Trump edition: Breaking the Pentagon
36:15 Share

Because

Because we hear it's bad luck to be hungry on game day. So download the Instacart app today and enjoy $0 delivery fees on your first three orders. Service fees apply for three orders in 14 days excludes restaurants.

No contract. Cancel anytime.

That's stance.com slash program. This is time and energy that's being expended on, frankly, silly behaviors when there are huge strategic challenges before the United States and its allies.

We'll 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 and not once have I seen him do something that was mean or cruel. 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 Battle Lines. It's Friday the 25th of April 2025.

Pete Hegseth is in trouble. Again. Just weeks after Donald Trump's defence secretary was caught sharing classified information on an unsecured group chat, it's been revealed he shared the same information in another group, this one including his wife. This is what the media does. They take anonymous sources from disgruntled former employees and then they try to slash and burn people and ruin their reputations. Not going to work with me because we're changing the defence department.

putting the Pentagon back in the hands of warfighters and anonymous smears from disgruntled former employees on old news, doesn't matter. But it's not Signalgate that's really rocking the Pentagon. It's a sense that the defence secretary has been beset by infighting and rivalries amongst his top team that's not only torn up his entire office, but is affecting morale at the very top of the American defence establishment.

To explore these questions, I'm joined by Kathleen McInnes. Kathleen, thank you so much for joining us.

Kathleen is a senior fellow in the Defence and Security Department at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, where her research interests include the intersection of gender and national security, global security strategy, defence policy and transatlantic security. Before that, she served as a specialist in international security at the Congressional Research Service, where she served as a senior expert to Congress.

on strategic issues including defence policy, military operations, civilian-military relations, irregular warfare and global strategy. Before that, she worked as a research consultant at Chatham House in London, writing on NATO and transatlantic security matters. But most relevant for us, from 2006 to 2009, she served in the office of the Secretary of Defence, working on NATO operations in Afghanistan. Yes, she was herself a former Pentagon staffer,

And her novel, The Heart of War, Misadventures in the Pentagon, is a semi-autobiographical account of civilian work inside the Defense Department. The New York Times compared it to The Devil Wears Prada.

saying it humanises the usually faceless bureaucrats of the defence establishment but also exposes the inner workings of the war machine in an affecting, if sometimes disturbing, way. Who better to explain to us the bureaucracy Pete Hegseth has found himself trying to run? Kathleen, welcome to Battlelines. Perhaps we could begin by talking about Pete Hegseth's week from hell. The Defence Secretary is clearly in a spot of bother today.

What's going on and why is he finding things so difficult in this particular job?

I think you're absolutely right. Secretary Hegseth is having a very difficult time right now. And in some ways, this was very predictable, simply because he is a younger individual from a journalist stroke, junior military background, being put in charge of one of the largest enterprises in the entire world, and one of the most complicated industries.

institutions in the world where there's a variety of different stakeholders, actors, procedures, policies, all the things. Structurally, it was always going to be quite difficult for Mr. Hegseth to succeed. Compounding this is the front office of the Pentagon, his inner circle. That's an incredibly important part of the organization.

Because everything comes together at the secretary's level. That's where the buck stops. That's where decisions are ultimately made and where paperwork is ultimately coordinated. And there has been a lot of chaos within his front office lately as well, in part because of these individuals that I'm sure they're trusted by him personally, but also don't have the institutional knowledge to how to get things done in the Pentagon. Yeah.

You know, one wonders when it comes to things like Signalgate, his use of Signal for a variety of different conversations and bringing in a variety of different, let's call them non-traditional stakeholders.

