What big changes inside the Pentagon could mean for U.S. national security

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth vowed to reshape the Pentagon. How the Trump administration is making sweeping changes to the U.S. armed services, just two months into its term.

Sec. Frank Kendall III, former U.S. secretary of the Air Force during the Biden administration. Author of a recent New York Times article "America has a rogue president."

Part I

MEGHNA CHAKRABARTI: In January, after his swearing in as the Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth promised to change the culture of the United States military.

PETE HEGSETH: We will put America first. We will bring peace through strength. And the three principles I talked about are what we will bring to that Pentagon.

Restore the warrior ethos in everything that we do. Rebuild our military. And reestablish deterrence.

CHAKRABARTI: Two months later, many of those changes have come to pass. Last month, the Trump administration fired the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, CQ Brown. They also fired chief of naval operations, Admiral Lisa Franchetti, and the Air Force's vice chief of staff, General James Slife.

And each of the top judge advocates general for the Army, Air Force and Navy. They are the most senior uniformed legal authorities in the Defense Department. And this month, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth shuttered the Office of Net Assessments and cut 60,000 civilian jobs at the Pentagon. Now that Office of Net Assessments has been charged for decades with helping America prepare for future wars.

So today, we're going to look at those sweeping changes at the Pentagon under the Trump administration. What do they indicate about how the White House views the very purpose of the United States Armed Services? Secretary Frank Kendall joins us for this. He was the United States Secretary of the Air Force in the Biden administration, also a retired lieutenant colonel from the U.S. Army Reserve. He recently wrote a guest essay in the New York Times titled, America has a rogue president. Secretary Kendall, welcome to On Point.

FRANK KENDALL: Thank you, it's great to be with you.

CHAKRABARTI: First, if I may, I'd like to spend some time helping our listeners getting to know you, right? And your military background.

Because it forms a good sort of basis by which to listen to your analysis of what's happening now. When did you first join the military?

KENDALL: Actually, I started out with an ROTC scholarship in 1966. I did a year at Rensselaer Polytechnic under that scholarship. And then I was admitted to West Point.

So I did four years at West Point, commissioned in the Army in 1971. Served on active duty for about 11 years. And then remained in the Reserves until I retired as Lieutenant Colonel.

CHAKRABARTI: And so during that time, were you deployed or where were you deployed to? I was deployed to Germany at the height of the Cold War.

KENDALL: I commanded a Hawk missile battery, air defense missile battery along the line of the inter-German border then, where we were basically trying to be prepared for a possible invasion by the Soviet Union.

CHAKRABARTI: What was that like?

KENDALL: It was tough duty. We were on alert all the time. We rotated. We could see across the border with our radars, the Soviet and East German planes flying around.

And we knew that any day we could see a massive attack come depending upon what happened.

CHAKRABARTI: As you rose through the ranks, in the military. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I oftentimes think that the higher one rises through the ranks, the more the day-to-day duties have to do with organization, management, and even politics.

Is that wrong?

KENDALL: It varies a lot by individual. A lot of people come through a very straight operational chain. And they go to higher and higher levels of either staff or command jobs in an operational organization. It differs for the different services, of course. In my case, I specialize in research and development.

I'm an engineer. I'm a very technical person. My last assignment in the Army was as a project officer, essentially, for ballistic missile defense in Huntsville, Alabama. When I left the Army, when I left active duty, I transitioned to civil service, and then a few years later came to the Pentagon, where I was in the Secretary of Defense's office, responsible for all strategic defense programs.

CHAKRABARTI: Shout out to Huntsville, by the way. I went there in high school for space camp at the Goddard Space Flight Center, so great place. And I'm a fan of engineers as a whole, Secretary Kendall. But so you've got what? Half a century of experience serving the United States, roughly?

KENDALL: It's a little more, it's a little more than that.

You go back and do the math, but I was commissioned over 50 years ago. And I've always been in the national security business in some way. A lot of it was in the Pentagon. I spent about 20 years in the Pentagon. Most of it on the Secretary of Defense's staff and the acquisition technology and the logistics side of the house.

But then, of course, the three and a half years as Secretary of the Air Force in the Biden administration.

CHAKRABARTI: How did you become Secretary?

