Trump edition: 'Woke' Pentagon chiefs in firing line
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Right now, all eyes are on Washington. But who's actually watching Europe at the moment? We will measure our success not only by the battles we win, but also by the wars we end. At this point, I spent a lot of time with the president.

Not once have I seen him do something that was mean or cruel. Dear President Trump, listen very carefully. Greenland has been part of the Danish kingdom for 800 years. We're not going to be defeated. We're not going to be humiliated. We're only going to win, win, win. We're going to win, win, win.

I'm Roland Oliphant and this is Battlelines. It's Friday the 28th of February 2025. Ever since 1945, the American military has been the pillar of American power around the world. It's also underwritten most of the world's security. But Donald Trump wants to use it in different ways. He's already started changing things at the Pentagon. What is he going to do with the American military?

Whatever Donald Trump's plans for the Pentagon, American generals can be fairly sure he's not going to rip the place down and build a gold statue of himself in its place. That does seem to be his plan for Gaza, according to an extraordinary video that he posted on social media this week. The bizarre clip caused consternation and confusion in equal measure. We ask, where on earth did it come from? How did he come to post it? And how has it gone down in Israel and Gaza itself?

But first, what kind of a military does Donald Trump want and how does he want to use it? To discuss these questions, I'm joined by Missy Ryan, national security and defense reporter at the Washington Post, who's been reporting from in and around the Pentagon for over a decade. Missy, before we get into the broad big picture stuff, our Prime Minister Keir Starmer is about to meet Donald Trump. By the time this goes out, they will have met.

His basic message is number one, please don't withdraw the American military shield from Europe. Number two, we need some kind of American defense backstop for Ukraine. How much either of those do you think he's likely to get? I don't think anyone really knows. Trump, as he's want to do, has sent conflicting messages to

himself, and then we've also gotten conflicting messages from those around him in terms of the willingness for the United States to provide any sort of security guarantee for Ukraine if there is a peace deal, and then the sort of overall approach to maintaining the transatlantic security arrangements that we've had since World War II. So what I've heard from senior foreign officials for the last month is, you know, we're just trying to understand what's real, what's

negotiating rhetoric, what is Trump being Trump. And I don't think anyone knows on some of these key issues. And key to that is how far the United States will go in providing a security guarantee for Ukraine. And that's what Zelensky is coming to do tomorrow himself. President Volodymyr Zelensky will be here right after Starmer on Friday. And that's the heart of what he's looking for

And so, I mean, it is in some ways typical Trump. I think you even have cabinet members and people around, you know, people at the Secretary of Defense Office, at the Secretary of State Office trying to read the tea leaves as well. You know, there in certain cases, there are policies that have been formulated for things like the approach to

these nascent talks with Russia, but you layer on top of that Trump and his sort of unpredictable comments. And I think you have to take those seriously. And often they contradict with what, you know, the policy that has been crafted so far. That's quite remarkable. I mean, that suggests that people in the Pentagon don't know yet what their duties are going to be, in a sense, in quite a dramatic sense. Yeah.

Well, yeah, absolutely. I mean, that certainly was the case during Trump one. We, you know, we haven't covered having covered the Pentagon during Trump one. You had people in senior positions where, you know, they would be responsible for executing sort of high level orders, just seeing things on Twitter,

and not knowing what to make of them. It reached a point during Trump one where the chairman of the joint chiefs and the senior officers around him would sort of ignore something, would treat something as just a statement on Twitter, not as an order unless it came

you know, across their desk in a sort of extort fashion and in a written order fashion. And that's how they made do the during the first Trump administration. But I don't know, it does feel different this time. It feels like certain things that were said and not carried through.

during Trump one may actually happen more quickly this time, in part because you have cabinet secretaries who are not willing to do the kinds of things that, you know, at least so far, we don't see evidence that you have people like Tillerson or like

Defense Secretary Mattis, who are kind of pushing back in subtle ways against things like when Trump wanted to withdraw from Syria, for example. So my expectation is that there's going to be more sort of full steam ahead on certain kinds of things. How that's going to play in Ukraine, I just don't think we know. And that's just kind of, I think, life with Donald Trump as the chief executive. I think it makes it hard for people within the U.S. system to know how to proceed and then obviously for foreign partners as well.

