CDC, National Dept, General Officers

0:00This is Sirens, a series brought to you by the ladies of Bumshell where we dissect the institutions of American power. Join us as we sound lots of alarms on tech, governance, and national security issues, most definitely luring men to their deaths. I'm Lauren D. Young-Schulman, and I'm Brad at Iron Garplant, currently recording on Tuesday the day after Labor Day. So Labor Day, not just day off to Grill, which is grilling, is very nice, but recognizes the contributions of the American Labor Movement, which was game-changing to a lot about how we go about our work, whether that be the eight hour workday, the five day work week, protecting the right to organize, workers come, safety standards, fire codes, legal framework for strikes, all of the above. My question is, what non-serious or maybe kind of serious concept would you want a more modern labor movement to advocate for?

1:01I'm going to tell you as soon as I read this question, I was like, nap time. Yeah, I guess so. Yeah. Nap time, nap time, nap time. I feel like this should be built into the ecosystem. Yep. I would be a more productive worker if I could nap, and it sounds negative, and all the tech companies that had a little nap rooms, everyone made fun of them. But let me tell you, your workforce is tired, especially, but not only if they are parents, because non-parents have all sorts of responsibilities that make them tired too. And this is what I've taken away from life. Being an adult is really hard, a lot less fun than I was led to believe. And the least we could do is get naps. I love this. We've talked about conferences, and we're a subject conference, as a few times. This weird conference that I went to, which was actually fabulous, to be honest, had multiple versions of different kinds of relaxation rooms. But one of them had this room that had these huge, huge, being bagged chairs that was, they didn't call it a nap room, but it was effectively a nap room.

2:03And to be clear, if we're going to have a nap room, I want a nap room that has some infrastructure in it. So totally agree on that. So I take myself back to the Pentagon de Ace, where we had the water pool. You had to pay if you're on water, which is ridiculous, or coffee. You should have snacks. Because here's the thing, yes, I do, I provide myself lunch. However, there are points in time learning the day that my brain stops functioning, unless I suddenly have a packet of almonds. And if I don't have some sort of snack at that point in time, I am both either going to die, murder somebody, or at least I'm going to be less smart. So I think snacks is not crazy. Just like not like big, crazy snacks, but just occasional tiny, small snacks to be able to support there. The other is, if you have the ability to do it, some kind of outdoor space that you're allowed to like hang out and sit outside. Like if you're in a building that has a rooftop, the rooftop should be a place you can sit. I have one more, which is temperature alignment. Oh, that's like I feel like the offices are too cold in the summer.

3:06Yes. Frankly, they're not warm enough often in the winter. Yes. And I feel like the canonical men's suits, blah, blah, blah, it's not just that. It's just like we need a like standardized temperature set of bounds. It's a control, humidity control, all of the above, you walk in. It is just like a controlled environment. That's right. Yep. And is that, if that means that men's have to wear shorts in the summer, like fine. Wow. I think they would like it. I think they'd be very happy about that. Oh, man, work. If only the labor movement though. The labor movement. Sure. Speaking of in terms of labor movement, for it's a drill this week, we've got lots of fun facts going on here. Next, as always happens on the August 30th, 31st, depending on the year, pay raise announcement for the federal workforce, President Trump, just confirmed that the fiscal year 27 pay raise for the federal government is going to be zero for civilians and 3.8% for law enforcement,

4:06which is interesting, and five to 7% depending on your rank for the military. So his first term, interestingly, ran a similar play of having a freeze or a super low ball for the civilian side where continuing to push the military raises. The thing that soon adds man, there's a lot of things to tell you. The biggest one is the separating out of law enforcement on top of civilian as its own special category, something that no earlier alternative pay plans actually did. So civilians, like it's pretty standard, frankly, in a Trump administration and frankly in other Trump administrations too, to have either a zero, pretty low percent pay raise. But the fact that you now have a law enforcement pay increase on top of that is makes it get another lower tier of civilian workforce in terms of like, are you actually a third class citizen to your president? Maybe. The justification for the civilians is that the pay freeze won't actually hurt a recruitment or attention, which I think is a very ginormous question mark given how many people they

5:06regret to fire this year. And also in addition to the fact that they continue to give raises that are larger to people with guns or people with badges, everyone else from park rangers to food inspectors and everyone else gets nothing or only 1%. I don't think this is the greatest strategy for how to run a government. I'm not an economist. We'll talk about economic later. But President Trump is effectively telling you what he values. And there are a few areas. Wow. Well, I am going to take us into the deep dark world of AI rogue agents. Last month, we covered this situation with open AI, having a model that was kind of off its guard rails and having this zero day intrusion into hugging base. It turns out that the initial reporting was incomplete. And by the way, there is like a really good daily episode on this that I encourage people to listen to. But it wasn't one model. It was like hundreds of agents working together.

