More Iran Attacks, Oil Problems Worsen, Tanker-for-Tanker Strategy | Command Post Live

0:00If you like YouTube, you'll love YouTube Premium. Hi, I'm Sean Evans from Hot Ones and I want to tell you about YouTube Premium. It has offline downloads, so you can watch without Wi-Fi, background play, so you can lock your phone and it still plays baby. Oh, and it is completely ad-free. Yes, I said it ad-free. Try YouTube Premium for two months free at youtube.com slash premium. File eligibility varies, terms apply, cancel anytime. Hi, I'm Ben Parker from the Bulbork. Welcome back to Command Post on the Bulbork Takes Feed. I am joined as always by our very own Lieutenant General Mark Hartling General. How are you this morning? We got a lot to do. Good morning, Ben. How are you? Let's talk about again today. Our load is not getting wider. Our cup run-thover and once again we have to start with the most senior leaders in our country just making us all really proud and excited about the direction things are going in. Chris, if we could start with Clip 1 right off the bat please.

1:01Did the plane hit the South Tower? A group of people on the 78th floor were trapped with broken bones, charged skin and eyes and lungs filled with black smoke. Death was all about them. It was certain. They were sure they were going to die. Then suddenly a rescue appeared. They called them the man in the Red Bandana. Have you heard that term? The man in the Red Bandana has become more famous than me. I don't like it. Very unhappy, but he has become much more famous than me. Okay, so we got a bunch of things to break down. There just was a little bit of background. This is Trump speaking at a 9-11 commemoration event. We'll talk about the setting and who is behind him. He did go on from there to describe this real hero, Wells Crowder, who was a volunteer firefighter who saved a lot of people at 9-11 and then later lost his life when the tower collapsed. Let's start with this.

2:03More famous than me. We don't like the fact that this poor guy who has been dead for 25 years is more famous than me. What does that tell you? I mean, obviously, there's the moral aspect of it. It's creepy with new psychology. But what I want to ask you, General, is what does that tell you about the psychology of Trump as a leader and the kinds of things he's used to saying to people? Well, any kind of commemoration like this, whether it's 9-11 or remarks on Memorial Day or anything, the president just keeps pointing it back to himself when it should be a time to commemorate those who gave their lives, offer condolence to the families, understand how this contributes to a great nation. But he just keeps coming back to him. And I mean, that, I'm not a psychologist, Ben, or a psychiatrist, but it tells me there is something desperately wrong with his psyche and his ego. But I'm even going to take it back a little bit because whoever is writing his speeches

3:07from the very beginning, and I listened to much of that speech yesterday from the very beginning, it is filled with death, gourd, blood, and smoke inside lungs and people allegedly saying to each other that, hey, we're gongers. And then the man in the Red Bandana appears, and I don't think he even mentions that name, his name in the speech. No, he does later on. We should clarify. He does later on. Okay. All right. I didn't see that part. This is just counterintuitive to what most normal people would expect in a commemoration of a significant event like this. I mean, if we go back to World War II, if Franklin Roosevelt had said, this is a day that will live in infamy, which he did, and it kind of starts the concept of what he's talking about. But if instead you can imagine him saying sailors were inhaling smoke and being killed by

4:11kamikaze planes and death and gourd, and they were floating in the water with their lungs hanging out, it's just not the right approach. And the other thing, you know, from the beginning, the death and gourd, then the storytelling, and then how it reflected back on him. But then I was watching specifically the soldiers behind me, not so much the fighter fighters. And I think the guy in the front row who wasn't quite sure what to do applauded at that line. And you say, what are you applauding now? And he chose you and why were you standing behind? And I think I said this to the members of our Bullwark team yesterday, then. There are two things that really hurt me in terms of what sometimes the military does. Number one, it's when politicians put them in their backdrop. And if they refuse to say, no, I'm not going to do that, that's not the right place. And I'm talking both Republicans and Democrats here.

