo, a radio operator. He was a communications specialist supporting Tier 1 units. He was not actually one of the operators in the Tier 1 unit. So there is a distinction just there, because they go through a slightly different selection process. But if that’s all correct — before operations, before Afghanistan, before Fifth Group went into Afghanistan, they took all the teams and they isolated them. It was 2001, so it wasn’t a huge deal. They put the teams in a tent, and the only way they could ask questions or get information was to write it down and hand it to someone who’d go out, get it from the real world, and bring it back. Maybe that’s what we’re going to go back to — we’re going to start isolating these guys well in advance, and then they’re literally going to be cut off from anything that is not classified systems until the missions are over. But what are the effects of that?
Eric Robinson: Modern information markets — whether Predictit, Kalshi, or Polymarket — encourage individual action to spike these markets. And it’s not unique to American special operations.
This is not new behavior, but it’s being dramatically exacerbated. It used to be you had to be a sports hero in order to throw a game, or you had to have sufficient financial backing to witness something coming and then place a bet in commodities markets — you could look at the price of oil, there were ways to do this. But sleaze is now super democratized. There are such a great variety of markets, and there are ways for individuals to push events one way or another.
Jordan Schneider: We’ve had congressional insider trading for decades now. Which is the justification one congress member made yesterday saying this person should get a pardon and just have to give their money back. But it starts with that — there’s some level of permissivity coming from the legislators themselves. Which is not to say that should be legal or this stuff should be legal. But there’s a wholesale reckoning with the whole graft ecosystem that really should happen sooner rather than later.
Tony Stark: There’s a bipartisan bill in Congress right now on this topic. But of course, I think it only covers the troops and not members of Congress or any other senior federal official. I’ve got an article in draft somewhere about all these reforms that need to happen. One of them is just — if you are a US government official in any capacity, you do not get to bet on anything. You want to bet? Go to Vegas. But you do not get to place Polymarket bets or anything else. You don’t get to use the stock market, sorry. It’s become absurd to the point of ridicule at this point.
Graft Rot
Justin: If you want to have responsibility, you have to be beyond reproach. Congress also needs to get their shit together. But the fact that they commit a wrong doesn’t mean that other people should be allowed to commit wrongs. I get that people will use that as a justification, but it is what it is.
Bryan Clark: It creates perverse incentives inside the department. On the operational side, weird behaviors could emerge if you get the chance to bet on an op you’re going to be a part of. And even more important — if you’re making decisions on this new big defense budget, those decisions obviously could be useful in the equities market. That information might be something you could use for your own insider trading. At the SES level, and at the level of people who make decisions about money, you’re supposed to be reporting all those potential exposures. But I wonder if we’re really starting to throw all that by the wayside because at the top levels we’re sort of ignoring it. The senior bureaucrats in the Pentagon and elsewhere are now not really worried about being transparent about their holdings, because their bosses and their bosses’ bosses aren’t.
Tony Stark: One of the ways CIA allegedly made inroads into the Chinese Communist Party in the 2010s was because of the way the graft system worked. You don’t want to create that in your national security apparatus — oh, here, I’ll give you an insider tip for a Polymarket bet if you give me information. That is the type of stuff that intelligence services will attempt to use in order to gain intelligence.
Justin: If they haven’t already at least attempted it, I would be shocked.
Bryan Clark: It undermines the efficacy of the organization. Which is what you’re seeing in the PLA — these purges are in part because people are not effective in their jobs because they’ve been corruptly operating their fiefdoms. You end up with things like weapons that don’t have warheads, because it’s cheaper — you can pocket the difference if you buy the weapon without the gas or without the warhead. Are we going to start to see that kind of behavior because there’s all these opportunities for malfeasance that we’re ignoring and allowing to fester inside the department?
Tony Stark: There was a tolerance even among the voting base of, well, if they’re corrupt but they’re effective, then it’s OK. That was the CCP’s model for a long time — graft and corruption are allowed because that’s how you build your patronage network. Don’t get caught. That’s the stakes of the game. But it’s quite clear from the PLA purges that corruption corrupts absolutely, and it will eventually, no matter how effective they were in the first place, it will degrade your readiness.
The Phelan French Kiss
Jordan Schneider: Should we do a Driscoll death-watch check-in now that Phelan’s gone?
Eric Robinson: Let’s do some Kremlinology. We lost the Navy Secretary this week. Long may he rest in his fantastically lucrative art collection and nice collection of poems. He will be fine.
Jordan Schneider: Can we read that just for posterity? I think it’s worth it. Was it a Politico article?
Justin: I think it was the Wall Street Journal.
Eric Robinson: The former Secretary of the Navy had a long-standing personal relationship with the president. He wasn’t a random selection. He is a West Palm Beach resident. He’s a Mar-a-Lago diner. He probably hits the waffle bar on the weekends. He was a bundler. He raised tens of millions for the president’s reelection campaign. He didn’t really have a national security background — he’s an independently wealthy financier.