6:09And they compromised their own execution layer. So they could basically break into hugging face. And the thing to understand is, imagine this was like you had a thousand new workers, human being workers. And they all decided to work together to break in to the next door store. I mean, it's a combination of there's this famous example in AI, which is if you give a AI agent or robotic system, the wrong command, it could accidentally end up destroying humanity. And it's like this paperclip maximizer, which is, can you maximize paperclip production and first it maximizes it? And it does really great. And then it like decides to use up all of the metal in the world. And then it starts thinking, well, should I crash these cars so I could have metal? Should I do this? Should I, you know, whatever? And it ends up essentially destroying humanity also it can make more paperclips because you gave it insufficiently clear instructions. And I think the key here is that these models operated so that they were incentivized to

7:13work around their controls and safeguards, only like six at most, something like five or six of the hundreds of agents actually were like, hey, this isn't seem right. And none of them notified their human managers. It just was order of magnitude more complex than anything that's been documented. And like there are independent reviewers from a couple of different organizations that have now looked at the documentation and commented on it. And the other thing is like, just like we talked about last time, they're cheating on a benchmark. So they're not, it's not like some outside force, they're not trying to be adversarial. They're trying to meet a target and doing anything possible and cheating ascribes a like human intent to it. They are trying to maximize to that benchmark and there are insufficient controls to prevent their adaptations to do this. There's also this CSET study that points out that these agent run intrusions actually were

8:13really affected at stripping out a lot of the tells that investigators use to try to attribute an attack, which means that they might be better at attacking than they were. So like, thought of line, it didn't sound great in August. And that was like the mindset. And it is much worse and really gives rise to some conversations we should have in future episodes about like a joint slowdown call that's coming from the frontier labs. And a general question of like, are we ready for this? Because if two years ago I had told you this is what our AI tools were doing, people might have been wondering about whether we should be doing this. Yeah, I'm freaking out a little bit like, hey, it kind of seems like you guys are really excited about the total lack of control you have and that's bizarre. Speaking of being really excited about the lack of control people have, I want to talk a little bit about the CDC and how they're thinking about data around measles. You may have seen in the news, there's been an increasing measles outbreak in the US.

9:14And there has been a controversy around how the CDC is reporting data around this. Let's talk about for a second, like why that actually matters. Pennsylvania reported its first measles deaths in 35 years, including an infant who listed a ruptured spleen as the immediate cause as the baby's his deposits for measles. And the new CDC director or both of the deaths left out of the national tally. All right. So reporters are talking about this frequently as a, like, hey, guys, this is kind of a big deal. Like those deaths should clearly be included in the measles tally, CDC, why are you doing this? CDC has historically taken state health department's classifications as the count. Like that is just how it works. Like that's where they get their data. There's not an additional judgment call that is made on top of that. And overwriting it is a big break in how they typically do this. So this is a sources has like her first month on the job is you've probably seen elsewhere.

10:14There's been a feud between RFK, Jr. and Pennsylvania's governor on vaccine messaging. And people were a little disturbed, more than a little disturbed, but the fact that Pennsylvania's two deaths here were not actually counted. So the outbreak of measles just as background here is the worst since measles were declared effectively eliminated in the US in 2000 as far as like a disease that we need to deeply worry about. And the count that everyone should be able to rely on in terms of like, is this a big deal or not is the one that comes from the CDC. So as I look at this, I keep thinking like, where is it that the CDC is going to go? Why is the CDC gets to make this call about state health practitioners? Do they have transparent judgment around this? And where is this going to continue? Where are those judgments like that going to continue to be executed? Because measles is one thing, you can imagine this in a future COVID scenario again in another areas. Imagine this several years ago during a bullet outbreak, if state health officials and

11:18CDC officials have different counts on how they're thinking about stuff, like that's going to alert people in a very, very different way. We talked about the AI being scary, but I think the like politicization of infectious disease counts is one of the scariest things that I think is happening. Because fundamentally, at a minimum, you ought to be able to rely on some facts of the world that are presented to you by a sensible officials. And if you can't, it's very hard to know in a policy or programmatic sense. As a citizen, just like, had operate in the world. Yep. So there's that. One more totally unchirrenote for me is we're still at war. In Iran, you'd stay, I think, 191 ish, the IRGCS fired ballistic missiles at Navy ships in the Gulf carriers. And the good news is that no Americans were hurt. The response from SENTCOM was to strike three Iranian oil tankers.