KENDALL: That's a great question. Chance has a lot to do with these things. I supported, then candidate Biden, of course, during the campaign.

I was one of the co-chairs of his defense committee, if you will, of volunteer advisors. And I was interested in coming back on to, into public service. There were a couple of jobs that were logical for me. I hadn't thought seriously about a secretary's job in one of the services, in one of the military departments.

But that became an opportunity and I really, despite my Army background, did want to go into the Department of the Air Force to be responsible for the Air Force and Space Force. There are a variety of reasons for that.

CHAKRABARTI: Can you give me one of those reasons?

KENDALL: I felt that, given the strategic challenge of China, that was where the most needed to be done.

And I also felt that I'd be a good cultural fit there. I'd gotten to know all the services really well. And I saw a lot of opportunity there to make positive change for the department and to make us more competitive with China.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah, I know it might feel weird for me to be asking you all this stuff about your background, but I often find that in the media, when folks come on to share their analysis, we just jump straight to their analysis.

And sometimes I think it's much more helpful to understand sort of their career and the experiences that they have that help inform, right? How they came to the conclusions about whatever they're analyzing now. So I really appreciate you going down memory lane with me. But just two more quick questions about your background.

What has it meant to you to serve the United States in this way for so long?

KENDALL: I'm very proud of what I've been able to do. I think at heart, I'm a public servant. I've done a lot of other things. I spent about 20 years probably in industry, but most of that work was in the national security area with defense companies.

I also am a lawyer. I got a law degree. And I think almost everybody who serves has a very strong sense of the role of the United States, the unique role of the United States historically is a great power, where we stand for much more than just naked self-interest. We stand for the principles that make America what America is.

CHAKRABARTI: So West Point, ROTC, West Point, law degree, overseas deployment, serving at the highest levels of the military, underachiever, Secretary Kendall. (LAUGHS)

KENDALL: There are a few other things on the list too, but we probably don't have time.

CHAKRABARTI: So then here's where all of this is building to. What would you say is the purpose of the United States Armed Services today in 2025?

KENDALL: To keep the peace, of course. Deterrence is always the first mission. There's a strategic element of that, the nuclear element of it, and then there's the conventional element of it. We provide security guarantees for our strategic partners around the world. And we, the United States basically instituted a system with its partners, with the allies after World War II, which was designed to end aggression.

And acts of aggression, such as Russia's more recently in Ukraine three years ago. That's first. And if, of course, conflict does occur, we want to prevail. We want to prevail decisively. That ability to prevail is a very important guarantor of the deterrence, so the two are very tightly linked.

And we do, we have global interests, and we have global responsibilities. Our military is large, but it has a lot of responsibilities.

CHAKRABARTI: With that as the measure, do you think that since January 20th, that what you've seen from the Trump administration, from Secretary Hegseth, is helping the armed services fulfill that purpose, fulfill those missions?

KENDALL: The blunt answer is no. There are a number of things I could comment on. I think the most dramatic and the one that bothers me the most, first of all, is the reversal on support for Ukraine. And making statements about Zelenskyy being a dictator and having been responsible for the aggression that occurred.

My team and everybody in the Department of Defense spent three years supporting Ukraine. And we were very proud to do it. They fought very courageously. They sacrificed enormously for their own freedom. And I think that's been a noble cause. And it's also very tightly coupled to the defense of Europe in general and to NATO.

So I think what we did there was, everybody in, that I worked with was very proud of what we had done and were doing. So to see that come to the sort of abrupt turn that has happened, I think is really devastating for everybody.

CHAKRABARTI: Let me just jump in here.

We'll take each one of your, your critiques of the administration one at a time. So about Ukraine. I think the argument that comes from members of the Trump administration, and this might be, I might be actually putting a finer point on the argument than they actually have, is there's no direct U.S. interest in spending money or offering defensive support to Ukraine.

And so therefore, it's not worth doing.

KENDALL: That's a very narrow-minded transactional view. There is enormous interest in making sure that any military power knows that aggression will not be tolerated. It's what the Bush administration did when Kuwait was invaded, long ago.

