You're Fired: Trump's trans soldier plan - a Times Exclusive
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Hello, I'm Holly Mead and with me is Lucy Andrews and we are both from the money team at the Times and Sunday Times. And our new podcast is called Feel Better About Money. It's a safe place to talk positively about money and personal finance. Each week, we will tackle a specific financial topic from managing debt, saving for a pension, buying a house or deciding whether to insure your cat or dog or goldfish.

Feel Better About Money is sponsored by Lloyd's Ready-Made Investments. Welcome to the World in 10. In an increasingly uncertain world, this is The Times' daily podcast dedicated to global security. I'm Laura Cook, joined by Toby Gillis today. The Times has learned that Donald Trump intends to sign an executive order to remove all current transgender members of the US military from their jobs.

The best estimates suggest that would mean firing 15,000 personnel from a service already struggling to recruit anywhere close to its targets. So how damaging would this be in terms of fighting readiness? Let's find out from The Times' Washington correspondent Alistair Dorber, who uncovered the story. Firstly, the suggestion is they'd be removed on the grounds of medical discharge. What's actually wrong with them?

Well, that's a very good question. I'm sure that the executive order will be challenged in the courts, but medically discharged in its normal meaning is that you're medically unfit to do the job that you've been assigned to do. You're medically incapable of doing it. There's some sort of

health reason why you can't fulfil your duties in a military sense. And it seems that that's the justification. As we understand it, it hasn't been confirmed, it must be said. I can't put myself in the shoes of Donald Trump and his transition team and the people coming in to work in his administration. What we do know

is that Donald Trump has been hugely critical of what he calls a slide towards a woke agenda in the American military. His nominee for defense secretary, a guy called Pete Hegseth, has taught...

in very disparaging terms about trans members of the military and some of the things that the military does to be more inclusive. So I think it's a justification that perhaps looking at in order to fulfill these, in fairness, campaign promises to crack down on some of the less central issues of the military. And as they would say, get back to what the military traditionally did, which is plotting and fighting and planning to take on enemies.

Alistair, Trump is determined to save money across society, isn't he? Getting rid of these people kind of sounds expensive.

I think, as I say, it would be a challenge and I think there would be some sort of compensation for these people if it got to that point. I think the wider point, though, is the cost to the military overall. I mean, this is 15,000 people. Many of them have several dozen people under their command. There's already a shortfall in recruitment in the US military. Only the US Marine Corps manages each year to fill its recruitment targets. So

Yeah, jobs will be spread out more thinly. Perhaps more people will have to be recruited. Certainly to the people I spoke to for the piece I wrote, it suggests that the cost of doing this, not just in compensating those people forced out of the military, but the cost in replacing them, the cost in finding ways around the jobs they were doing could run into billions of dollars.

Alistair, 1.3 million people in the US military. Losing 15,000 can't affect the fighting capability, can it? Why are people worried about the numbers here?

Just because I think that there is a chain of command in every branch to the military and take one of those links of that chain out and suddenly you have a problem. People have to be replaced. Chains of command have to be reordered. People have to be promoted, shifted into different jobs. So it's a logistical issue as much as anything else. You're at 15,000 out of a military and active army.

service personnel of about 1.3 million people is a tiny number but I think what a lot of people argue are against this idea especially in terms of how it will destabilize the military and suggest that you know you take about you know a card out of a house of cards and the whole thing can come collapsing down now US military isn't going to collapse but it certainly will make it more difficult for the people that remain in service jobs.

Would it affect, you know, let's, you know, so that Canada were to invade the US, would the US be able to defend itself without these people we're talking about in their ranks? Almost certainly. I mean, I don't think there's an issue about the readiness to deploy or the readiness to meet challenges as they appear. I think what is argued by some of the charities is that it's just a chipping away of the military. It makes it more difficult for the military to do its job.

And how sure are we that this is actually happening, Alistair? There'll be a lot of concerned people right now, won't there?