On the one hand, certainly after Iraq and Afghanistan, people started using Signal and WhatsApp to get things done quickly. And it seems like that's an impulse that's been brought into this government. But on the other hand, he clearly wasn't staffed properly, right? Those are things that he should have known not to do. It's the institution's role, the Undersecretary for Intelligence, it's their role to stop this kind of behavior. So

It seems like a combination of poor judgment, but also institutional failures. That's really interesting what you said about this signal WhatsApp usage doesn't come out of a vacuum. It comes out of a place where other people have been doing this in the Pentagon or in that environment just because it's quick and it's efficient. Yeah, that's right. I mean, particularly, as I mentioned with the Afghanistan evacuation, things were moving so quickly there.

that you needed to have rapid ways to communicate across a variety of different channels around the world, right? Because they're coordinating the landings and the follow-on refugee support, so on and so forth. So Signal became used quite frequently, but that doesn't mean it's appropriate for US government principles to do so. I really want to get into what you were just describing about this dysfunction in this front office. I'm going to come to that in a second, but

But, you know, you worked in the Pentagon. You actually even wrote a novel about working in the Pentagon. Just give us a sense of what the Pentagon is like. I mean, OK, the Pentagon is a big five-shaped building in Washington where the entire United States military is headquartered. What is it? What is this enormous bureaucracy that Pete Hegseth is sitting on top of? What is it like? Why is it so difficult to get to grips with it? The short answer is that it's a collection of people trying to do the right thing.

The long answer is that in different components, which is the word we use to describe organizations within the Pentagon, like the army, the Navy, the undersecretaries for intelligence, those are called components. Each of these components look at the national security problem set and the defense problem set from a particular vantage point. And because they do so,

the way they think about risk and their priorities are going to differ from those of other components. And so what the secretary ultimately does is sits on this teeter-totter, if you will, balancing different priorities and coming up with

strategies and budgets that reflect that consensus across the different components. But think about it. There's millions of people that work in the Department of Defense. It's a huge, huge organization. So you can easily imagine that there's just so many different components. There's so many different stakeholders. So getting decisions made

in that context can be quite cumbersome. It can take quite some time because you want to make sure that all the different risks are accounted for, that the taxpayer dollars are effectively managed. And so that's led to an enormous frustration with how the Pentagon operates and

how slow, how inefficient it is. And that, frankly, is one of the reasons that Secretary Hegseth was brought in by the Trump administration, because the old way of doing business has led to more and more bloat and inefficiencies in their view, in part because there's all these different components that have to be part of the conversation to get things done.

So bring in somebody like Secretary Hegseth, who doesn't mind cutting down some of the bureaucracy in much more radical ways than his predecessor has done. The flip side of that is that the Pentagon's not a private sector organization. Efficiency isn't necessarily its primary objective. The job of the Pentagon is

to fight and win the nation's wars, to keep America and its alliances safe. That's a very different calculation and very different inputs into what makes effective defense policy. It's not, were you able to save a billion dollars here or there?

Albeit that is a lot of money, a lot of taxpayer money, and that is an important thing. But the institution instead is thinking about things like, if we don't spend a billion here, are we taking risk elsewhere that's going to come back to bite us? Like the September 11th attacks, we decided not to prioritize thinking about terrorism right before September.

September 11th in the late 90s, early 2000s. And then all of a sudden we had this catastrophic terrorist attack that fundamentally recalibrated the international system and how the United States thought about the world and its strategic priorities. The Pentagon is full of people who work extremely long hours, who don't get to go to the football game with their kids, burn in the midnight oil to try to make sure that our nation's leaders have the best education

options and tools available to them and that our warfighters also have the right tools available to them. It's just a long, slow process to get there. And that's incredibly frustrating at senior levels in Washington in particular. Some of these structures and checks are there for a reason. It's to help make sure that we have included all viewpoints possible before sending a national level decision up to our senior leaders. Right.

You only get these chances once, so make sure you get it right the first time kind of thing. But yeah, it takes time. That's the incredibly challenging environment that Pete Hegseth has found himself in. At, I think, a relatively young age, he is an ex-soldier, but he has not run a corporation of that size before. How does this play into this incredible dysfunction that's currently being reported across the American press and the British press as well, actually, over the past few days? And it's not really about Signal Gang. I've got to...