5:14Any president or political figure that uses soldiers as a backdrop is in the wrong in my humble opinion. The second thing that is a real pet peeve of mine is when, and not related to this speech. But when anyone who's running for office touts their ability to take over a position in our legislative body by telling what a great soldier or airman or marine they wear and they're wearing their uniform and their campaign ads, that's just wrong. Because you don't elect representatives based on what they did in military service. I'll drop that now, but it's related to what we're talking about, I think. No, I think it's an excellent point. I would add this distinction. We talked about this a little bit offline. There's a distinction between when the president or a member of the cabinet or Senator Congressman or whatever goes to give a speech to the troops. And it is scrupulously nonpartisan, nonpolitical, right? As leaders of the country, it's totally fine for them to go talk to the soldiers, tell

6:17them about their mission and what their service means in the country is behind them and etc. It's different when it turns into a campaign speech. And now you are putting everyone in a difficult position, right? Either the soldiers have to look like they are supporting your campaign message, which maybe they are, maybe they aren't, or the soldiers, sailors, Marines, airmen, guardians, whatever, have to self-segregate into those who support your politics and those who don't, which creates divisions within the forest. Now you're judging each other based on their politics instead of just focusing on the mission, right? For now you're making it look like the politician is maybe supported by the military, which is a bad position for the military. Or the firefighters and the police. And the firefighters, right? It looked to me like that one soldier you mentioned, sort of hesitated to applaud at first and everyone else was applauding, but it really is gross. You know, if you watch this data, the union address, the joint chiefs were normally in the right front row next to the Supreme Court justices, never applaud unless they're

7:24applauding when the president mentions a soldier or a service member. That's the right approach. A quick story then. After World War II, General Lucian Truscott went to dedicate a cemetery in Italy. He had a bunch of congressmen and VIPs sitting in front of him as he went out to give the speech. The cemetery was behind him where all the soldiers were buried. He turned around in the speech and gave his remarks to the grave markers and turned his back on the VIPs. And in that speech, he apologized for what he might have done that caused those soldiers not to go home. No one in the audience heard his speech. He was talking to the dead soldiers. That's what right looks like in terms of how to use the military, in terms of a coming generation. We were talking about all of this because we're coming up on the 25th anniversary of the

8:26September 11th attack in the quarter of a century. There's been a lot of remembrances going around. You had two articles in the bull work that I'd like to talk about just briefly. The first one, and we don't have to get into it because people can read it. You have to read it. I worked on this a little bit with you. It was to me a very interesting but very emotional, frankly, piece to read because you wrote a letter that you would send back to yourself on 9-11 from 25 years ago based on what you know now that you wish you had known then. It's not only personal, though a lot of it is personal to you, but a lot of it is also really about the country and what we know now, what we've experienced. If you could just give people a little taste, tell us about what you were doing on 9-11 and how that day was for you. If I can just start off by thanking, as you know, this was Sam Stein's idea, to write

9:26a letter to your shelf, Hurtling. Tell us what you're thinking today after 25 years. I want to compliment you and Adam Kuiper, who contributed greatly to this and really helped me shape this piece because I was all over the place because of emotions, as you can imagine. What I tell is the first couple of paragraphs is about what I was doing on that day. I happened to have just reported to the Pentagon about a month earlier. I worked on Labor Day. My boss, who was the three-star general, knew I just arrived from the West Coast, working at the National Training Center in California, and he said, why don't you take along weekend because all of us got it while you worked this last weekend. Go see your in-laws on the East Coast. I went up the Long Island to see my wife's parents. It was Friday when I left and on that faithful morning of 9-11, we got a call from my brother in law saying that a small plane had just hit the building.