This basic premise and the unity of ourselves and our allies behind this has really kept the peace for over 80 years now. It's been incredibly important for international stability, and the United States has benefited enormously from that. So to say that this is just about narrow minded, immediate interest is very myopic, quite frankly, and not consistent with the history of the last 80 years.

Part II

CHAKRABARTI: Secretary Kendall, I definitely want to come back to the issue of Ukraine a little bit later in the show. Because it's a key part of the world view that the Trump administration is advancing about America as a global power and the role of the military within that.

So put a pin in that and we will come back to it. But in terms of who helps inform that worldview, or who provides guidance for what military's role should be. Of course, I'm talking about the top of the top brass. So let's talk a little bit about the major, the sweeping changes in military leadership that President Trump enacted.

Now, first of all, I understand that the former Secretary of the Joint Chiefs General Charles Q. Brown, you actually know him quite well.

KENDALL: I do. CQ Brown was the chief of staff of the Air Force when I became the secretary. And we were essentially a partnership in running the Air Force. He worked with me for over two years, I think, and then went on to become chairman of the Joint Chiefs, where he also performed exceptionally well.

He's one of the finest officers I've ever had the privilege to know or work with.

CHAKRABARTI: And so how did you find out that he had been forced to step down as chairman?

KENDALL: I think the same way everybody else did. I was out to dinner in Washington that night and my phone lit up when the firings were announced on a Friday evening.

CHAKRABARTI: And what did you think?

KENDALL: I was dismayed. There's no reason to fire these people. I know all of them, actually. I know all of the people who were fired, plus a few more that have been fired. I don't know every JAG, Judge Advocate General. But I know the Air Forces very well, of course. These are all qualified, very capable, very apolitical professionals.

And I've never seen firings of senior military officers without cause before, without some good reason. Not being, acting consistently with administration policy is a good reason. There've been a few for that reason. There've been some fairly senior people who just misconduct of some kind. This was never really explained, and the president does have the right to have the people that he wants working for him in these positions, but the apolitical nature of the military is really reinforced by the continuity of people. It also helps the president. He gets experienced people to advise him when he comes into office.

So anyway, this was very dismaying. And also, if you look at the composition of the senior people that were fired. CQ Brown is Black general or rather, Admiral Franchetti is a woman. Another three star Air Force Woman General, who was the military assistant to Secretary Austin, and then Secretary Hegseth, briefly, was also fired.

Very fine officer. An A-10 pilot. Really terrific person, as well as the chief of staff of the vice chief of staff, rather of the Air Force, who's a white male. The JAGs are mixed. One of them is acting is a woman, the others are white males, but this sends a message to an awful lot of people that maybe this administration doesn't want people that don't look like them in some of these roles.

CHAKRABARTI: To that point, hat tip to the Military Times, because in an article from late February, they noted that in his official statement as Secretary of Defense when General Brown was told to step down as chairman of the Joint Chiefs Secretary Hegseth said, quote, that Brown has served with distinction in a career spanning four decades of honorable service.

I have come to know him as a thoughtful advisor and salute him for his distinguished service to our country. End quote. So that was his statement as secretary of defense, but the Military Times dug back into Pete Hegseth's book called the war on warriors. And they also looked at interviews that Hegseth had given before he was nominated as secretary.

And here's what he said. He said, quote, you think CQ Brown will think intuitively about external threats and internal readiness? No chance. He built his generalship dutifully pursuing the radical positions of left-wing politicians, who in turn rewarded him with promotions, end quote. How do you respond to that, Secretary Kendall?

KENDALL: That is utterly absurd, it is nonsense. Look, I worked closely with CQ for over two years. He's a warfighter. He's a warfighter and a distinguished pilot through and through. He's had combat experience. He and I were close partners in bringing the Air Force forward to meet the challenge of China.

I came in, focused a lot on modernization. He was my partner in that. He was my partner in some of the organizational changes we made, all designed to make us more competitive and to improve readiness. That was his, 99% focus, if you will. All of us spend a fair amount of time on personnel issues and so on, and trying to improve the lives and quality of lives of our airmen and all who serve and their families.

And CQ paid attention to that as well. But he's a war fighter and warrior. He was promoted on merit. Period. Every step of the way. And I would say, I've talked to him about some of this. There were places where he encountered bias. And he tells some of those stories. And he's been open about that, and I think that's been a healthy conversation to have.