It's a story that Politico published this week, which says that Mr. Hegseth has surrounded himself with advisers who quickly turned into vicious rivals for power, whose bitter brawl has now unraveled into revenge power plays, surprise firings, accusations of leaking, embarrassing headlines that are blowing up the Pentagon.

They say that many administration feuds have been driven by ideological or factional differences, splitting old school conservatives from MAGA headliners and America first activists. That's not the case here. This one is all about personality conflict. I don't know if you've been following this drama, but are you able to tell us anything about the personalities involved in this blow up? People like

Joe Casper, Dan Cowdle, Darren Selnick. I guess what I reflect on as I read these pieces is two things. One, people are policy. Who you put in different seats is absolutely going to have an impact on the policy decisions that are made by your organization, like the Department of Defense. Now, two, the other thing that sort of mitigates that dynamic slightly is

is process, right? The reason we have this big cumbersome system that I just described about getting coordination and clearance on different memos and priorities and all that sort of, the reason these processes exist is so that some of these

the personality dynamics don't have such a huge play. There is a system for getting ideas up to the secretary in a rational manner that he can take to the National Security Council, he can take to Congress, he can do whatever he needs to do with. The secretary came in and was pretty candid about his skepticism about existing processes and priorities of the prior administration. So we have this

twofold situation where it doesn't appear that the personalities that he put in place are the right people to help him steward the building. So just to summarize that for the benefit of listeners, the personalities at the center of this apparent scandal are Joe Casper, who was Hegs' chief of staff and now appears to have been forced out before he left the

Three other Hegseth allies, his senior advisor Dan Caldwell, chief of staff Darren Selnick and Colin Carroll, were all apparently forced out. Caldwell told Tucker Carlson on Monday that we had people who had personal vendettas against us and that they weaponized the investigation. He's talking about the investigation into Signalgate. They seem to be talking about Joe Casper and the reporting, as we're seeing in Politico and other places, is

essentially says that there was a power struggle, a struggle for control of access to Mr. Hagseff between Mr. Casper and these three, which has ended in all four of them losing their jobs by the looks of things.

Given all of this, given two signal gates and this kind of dysfunction, can you read the tea leaves for us? Do you think Secretary Hegseth can survive? Or do you think President Trump is going to have to replace him? Certainly, there's been media reporting that the White House is looking for a replacement and caution against thinking that his demise is imminent. You know, he's not dead yet, like Monty Python.

Pete's doing a great job. Just fake news. They just bring up stories. I guess it sounds like disgruntled employees. You know, he was put there to get rid of a lot of bad people. And that's what he's doing. So you don't always have friends when you do that. Apparently, President Trump was quite burned by his experience during his first administration in dismissing then National Security Advisor Flynn. He has stated that he felt motivated.

Like his administration got off onto bad footing because he had been bullied into dismissing his guy so quickly into the administration. This is General Michael Flynn, who was briefly...

National Security Advisor at the beginning of the administration. Yes. And we saw reporting to that effect in the first round of Signalgate when there were questions about whether or not Mike Waltz would be remaining in the seat. Many people didn't think that his nomination would survive, period. His nomination was very much in question for quite some time and he managed to pull it off. So I wouldn't count him out just yet. There are other dynamics at work.

And in the meantime, you know, I really hope that the Pentagon's leadership

finds a way to come around and support this guy. I may disagree. You may disagree. We may disagree with his policy statements and priorities, but it's in nobody's interest to have these kinds of slip-ups. I really do hope that the team that backfills the individuals who have left can find a way to work together because this is time and energy that's being expended on

silly behaviors when there are huge strategic challenges before the United States and its allies. Can we talk about those strategic challenges briefly, moving on to the policy? What are they in your view, and how do you expect the administration to tackle them? My view is very different than the administration's view, to be fair. Starting with the administration, they appear to be implementing a wedge strategy or an

Russia and China have gotten closer over the years. They're getting, I think, over 100 bilateral visits between Putin and Xi. Chinese forces have been found in Ukraine. Certainly, Chinese materiel has helped support the Russian war effort. So the idea is to put a wedge between Russia and China. Kissinger, in decades past, employed the same strategy to peel off China's

in favor of the U.S. and normalizing relations with the U.S. It appears that we've got the reverse, that the Trump administration wants to peel off Russia away from China. And in fact, both the Trump 45 administration, the Biden administration, and now Trump 47, that China is the main national security threat.