There's a bigger question here, which is about the kind of military Donald Trump wants, the kind of role he envisions for the Pentagon in his presidency or even his new kind of America he's trying to build. And he's made some moves already on Pentagon reform. If we could just start with, I suppose, the first move, the significant one. He's just fired the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Air Force General Charles Browne.

As well as two other top Navy and Air Force commanders. This was premature. Brown was meant to finish off a four-year stint. I think he'd only been in for a year and a half. What do you think is behind that? And what does that signal about Trump's intentions for the Pentagon and the military? I think there's a couple of things at play. So they have...

talked about wanting to enact reforms in terms of shrinking the number of four-star officers, shrinking headquarters staff, potentially, you know, there's rumors they could merge certain combatant commands or, you know, downsize commands that are here in the United States as well.

So, you know, they definitely are going to do some of that. And as part of the broader effort to shrink government and, you know, like Seth has said very openly that he thinks like the top brass is bloated, there's too many general officers, et cetera. So that's one thing. But then the particular individuals who were fired last Friday were people who he had singled out by name,

In the case of CQ Brown and Lisa Franchetti, who is the chief of naval operations, the first woman to hold that job.

because of, well, he suggested that they may have been diversity hires, quote unquote, and were too focused on diversity issues, even though they both came into the job with extensive records. C.Q. Brown had more than 130 combat hours, he was a F-16 pilot, commander of U.S. Central Command, the head of U.S. Air Forces in the Middle East, etc.,

And in a book that he wrote that came out in 2024, he attacked them both by name. And so they have been very open about going after quote unquote woke policies at the Pentagon. They feel like this is a distraction and detracts from lethality. There's no evidence of that that I've seen. But so while they did not explicitly say that those people were fired for those reasons on Friday,

It seems to me that that's why they were fired, these particular individuals, because they didn't give another reason. It wasn't for cause. In certain cases, there have been senior officers occasionally, as J.D. Vance pointed out on Twitter, who have been fired over the years, but usually it's for cause.

like General McChrystal, who was fired by Obama. That was because during the Afghanistan war, that was because he had aides who were insulting the vice president in a magazine. And so this seems to be more about, number one, rejecting people who have been associated with diversity efforts. And then number two, putting the sort of America first stamp on the military and the way that they're trying to do across the federal government.

What do we know about their replacements? So the person that they've tapped to be the new chairman is a guy named Dan Kane. He's a pilot also. Raisin Kane was his call sign. And he's unusual in that he was in and out of the military as a National Guard officer. So he doesn't have the same kind of command time that most people in that job have.

will have had and also he will require a waiver from Congress if he is to be confirmed, which he has to be confirmed by the Senate because he like there's a there's a law that says you have to have served on the joint staff before coming chairman of the joint staff. So, you know, the people we've talked to say he's a good guy. He worked at JSOC. He worked in

at the CIA. So he has a lot of time, he has time in special operations, but he also didn't spend his whole career in the military. He worked in investment and finance. And so there's a lot of speculation that, you know, maybe he was chosen because, you know, he had relationships with Trump world via the finance world. We don't really know. We've heard good things about him, but it's going to be a very different kind of confirmation process because usually when you, when people who are up for senior military jobs go before the Senate,

They've been in the military their whole lives, which, you know, they don't have the kind of business record that this guy has. And, you know, not necessarily a bad thing, but it just adds a whole element where people are going to have to look into the firms that he worked at, the investment portfolios, et cetera, et cetera.

There's also been talk about, I mean, the whole Trump administration is, you know, about cutting, is it a trillion or two trillion dollars off the deficit and cuts everywhere and so on. The other aspect of all this is the defense budget. Pete Hegseth has already asked Pentagon department heads to cut 8% from their budgets, from their respective programs. How significant is that? Is it a debilitating loss of money? And what do you think would go and what would stay?