But he's a fantastic person and a fantastic officer, and I think a great loss to the nation to force him out the way it was done.

CHAKRABARTI: The reason why, to me, the stark contrast between what Hegseth says as secretary, versus what he wrote in a book is important to note, not just because of the hypocrisy of it, but his, Secretary Hegseth's book, The War on Warriors, is this long, sort of impassioned screed about his belief that for decades now, the quote, radical left, has been undergoing some kind of campaign to weaken the United States military, to undercut its readiness, to allow people who are unfit for military service, into its ranks. And that, as we heard at the top of the show, in the remarks he gave right after being confirmed, or excuse me, sworn in as secretary, he sees part of his mission as the head of the Pentagon to undo all that. This is why your experience matters to me so much, Secretary Kendall.

Have you seen a systematic weakening of the United States military in the past 40 years?

KENDALL: Look, that's so ridiculous that I don't know how to respond to it. I've served in administrations that are Republican and Democratic, both as an officer, as a career person in the civil service, and then political appointee for the Obama years and the Biden years.

Our military is incredibly capable and it's very much focused on its military readiness and preparation for any conflict that might come. That's what we do. That's all we do, basically. We do take steps to try to improve, again, quality of life for people. We do try to ensure that everybody in the military is treated with respect and gets to rise to their full potential and contribute as much as they can.

But those are reasonable leadership things to do. I don't, frankly, know where Secretary Hegseth is getting this from. I don't, I won't dispute that he believes it, because he's acting as if he does. But I think he's doing a lot of damage in the process.

CHAKRABARTI: When he talks about restoring warrior ethos, I feel that might be one of those things that people just say to be, sorry for the pun, Secretary, but to rally the troops, right? But I think he's indicating something very important to him, that he sees somehow the hundreds of thousands of members of the United States military in lacking in a kind of aggressive ethos of military purity. Have you found that to be the case?

KENDALL: No, of course not. Look, we had 20 years of counterinsurgency campaigns. We had deployments all over the world. We have a new strategic threat that we're trying to get ready for in the rise of China. And of course, we have Russian aggression to deal with. The military is very focused on its mission.

And the war leader ethos, I find it silly actually to say that. I don't know where he gets this impression, if it's real, I'll give him the assumption that it is, but it's wrong. One thing a new leader in any organization, but particularly a military one, needs to do when you take over, when you take command, is to assess the organization.

Don't come in and start making radical changes based on the perceptions you may have. Get to know the organization. Get to know the people. Understand it more deeply than you do when you walk in the door. That's a fundamental leadership thing that I was trained on at West Point and learned in practice early on as a junior officer.

Secretary Hegseth has not done that. He's come in and started attacking the institution, basically, based on what is these apparent assumptions or presumptions that he has. And unfortunately, he's doing a great deal of damage. Purging DEI will take about five minutes. There's not much there to purge, but he's going way beyond that.

He's doing, he's disrespecting, frankly, a lot of people who served without much recognition throughout our history, women and minorities, basically. And removing things that acknowledge their service, which was not there at one time. And I think that's a great disservice to those people.

CHAKRABARTI: Given all the stories that we hear about various branches having difficulty with recruitment, I almost feel like the last thing you want to do is make the military feel like it's a place that would exclude many potentially highly qualified Americans to join. But, let me lean on your experience and passion for being an engineer for a second, Secretary, if I could.

Because, look, you know better than anyone, in building a new engineering system, one of the things you have to do is test for failure points. And I want to do the same thing for your analysis here about what the Trump administration is doing to the military. Because I heard you say loud and clear that the military is as strong as it's ever been.

It's capable. It's globally ready. But at the same time, let's look back in time, as well as anybody that, for example, during the Iraq War in the early 2000s, after a while there was story after story of, for example, there wasn't equipment readiness. I spoke to so many soldiers who were like, yeah, we were like self-arming or self-armoring our Humvees.

And at the time, it really struck me as how is this even possible? The world's largest, most capable and best funded military can't even send enough flak jackets and armored Humvees to the soldiers that its deployed into a foreign country?