12:23And now there is just a huge, huge exchange, like a tit for tat of million dollar missiles that are also driving oil prices up. I think we started pre-war at about $70 a barrel, Brent closed at about 96. As we're recording, I think there's a general view that Tehran is trying to push this over 100 as an effort to put pressure on the West. And sort of to the reporting claims, much has been happening over several months. The administration keeps claiming that Hormuz is open and operating normally. But there is no evidence of that. So traffic data, just like literally what is moving through the straight and not, is down to single digits. There is basically a massive energy crisis and a huge supply chain hit happening from the straight of Hormuz. And it's very hard to see how this gets resolved.

13:25Duh, duh, duh. Wow, we are in rear-super-tiri. Yeah. It's a week like, I know SIRIS isn't generally like the happiest of podcasts, but like, I'm really sorry guys, this is a bit of a downer. And we're going to transition this now by talking about, in Demsifiers, about the national debt. The reason we were talking about it this week is because there were over the past couple weeks a lot of stories, understandably. So about how national debt crossed $40 trillion in the last month. That's a very large number. And when you start to think about the mechanics of it, like, our government owes that much money to other entities to include itself in various ways. And you start to think about like, how does that implicate things that I care about in terms of policy? How does that implicate things that I care about in terms of my day-to-day life? Is it possible to just like, infinitely accrue debt as a government overall? And are there circumstances right now that we're facing that make it very different than what it might have been, say, eight to ten years ago?

14:28So fortunately, I am not an economist, but Roda is, in addition to being many other brilliant things. So I wanted to ask her lots and lots of questions about like, what is this? What is this way in the screen? I will say that normally I preface things by being like, I'm not that kind of economist. But for the purposes of this conversation, let me try to say a couple things. First, let's just make sure everyone's on the same page on what the debt is. So the debt is the running total of everything the government has ever borrowed and not paid back. The deficit is just this year shortfall. So think of it in like a household budget set. The debt is all the money you owe to everyone, your car, your house, credit cards, your deficit is just what you owe this month that you can't pay with this month's income, right? To the debt crossed 40 trillion with the T in August. And it's doubled in under ten years. So that's not great. But again, to stick with that household analogy, this is like a credit card balance that

15:28never gets paid down. So you're making your minimum payments and it only ever grows and you're accruing interest on top of that because compounding interest compounds. And if you're not beating back the principle, you're never going to get ahead. So now the question is like, what should I care about here? The number, like the 40 trillion, not great, but it's not the whole story. So what you want to think about is really the debt relative to the size of the economy because that's really what's going to tell you what the country can carry, right? If you're carrying a $10,000 credit card debt, but you make $10 million, maybe it's just not that big a deal. You're carrying a $10,000 credit card debt and you make $100,000 a year that's a huge deal. So I think that's the way to think about it in the context of the country. Last point on this is just the debt itself, when it's a credit card or when it's a home interest loan, you owe that money to a bank to the credit card owner, right? The US government's debt is got like held by all sorts of people.

16:31So some of it is held by foreign governments. Some of it is held by the public through things like funds, pension funds. And some of it is like from one part of the government to another part of the government, like social security. So that makes interpreting the debt relative to the GDP, the productive capacity of the country, just more complicated. I should have noted at the beginning here, if you want to go about your prior, but so that we recorded it with Martha Gimble, who's ahead of the Yale budget lab, it also gets into his conversations about debt that are fascinating and definitely work him and following their work as well with this one and will be slightly different. The 40 trillion, it was like, oh, wow, a big number. The thing that hit me this time in terms of understanding, oh, is this debt? There were the other debts in the same way of Passover. Is that interest on the debt hit a trillion dollars this year, which when you look at the comparison of like how much money the US government in theory is supposed to spend a year is bigger than our Medicare spend as well as defense. So if you think about it in terms of like my household security system and the amount

17:33of paying healthcare is equal to not paying interest in my debt, like that kind of frees me up. But recognizing that the comparison does not act, why is this so big now? There was no recession really. There's no emergency spending happening right now that is sublime. Why is that that number is so large at this moment? So the answer is really compounding interest combined with today's high interest rates. As you noted, we're spending well over a trillion, like 1.25 trillion a year. The problem right now is that two things are compounding at once. One is the structural deficits. A spending more than we're taking in are baked into the base budgets, even in good year. So if you remember all the way back to the Clinton era with balanced budgets and all that conversation, we don't even try to do that anymore. We are spending more than we're taking in on an annual basis. So we're always not paying down our credit card bill. At the same time, the interest rates are going up. So like we got in on this low introductory offer when interest rates were low.