Well, there's some confusion as to whether or not they intend to cut the top line numbers or cut certain things with this, you know, potential 8% from different departments and reallocate it. So Hegseth has said he intends to reallocate it into other things like counter drone technology. I don't know how that's going to go. I'll just say that the...

Budget is now about $850 billion a year. And Congress has added to that in the last few years, Biden put in a certain number and Congress added some number of billions on top of it. So it's possible that that will happen too. I do think that there are, we are expecting, you know, there to be some Doge style, you

cuts from the military personnel as well. But the military workforce, the military budget, I think all of them will be shielded from the most aggressive of the DOGE, the Department of Government Efficiency, this Elon Musk-led effort. The military is going to be shielded from the most aggressive of those efforts compared to other government agencies like USAID, which has just kind of been decimated and may go away.

So the Trump administration likes the military and, you know, there's a lot of bipartisan support for maintaining a strong military and trying to make it more efficient. I think that's what they're talking about. But, you know, in terms of the acquisition process, but every administration says that coming in and it's notoriously unwieldy and hard to reform. So we'll see how that goes. I mean, is there is there a place is there a is there a case for reform of of that absolutely enormous budget?

- Yeah, I mean, for sure efficiencies need to be found. I mean, there's 100% unanimous agreement about that in both parties everywhere that the military, the acquisition process particularly

And what's going on with the defense industrial base needs to be more efficient, like the spending on programs like the F-35 and different kind of, it's slow, it costs too much, cost overruns, time overruns, all of that. There is so much support for that. It's just a question of making that happen and making it more nimble. Like everybody talks about how

the US military needs to become more like Ukraine's military, which has just kind of become very skilled at MacGyvering weapons systems in real time and doing it at a low cost. That's kind of the antithesis of what the US process is. So that will certainly be a goal.

But I do think that the military workforce is not going to be as affected. But you could see significant sort of structural changes and downsizing of headquarters staff and all of that. That's something that I think they probably will do. You mentioned the F-35 briefly there. And I wanted to get into that just before we came on. I was reading Defense One.

And they quoted an Air Force general about this, basically saying that the Air Force has already cut quite a lot. It's already quite old. And the quote I've picked out is here. There's not many places where we can go now for these things. So an 8% cut to the Air Force is going to be painful. It's going to look really, really bad. And they're citing a chap called Major General Joseph Kunkel, Director of Force Design, Integration and Wargaming at Air Force Futures there.

And that caught my eye because I also know, and you'll probably also know, that Elon Musk, who seems to have a lot of clout in this administration, has talked about how if you're still building jet fighters in 2025, you're an idiot.

And the future is entirely drones. And maybe the implication being that maybe the F-35 program or other things like it should be completely scrapped. Are there question marks around the future of that program? Yeah, I mean, Trump criticized it repeatedly during his first term. And so there's a lot of scrutiny there. On the other hand, I think he's promised there's some talk of the U.S. providing F-35s to India. So I don't know. Again, I just don't think we...

We know whether that's a kind of rhetorical thing that won't go anywhere. But one thing to remember on the F-35s is that Congress plays a role in a lot of these program decisions. The Defense Industrial Base has constituencies in virtually every district in the country. And so there's going to be congressional resistance. We've seen that when the administrations have tried to retire certain programs, Congress keeps them alive because they create jobs.

they create jobs in people's individual constituencies and they don't want to, they don't want to see that go. Missy,

What's your sense of the mood inside the Pentagon? What are you hearing from members of the military? We're hearing a lot of concern about the way things are happening and concern among folks who feel like they, you know, uniformed folks who feel like they could be targeted because of their gender or their skin color. There's a lot of anxiety around that. And then just sort of the style that Trump and Hegseth and all those guys have had, which is very unusual, to put it mildly.

On the other hand, I spent time this past year out in communities where army folks were trying to recruit people, trainees. And there is this idea of the woke military is very widespread in certain parts of American society. And there are people within the military who also believe that. I have no idea what the breakdown is. Nobody has good polling on that.