KENDALL: That's a fair question. I was not in government when that occurred, but I was there a lot of years leading up to it.

For many years, we were preparing primarily for a conflict with the Soviet Union, and the conventional side that would have probably been an invasion of West Germany and then a mechanized warfare, air-land battle, we used to call it. And the focus of what we did was to be ready for that.

When we got, after 9/11, when we got into long term counterinsurgencies, and IEDs, for example, became the enemy's weapon of choice, we had some weaknesses we had to address, absolutely. We're not perfect. We can't be prepared for every single threat all of the time. So you have to make, you have to prioritize.

You have to take the budget you have. And the resources you have, and allocate it to deal with the range of threats and focus on the ones that are the most serious which can leave you with some vulnerabilities in some other areas. And that's exactly what happened in the Middle East and in Afghanistan.

CHAKRABARTI: So who bears the responsibility for that?

KENDALL: I think it's a collective responsibility. One of the things that secretaries do, one of the things I did in my previous positions, was we build budgets, and we try to allocate the resources that were given to the best of our ability. The Congress, at the end of the day, has a judgment on how much we get, and gives us a lot of very specific direction and how to spend it.

So it's rather distributed around. I can't say you can point to one person and say, this is the person or these are the people who are responsible for this. It's unfortunately, it's collective. I think the main thing here is not to think about who to blame for something like this, but to think about, how do you avoid it in the future?

How do you go forward in a way which is constructive? Because I will tell you that nobody was trying to do anything wrong. Nobody was being stupid or foolish about what they did necessarily. They just did the best they could with what they had at the time. And you can't predict the future.

You don't know exactly what kind of conflict you might find yourself in.

CHAKRABARTI: Secretary Kendall, I have to say, I definitely believe that your answer to my question is highly accurate. I'm also a little bit surprised, because I thought, maybe naively, that you were going to say, who bears the responsibility for that?

The Commander in Chief.

KENDALL: I think ultimately, yes. But the Commanders in Chief rotate every four or eight years. Yeah, the military, one, I'll give you an example of this. Our equipment is kept for on the order of 30 to 40 years. In my four years, say, that I was in charge of acquisition for the Department of Defense, I could touch 10% of any program.

And that was all. So these are enduring things. That's why it's been, in part, so important for the U.S. to have an enduring strategy, a sound strategy, and then to work over years and decades, even, to stay consistent with that strategy. And that's what we've done with our strategy of deterrence and our commitment to our allies around the world.

The strategy has been basically deterrence. And we've equipped for that and we've been quite successful that, when something unexpected like a 9/11 occurs or when, for whatever reason, an administration decides to go into Iraq. And in the case of the Bush administration, then it was a belief that nuclear weapons or weapons of mass destruction were there, that may not be the conflict you prepared for.

And the environment you have to operate in may not be the one that you were most concerned about. But I think, overall, up until now, the U.S. has had, across many administrations of both parties, a sound strategy of deterrence and a military which has carried that out successfully. To go 80 years without a major conflict between great powers is unheard of in history.

And we've achieved that. We also went into the Cold War successfully without a conflict. The Soviet Union collapsed in its own way. And the reason that we put ourselves in a position to allow that to happen was because we maintained a strong military focus on that threat for about 45 or 50 years.

CHAKRABARTI: The reason why I asked how much can we zero in on the commander in chief as bearing responsibility for the well-being of the United States military.

It's directly related to what you wrote in the New York Times. You wrote that our country is in uncharted territory. We have an administration that is waging war against the rule of law. It's time for the American people across the political spectrum to recognize what is happening.

America has a rogue president and a rogue administration, and we need to acknowledge that and respond. Built into that is America. Tell me if I'm wrong, but America has a rogue commander in chief, because that is the president's responsibility, no?

KENDALL: Yes. I was very thoughtful about the words I chose in that piece and there's been even more evidence, a lot more evidence that it's accurate in the last few weeks.

I'm talking about something very fundamental to who we are as a country, and that's the rule of law. Every officer, every civil servant, every political appointee takes an oath to defend and support the Constitution of the United States. That's what we're about. And that's the rule of law that guarantees our freedoms and supports them.