Jordan Schneider: All right, let me read it from the WSJ.
John Phelan sat in the lobby of the West Wing for more than an hour Wednesday night, waiting to see if his longtime friend and neighbor, President Trump, would save his job. He would leave disappointed. That afternoon, Phelan, the Navy secretary, had received a phone call from his boss, Pete Hegseth, asking for his resignation. Phelan had spent most of Wednesday on Capitol Hill meeting with lawmakers about Navy shipbuilding.
A few miles away at the White House, another gathering was taking place that would decide his fate, according to US officials. Hegseth and his deputy Feinberg had made the argument to Trump that Phelan wasn’t moving quickly enough on Trump’s shipbuilding priorities, especially the Golden Fleet and increasing reliance on US use of steam. The Navy, they determined, needed new leadership.
Phelan made a round of calls, including to the president’s executive assistant, saying he needed to speak with Trump. Phelan then headed to the White House. Once the president had a spare minute Wednesday evening, Phelan asked to keep his job, but the commander in chief backed Hegseth’s decision, according to a senior official.
Eric Robinson: There are some other interesting reveals. The people commenting on the entire saga are saying it was a combined decision between the secretary and Deputy Secretary Feinberg — that we often talk about — and how he’s disciplining things throughout the Pentagon. There are some organizational decisions Deputy Secretary Feinberg made that really undercut the Secretary of the Navy. He captured the submarine program office and put it under his direct supervision. He wasn’t inviting the Navy Secretary to meetings. That strikes me as the death rattle of his tenure.
Ultimately, Stephen Feinberg is sufficiently sophisticated to not promise the Trump battleship — the Defiant class, whatever you’re going to call it. He knows it’s fantasy. He might as well promise an Imperial Star Destroyer; it’s just never going to happen. The level of personal animosity that existed — with Secretary Hegseth firing the chief of staff to the Secretary of the Navy, the personal relationship between the Undersecretary, Hung Cao, and the Secretary — there’s this thicket of interpersonal hostility that boiled over. John Phelan went to Washington without much of a constituency, and I think he found himself without a friend. But he’ll be back in the president’s good graces at a personal level. He didn’t break from the phalanx. He just didn’t really deliver.
Bryan Clark: I’d like to commend Secretary Hegseth for his apt bureaucratic wrangling. Because neither he nor Feinberg like the idea of the Trump battleship. They don’t like the idea of the Golden Fleet. They have certain priorities that they want the Navy to pursue — unmanned systems, submarines, electronic warfare, some other stuff. Those are the things they want to focus on, new technologies that help us better address a more contested environment. And you’ve got the Secretary of the Navy freelancing, pursuing the battleship with the president, and then this new frigate, which is just an effort to make the fleet bigger and spend a bunch of money on shipbuilding. Which is not a bad thing in general.
Driscoll Lives…For Now?
Justin: They promoted him to constituent again — it was good. This is a demonstratively different situation than Driscoll finds himself in. Driscoll and Hegseth seem to have personal animosity for whatever reason — we can speculate.
Eric Robinson: Ranger tab, Ranger tab…
Justin: When you’re an infantry officer. But I don’t know that Secretary Hegseth would be able to create the groundswell for Driscoll, because from everything you can see, Secretary Driscoll and the Deputy Secretary get along and seem to be in lockstep on most things. If I had to guess at who was better at bureaucratic machinations — Secretary Hegseth or Secretary Feinberg — I’d imagine it’s Secretary Feinberg who’s like, no, no, don’t do the public pronouncement thing. Do it this way. I don’t see him offering that same level of support for Secretary Driscoll’s removal.
Tony Stark: Let’s step back and look at the broader political landscape, because that’s part of the differentiation between Driscoll’s position and Phelan’s. Driscoll has an ally in the Vice President — they’re close friends. Driscoll is also known to be effective within the building. He is liked by his own service. On top of the fact that he’s liked on the Hill, he’s liked in the White House. That is substantially different from what SecNav’s position was.
And that matters at a time when you have an already schisming Republican Party, where Driscoll could be one of the fault lines. From a Washington, DC, politics standpoint — the grassroots does not care — but in terms of the various factions in Washington, that is a schism you don’t want to happen, particularly before midterms, especially when most of the party at this point has a 30% approval rating and is looking to what comes next. And it’s very clear that with Vance — I think at 42% — is the most likely candidate for 2028 right now. You don’t want to piss off an ally of Vance if you want to have a future in the Republican Party, at least as it stands right now.
I’m not saying Driscoll is untouchable, because I could say that and in five hours a phone call could happen and he could be gone. But I think he is a lot more protected, both through his own actions and the broader politics of the party, than Phelan was.
Jordan Schneider: How do you square that with all these generals and his chief of staff and random advisors that work for him getting —
Tony Stark: Generals are the domain of the Secretary of Defense. That is how Trump sees it. They’re not his appointees. And you can get away with well, they were Biden generals. I think that is fundamentally it. I also think those firings have caused part of this schism — it’s made it worse. And I think Driscoll is the fault line for something you can’t walk back from.