Peg Seth and Trump have like tapped into something. You know, I personally haven't seen any evidence, you know, that efforts to have greater diversity at the top of the military have harmed anything. And, you know, people in the army will point out that there's like, you know, the number of hours that people get on diversity when you join the army on diversity training is like

a 20th of the number or maybe less, I can't remember the number, of the rifle marksmanship trading that you get. But it has created, gained some currency. And so I think that the tension between those kind of two viewpoints is gonna have to play out over time.

over the course of this administration. And we just don't know yet what that will do to overtime morale in the force, recruitment and retention, people who may choose to leave, people who may choose not to leave, and how that interacts with decisions they make about global force allocation, rules for people in the military, et cetera.

Missy Ryan, defence and national security correspondent at The Washington Post, thank you very much for joining us. Thank you. After the break, where did Donald Trump get hold of the video showing himself and Benjamin Netanyahu sipping cocktails on a Gaza beach?

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Now, no more tunnels, no more fear. Trump Gaza is finally here. These are the lyrics to an extraordinary video that Donald Trump put out on his social account just the other day, which has caused

a remarkable storm of controversy around the world. I am joined now by Henry Bodkin, our Jerusalem correspondent. Henry, this video hit the internet earlier this week. Could you just, for the benefit of any listeners who somehow have not yet seen this, just walk us through it first of all. It starts with what looks like a Palestinian family standing next to what looks like a Hamas gunman in a scene that we would all recognise as the

rubble of current Gaza. Very quickly though to the background sound of some thumping club music. They walk from that scene through a tunnel which looks rather like a Hamas tunnel. And out into an AI generated scene which is somewhere between Las Vegas, I guess you could say Tel Aviv, Dubai. There are luxury yachts moored off the sea. There are banknotes floating through the sky.

Trump Gaza, number one. The most catching thing of all is the ubiquitous presence of Donald Trump. So there's a kind of Las Vegas style arch, Trump's Gaza. You go through that. There's an enormous golden statue of Donald Trump. It looks rather like one of those...

Central Asian dictator statues. But then if you want your own statuette, kind of Oscar-like statuette of Donald Trump, you can grab one at one of the stalls. There are sports cars driving up and down. They look rather like Teslas, on which note, Elon Musk, of course, Donald Trump's key advisor now in his second administration, features quite a lot. He's

eating hummus, eating flatbread, or just kind of wandering through clouds of floating banknotes. Looks a very happy chap. Donald Trump is, or an image of Donald Trump is seen reclining on a sun lounger next to Benjamin Netanyahu. They both seem to be having a kind of cocktail or maybe a mocktail if it's Trump because he doesn't drink. And so it's a rich man's playground look, hedonistic,

uplifting, if you like that kind of thing, and deeply, deeply pervasive. This is obviously a reference to comments Donald Trump has made about Gaza, about America maybe taking over and rebuilding. Before we get into that, what do we know about the origins of this video? Well, not a huge amount. It's been reported that versions of this have been knocking around for a couple of weeks on different platforms, on X, on LinkedIn, on Instagram, but...

This version, this I guess you could call complete or final version, was posted, I suppose in US time, late on Tuesday night by Donald Trump on his Truth Social social media platform. Where did it come from? Well, it's been reported that it was downloaded from Rumble, which is a video site and cloud sharing platform very, very popular with American conservatives and the alt-right. Truth Social is actually hosted off Rumble.

But in terms of who made it, we don't know yet. I mean, my initial thought was maybe it's one of Elon Musk's bright young things that are helping him slash billions from the US government and running a mock around Washington. But actually, if you look at the video in one of the clips, Elon Musk is shown with six fingers, which seems to be a bit of a dig at him. So I'm not quite sure if that would come from his team. Look, at the moment, we don't know. But the truth is that

There are such close links with the Trump administration and Silicon Valley and all this tech scene on the right that, you know, it could have come from his entourage or more likely just from someone in the wider milieu. And he saw it and liked it and put it out. I mean, he posted it without comment. He didn't say, hey, look, this is a cool video that someone else has done or he didn't repost it. He posted it. But I don't know where it came from. It could have come from anywhere.

