Lawrence Wilkerson discusses his views on growing public concern about Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s unprecedented purge of top military leadership and political interference in officer promotions, as well as charges of mismanagement and incompetence in the U.S. war on Iran. Wilkerson served a 31-year career in the U.S. military, was chief of staff to U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell from 2002 to 2005, and is now a senior fellow at the Eisenhower Media Network.
SCOTT HARRIS: We begin this evening by welcoming retired U.S. Army Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, who served a 31-year career in the U.S. military, was chief of staff to U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell from 2002 to 2005, and is now a senior fellow at the Eisenhower Media Network. Col. Wilkerson, thank you so much for making time for us this evening.
LAWRENCE WILKERSON: Good to be with you.
SCOTT HARRIS: So before we talk about all the issues on our plate—and there’s many of them regarding the war and Pete Hegseth—say a quick word if you would, about the Eisenhower Media Network.
LAWRENCE WILKERSON: We’ve been more or less going pretty strongly for about a decade. I can say this now, I think, our main supporter is none other than Ben and Jerry’s ice cream man, Ben Cohen. And when I say support, he provides most of the funding. But we’ve got about 17, 18 fellows now, all of them military veterans, male and female, all the services. We even got a Navy admiral. And what our purpose is, is to do all we can to persuade the country not to enter and engage in these stupid, insane wars.
SCOTT HARRIS: A good cause. Thank you so much again for being here. And I wanted to talk about Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s leadership, but I thought first it would make sense to get your assessment of the Trump administration’s war in Iran. It’s been going on for more than six months now with 18 U.S. service members who’ve died, hundreds injured and thousands of Iranians, Lebanese, and others in the Gulf States killed and wounded as a result of this war. There’s so much to talk about with this, but what’s your overview?
LAWRENCE WILKERSON: Well, it’s also—and I think we need very, very much as Americans not to lose sight of this—it’s also part and parcel to another heinous war that’s been going on for some time, and that’s the war against the Palestinians and others associated with them. The atrocities that are still occurring on the West Bank and in Gaza itself and now in Lebanon and possibly resuming in Syria and other places in the region are just a side theater in some people’s minds. But I think they’re a predominant theater in this whole business of war in the Levant in Southwest Asia, of which Iran is the most recent and insane part because it was started on the basis of fraudulent evidence and fraudulent suspicions. And on another aspect of Trump’s distaste for Biden and for Obama and for any Democrat, but particularly those two, and particularly Obama with regard to Iran, because we had a JCPOA, Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, which was working and was supported by Russia, China, people now who are fighting us in conjunction with Iran.
It was supported by much of the world in addition to the major powers in Europe and it was working. Perfectly good agreement. And for nothing more than wanting to top Obama and to make a better deal, Trump negated it, broke international law in that process, and I would say even broke domestic law because it was an executive agreement and he had no right really as a subsequent president to break it for less than the reasons that he had. And so we’re in a mess now. He declared that we’re pursuing this war essentially for a strategic objective of preventing Iran from developing a nuclear weapon when his own intelligence community, including his DNI, had determined that they weren’t intending to make a nuclear weapon, had assets to do so, but weren’t intending to make one. I spent a lot of time with Iranian leaders, including President Ahmedinajad, his two foreign ministers and others, and I believe that the intelligence community, U.S. intelligence community was right and concluded they were not intending to build a nuclear weapon.
So we even did that under false pretenses. And now we’ve set all manner of strategic and operational objectives like ballistic missiles and the Strait of Hormuz and all sorts of nuclear ramifications to what we’re doing and yet we’re not achieving any of that. In fact, we are so bad at what we’re doing right now, we’re actually losing the war. Something most people in the world probably thought was impossible to do against, as Trump says, the greatest military power on the face of the earth, but it’s not impossible at all. We’re losing.
SCOTT HARRIS: Yeah. Thank you for that, Col. Wilkerson. What’s your level of confidence in President Trump and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner and Trump’s golf buddy, Steve Witkoff, who are now leading negotiations to end the war or who have attempted to do that in recent months?