10:28He was listening to NPR and that's what they reported initially. We turned on the TV and saw the second plane hit the building. I immediately called my executive officer who was a Navy captain in the Pentagon and said, do we know what's going on? During the middle of the conversation, he said, hey, boss, I got to go something just happened in the building and what I found out later on, obviously, and never got a return call was another plane to hit the Pentagon. This was my first tour in the Pentagon. My first and only tour in the Pentagon. I told Sue, my wife, let's get in the car and go back. We got caught up in the Long Island traffic, went over the Verrazano-Narrows bridge with the escort of a police officer, drove through the night, got into Washington at 5 in the next morning on September the 12th. You could still smell at the Pentagon, the smoke and the jet fuel and all that other stuff. That's my description of what happened. Then I reverted to the letter and talked about all the lessons that I would have written

11:34on September 12th to myself if I was smart enough to see into the future and what I was going to see over the next 25 years. It talks about how the military and the population and our friends and government and everybody else reacted to the attack. I think it described my thoughts 25 years later of what I wish I had known. There's a lot of people writing about their experiences on 9-11 today. Some who work around zero, some who were in kindergarten, some who were in college somewhere. This was a little bit of personal at the beginning but a whole lot of country toward the end. That's what that piece was about. I highly recommend one of the reasons I really recommended people. It's on the bulwark right now. It's a letter to myself on 9-11. There's a lot of for some very good reasons. There's a lot of acrimony and bitterness and recrimination in the country about everything

12:39that followed 9-11. I think we're just now starting to get to a point where we can look back with not only a degree of remove which allows us for a little more sophistication but your piece really does focus less on assigning blame or identifying mistakes that on wisdom. Here are the things we did right. Here are the things we didn't know we were doing wrong. Here are the things we wish we had paid more attention to. It's sort of that wise, slightly melancholy detachment that really moved me about this piece. I highly recommend people read it. The other one, I'm just going to say it was in our morning shots newsletter this morning. If you're not subscribed to the morning shots newsletter, it is free. It is five days a week. It is excellent. It gives you a really good idea of everything we do here at the bulwark. It is just a taste. We do a whole bunch beyond that.

13:39But if you want what I think is honestly the best free daily newsletter in America, it is lively. It is interesting. It's smart. It is varied. It's fascinating. It's fascinating. It's time to. It's actually it's occasionally funny. Sometimes you throw some puns in there. Morning shots. You go to the bulwark.com and subscribe. It is a great newsletter. If you want to expand from there and trust the newsletters, you're more than welcome. But I really recommend morning shots. You had an article in there that I thought was really interesting. As you said, a lot of people are showing their memories of 9-11. You in this article tied something that happened on 9-11, 25 years ago to what's going on in this country right now today, all because you saw a play last week. Can you connect those for us, please? Yeah, I've seen this play four times. The first time I saw it was over a decade ago because it was recommended to me by, by the way, the same brother-in-law who called us on 9-11. And he said, you need to go see this play and it was entitled Come From Away. And I didn't know what it was about, but we took his advice.

14:42And it's about Gander Nufanland on 9-11. It's a true story. Where over 38 jumbo jets, flights are diverted to Gander, which is an old military base, the Gander Airport. I travel through there once as a young lieutenant. I mentioned that in the article. And it's a small town in Canada, in Nufanland. And these 38 flights with over, I think, 8,000 people, 7,000 people descended on a town that had less than 5,000 people. And they were there for almost a week. And the townspeople took care of them because the corridors, the flight quarters were all shut down in New York and New Jersey and all around the country. And the townspeople were not prepared for this. But they took care of a bunch of people, really, from mostly Americans, but from all over

15:42the world. It is a hilarious story. It's a truly emotional story. You bounce between laughter and tears. But at one part of it, when I saw at the first time, this one part talked about an American on the day that President Bush said, we're going to have a day of national, national morning and silence. And the Canadians, he watched adhered to that and everybody went silent. Yeah, they shared that moment of silence. They shared them voluntarily. And in the play, the American character said, who's describing it, it says, I don't know if we would have done the same thing for them. And that really struck me when I first saw the play.