And as you're seeing even more recently, the defiance of the courts belittling the courts, talking about impeaching judges for passing down decisions that are inconsistent with the administration wants to do. These are not consistent with what America is. It's not consistent with what we stand for, at least as I've understood it from my entire life and career.

Part III

CHAKRABARTI: Secretary Frank Kendall is with us. He is the former Secretary of the United States Air Force. And Secretary Kendall, with the sanctity of the rule of law in mind in the, 200 plus year history of this country, one of the sweeping changes that the Trump administration has made, which I think received less attention than the firing of General Brown from the Joint Chiefs, for example, is the firing of the judge advocates general for the Army Air Force and Navy.

Now these are the most senior legal officers in each of those branches of the military. For folks who don't know, can you tell us a little bit more about what the JAG officers do?

KENDALL: They're the head military lawyers for their services. There also are general counsels who are civilians, political appointees, and in the Secretary of Defense's office and in each of the military departments, but they're career people.

They've come up through the ranks of the Judge Advocate General Corps. Most of them have probably done prosecution and defense, uniformed code of military justice, criminal offenses, but they oversee a lot of other things as well. One of their core responsibilities is to determine whether or not an order is lawful.

And consistent with the rule of law that includes the laws of armed conflict. So whether you can attack a certain target within those laws, particularly in counterinsurgency kinds of situations that we've been experiencing for a long-time, counterterrorist situations, is an important responsibility for the Judge Advocate Generals.

CHAKRABARTI: You wrote about an example of how JAG officers view their work, which in, of all places, you witnessed at that detention facility at Guantanamo Bay.

KENDALL: That's right. I was there as a volunteer observer for a human rights group.

CHAKRABARTI: And what did you see?

KENDALL: I saw a system that was working fairly effectively, the specific instance I talked about in the article was a briefing that was given at the end of the day of hearings by one of the Judge Advocate General military officers who was in charge of the defense team.

And the point he made, and I'm paraphrasing a little bit, was that when the system was set up to have military tribunals and try these people in Guantanamo, it was assumed, he believed, that there would be quick show trials and quick convictions and that we would get on with whatever punishments were made out.

And then a comment that stuck with me was that person didn't understand military lawyers. He didn't understand how committed JAG officers are to the rule of law. And if we're told to defend a client, we will defend the client. And I was very proud of that. I thought that was a tremendous statement of loyalty, of fealty to the rule of law and to doing a professional job that they were given to do.

And that really stuck with me at the time. I was proud to be an American that day, especially proud.

CHAKRABARTI: It was really, I hadn't heard this story before, so when I read it in your New York Times piece, it made me pause. Because this was a statement made by a JAG officer who, just to be clear, was this, colleagues were assigned to defend the detainees at Guantanamo.

KENDALL: That's right. That's correct.

CHAKRABARTI: And also the statement was made with the backdrop that many Americans simply considered the mere existence of the military tribunals in Guantanamo as a perversion of the rule of law. Like, I wanna acknowledge that too.

But, so the reason why I wanted this background from you is, again, the sweeping out of JAG leadership, it seems to be to me, they serve at the pleasure of the commander in chief, no? So what's the big deal?

KENDALL: The big deal seems to be the reason they were removed.

I don't know any reason why these people were removed. I don't think Secretary Hegseth knew them or had any experience with them, particularly. I think he had experience in the field where he had, and I'm intuiting this from what he said, where he'd wanted to use more firepower than he was permitted to use.

You can get in a situation, I'll give you an example, where your unit may be under fire from a sniper in a village. And you're not allowed to destroy the entire village and kill everyone in it, if that's the case. You've got to do something that's more surgical. And the people who make these decisions about what's permissible under the rule of law, under the laws of armed conflict, ultimately are the JAGs.

I've sat in headquarters where these decisions were made. I've watched them be made. Particularly in the war on terror, where we surveil a target for a long time, and then we want to make sure we're not killing civilians when we strike. And the JAGs get the final approval of whether to make that strike or not, whether the rules have been satisfied, the rules of engagement.

Apparently, Secretary Hegseth felt overly constrained by this. He's never served above the level of major, and I don't think he has the perspective because of that. That there are more things at issue here than just the success of that operational mission, that tactical operational mission.