It's incredibly provocative, partly because of the number of people who have died in Gaza, the desperate plight of the people there and so on. And of course, the scene of Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu reclining on sun loungers, which implies an Israeli annexation of some sort and the displacement of the Palestinians who live there now. How has it gone down where you are? I mean, what has been the reaction in Israel, but in Palestine as well?

What's interesting, but actually if you think about it at the same time, not hugely surprising, is that...

It hasn't created a massive storm. I mean, we've got Ahmed al-Salfi, who's the mayor of Rafah. He gave a quote. He said, it's fantasy. If Mr. Trump wants to give Palestinians a place to live in dignity and a future, he must give them a state alongside Israel. But other than that, I haven't seen a huge amount of reaction. I mean, there's probably a number of reasons for that. Firstly, it's not in Israel's interest to kind of

draw massive attention to this kind of thing. The Netanyahu government finds the general thrust of Donald Trump's vision for Gaza deeply attractive and are very excited that he said it, but they're aware that they can't be seen to be talking about displacing Palestinians. And so, you know, they've been very careful to make sure that they're not in the lead on this kind of thing.

but just making comments like, well, you know, it's fresh thinking. We need some fresh thinking. We haven't had a fresh idea about Gaza for decades. It's more coming from America, to be honest. But just to deal with the Middle East, you know, the Arab states are almost falling over themselves to be quite polite about and to Donald Trump in the midst of this process. You know, they've said that his vision for a Middle East Riviera shouldn't work and can't work, but they're not being rude to him or being rude about him.

Jordan and Egypt which are the two countries in the firing line in terms of having to take the population of Gaza if that plan were to go ahead receive a hell of a lot of USAID so they're not sounding off about this and I suppose kind of more generally you know it is just a video it's provocative it's offensive but the the daily currency out here is bombs and bullets and deaths and

This is just a video. Israel buried the three B-Bas family members yesterday. They received four bodies back, etc. 600 Palestinian prisoners were released overnight. This is the thing that's really gripping people here. I think the reaction was kind of more interesting coming from the States. A lot of it was on social media.

big Trump followers saying, oh, you've gone a bit too far this time. I love you, but this is in bad taste. And quite interestingly, some people from the evangelical Christian side who are obviously big Trump supporters and you have a very, very laser focused view of Israel and view of the Middle East accusing Trump of idolatry, saying, don't let this go to your head, that kind of thing. So I think there's been more reaction in the States than there has been in the Middle East. Very briefly, since we've got you,

He talks about the real currency of things, of the bombs, bullets, hostages, exchanges, much more important than videos out there. Where are we right now? Could you update us on the state of that ceasefire? Yeah, so on the ceasefire, on the deal, technically phase one runs out on Sunday. In terms of people or bodies to be exchanged, that has now run out. People will probably remember that last Saturday we had six living hostages being killed

released, which moved essentially doubled the number that people thought they were going to be. They thought we're going to be three Saturday, three this coming Saturday. All the living hostages under phase one are now back in Israel. All the bodies after obviously huge amount of controversy and trauma last week are now back in Israel. The requisite number of Palestinian prisoners, I think at the time of recording have been released. There were some reports that a couple of dozen were being held back, but I think that that's all now gone through. So

It's now a question of can they find common ground for phase two, which in outline means the complete withdrawal of the IDF from Gaza and ultimately the release of all the hostages, among other things. Or do they just start fighting again on Sunday evening, Monday morning? Or can they just agree to keep talking, technically extend phase one? Now, that seems to be what everyone in Israel is saying.