16:47But this time, because I saw it on the day that the tariffs went into effect and there's a trade war going on. And the president's posting memes about beating up Prime Minister Cardi with a hockey stick and all the other things that are going on. I ask a different question. And the question is, it comes out at the end of the piece is, what the hell are we doing to our best friends who took care of us? That's the gist of that particular piece. And I really had to write it the evening after I saw the play because I was so moved by the play again in a very different way. Yeah. No, it's, I mean, the contrast you tell other stories in this piece that are really interesting and worth reading. But the contrast between the really true friendship the Canadian showed and the enmity that we're

17:47showing now is just, it is depressing. Yeah. Well, by the way, on the story is though, I'm an old retired general Ben. When we leave the army, we have to sign a piece of paper that we will bore people with our stories. So that's what I continuously try to do. Legally, that's my new job. Well, speaking of news of the day, we definitely have to talk about the ongoing around war. But first, a quick word from a sponsor of ours. You have heard us talk about Lorine before, the government strengthens tooth and amel. I'm a big fan of mental health, I'm a big fan of Lorine. And now they have something else that I'm really excited about. I am not a nicotine user myself, but this is a product I would use because it's a nicotine free pouch. Lorine cup pouches give you the familiar pouch routine, but you swap out the nicotine for ingredients designed to give you clean, steady focus while supporting your enamel. Each pouch has 50 milligrams of caffeine, about half a cup of coffee. It will not surprise you to learn that here at the bulwark, we consume a lot of caffeine.

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19:50And you might need that 50% off if you're spending more money on gas because they're still fighting in the biggest oil producing area of the world around the state of Hormuz. We just got this new, I don't know whether to call it an escalation or just a new development in the world around that now Saudi or Ramco oil facilities have been hit by Iranian attacks. We've seen Saudi refineries and other oil plants hit before, not only during this war, but also during the first Trump term, it was a big drone attack on the biggest refineries Saudi Arabia that I think we didn't respond to. General, this is not good. It's not good that the Iranians are striking more oil facilities. Just recently we saw another big spike in gas prices and oil prices. Where do you see this going? Well, first I want to talk about that Aramco strike because it was against pipelines coming

20:51out of the facility. And that's important because just about three or four days ago, Secretary Besan and the Secretary of Energy as well talked about how the future isn't the straight of Hormuz. The future is the pipeline. Are the pipelines that are going to be built? We actually built a clip of that. Let's play the clip, really. Oh good, okay, super. The Iranians are trying to use the straight of her mutes as a choke point. It's not a choke point for the US, but it is a choke point for many other countries. But that will be bypassed in two years. In two years, the straight of her mutes will be like a worthless piece of water. The oil will be going on pipelines across the land. He also said just prior to that, he said we have to de-risk, we have to de-risk everywhere in the world. And then he said we can see the Iranians are trying to use the straight of her mutes. It's all pipelines. It's all pipelines. I feel like cranberry inside of our house. It's all pipelines, Jerry.

21:52Well, first of all, we haven't defined what de-risk actually means, but we can talk about that, too. But the pipeline issue was interesting to me as soon as I heard him say that, because having spent a little bit of time in the oil region of Iraq, pipelines are everywhere. And you know what? Al-Qaeda used to blow them up all the time. And it's a whole lot easier to blow up a land pipeline with either people or with missiles or with targeting than it is to actually stop a large tanker. So if the straight of our mutes is going to disappear because it's just going to be a worthless body of water and we're going to rely on pipelines all through the Middle East, I think we're exacerbating the problem. It is, these are people who don't understand the culture or the history or the dynamics of the region. And it's not only the pipelines that are causing problems, but it is now the Iranian government

22:54and that's bifurcated between the IRGC, the parliamentarians and the IOTOLA. They are hitting the US tit for tat and they are doing more than just signaling. And by the way, that trifurcated government in Iran doesn't have to run for election. They are just there. So they know how our culture works. They know how our politics works. So they're doing things not only having the Houthis hit the Saudi Arabian or Aramco pipelines, but they're also striking Jordan as they did last night or two nights ago, I guess it was. And they shot estimates of 16 missiles. They shot 30 missiles, cruise missiles, US facility in Jordan. And we fired back 60 Patriot missiles at the cost of about 5 million bucks a piece.