LAWRENCE WILKERSON: Neither Steve nor Jared have any diplomatic experience at all. What diplomatic endeavors they have been involved in have been mostly for remuneration, personal remuneration. That is to say they’re crooks. And I don’t mean to put too fine a point on it, but they’re crooks. And when you listen to Jared talk, he’s a little more mellifluous and he’s a little more unctuous, if you will. But Jared is a crook and Witkoff is joining him in that profession. We could say the president himself is a crook if we want to look beyond the emoluments clause that the Congress is so supine it won’t even begin to bring them into play. But this man is stealing money. He’s stealing the taxpayers’ money every day of the week. And Jared and Steve are emissaries in so doing. They’re stealing money from Saudi Arabia in order to buy influence and Saudi Arabia working with them in order to get cheaper deals on weapons and things like that.
All of which is probably coming to a screeching halt here as all the Gulf states now pulverized by Iranian ballistic missiles are beginning to understand just how dangerous their relationship with the United States is. Me personally, and as a military professional having engaged with that group for some time over the last 40 years or so and as a diplomat engaging with them even further, I say good riddance. They’re all tyrannies. They’re all non-democracies. And even worse than that, as I said, they’re all tyrannies. And what Iran is doing in some respects is a favor to the people of Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Kuwait. I won’t say Oman because the sultan there is a fairly decent leader and doesn’t do the kinds of things that say (Saudi Arabia’s) Mohammed bin Salman or (United Arab Emirates’) Mohammed bin Zayed do in Qatar and other places. In fact, even I would say similar things probably about Jordan and Egypt, but they’re not quite as draconian as some of these other leaders.
So we’ve always been supporting these tyrants in the region and professing we believe in democracy, liberal democracy. And it’s a farce when all we do with these people is sell them weapons and get money off of them and have them protect the black gold that they pump out of the ground for us, which incidentally we don’t even need anymore. So the whole region is convulsing right now. And when it finishes the convulsions, I think you will see the United States gone. We might still have a maritime presence, but even that is somewhat in doubt since our Navy is shrinking every day that goes by and we’re not helping it any by putting it through the rigor we’re putting it through right now in the Indian Ocean and the Sea of Oman and the Persian Gulf. So I think we’re gone. I think we’re gone from there.
And I think Elbridge Colby talking about a redoubt in the Western Hemisphere, while I might not quite agree with the way he wants to go about it, that’s probably absolutely essential for us to do because we’re up against an inexorable push right now by a combination of countries which we have given great alacrity and success to by our mistakes. And those countries are China, Russia, now Iran, and about two-thirds of the world population-wise and about two-thirds of the world GDP-wise are deadset against us. And incidentally, if you take a really close look at it, in fact, if you take a cursory look at it, they’re far more economically successful than we are now.
And so they are moving inexorably towards taking over the global economy in all aspects and we’re fighting it tooth and nail. So if Colby wants to fall back on the Western Hemisphere and bother our brothers in Brazil and Argentina and everywhere else, Canada, Mexico, that’s a strategy, but it’s not one I would support. The kind of strategy I would support, the kind of policy I would support is the kind we began to work on until we got distracted by 9/11. And that was what I call a policy of accommodation, cooperation and comity. And what I mean by that is sort of an ASEAN-style multinodal world. Don’t call it multipolar. Poles have tips and ends. It’s a multinodal world with a lot of power in it being shared by different countries now. And what we should be trying to do is accommodate that sharing because we’ve got two huge challenges facing us that this might eliminate us all. One is nuclear weapons and aspirants to having nuclear weapons—in addition to the nine countries that already do have them—and no treaties whatsoever because we, the American Empire, destroyed every single nuclear weapon treaty from the ABM treaty all the way up to a new START.