And we don't want to lose people unnecessarily. I absolutely want to support and defend our people and particularly under fire and contact. But we also need to do so consistent with our values. And that's something, again, that every American who serves should be proud of and should take a lot of credit for, as part of the professionalism of the American military.

CHAKRABARTI: Secretary Kendall, to state the obvious, the United States military is an enormous institution, vitally important, truly, to the U.S., obviously. It's also a very expensive one, right? The defense budget is probably, if not this year, next year, it's going to be pushing a trillion dollars. The men and women who serve in the U.S. military at all ranks are, their mission is to protect the United States. And it's also, the institution has also been used to project U.S. military power around the world in all the ways that you said earlier. So With that, I wanted to restate that, because any massive leadership change, in any organization, brings in a new worldview with it.

And it seems to me that the worldview of the Trump administration is completely different than the worldview in which our modern military was developed. I was thinking what you said about having served in Germany during the Cold War. I think that, obviously, President Trump has basically said that world doesn't exist anymore.

He seems perfectly fine with having the U.S. be not the dominant geopolitical power, but one of several, one of several along with China, along with Russia, he wants Europe to be on its own to defend itself. That has some allies, that point of view has some allies. If that's the case, what do you think the role of the U.S. military would be within that worldview?

KENDALL: I think that, in fact, President Trump has some valid points there. Europe has not provided nearly as great a contribution as a percentage of gross domestic product, for example, to defense as the U.S. has. And they've been under pressure from the U.S. for decades to do more. I don't disagree with the desire to get our allies to provide more for their own security.

But we benefit enormously from what they do provide. And we have for a long time. I talked earlier about all the decades of peace Since the Second World War, we could have a debate about exactly how to increase Allied performance and exactly what the best distribution of U.S. forces around the world should be. I think that's a worthwhile debate to have. Those are valid subjects to take a look at.

But switching to an entirely transactional view of the world, where we're only about our own self-interest and we're only interested in doing anything with anybody else if it benefits us, is really the not right way to approach this.

It's ignoring the entire history since the end of World War II, and how successful that's been.

CHAKRABARTI: I'm pausing here, because I'm just going to ask it. Has the United States actually ever acted in a way that wasn't ultimately in our own self-interest?

KENDALL: I think that's a fair question, and the answer is basically no, but it depends upon what perspective you take.

If you take a longer-term perspective and you think more strategically, then many of the things we've done have been in our self-interest, while they may not be in our immediate, narrow self-interest, right? So that requires some thoughtful, strategic thinking. It requires a broad world view.

It requires a good, careful, strategic assessment of all the different factors that enter into a decision about what to do. I don't see that from this administration. And you mentioned Secretary Hegseth has three things he wants to do. None of them talk about the strategic intent of the U.S. military, or what threats we're going to prioritize, or how we're going to be allocating forces around the world.

Those are strategic levels that should be thought about by Secretary of Defense, National Security Advisor, Secretary of State, and the President. I'm not seeing a lot of that. What I'm seeing instead is things that are very narrow, very tactical, and very transactional, and not, in many cases, consistent with our historic values.

Or the strategy that's been so successful since World War II.

CHAKRABARTI: That's an interesting point, secretary. I'm going to come back to what the role of the U.S. military might be in a sort of differently aligned world. But since you mentioned what Secretary Hegseth has talked about regarding his own priorities, we have a little bit of tape here.

This is from last November. So prior to him obviously having been named Secretary, because it was around election time, and he was on the Shawn Ryan YouTube show and he talked about how a new administration should, quote, course correct military culture.

HEGSETH: First of all, you gotta fire, you gotta fire the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs and you gotta fire this, obviously you're gonna bring in a new Secretary of Defense, but any general that was involved, general, admiral, whatever that was involved in any of the DEI, woke [expletive], it's gotta go.

Either you're in for warfighting, and that's it, and that's the only litmus test we care about. You gotta get DEI and CRT out of military academies so you're not training young officers to be baptized in this type of thinking.

CHAKRABARTI: I have to say, does the focus on military culture seem unusual to you, Secretary?

Because I can also hear an argument that's actually a major part of what a Pentagon leader should be modeling.