23:58They know what they're doing. They're sending out large and complex salvoes which they learn to do against the Israelis. And they're looking to penetrate and overwhelm Patriot missile batteries, the admissile batteries and things that are in the area. It's too first of all, by the way, we have said that the President has said they are depleted and they're beaten and they don't have anything left. And yet they continue on a nightly basis either hitting our bases, hitting other tankers that are in port, closing down things. So yeah, they have been depleted for sure. The Iranians have been depleted for sure, but they also understand that this ain't over. And their objective, just like it's been in the past, is becoming clearer and clearer as that they want to impose a higher price on the US than the US is imposing on them. Yeah, you know, we've seen this, I've seen this movie before. The Iranians by themselves might not be such a big military challenge to the United States,

25:02but they're certainly not only learning from their attacks in Israel with combined missile and drone attacks. They're definitely learning from what Iran is doing in Ukraine. And it would shock me if the Iranians and Iranians, sorry, the Iranians and Russians weren't comparing notes about how they're going to list, how to, and how to defeat the same weapon systems, right? It's patriots that we're using in the Middle East and it's patriots that the Ukrainians are using when they have enough interceptors in Ukraine. And we already know the Iranians are getting some missile technologies from China. So like we're, we're, we're, we talked about this last time where Trump said we destroyed the radar and then we destroyed it again. Where do we think they're getting these advanced radars? They're not, you know, maybe they're putting together advanced radars somewhere in the earth of Iran. Yeah. But yeah, I'm sure they're importing them. That's why we keep on destroying the same things over and over and over. It is amazing. Well, here's the thing. Here's the thing. We have said this so many times on the show, I'm going to beat the table again and say it one more time. In warfare, in conflict, the side that adapts first wins.

26:06Iran has been adapting. They've learned lessons from both strikes by Israel and strikes by the United States and they're applying those lessons. Ukraine has adapted first. They've learned how to counter the kinds of things from the most part, how to counter Russia. Russia has not learned and neither has the United States. The United States keeps doing the same thing. Strikes, the same target as you just said, you know, I have the president say things on social media that insults the country. No diplomats are working the issue. We've got Whitkopf and Kushner and Russia and we've got the secretary of state in Columbia, South America. I mean, I don't know where the State Department or the diplomacy or the information is playing a role other than the let Trump continue to post on social media and the US Navy continue to trip the Iranian forces. Iran's adapting the United States is not.

27:14It's worse than that. I'm afraid. It's worse than that because the people inside, and this is another story we come back to, the people inside the Pentagon, the people inside the military who are focused on adapting, who do want to innovate, who do want to move things forward, they're being shown the door. And we just had this big New York Times report about the story of what happened to General Donahue who was a very well respected commander. He was the general who was brought in when the situation of Afghanistan was going south under the Biden administration. They said, you've got to clean this up. You've got to help us figure this out. He apparently did a very commendable job taking what had been a real trying to think of a military term we can use that isn't profane. In a mid-a-cantic disaster, he organized it to the degree that was possible. Thank you. And he was in line to become the commander of European command and Supreme Alec commander of Europe. And Pete Hegsett said, nope, I don't like him.

28:18Even Hegsett's own staff were saying, no really, this guy is really good. He's the future of the Army. He's the kind of guy he wanted commanded. Hegsett said, no thanks. Connect. Well, yeah, and it was the reasons that were reported by the New York Times that are just, I knew a little bit of this been. I didn't know all of it. I knew that Donahue was likely placed in my old job, the US Army Europe commander, as a holding pattern, that they were going to literally give him some kind of combat and command as another holding pattern for eventually either being the chief of staff of the Army or the chairman of the Joint Chiefs. This guy is a once in a generation mind. He is smart as a whip and he's got 10 years of combat experience, more than any other general officer in the force. And he's been everywhere. He's been in the dark world. He's been in the conventional fight.