The problem is, and this is where I differ from the team in the administration now, is I don't think that a wedge strategy is remotely feasible. I think that the cooperation between Russia and China is way too strong. Their interests are way too aligned. All we are doing in employing a wedge strategy is taking risks that we're alienating our allies in the process. So in my view...

The strategy should be much more about shoring up our democratic alliances and partnerships around the world and doing what we can to make sure that we can collectively stand up to the economic, political, and military challenges that these authoritarian regimes are presenting to all of us. But again, that's not the view of the White House right now.

I think they care about allies and partners. I just think they've got a different risk calculation and different priorities than I would have. I believe you also wrote a book about why countries leave military alliances. There's a lot of talk about the future of NATO that I don't think it's an exaggeration to say there's

There's a massive transatlantic rift at the moment. There's open discussion on this side of the Atlantic about is America still going to be there, even if they're there on paper? Are they really there in spirit? Given you literally wrote the book, what is your sense of the future of NATO? Is America leaving? Is that whole show over? I don't think the whole show is over, but I do think the future looks very different.

This is a long-standing argument. Bergen sharing this notion of Europe has not spent as much on defense as it needs to, and American leaders getting frustrated with that situation. That's been a...

part of the discussion about the alliance since essentially since the alliance existed and then like in 2011 i believe then secretary robert gates in his farewell address to allies said look if you guys don't start spending more on defense a future president is not going to be able to justify our contributions to nato all of that stuff in europe they're not going to be able to justify it to the american people this is something that has been bubbling for a very long time and

And I think both sides of the Atlantic have ignored that this has become a serious strategic problem for continued U.S. involvement in NATO. So what does the future look like? I don't think that the U.S. will leave NATO, but I do think that there's probably going to be a reduced presence, a reduced appetite to take on leadership roles on key issues.

But again, that's kind of where President Obama was back in the day, as I reflect on the history of U.S. relations with NATO. So what does that mean? It means that it's no kidding, guys, in Europe, it's time to invest in defense capabilities.

I think it's also time for the United States to recognize that some of the capabilities that Europe must invest in aren't just a part of that 2% or defense spending pledge. We're going to spend X, Y, or Z amount of gross domestic product on defense. There's other things that can be done, other things that have to be done that aren't actually counted in that, that really matter for the overall security of the alliance, not just the defense. Another thing that I've been thinking a lot about

is that we don't have shared stories anymore, really. I mean, think about it. When was the last time we had a movie or popular culture, something about NATO and why it matters?

in the public popular culture. We haven't been doing a good job telling NATO's story, I don't think. And that's another reason why it's very easy for different publics to sort of think, well, maybe this alliance just isn't worth it anymore. When the reverse, the opposite is true. You don't get to have the arts. You don't get to have educate. You don't get to have the way of life you want to have without the peace that NATO brings.

Do you think the course of the Great War on Terror has something to do with that? Because, of course, NATO was at war for about 20 years altogether, everybody fighting side by side in this endeavor that America launched, actually. I suppose there is a sense that that was a bit of a Vietnam, that it all went wrong, and there's a lot of regret about that. Do you think that's got something to do with that lack of common story, that reluctance to tell that story that you're commenting on there?