So we have no treaties in the world, major danger coming from that. Elbridge Colby in the Pentagon is talking about using nuclear weapons potentially against Iran, seriously talking about it. And the other challenge of course is the climate crisis, which is coming at us with a vengeance and a speed that even I didn’t envision, and I’ve been involved in it for almost 20 years. And I would’ve said 2050 for some of the things that are happening right now. And it is 2026, almost ’27, and some of them are happening, like going beyond the Paris limits on temperature rise. We’re beyond it now. We can’t go back. So there are all kinds of things we need to be doing in the world in a cooperative and collaborative way with other powers like China, like Russia, like Iran, like India, that we’re not doing because we’re doing this other stupid, insane stuff.
And we have terrible leadership on top of all of that. So I mean, I just gave you a rough sketch.
SCOTT HARRIS: Well, I’m glad you tied all those intertwined issues together because they are often separated in commentary you hear about the war and U.S. foreign policy and domestic policy. You tied it all together there, I think, in a way that is rational and makes sense, regardless of the fact that people in Washington right now are going in the complete opposite direction as you noted. We’re speaking with retired U.S. Army Col. Lawrence Wilkerson who served 31 years in the U.S. military and was chief of staff to U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell from 2002 to 2005. He’s now a senior fellow at the Eisenhower Media Network. And Col. Wilkerson, we’re so glad you could join us tonight. And I did want to get to the question about Pete Hegseth. There’s been growing criticism of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who was a former Fox News weekend host with a reported drinking problem who now calls himself secretary of war.
Under Hegseth, there’s been a mass purge of senior civilian and military leaders there where many Black and women officers have been fired without cause or had their promotions canceled. More recently, the Secretary of the Army Daniel Driscoll resigned after friction with Hegseth. And of course, you’ve had Pete Hegseth has kicked the U.S. media out of the Pentagon. He’s conducting polygraph exams for leaks and emphasizing the need for testosterone testing among troops. There’s a lot to talk about and I’m sure we’ll get to a little bit of it, but what’s your opinion of Pete Hegseth?
LAWRENCE WILKERSON: Pete Hegseth is a clear and present danger to the United States of America and he is a tremendous deficit in terms of leadership and control and competency in the very department that he heads. And I will call it what the Congress still calls it in legislation, the Department of Defense and him, the secretary of defense. But you just cited some of the reasons I say that and you missed the one that he’s now looking at in order to complement the look at men and testosterone, he’s looking at menstrual cycles in women. Now I happen to know probably why he’s doing that because we have such a problem with deployable soldiers. And by that I mean you might have 400,000 soldiers, but at any given time you might have only about 300,000 of them are deployable. And one of the primary reasons women soldiers, female soldiers are not deployable at any given moment is menstrual cycle problems, pre-pregnancy, pregnancy and post-pregnancy, which at any given time takes anywhere from 9 percent to 10 percent, even as high as 15 percent of them off the deployability list and puts them on the non-deployable list.
And when you’re already so short soldiers as we are, then you’ve got a real problem. The other things he’s doing with regard to the Army that are unconscionable is he’s got 1 out of 10 now “mental category fours.” If you know anything about the Vietnam War and McNamara’s 100,000, you know how disastrous that is because these are people that get you killed on the battlefield because they’re incompetent. They can’t read their name on a guard roster.
He’s packing the army with them. He’s also packing the army with Christian nationalists because he is a fervid Christian nationalist himself and has had ceremonies in the central courtyard of the Pentagon, for example, that were in essence Christian prayer meetings. Now we’re supposed to have separation of church and state in this country, but Hegseth does not believe in that and has said that he doesn’t believe in that, has formally said that to the troops. He leads prayer meetings in the Pentagon himself personally and the audience is told where to sit and how to sit and how to come and how to go and listens even to some of Hegseth’s favorite preachers who say things like “women are only good for having babies and that’s all women are good for and that’s all they should do.” Or says such things as if you’re not involved in this war, then you’re not for Jesus because you’re not fighting for the Constitution or for the security of America, you’re fighting for Jesus.
This is Pete Hegseth. And we must remember too that JD Vance, the vice president, for the first time since 1947 in the history of the position and people filling that position, Hegseth’s vote for confirmation had to be determined by the vice president coming and voting because it was a tie vote. It should not have been a tie vote. They should have voted him down. They should have never put him forward for nomination from the committee, but they did. And now we’re stuck with him and next to Trump, he’s probably the most dangerous man in the administration.