29:20He's helped Ukraine. He's built a, in fact, I was telling somebody the other day when the last task I had when I was commander of US Army Europe was to build the headquarters in this spot and then turn it over to the next guy. But in that headquarters, which is called the Shalikashvili Center after a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General John Shalikashvili, was a room to coordinate Europe if there was ever a fight. It was basically a command post as we're talking today on this. Donahue used that to bring the Ukrainians and all the European forces in and it became the command post for the helpers of the Russian fight. Those are the kind of things that he would do with a great deal of connection to the force he was working with. And by the way, one other thing since we're talking about continued missile and drone attacks.

30:20One of the things that Donahue did was try and work a deal where the Ukrainians would help the United States at the early stages of the Iranian war fight against drones. And he was turned down after he convinced General Sursky and President Solinsky that they should be helping the United States as a form of good diplomacy. And he and they were all turned down with the help and we've suffered the consequences. And I'm going to take just a second here. If you are enjoying command post, if you watch all the other World War live streams, we are going to be live tonight. Wednesday night and Thursday night tomorrow for the weird Republican midterm convention, not a convention, Trump up a loser thing going on in Dallas. So come hang with us. You can watch if you're watching on Sub-Sac or on YouTube. You can watch us same place right here. The plan is we're going to start at 8.45 pm Eastern time.

31:22But we don't really know when exactly Trump will show up because he never sticks to his schedule. So hang out with us. We'll see what happens. We'll follow the action or the lack of action or the insanity, whatever it is. And also we have a new event. If you subscribe to Morning Shops, you know that we've been following the saga of the terrible tragedy that's going on with the patients in Springfield, Ohio, with that whole community very closely. And we're doing an event in Ohio to support them. So we are going to on September 25th have a live show in Dayton, which is just down the road from Springfield. It's going to be I think Sarah, JVL, Sam, maybe others. And all the proceeds, all the profits from that show will be donated to organizations helping the community in Springfield. So tickets for that event if you want to come out and see us spend a night and support that community. Tickets are available at the bulwark.com slash events. That is in addition to our normal fall tour where we are going to Atlanta on the 20th of

32:27October with special guest Mark Hurtling joining Sarah, JVL, Tim and others. Columbia's out Carolina on October 16th and Charlotte and North Carolina on October 18th there will be special guest edition of the bulwark crew at all of those. We can announce those later. So get your tickets at the bulwark.com slash events. And finally, general, I had missed this last story. We're going to talk about you pointed it out to me, both military.com and federal news radio reported that the Pentagon is now looking through medical records to identify transgender soldiers so that they can drum them out of the service. I have a lot of questions. But first question is, if you have to look through the medical record to tell which soldiers are transgender, are they really causing a problem? Yeah, that is a great question, Ben. I hadn't even thought of that.

33:28They are, I wouldn't say drumming them out. They are offering two things. They are offering either an early release so you can retire early with pay, with a payment or if you don't choose that, then you're going to be administratively discharged. So there are those who want to say, I'm so sorry to interrupt. You're saying that we are now offering to pay people who volunteered to be in the military, not to be in the military. Correct. Where do I sign up to get that deal? They will get along some payment. It's a program that's been used in the past when the military forces have downsized as we call it when you're trying to shape the force. You say you take a look and say, hey, anybody want to retire early instead of retiring in 20 years, you want to retire at 15 with a little bit less money and we'll start your retirement action there.

34:29So that's the payment. But the ones that say, hey, I don't and they find that as I understand it, if they find that they are taking some type of transgender treatment which would be found in their medical records, if they hadn't told anybody about it, then they would be administratively discharged. And there's a group of soldiers who are one who has 19 years in the service and who is performing at an extremely high level according to her lawyers is fighting it so that it brings you in a legal action against it. But again, it gets to the point. Personally, I'm talking about me as a commander. I never ask anybody what their sex life was all about. I think that would be highly inappropriate for anybody to do. But it doesn't matter. If someone, in my view, if someone wants to serve their country, as long as they're keeping

35:30their private life to themselves and what they do sexually to themselves, and they have a great desire to be selfless servants, I'm okay with any of them to be honest with you. But it seems that there are some who just can't stand this and they want to drum these people out even though many of them have spent years wearing the uniform and serving their country. As you said, if you're trying to find them by looking through medical records, they likely haven't been a problem in the past. Right. So I agree with everything you said. There are a couple of points to make here. One of them is I probably wouldn't, but I could imagine feeling differently about this. We were just inundated with qualified, fit people who were hoping to join the military. And there wasn't a multi-decade long recruitment issue with almost all of the services.