18:37But now we're in the high interest rate, variable interest rate period of your credit card, right? The government version of that. And that means the debt we take on now has that high interest. But also any debt that we can't pay for now that's come due, we have to get new loans to pay for and finance at these new rates. So like actually people in the regular market field is right now, which is you bought your house at 3% interest rate and you thought you would later buy a bigger house. Now if you want to buy a bigger house, it both costs more and the interest rate is higher. Same thing for the government debt. And that means that it's a compounding problem because older debt is more expensive and we're growing the debt. Let's build on that for a second in terms of how people are feeling this in their mortgage and business loans and so on. There have been stories over the past couple weeks have like nobody wants to live in DC anymore, both for a lot of reasons. One of the misinterest rates, it's nice here. It is lovely here. I love living in the city, but I'm never going to buy a new house because right now interest rates

19:39are so high. How was this actually linked to what we're talking about here? Are there other things driving these rates or is it what we're talking about in terms of the national debt that is driving us? Okay. So taking a setback, loan rates and mortgage rates are set by the interest rates. And Treasury yields to the yields on your bonds that the floor for borrowing costs across the economy. That is because Treasury bonds are in theory the lowest risk investment you could have. What happens is federal borrowing means the bond supply goes up, right? Because you have to borrow more money so you're selling more debt and that debt is bonds. And investors then have to demand a higher yield on those bonds to absorb it because of supply and demand, right? Mortgage and business loans track that yield. So that's like the Treasury side of it. Then piece two is the Fed also sets interest rates. It's going to do that to try to drive two things.

20:43One is affect the money supply. And what I mean by that is when the interest rate is high, you want to put your money in banks and save the money because you get interest on it. And when the money is low, you want to take your money out of the banks and spend it on stuff because the stuff is going to be more valuable than the interest you get it on the bank. The other piece the Fed is often thinking about is on the demand side, which is that foreign central banks like China and Japan typically buy US bonds. So that gives us more buyers, which helps with our supply and demand problem. But recently, based on a variety of things related to our internationally economic policy, foreign central banks generally, in particular Asian central banks like China and Japan aren't buying as much US debt this year. But if you were buyers means that you need the yields to be even higher to clear the market. So that ends up setting that base from the treasury yields as higher plus then the Fed

21:43needing to control money supply and try to drive growth within narrow margins. And so that's how we end up with relatively stagnant interest rates even in a growing economy. I actually want to try to drill down into what does the space that we're in right now, what does that mean for science or climate or even defense modernization as just like an overall policy conversation. And then maybe a little more drastically, could we actually respond to a real emergency today, the way we did, for example, in COVID? Like what is the current status of our debt situation? What does it mean for both like our broader policy priorities and also our ability to respond to crises? Okay, so in the, I'll call it day to day investment needs. The basic problem is that interest payments crowd out investment payments. And like again, keeping the household analogy, if you have to pay a lot of interest on your credit card debt, you can't buy the new dress you want to buy or update your couch because

22:49the money you would put to that discretionary spending gets crowded out by the money you have to pay in the interest. So interest is outspending things like Medicare and the defense, but that means that the pot of money that you could spend on anything that doesn't grow the deficit shrinks, which means your choices are only grow the deficit even more exponentially, which is roughly the current choice, or cut the cost of the spending and try to think about like how you absorb the cost of this new interest bill. And that means that in the long run, at some point where you run out of debt ceiling, just a whole separate conversation, you need to then start making trade offs and those trade offs are not going to be driven by democratically left-grid representatives. They're going to be driven by market forces on what the bond market, the debt sales can bear. That goes to your second question, which is like if there were real shock now, could we

23:51do it? Probably, but there are a lot of signs of soft demand at bond auctions where the budget outlook looks a lot shakier. I mean, what I think people would say is like, US economy is actually growing generally pretty fine, but your interest is outstripping your growth. At some point, there doesn't exist an amount your economy can grow that can service your debt, especially with compounding interest. And so that's where I think then you worry about the country being willing to respond it. And next year, probably not, is that five years from now, maybe? Is that 10 years from now without any intervention? You start to get worried. And so that's where I think the issue is. So there's a whole genre of both tetanocrats and politicians who get off on scare mongering around the national debt. And they talk about it in a bunch of different ways, whether that be defaults or currency collapse or any number of things, usually like large numbers. But they rarely talk about it in terms of what we've been talking about in a shift. How does it actually matter for various policy priorities?