Yes, I think is the short answer. I don't think we have done a very good job of showing and reflecting on and really engaging with the fact that allies like Denmark took so many lives.

casualties per capita, right? Like it's astonishing how many soldiers they lost in Afghanistan, right? And so when Americans have been thinking about whether it's worth it, we've been talking about it in terms of dollars and cents, but this is crazy. We've had allies standing shoulder to shoulder with us in the harshest environments in the world because they wanted to support Americans and America. It is, in my view, a

A real shame that we haven't been more open and honest about that. And instead, we've let other more niggly issues permeate the discussion. Different commanders and even the Secretary of Defense at the time in Afghanistan, when we were in the 2003 to 2014 phases, they would be grumpy about caveats.

You know, there's limitations that European forces had on their troops that would limit the ability of commanders to send them into different kinds of situations and lots of frustration about that. But our allies were there and they took risks for us.

As I mentioned before, that's a story that hasn't been told nearly well enough. It becomes easy for the disinformation machines, for lack of a better term, to exploit some vulnerabilities there. So all of a sudden, why should Americans care about Ukraine if all we do is lose wars? I mean, we've lost wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Afghanistan was lots of corruption that compromised the ability to

win the war. We're also seeing corruption in Ukraine. Doesn't this mean that all we're doing is throwing good money after bad? And isn't this war unwinnable? The problem is, it's not even apples and oranges, Afghanistan, Ukraine. It's like apples and a wet herring, right? Like Ukraine is a fundamentally different problem, a fundamentally different war, and a fundamentally different will to fight. Right?

And so corruption is a problem, sure. Deficiency is a problem, sure. But that doesn't mean that Ukraine should be left to hang out to dry, right? Or not supported if Ukraine does not win this war. And I would say winning is probably in the eyes of Putin, right? Him being the beholder, right? He needs to feel punished by whatever outcome for it to be

A Ukrainian win. All this is to say, not caring for these stories and the story of how NATO has brought prosperity to both sides of the Atlantic for decades is now becoming a very big strategic problem.

We did actually have a journalist called Kurt Males, who's executive editor of the American Conservative magazine. He was talking about the kind of tension between the MAGA-ish, American First-ish view of American foreign and defense policy versus what he called the old Republican view, which was really what he's obviously kind of identifies with the first of those. He was describing a sense that the war on terror had been massively missold. We

We can all remember September 11th and it was 1939 again and everyone was going off to fight World War II. And it wasn't, and Carl said to me later, it wasn't like World War II. No one's made a movie about how heroic the war on terror was. Nothing good came out of that. We were all taken up the garden path. I got this sense that a lot of what moves this, I suppose, the sense of

Critics might call it isolationism, but this move towards a kind of an America-thirst, this kind of foreign policy, in part reflected by veterans like Pete Hexeth and J.D. Banz, is this sense of this kind of anger at what they feel was that massive deception. Is that something you recognize? Yes, absolutely. Absolutely.

And it led to a school of thinking in U.S. foreign policy circles, realist restrainers, you know, that the U.S. cannot, should not be the global cop because not only are these problems unsolvable by foreign actors, but also we do a really bad job at it. So we shouldn't be involved in much of anything. We should be focused much more internally and the world can sort itself out.

The problem is that that logic worked in the war on terror. It does not work in a great power competition Ukraine world. We may not be interested in war, but war sure is interested in us. It is, in my view, a mistake to let the emotions and the anger and the lessons of a fundamentally different strategic environment

impact how we approach this present moment, which is quite fraught. Our authoritarian adversaries, China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, are learning from each other. They're getting better on the battlefield with each other.

This is a world that requires much more cooperation, in my view, with allies and partners to keep our countries safe. That is a more expansive vision of American foreign policy, I think, than our realist restrainer friends would argue for. I get it, man. We now went to Afghanistan 10 times. I get it, right? But we're in a new world. It's time to appreciate that. After the break...

Can America fight and win a war with China without fundamentally changing the Pentagon first? Work takes up most of your time.

That's why you should use Stamps.com to save time with your mailing and shipping. Stamps.com will simplify your postage needs and add valuable time back into your workday so you have flexibility to focus on more important things. Stamps.com can handle your mailing and shipping needs with rates up to 88% off UPS and USPS. Send invoices, checks, certified mail, packages, and anything else you need to keep your business running with Stamps.com.