36:33And the military services are very, very careful about what information they put out about recruiting. But you can look at the numbers and they published things like, here are all the people in America who are graduating from high school or getting your GED in a single year, right? Which is the basic requirement, right? You basically need to graduate high school to join the military. And then here are all the people who are at least in the range of physically fit enough to join the military. And in America, that makes a much smaller proportion. And here are all the people who have graduated and gotten their GED, our physically fit enough and don't have a felony record and don't use drugs. And don't have some other medical reasons where they can't serve it. And you get to a really, really tiny proportion and then of that proportion, it's like here the tiny percentage who actually volunteer. Okay, if we had millions, pond millions, pond millions of people saying, I want to join the military and I'm fit and I'm ready for service, then we would say, oh, well, now we

37:34can pick and choose based on these criteria. We don't have that much. We can become more gyrconian at that point. You're right. And we're lucky to have people who are fit and able to serve doing so already. Turning them away is not making us better off. Right. Well, what I'll say, men, is you've now opened a can of worms with me because everyone knows my last job was as a commander of US Army Europe. My job before that was commanding initial military training. So all the basic training sites throughout the Army, basic and advanced training sites. And I knew because I was tied with the recruiting command, what was coming in. And in 2009, 73%. Let me say that again, 73% to your point of American males and females between the ages of 18 and 24, the key draft age, if you will, were unfit to serve because of one of the three reasons you've decided. They didn't have an high school education. They had some kind of felony charge on their record or they were not fit.

38:37And that was the biggest element of the three, the fitness component. They were either overweight or obese and couldn't pass the basic, very simple physical training test. And that's the state of America. It was 73% in 2009. It's 78% today. I know that for a fact. Until your point, even though Secretary Hanks has just says, we've had the best recruiting year at possible. And everybody wants to join because of the Trump administration. None of that is true. Most of those who serve, who join up, were recruited a year ago or more. And part of the reason many people want to join is because the economy, that's always the ebb and flow. But as you said, there's a very small slice of America that can literally join. The army even had to open up a, what's called a fitness camp for 60 days to get people in

39:38good enough shape who wanted to join the army into the army so they could start basic training. Training for your time. That's the rest of the story. I don't understand why this is a focal point of the Department of Defense right now, as well as the beard issue and the fashion. I'm so glad you brought that up. It's been a long show, but I didn't want to end on this note. This is the same Department of Defense that Pete Hanks at the announced is going to give you testosterone therapy. So if they look in your medical record and they see testosterone therapy, how are they going to know if you got that from the Department of Defense or from someone else? Is that gender affirming care for the way the Department of Defense wants it or gender affirming care for the way Department of Defense doesn't want? I'm very confused by this policy, by this combination of policies. And you know what? I think Pete Hanks at probably is as well. Well, and I had one more thing about Secretary Hanks at and that is we also have to remember

40:42that he's throwing people out of the military or pulling them off a promotion list and saying it's all about DEI or you know, and he wants meritocracy, we have to remind ourselves that Secretary Hanks at was once a soldier who was thrown out of the military because of a tattoo policy. And that was the reason that he was not mobilized as part of a National Guard Unit to defend the city of Washington because he had extremist tattoos. That used to be a policy in the army. So he's creating these same kind of arbitrary policies that actually contributed to him being thrown out of the army. You know, General, I learned something new every time we do this show. Thank you so much for joining me for another Command Post. I can't wait to do it again next week. You got it. Thanks.