Well, I've had a message from one of his spokespeople this morning to say that no decision on the issue has been made. It's quite an angry response to our story. We went to them on Friday and they didn't get back to us, but have come back this morning. They say that no decision has been made. It's not a denial that that's what they're planning. So, yeah, Donald Trump spent a great deal of time during the campaign running against this idea of a woke military and things he would do to change it. And, of course,

It's with assuming that Pete Hageseth gets confirmed as defence secretary. It's someone there who I think shares a lot of the elements of what Trump's been saying on the campaign trail. OK, Alistair Dorver, Times Washington correspondent. Thank you for joining us. Thank you.

A cargo plane crash in Lithuania, which has killed at least one person, may not seem overly significant when it comes to the world's security. Yet a trend involving the company behind that flight, DHL, may suggest a pattern that could hint at a far darker truth. There were fires from parcels at their depots in Birmingham in England and Leipzig in Germany recently that were blamed on Russia.

This flight came from the very same Leipzig depot and some believe it is Russian intelligence actually testing DHL security measures before launching a kind of similar attack on a transatlantic flight. The Times' Berlin correspondent Oliver Moody joins us now. Oliver, the Leipzig link makes this seem too much of a coincidence to be an accident, doesn't it?

Yeah, I mean, it's not just those incidents that are in the background. It's also the way that we've seen data cables between Finland and Germany and between Sweden and Lithuania apparently sabotaged in the Baltic Sea.

and a much broader background hum of Russian sabotage across Europe. Everyone is on edge about this issue. It is definitely happening. It's happening with greater frequency and intensity. So inevitably, when a crash like this happens a few months after DHL packages caught fire in Leipzig and in Birmingham, and European intelligence agencies suggested that that might have been a kind of Russian proxy operation,

That suspicion would fall on Russia in this case too. If this is on Russia, what are the gains for them of causing this chaos across Europe? It's actually a really good question because I'm responsible for a lot of the eastern flank states that have really been in the firing line of Russian so-called hybrid warfare for many years now.

What is the overarching strategy behind this? If there is a kind of long game from the Kremlin's perspective, it appears to be this idea, first of all, that this is a way of throwing Europe off balance, of sowing uncertainty. It's very cheap as well. So compared to other more obvious forms of escalation, like firing an inter-regional ballistic missile,

missile. It's very kind of straightforward and throwaway. And then the other thing, of course, is that it's all very deniable. So it gives Russia a means of escalating against the West without it being obviously attributable as an escalation. People are talking about this being a rehearsal for a transatlantic flight. Do you think there's intelligence behind that? Or is it just one semi-educated hypothesis?

It's hard to tell. This suggestion that a transatlantic flight might have been the ultimate target came in the Wall Street Journal from a very good investigative reporter who has extremely good contacts in European intelligence agencies. But I haven't been able to independently verify it through intelligence contacts myself. So I'm a little wary of it. And obviously, it was addressed primarily to an American audience who need a reason to care about it. So I don't think that should necessarily be the kind of primary reason.

focus of the issue here, which is fundamentally that we are now seeing attempts to plant incendiary devices on cargo or passenger planes in Europe. And can I just ask about Lithuania's stance on Russia? Is there any reason that they try to hide Russian involvement in this? Or can we actually trust their messaging?

They're not just West-leaning, they are West-fixated. The kind of central purpose of the Lithuanian state since the country regained its independence during the collapse of the Soviet Union has been to anchor it in NATO and the European Union in order to prevent a repeat of the Soviet occupations of 1940 and 1944, which were absolutely brutal.

Lithuania has been not just an extremely enthusiastically pro-Western country like the other Baltic states, it's also been at the kind of vanguard of Western foreign policy in terms of seeing what a small state can do against much bigger aggressive powers, particularly China. OK, one to watch then. Oliver Moody, thank you. And thank you for taking 10 minutes to stay on top of the world with the help of The Times. See you tomorrow.

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