Did

Did you know 39% of teen drivers admit to texting while driving? Even scarier, those who text are more likely to speed and run red lights. Shockingly, 94% know it's dangerous, but do it anyway. As a parent, you can't always be in the car, but you can stay connected to their safety with Greenlight Infinity's driving reports. Monitor their driving habits, see if they're using their phone, speeding, and more. These reports provide real data for meaningful conversations about safety. Plus, with weekly updates, you can track their progress over time. Help keep your teens safe.

Sign up for Greenlight Infinity at greenlight.com slash podcast. Turning to the big geopolitical challenge, we talked a little bit about how this administration seems to be focused on splitting Russia from China. I suppose we could see the tenor of the peace proposals being discussed around Ukraine this week in that framework, and it includes a proposal to lift sanctions from Russia, essentially move towards normalizing relations between Washington and Moscow. But I'm interested also in...

In the Chinese, the Pacific part of this equation, if America is going to shift its military defense posture towards the Pacific to prepare for a potential war in Taiwan, you were in the Pentagon for years, you worked around this for a long time. What are the challenges? Is America in a position to do that? Or is China's Navy just too big already? We have had a...

fundamental problem for decades where we keep saying things like, we're going to pivot to Asia, we're going to get out of the Middle East, and then reality comes and catches us again, and we find ourselves there. So there will always be a tension between what we aspire to do in the Indo-Pacific and what we are actually able to accomplish. I would also note that our

friends in the Indo-Pacific, South Korea, Taiwan, Japan, they look at what's happening in Ukraine and argue to us that if Russia wins, China becomes emboldened.

The Taiwan scenario becomes that much more likely if America sort of gives up on Ukraine and Moscow is seen to win this conflict, because that would just be a profound statement about the world that we're operating and that might equals right. The United States Department of Defense has this document called the Unified Command Plan.

And it divides up the world. And there's one command for the Indo-Pacific, there's one command for Europe and some others. It just seems to me that that way of thinking about the world from one theater to the other, that we have to prioritize one theater at the expense of another, is just not going to cut it anymore.

We need a much better, more holistic way of thinking about forces and force employment beyond like we're going to send a carrier to a different theater occasionally when events weren't. We need something much more comprehensive. And it's kind of a shame, again, back to the top of our conversation, that the senior Pentagon leadership is being embroiled in these

These discussions about signal usage and internal infighting when there's big, big work to do to help us manage these global challenges. It sounds like you believe there is a case for real serious...

fundamental reform at the Pentagon? Yes. Oh, absolutely. I can't think of any analyst in Washington, DC or elsewhere that would argue otherwise. The question is really how to do it, how to do it in a way that cares for the workforce, how to do it in a way that minimizes the introduction of new risks as you slash programs. These are all difficult management challenges in any business, in any organization.

Times 100 when talking about a place like the Department of Defense. But yes, fundamentally, everybody recognizes that there needs to be change. There's strong disagreement amongst most people, I would argue, that this is the right way to do it. But then, you know, the American people elected change agents. So here we are.

Could America fight and win a war with China at the moment? I worry about logistics and resupply. I worry about noncombatant evacuation operations. I worry about readiness. I worry about arsenals. Could we fight and win? Probably, but it would be very, very ugly. Are you able to flesh out any of those particular concerns?

For us, over the past couple of decades, we have invested in high tech exquisite systems. When we've learned in Ukraine that things like artillery matter, China is preparing a they're working on their numbers and the quantitative advantages that they have. The quantity has a quality of its own. Could we get in there and win the fight? Again, I think probably. But at what expense and what time frames?