SCOTT HARRIS: Well said. Col. Wilkerson, Hegseth has often promoted something he terms as “lethality over legality,” dismissing and denigrating human rights, international law, the Geneva conventions. Then of course you’ve got the international condemnation of the U.S. militaries blowing up these small boats in the Caribbean Sea and the Eastern Pacific. The U.S. military now has destroyed 69 of these boats killed some 227 people who are alleged to be drug smugglers. But as far as I know, there’s no death penalty for being a drug smuggler. And the U.S. military, the Trump administration hasn’t produced any evidence tying any of these folks they’ve killed with drug smuggling. What’s your view of what’s going on here and is there a future of accountability for these, what I think can only be termed war crimes?
LAWRENCE WILKERSON: It’s unconscionable. It’s illegal both domestically and internationally, and they are war crimes and we just don’t seem—look at what my President George W. Bush did authorizing torture or authorizing human torture from the Oval Office. No accountability whatsoever. Recall President Obama saying we’re not looking back when he was asked if he was going to bring any accountability to that regime. We’re not looking back. That’s what we do. We don’t look back. We don’t do accountability. We don’t do truth commissions. We don’t do anything in the way of accountability. And this regime, this Trump regime is just so guilty. Blood is pouring out of their gills as it were. Look at what’s happened now with regard to drugs. All these people are killed allegedly because they’re bringing drugs into the United States or in some way assisting that process. And cocaine, fentanyl and heroin are at record levels in the United States.
The “price” has not been impacted at all. So what are they doing? Why are they killing these people illegally and in war crimes if it’s not impacting at all the drug traffic into the United States? And it isn’t. The record’s clear. And a matter of fact, if I wanted to tell you the honest to God truth, I was involved in the very startup when Powell took over at Forces Command in Atlanta, Georgia of implementing what was Ronald Reagan’s holdover and H.W. Bush as vice president for a year of course, keeping it going and intensifying it, of introducing the military as an instrument of policy and destruction into the so-called drug war. In other words, we weren’t there before, but we entered it and we’ve been in it ever since. And we have not impacted the flow of drugs, cocaine, heroin, or more esoteric drugs one bit.
In all the years we’ve had SEAL Team 6 and a whole bunch of other military elements involved in this drug war. I told Powell in 1989 at Forces Command in Atlanta, Georgia, why are we doing this? Why are we part of a war that we cannot win? And he looked at me and he said, “Why do you mean we can’t win it?” I said, “You know center of gravity, Clausewitz’s phrase about what you have to go over in order to win any war, the enemy’s center of gravity or centers of gravity, if he has more than one. The center of gravity of the drug war is the people taking the drugs, not the people making the drugs, transporting the drugs, selling the drugs. The center of gravity is the people taking the drugs. Until you’re ready to go after rehabilitation and help and education and cut down European and American intake of drugs, you’re never going to influence it.
And you’re wasting the military when you’re doing it and you’re just inviting war crimes. Well, here we are.
SCOTT HARRIS: Well, the accountability part really disturbs me. And as you accounted the history of the U.S. in terms of the accountability for torture under George W. Bush and Obama’s attitude looking forward and not backward, it’s disturbing. And I think there’s many historians that will say if we make that mistake again after the Trump regime, this country, its fate may be sealed. I don’t want to think like that, but there has to be accountability, as you said.
LAWRENCE WILKERSON: I don’t want to think that way either, but I’ll tell you what, the things I’m seeing and hearing and participating in now as I go about trying to fight them, they make me very, very, very sad and they make me at 82 years old, they make me think that I might live to see my country in some deep trouble.