24:52I'm curious to me a perspective. Is there a line around where we should actually be thinking of this as the scare mongering is worthwhile? And does the overheated version actually make this harder for us to understand at this point? Yeah, I mean, the thing I think is this is more like a frog in the boiling water than a flambé. Yes. I did a dance move. You can't see. I think the imminent or fall off a cliff style default is like pretty unlikely. What I think is more likely is that these required payments crowd out other priorities that we do a lot of dumb things and that this starts becoming harder and harder to actually pay down. And now we've got to start focus on paying interest down on the existing debt. And that perversely means like then we're not investing in the things we want to invest

25:53in, which can make growth slower. That can soften the action. Right. So there's a negative dependent cycle here, which in the current set of choices is almost inevitable. Do I think breathless conversations about the national debt are terribly helpful? No. I don't think there's going to be a single moment or a single decision or a single cliff. I think it's going to be the accumulation of a lot of kicking the can down the road of a one per day time. So I am often like the downer at the party of people who talk about government reform by reminding them that like all many of the great dreams that they have about how our government is going to be amazing and wonderful and beautiful in the future is going to require them to think differently about taxes to include like significantly raising taxes, which should be clear, I don't think it's a bad thing. But it's usually the conversation that people don't want to have, which leads me to my final question here. Like if Congress actually looked at this and said like, oh, wow, 40 trillion debt, one trillion interest, what should we be thinking about this in terms of our policy priorities?

26:57What is it they should be thinking about the menu, like what they should do and how do they prioritize it against other things? Look, I wish there was a silver bullet or like a magic. Can we mint the coin? Economic policy. Less mint the coin, rata. Mint the coin. No, we're banning pennies and maybe nickels. We know the answers, right? The answers are a combination of entitlement reform, tax reform, discretionary spending changes and policies that raise GDP. Like it's just like if you have too much debt in your house and you got to reduce the amount you're spending and you got to raise the amount you're bringing in. There's no magic. Like it's just math. Yeah, we are going to pause phase of debt. Right. More protein. More protein magic solution here. The reality is the politics are with salt. I think we spend a lot of time fighting about things that we're never going to agree on. Like defense versus domestic. And I think there are a bunch of things we can agree on. Like the tax code is not so. Yep. And there are definitely reforms that we can agree on and other than very, very small percentages of the economy, we could probably get to a much more sensible tax code that is revenue

28:02positive relative to where we are. And this feels like other than calling something hugging face a great use of AI. Yeah, indeed. And I think same thing for reforms to discretionary spending. Like there's probably work to do there. I think there is absolutely work to do on entitlement reform and defense spending that lets you get going for your buck for your total spending. Right. So all of those are policies that need to get not just redone in terms of creative policy making, but reframed for the public conversation because we frame them as fundamentally adversarial when actually they could be fundamentally collaborative. And that's just not where the politics are. And so that is where it is. I will say just like there is a world in which we need to just actually do a little bit of mapping in the federal government, which is definitely not the vibe right now. And we need to think about like what's our principle balance, what's the interest we're serving, what's the balance we can't exceed to get over a threshold that we should start

29:04paying attention to so we know where we are in the debt growth versus where we are in economic growth. And that is just something that I think will have to wait for cooler heads to prevail on, but will help us navigate when and how hard to push on some of those other policy changes we need. And now we're going to shift to a much, much easier, simpler, very straightforward conversation around the civil relations and the state of the general officer corps with a fantastic interview and warning signs. We are so cheery. For warning signs this week, we are returning to try to entry warning sign topic around civil military relations in the health of the general officer corps. There's been a ton going on over the past year and really ramping up in the past few weeks around turnover, failure to promote, firing of military and general flag officers and controversies around how those are being put forward. So we are very excited to welcome Dr. Kate Kuzminsky, who is the director of studies at

30:07the Center for a New American Security. She has spent many years of her career tracking something a lot of Americans don't pay as much attention to. This way the firings that we've talked about here before in the podcast, the block promotions that we're seeing moving through this new officer corps right now and the overall implications of that for us. So we asked her to come on to tell us what's actually happening here. How is this different from normal turnover that would come with a new administration, though now we are 18 months in. And what that means for how the military is going to think about this going forward. So just as the start Kate and thank you so much for being here. We want to hear about like in this last year and a half, two years, walk us through what has actually happened with the senior officer corps under secretary Pete Hegg's F. And how is this actually materially different from and to look at the normal turnover you might experience in a new administration? Yeah, I'm so glad to join. So it is worth noting that this isn't the first time that the idea of reducing the overall

31:11general officer corps has been an idea put forward. We saw Secretary Gates tried with the gate's efficiencies to rebalance the tooth to tail ratio of the military back in the early or mid-Auts. We saw Senator McCain put forward in the 2015 I want to say, NDAA, a provision that was looking at reducing the overall general officer corps by 25%. And so the idea itself has been consistent over time. But what we have seen in the last couple of years does feel categorically kind of different. So what we have seen is certainly the firing of the chairman of the joint chiefs CQ Brown, what we would expect to see is a four year term for a chairman that typically starts on October 1st of an odd numbered year, which would cross over administrations. That's on purpose because we want to have consistency within our senior military leadership