It could be very, very ugly. And from there, there's all sorts of permutations, you know, that different scenarios that could play out that planners in the Pentagon are working every day to try to make sure don't happen. Yeah, it's an incredibly...

thorny. That's an incredibly thorny question because it points to such an incredibly difficult task. One of the things, though, that I wish that we've paid more attention to is the economic and infrastructure investments that China has made around the world, but also in the Americas. Buying things like electrical grids, ports, those sorts of things, the linkages between the Chinese Communist Party and the organizations, the businesses that are purchasing these

facilities, this infrastructure, they're quite close. And there are questions about whether or not we would have continuity of life. Would our electrical grid survive? Because could they be shut off by China in the event of a war? So I worry a lot more about resilience. I worry more about infrastructure. I worry more about political and economic warfare.

I just want to finish off going right back to the beginning of our conversation, which is about the Pentagon itself, about that remarkable institution, that enormous building, the men and women in uniform, I think the people you call the war fighters, and then there's the civilians as well who make this thing tick. Your book, The Heart of War, Misadventures in the Pentagon. What would you like to leave listeners with, just to give us a sense of

of what that job's like, the reality of what's going on there and what the men and women who are working in that institution now, we talk a lot about the people at the top at the moment, what's going through their heads at this moment? You go to the Pentagon, you walk in and you expect high-tech widgets and lens flares and all sorts of, I don't know, like Star Trek. And you go in and it's an office building with concrete floors and

and a whole lot of people. You get lost in the place. Acronyms are everywhere. You enter this world and you really don't have a sense of what you're getting yourself into until about six months in. And then it clicks. You've got this front row seat in history. And it's an enormous responsibility. The work that you do, the policies that you recommend, they're going to keep people safe or not, depending on the choices that are made.

So you stay long hours to try to make sure the job gets done properly. That builds over time, you know, in any high pressure job because the stakes are such.

It's people. As I said before, the institution is full of very good, very hardworking people that are just trying to do right by the American people. One of the reasons I wrote the novel is because the stories of these people, these incredible civilians that had the opportunity to serve alongside, and military officers too, right? Their stories weren't being told.

The Pentagon is an amazing, dynamic place where so much comes together. Claffin McInnes, thank you for joining us on Battlelines. That's all for today. We'll be back on Monday as usual. Until then, that was Battlelines. Goodbye. Battlelines is an original podcast from The Telegraph created by David Knowles and hosted by me, Roland Oliphant, and Venetia Rainey. If you appreciated this podcast, please consider following Battlelines on your preferred podcast app.

And if you have a moment, leave a review, as it helps others to find the show. To stay on top of all our news, subscribe to The Telegraph, sign up to our Dispatches newsletter, or listen to our sister podcast, Ukraine The Latest. You can also get in touch directly by emailing battlelines at telegraph.co.uk or contact us on X. You can find our handles in the show notes. The producer is Peter Shevlin and the executive producer is Louisa Wells.

Buying a new mattress sounds great. Paying for it? Debatable. Hear us out. At Mattress Warehouse, we offer 0% interest financing over 2, 3, 4, or 5 years. And we guarantee you'll pay the lowest price available and we'll keep that promise for a full year after purchase. Go ahead and buy that mattress of your dreams. Mattress Warehouse has you covered. So where would you look to find the perfect mattress? In a little mattress store or Mattress Warehouse? Visit MattressWarehouse.com.

work takes up most of your time.

That's why you should use Stamps.com to save time with your mailing and shipping. Stamps.com will simplify your postage needs and add valuable time back into your workday so you have flexibility to focus on more important things. Stamps.com can handle your mailing and shipping needs with rates up to 88% off UPS and USPS. Send invoices, checks, certified mail, packages, and anything else you need to keep your business running with Stamps.com.

If you sell online, connecting with every major marketplace and shopping cart is easy. Plus, you can schedule package pickups through their dashboard and automatically see your cheapest and fastest shipping options from different carriers with Stamps.com's rate advisor. Add more flexibility to your workday with Stamps.com. Go to Stamps.com slash program to sign up for a special offer. No contract. Cancel any time. That's Stamps.com slash program.