KENDALL: Let me just say this for the American people, we have a very professional military, it is a very strong culture, it's very committed to readiness and to protecting the nation, and it's very mission focused, that's, he's completely wrong to argue that it might be otherwise. Every leader will come in and try to do some things to shift things marginally, but we have a strong, resilient military.

There is a deep bench behind CQ Brown and the other people that were fired that are ready to step up. I frankly don't know what people are talking about when they talk about wokeness. I don't know what they mean. We did try to ensure that everyone in the military was treated with respect.

We tried to ensure that everyone was able to perform to their full potential. We did do some training to help people interact more effectively and understand people who weren't like themselves, right? And have more empathy for them. That's important for leadership. I just put a piece, did a piece that's in Politico that just came out, that talks about all of this.

I think there's been a huge overreaction to the perceptions that Secretary Hegseth seems to have about the military. I don't know what his personal experiences were like in his unit, but I can tell you with a much broader look at the military, particularly in the Air Force and Space Force, the problem that he's identified doesn't exist. And it's right now, I think people out there are just keeping their heads down, trying to get through the day, do their jobs and stay out of trouble.

He's created a very difficult environment for people to operate in.

CHAKRABARTI: There does seem to be, and I'm just, I'm speculating here, a celebration of what Hegseth might see as like special forces culture and wanting that along, across the entire institution of the U.S. military. But Secretary Kendall, I have two more questions for you. And one has to do, again, with thinking about Ukraine, because you talked about the importance of deterrence as a mission critical aspect of the United States military. And it's not just President Trump who's talked about this.

I'm thinking of many conversations I've had over the years with, say, Andrew Bacevich, who also served with dignity and honor in the United States military. His son was killed in Iraq, I believe. He for a long time has said deterrence shouldn't necessarily be the core mission of the U.S. military anymore, but rather simply, truly defense. It's called the Department of Defense, but that the mission should be to defend the United States and anything else that seems a global projection of power, to deter or control the rise of other nations is not what the purpose of the military should be anymore.

KENDALL: That's a debate we, I thought had been resolved. There are people who still have an isolationist view of what the United States should do. And it appears to be a lot of that in this administration. I again point to the history of the last year since the Cold War, World War II.

We were drawn into both World War I and World War II, because when aggression happened somewhere when someone, often a dictatorial, authoritarian regime tries to use force to expand its boundaries. We end up getting involved. There are fundamental values that we have stood for, for a very long time, that have served America and they serve our partners well.

And frankly, we're not a big enough nation, despite how powerful we are, to try to take on China by ourselves. We need strategic partners. Russia is a little bit different, but Russia has a very large nuclear arsenal. Their conventional forces are not as capable, but their nuclear arsenal is substantial.

The existence of the U.S. deterrent force, the strategic force, has provided a deterrent to both nuclear proliferation and to nuclear war. And that has benefited everyone on the planet, but particularly the United States. I disagree that we should be only about defense and wait for someone to attack us.

I think we should, it's much more, I think, productive and rational for us to have done what we've been doing for so long, so successfully. Which is provide security guarantees together with our partners that prevent aggression and hopefully will always prevent a nuclear conflict.

CHAKRABARTI: Last question.

Earlier in the hour, you used an important word. Politicization. You warned against the politicization of military leadership. As we know, in the past, President Trump has complained about quote-unquote, my generals. The purpose of military leadership, especially on the Joint Chiefs, is not to agree with the commander in chief, but to advise. With that in mind, President Trump has nominated Dan Caine for the position of Joint Chiefs Chairman.

Do you think that he can serve in that capacity without further politicizing the post?

KENDALL: I know General Caine, I don't know that his election per se matters all that much. The act of removing those people is really where the politicization came in. What's been created is a climate of fear now. I've never seen this, I've been through a lot of transitions. I did it in the military as a civil servant. And then I was involved in making transitions happen a couple of times, from the political point of view. They've all been seamless. Nobody's ever been afraid that they were going to be fired or relieved or replaced because they weren't politically aligned with the administration.

The military, they do several things, but basically, they basically follow the lawful orders of the president and support the constitution. Whoever the president is, that's what they'll do.