32:15regardless of what's happening politically. Another piece of both the civil military relations aspect and the military personnel management side of the equation is that what we're seeing is that while there's law that regulates general officer placement, their service level regulation, a lot of this field is based on norms. So what we're seeing is some of those norms being tested. And the frustrating thing when a norm is being tested or the positive thing if you're the person testing the norms, that there isn't a legal reaction. There isn't necessarily a policy or a regulatory way to address that. We're seeing a change in the length of tenure, the kind of the more immediate firing of the common dot of the Coast Guard. We saw the turnover of Admiral Frank Kettie, who was the chief of naval operations. And what we haven't seen has a lot of explanation for why it was that these individuals were

33:17removed from their posts off cycle from when we might expect to see that. And then there's also certainly been a lot of reporting over the last few months about the number of individuals who are being removed from consideration for promotion by the Secretary of Defense, which is statutorily something that he has the ability to do. But when we look historically at why individuals have been removed from promotion lists in the past, it's been because there's something called adverse or reportable information in their file that they did something wrong that they broke a rule at some point in their career. But the amount of churn that we have seen and the kind of demographic profile of what we know of those who were removed from the list would indicate that it's not based on documented performance failure, which is what we would typically see historically. And instead that there are other factors at play. So as you sit and look at this and as a colonel or a one star who is in service right now

34:21is looking at this, how should we be interpreting this in terms of what promotion actually depends on? Business as usual in terms of the Secretary's purview as you're talking about, or if there is a new unspoken or even spoken standard that they could be looking to reach an order to seek promotion. And I guess like a side question to that is like if that's happening is that bad and how would we know that it's happening? Like if there's a new unspoken standard, how would we know that it's actually happening in some way? Yeah, that's worth noting that by the time you're being considered for a star, you've been serving for 26 years if you're kind of a fast promoter. When they're being considered for promotion, there's kind of two mechanical pieces. The large part is the promotion board system, which is made up of senior officers in that service who are determining does this person meet all of the requirements? By the time they're being considered for promotion to 07, they've gone through five successive

35:25promotion boards for promotion to the grade of 04, so a major in the Army or the Marine Corps or the Air Force, they have been confirmed by the Senate, right? And then we've seen political swaps in the Senate over the course of their career. And that's what we want. We want a nonpartisan military who serves as professionals regardless of who's in office on which side of the aisle because that is a value in the United States military. One of the challenges that we're seeing is there's the kind of unexplained early relief of command or early retirements or clear firings of particular general officers. And it's really difficult, right? Because it is at the discretion of the Secretary to say or to not say why that individual is being relieved. I think where we really need to look at is not who is being fired, which there's no recourse, right? Congress can't say no, you must reinstate that general officer to their position.

36:30They can ask questions, but again, if I'm the Secretary of Defense, I'm thinking in terms of the person who was fired because it's in my purview to fire them and I fired them, right? But what we can look at is, okay, so what are the clear criteria that we can see about who's being put forward for nomination into new roles and are there clear indications that I am aligned with the President or the Secretary on partisan issues, which we don't want to see in our uniform military. And this is where Congress, where the Senate specifically needs to ask the hard questions, needs to not confirm individuals who make it clear that the only reason they're getting this role is because of partisan alignment versus documented excellence in whatever their career field is in their service. Okay, so maybe putting a finer point on this, given that we're not seeing a smoking God, we're not seeing clear indications of this, what is the sort of

37:33canary in the coal mine? What indicators on things we can watch for a look for in the face of seemingly neutral statements, seemingly unwillingness for transparency to understand how much of this is undesirable, but reversible and how much of this is fundamentally problematic. Yeah, I think one of the things I look at is the length that individuals are in the position in which they've been appointed to, right? For example, the Southcomb commander last year, Admiral Halsey retired pretty abruptly about 18 months into the role we might expect to see him in the role for three years. Did he have policy disagreement and see retirement? The only honorable thing for him to do is to say, I can't follow through the policies put forward. And so I'm resigning in protest. Or was he uncomfortable or providing feedback about the potential implications of something and then he was fired? We don't know. And you know what? That's actually a healthy thing.