realistically hoping for because there is such little common ground on phase two. It's where what is arguably the inconsistency of Benjamin Netanyahu's war aims to eradicate Hamas and to secure the return of all the living hostages clashes with each other. What's the long-term incentive for Hamas to give back the hostages if there is no future for them in Gaza? So I think Israel are falling over themselves to try and find things to give Hamas

to get hostages back without having to go forward to that long-term thinking of, you know, what does the future of Gaza look like? Just remind us, how many hostages are left after phase one? So Israel's fairly confident that there are 24 living hostages still left in captivity, which is obviously a huge number of lives to be considering. So it's been quite interesting in over the last 24 hours,

Israeli officials have been kind of briefing in a contradictory way. Some of them were saying, let's go ahead and move our troops out of the Philadelphia corridor, which is the strip of land on the south end of Gaza, on the Egypt border, which is so crucial, Israel says, for stopping all the kind of hardware coming into Gaza so that

so that Hamas can rearm. And that technically is what they're obliged to do under the outline agreement of phase two. And then another anonymous official this morning saying, absolutely not, we're not going to do that. So it's,

I mean, Steve Witkoff, Trump's Middle East envoy, has refused to even take off to come to the Middle East this week. He was going to come on Wednesday. Now he's saying he might come on Sunday if some progress looks like it's being made. But I think we're coming to a real crunch point whereby Israel's absolute determination not to allow Hamas to rebuild or not to allow them to remain in Gaza at all is coming into conflict with their

desire, certainly the desire among mainstream Israeli opinion to get all the hostages back and some very, very creative thinking I think is going to be required to keep the ceasefire going after next weekend.

Thank you, Henry. Could we also ask you about developments in the West Bank, which have changed dramatically over the past week? Yeah, so the big eye-catching thing is that Israel have deployed tanks in and around Jenin, which is the kind of north end of the West Bank. And it's the first time that

tanks have been deployed there for, I think, 23 years. Israel say very simply that they are trying to, in terms of their operation generally, they are trying to stop the third intifada. They are trying to

continuously chip away at build up of terrorist weapons activity in that area, which is a massive refugee camp. It's kind of like a permanent refugee camp, like the same with Tulkram, which is near the Israel border on the kind of west of the West Bank. Lots of weapons are flooding in over the Jordan River from Jordan

ultimately supplied by Iran. The Iran, which has lost a huge amount of its grip in Lebanon and now sees West Bank as its primary theater of operations to have a go at Israel. You've got this generation of young men in the West Bank, social media obsessed with seeing all the images of Hamas from Gaza in their white SUVs bristling with weapons and their green flags, slightly inspired, Israel says, by HTS in Syria as well.

And they're tooling up and Israel is going in, the IDF is going in night after night, taking three or four rifles, arresting a couple of people, intercepting bomb-making materials. So that's what they say they're doing. They're saying this is to prevent a build-up of materials that could prompt something really, really unpleasant like we saw in the second intifada. There's a lot of controversy around it because there are reports that

In the process, they've displaced about 40,000 people. Now, the Minister of Defence Israel Katz, like officials around him reportedly briefing, yeah, it's 40,000 people. And the IDF themselves are sort of briefing, not publicly, but kind of in response off the record saying that's more like 13,500 people. Still quite a lot of people.

So it's getting more and more tense there. The release of all these Palestinian prisoners complicates matters because Israel are worried that they will stir things up, that their presence back on the streets will engender a more preponderance to violence. And so it's kind of one to watch. There's a steady...

day by day, a stream of incidents. And, you know, the key thing to remember is that actually before October the 7th, it was the West Bank that was Israel's main focus apart from the northern border with Hezbollah. They had preponderance of their troops there. And that was the thing they were most worried about. And with the ceasefire, they've immediately taken the opportunity to reroute a lot of troops up to the West Bank because it shows how worried they are about it.

Henry, thank you very much indeed. Henry Bodkin reporting there from Jerusalem. That's it for this week. Next week, the Telegraph will be producing a special video looking precisely at the question of how Gaza could be reconstructed. So stay tuned for that on the Telegraph website. Until then, Battle Lines will be back on Monday with our usual updates. For now, goodbye.

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