Justin: When you have Republicans coming out and openly supporting — like Representative Cole coming out and openly supporting Driscoll while excoriating Secretary Hegseth on the decision to fire General George, saying you’re exactly the right person at this time — that’s a strongly worded letter said to the media.
Jordan Schneider: If Hegseth is out in three months, what happens to all these people? Do they just go hang out at Raytheon? Or can we reel them back into the fold? What is the mechanism here? Probably not, right?
Tony Stark: You’re running into two issues. One, people get tired after two years in politics even normally. The Biden administration was a bit of an aberration in that most people stuck around for four years — and some might argue that was part of the problem. Most people look at changeover anyway with a completely open primary on both sides in 2028. You’re going to see a lot of people scrambling to look for a congressional seat, to look at which campaigns they’re going to work on.
The last two years of the admin are going to be people either trying to secure their legacy — because they know they won’t be welcome in Washington for the next 20 years until we have another round of this — or they are actively going to look for their next job. A lot of these people are going to say, eh, I don’t want to go back in. The people that will stick around or bump around — Driscoll might be one of them. He might become SecDef, he might become National Security Advisor. I actually think that might be a better space given his age. At the ASD and DASD level, most of these people are going to try to hold on because there’s nothing out there for them.
Justin: I can’t imagine either of the next administrations are going to be like, we really need a former officer to lead the Department of Defense. I have to think it’s going to be a non — they’re going to go back to the Gates model, where it’s somebody who understands policy.
Eric Robinson: He was a captain once upon a time.
Tony Stark: Junior officers are fine, which is what Secretary Driscoll is. I don’t think you’re going to see another GO. I’ve seen some other names floated.
Jordan Schneider: DeSantis, baby. Let’s go down the list. We got DeSantis, Joni Ernst —
Tony Stark: That’s how you know Pete’s days are numbered, because Trump only floats those names when he is thinking about making a change. He’s not going to pick the Senate — that’s not passing the Senate. This one or the next one.
Eric Robinson: Why don’t you think Governor DeSantis can get through the Senate? Is he personally unpopular?
Tony Stark: He’s not well-liked. There’s probably a world in which if the House flips — and it probably will — that maybe Chairman Rogers gets the tap, which I think most people in DoD would welcome. But it’s more likely to be a personal ally of somebody else, or somebody who wants to be a caretaker for the next two years. Or you might see what happened in the first admin, which is people change out every six months. That’s a pretty likely possibility too. And you’re going to see a lot of people in performing the duties of.
Jordan Schneider: Tom Cotton — another name. But honestly, would you take that for two years?
Tony Stark: Tom Cotton wants to run for president, and that’s the problem.
Justin: The only thing I see with him is, he thinks his time in the halls of Congress is probably over, but he wants to move up to something else.
Tony Stark: I’d also say that if you’re thinking there still might be a GOP admin in 2029 — sure. You don’t want to taint yourself by saying, well, I already held a cabinet position from ‘27 to ‘28, and it was, you know, the great oopsie of 2027 that I was responsible for. A lot of these people who want to work for the DoD — their politics are not necessarily the people that a Vance would have in his administration, given his proclivities toward isolationism.
Bryan Clark: One thing to think about too: as we move into the last two years of this administration, if they lose the House, if they lose the Senate for sure, the president’s wiggle room in terms of things he can do with his time is going to really be constrained domestically. So he’ll pursue more foreign adventures, which means he needs a SecDef that’s going to be willing to go along with those — which means not somebody who’s going to have an independent base of support or an independent perspective on what the DoD or DoW should be doing. Somebody who’s more compliant in the mold of Hegseth, who depends on the president for his position and future.
So it’s likely we’ll get somebody in there who’s willing to go along with most of what the president wants to do for those last two years, which could be on the model of last time, where it was people who were there every six months — because if you know you could be fired that easily, then you’re always going to either go along or bounce, get bounced, and the next guy comes in. I don’t think the president is going to want to continue the foreign adventurism in the face of domestic resistance.
Tony Stark: When Congress flips, it’s going to get so weird. I think that’s the best description for the last years. It’s going to get really weird.
Jordan Schneider: Well, the question is, how much can a Democratic Congress physically restrain the president from invading new countries?
Tony Stark: Nominees are the one control they have. So if he wants to make the swap on Hegseth and he wants somebody, he has to do it now. He can’t do it when the Senate flips even by two seats.
Jordan Schneider: Or you can have a boring person.
Justin: Conceivably. Heritage probably has somebody that they would pick.
Jordan Schneider: What are the odds on the last two years of Trump laying down to just being like normal, boring conservatives? I guess probably zero. So yeah, we’ll just be in an acting world for the end. Anything else to close out on?
Eric Robinson: They might fleet up like Earl Matthews or somebody like that. That’s not going to be normal.
Jordan Schneider: See you next week on WarTalk.
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