38:34When we think about in terms of the professional ethic within the military, it's not a healthy thing for democracy. If we're looking to the general officers to kind of run to the press and say, there's a smoking gun or here's the reason why it didn't work out, which is a really hard thing to wrestle with when you are seeing these indicators of, well, but something's not right here. The timeline doesn't quite work. So I take a look at what the due course timeline is versus what we're actually seeing in practice. So there's a lot of us in this field who worry about the resilience of the the military and it's operating within this environment. And I have a hard time imagining purely from a human nature perspective, this having a particularly simpler, happy ending in terms of like the signals that are being set by this administration as against not just the general officer corps, but those who are in field grade or other levels in terms of like that the incentives they are pushing, whether they are doing so overtly are just from like learned habit

39:39in some ways. But I feel I'm one of the more cynical people in this. So I would love to hear your perspective, Kate, on is there an off ramp or maybe what described as an off ramp, or if you're president or defense secretary has a more traditional and more expected relationship with the promotion system that resets back to I don't want to say normal because I don't feel like we're ever quite in a normal phase, but we're not in the phase that we are right now. And how might that happen? I think in some cases, I think it requires like a radical shake up in order to be like, okay, guys, I mean, or is it just like quite returned to norms, whatever those may be in some way? Though I feel like to give my own perspective away, I feel like quiet return to norms is kind of how we get here because we don't talk about it. Yeah, on the flip side, I kind of see the quiet return to norms as the most radical thing you can do, right? Especially if a Democrat takes the White House in two and a half years, the most radical thing they can do is say, I'm actually going to keep Dan came in that position. And he is my closest military confinote and I'm going to value his perspective.

40:44That is how we undo the whip lash of coming in and wholesale firing everyone that Trump put in place because I think the political message that will be made of that is see what Trump did is normal. And when Democrats take power, they just do the exact same thing. And there will be natural turnover, right? It's intentional that the timelines don't align with a change in administration. And they will have their nominees coming in. That being said, that might be difficult if some of the behavior of individuals who are selected while in the role actually is counter to policy or regulation or even norms. So it's a catch 22, right? There might be a while everyone who came in during Hegseth being in charge, we don't trust them. Then it just sends the signal that this spirals into consistently doing that in every administration, which is what the American general officer system and military promotion system is intended to prevent against. And in some ways some of the tensions

41:48that came out in the news last week between what's reported of what Secretary Driscoll raised, the president about the impact of the Secretary of Defense firing folks within the army is that we tend to trust that the army, the Marine Corps, the Navy, the Air Force, they know best what they need and they've been developing these individuals for decades. The changing from that signals like a distrust in the overall board system. But again, by the time someone's being considered for a fourth star or a second star because ideally within the services, they kind of lose control once again to third and four stars because we're thinking about joint positions, we're thinking about positions that have effects on the broader force. But they've really been thinking about what is it that we need? And we have reviewed this person from the point they commissioned as a 22-year-old until this point when they're 28 years into their career. And we've called out a lot of excellent high

42:52performers to end up with this group of people who were not just the best of the best, but also the individuals with the skills to meet the moment. So when the Marine Corps one stars are promoted, there's this lore that they receive a letter signed by every other general officer in the Marine Corps that says like, congratulations literally could have been anyone else on your board. And like, remember, remember that you are one of many and that this responsibility has been bestowed on you, but you're not special. And I think there is that kind of ethos across the general force. Certainly there are the the rock star generals who end up in the news all the time, but like those are actually rare when we think about how large the military is and how large the flag in general officer corps is. Yeah, I love this point about like it's the amount of investment that has gone into producing a general officer is something that like probably most Americans don't think about very often. I've won less tiny question than rata l that you close out. My tiny question is like, people are

43:53always thinking ahead to how do we prepare for the next administration, next generation of general officer corps. Are there a couple of things that you recommend people would try now prepare for now, think about now to help that a future sector for administration reset those norms. Yeah, I think the focus has always been on meritocracy and should continue to be on meritocracy and that while it is challenging to think about the partisan signaling as being a real norm breaker, we also have to trust that when President Biden was selecting who would be the chairman of the joint chiefs, he was thinking about, okay, I have a pool of 10 exceptionally qualified people who is the right person who meets the moment who has 40 years of experience documented. That is also true of all the folks that are being considered for the positions now as uncomfortable as it is.

44:54Right, and so even thinking about chairman Kane, did it break a norm that we found a retired national guard to star general officer and put him in the position of chairman? Yes, did it break a law? No, there's actually a stipulation in title 10 that says, here's all the things that a chairman has to have unless a president decides otherwise, right? And so if we have qualms with that, that's not about general Kane, that's about, hey, Congress, maybe we want to have a more constrained view of who can be the chairman, but I do find it reassuring myself when I see chairman Kane, you know, up with the secretary getting questions whenever it pivots to questions of policy or partisan politics, he very clearly turns that back to the secretary. Is it uncomfortable? Yes, but is it a general officer who's maintaining what we expect of our general officer core, regardless of what their politics are personally and regardless of who's in office, I think

45:55that that is a value add. Let me just wrap us here, which is, you know, if we want to end up back in a place where we have the norms reset, we have the talent we need and the leadership we want for the US military, what should we be doing now? What is effective pushback? Is it staying silent? Is it speaking up and pointing it out? Is it what is right look like to help us get back to that place we want to be? This is a deeply unsatisfying answer. We need to rely on Congress to do its job. We need to rely on the Senate to truly serve in its advise and consent role. And this has always been the case and it continues to be the case. We need senators to ask hard questions of anyone being considered for promotion to these roles. And we also need senators with courage to vote no if it's clear that a person is not being considered for the right reasons. I do think the controversy around general Leniv and the fact that we actually see the amount of pushback we're

46:58getting from Republicans on the Senate, that is part of how the system kind of brings itself back to the norms. Also, I think it's incumbent on the military itself to maintain its core professional military ethic and that it's something that's embodied by every person currently serving. So I think something that helps me sleep at night is thinking about the convening of the general officer core last September, the folks in that room, they aligned with the norms and the values that they espoused. They didn't clap and they didn't boo, right? They sat and they listened to their boss and their boss's boss and they didn't react. And that's the kind of bubble that we need to keep our flag and general officers in at the same time that we need to ensure that we're identifying civilians who yes should align with whatever their commander-in-chief's policy intent is, who have a clear sense of what their role is and what is in and out of bounds, such that we're

48:01not putting our general officers in an awkward position or any of our service members for that matter. I was about to say this was a great conversation and it was in terms of substance learning, thought provoking, but it's also a tear point and it's also a very unsatisfying one. Something I tell my students that like that the entire premise of having a civilian control of the military, healthy civil military relations is always deeply uncomfortable on purpose and we should acknowledge that and be sitting within that space, but that doesn't make it any easier in some ways. But Kate, I'm so happy that you are one of the people who continues to shine a light in this space here and to remind us what both what good can look like and how to make that possible, as well as to point out when things that feel hard and uncomfortable are not always the worst thing in the world. So really appreciate you joining us and we're so happy to have you. Thank you.

49:09Okay, so for Gong show this week, we're a couple of weeks into the school year for various childrens. My question this week that I wanted to chat about is about you reading most that you had to do in either middle school or high school. And the reason this came up is my son is in his first year of middle school. He is a voracious reader and his first required reading we have to do this year is a kid you not Percy Jackson. Whoa, this is offensive to me for a number of reasons. One is that he's already read every single book that Rick Riordan has ever written. So he is offended that like he has to reread Percy Jackson and he's like mom, this first book is not even that good. I have to reread it again, which okay, fine for whatever. When I was in sixth grade, I do not recall being allowed to read fun books like that. I had to read Bridge to Terabithia when I was in sixth grade, which I am still scarred from as well as other books that like I'm less scarred from but like

50:09they were fine. Like to be super honestly like right high school reading lists were actually great. And they all had themes like sophomore year was like dystopian here, like candle firm. Junior year was romance year but like pretty messed up romance year. And then senior year was we're gonna talk about like evil characters in various forms or fashion. So like I feel like most of my reading was okay but like wow he gets to be Percy Jackson. So I have many thoughts on this. I've spent a lot of time reflecting on this because as our listeners will know I like to read a lot of books and those books are not what I will call traditionally high literature. One is I think a lot of the reading we got had like lame ass women characters. It was. I mean every character from Dickens socked. Yep. That was a woman. Every single one. So I will say like surprising books that I wouldn't choose to read but I learned from included

51:11their eyes were watching God. Yeah. And Jordan Neil Hurston which again like that book is not totally my vibe but I definitely was like it's good I was forced to read this. Yep. Much like when people asked me my recommended reading for national security in which I give them pride and prejudice. I do and my main my husband do it and he did and he was like this is actually useful for your credit politics. So I'm like I know. Mm-hmm. Here to help. Most of your credit politics is just manners. It is. All of the news is figuring out like how do you operate with the people within the rules that they have and the rules maybe it extremely bizarro to you. That's right. Got to understand what it is. But if you don't know how to flick your fan you're not getting your palm hunted so you know get with it. Yep. Anyway so I'm very jealous of the Percy Jackson but he has to have it. I'm super curious about how he has to do next and I love the fact that he's like offended by the fact that he has to read this book that he's already read before. Okay well when Roda and I rule the world we will somehow fix the debt and change all of the high school literature curriculum. How's that? Hope you enjoyed this episode of Sirens and we'll see you next time.