SCOTT HARRIS: Yeah. And that brings me to a question here that might be how we conclude this conversation, colonel. And that is with all of Trump and Pete Hegeth’s firing of the Pentagon’s top leadership, former Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall III recently warned that the Trump administration is eroding institutional checks and attempting to politicize the military as the U.S. midterm elections approach. Kendall expressed deep concern that all of our guardrails are gone heading into the midterms, noting that President Trump has refused to rule out deploying the military during the elections. It’s been a constant threat since he lost the election in 2020. And it seems like there is a multiplicity of different tactics and strategy that Trump and the people who surround him are about to employ in this coming election that could amount to a coup d’etat. What are your concerns about what’s happening here around the election and the Trump administration moves to suppress the vote and a hundred other things?
LAWRENCE WILKERSON: Well, I’ve said in public a number of times that I do not think the Jan. 6th coup d’etat failed because the system held. I think it failed because the coup plotters were incompetent. And then I say they will not be incompetent again. And the biggest aspect of their incompetence that without which no coup in history has ever succeeded that I’m aware of anyway, no prominent coup, they did not have the state elements of force on their side. In fact, they forgot about that completely other than the telephone call to the desk ops of the army and maybe one to Gen. (Mark) Milley, both of whom were singularly non-cooperative. This time Hegseth has made sure that will not happen. So I think your question is well couched. I think we are in trouble because I think one of the missions Hegseth has carried out for Donald Trump is to make sure that that problem with that Jan. 6th coup, which failed, of course, doesn’t occur again.
SCOTT HARRIS: One thing that I’ve been asking a lot of folks who are guests on this show is if orders are given to the U.S— military to carry out repression of protest in the streets that would ensue if the election is stolen by Trump and company, would the military carry out those orders that would be blatantly illegal and non-constitutional?
LAWRENCE WILKERSON: In fact, I’m fairly sure we aren’t going to get to that juncture. I think there are sufficient forces now who will be more or less completely compliant with any orders they are given within the ICE complex, what I call the brownshirts echoing Hitler in the ’30s. I think they will be the forces deployed and they will be the forces used. But to your question specifically, there are some elements I think in battleground states of the militia, —that is the National Guard, and of the active forces themselves—that Hegseth has finally tuned and I think knows how to move and distribute them, that if it were necessary, they could be used. The question in my mind on both events—let’s say it’s pure ICE doing it and it’s in battleground states that they want to make sure go their way, and the military is standing on the sideline, maybe some of them waiting to see if they have to help—might there not then be a civil war within the military? Active duty units against ICE and maybe against some of their own militia forces or even some of their own forces? That’s a recipe for real disaster if you’re military itself.
This happened to a certain extent in the French Revolution.
That’s one of the things Napoleon could take such advantage of when he finally took over everything. It’s one of the things that (Maximilien) Robespierre, and the Committee of Public Safety and people like that violated and used as a tool to deepen the oppression of the French people in general, as well as hang aristocrats and guillotine them and so forth. So I mean, you’ve got all kinds of possibilities when you prep the ground the way Hegseth has and the way I think two other people who are very much in this and are probably two of the most powerful people in this administration. And most Americans don’t know this, one is the deputy chief of staff for policy, far more powerful than that title recommends. He’s more like a national security advisor, far more like a national security advisor, an alter ego to the president, if you will, than Marco Rubio or even JD Vance.
And this is Stephen Miller, deputy chief of staff for policy in the White House. He’s more powerful than Susie Wiles. He’s more powerful than Pete Hegseth, more powerful than Marco Rubio, and more powerful ultimately than JD Vance. And then the other person is (Russell)Vought at the Office of Management and Budget. He’s the Project 25 architect. He’s the one who says he doesn’t believe in the Constitution. He’s the one who says he thinks America ought to be a corporatocracy. And oh, by the way, he’ll name the people to be in that corporate leadership. So these two people are extremely dangerous and they’re all for a coup.
SCOTT HARRIS: Yeah. Well, this conversation has been fascinating and depressing, and I appreciate your historical analysis that brings it all home to understand the situation we’re in right now, which is kind of desperate, I think be one way to describe it. Thank you so much for spending time with us, Colonel. Always appreciate your insight as to where we are and where we might be going. Thank you.
LAWRENCE WILKERSON: Well, thank you for giving me a chance, and I’m sorry it’s so sad and dire.
SCOTT HARRIS: Well, hopefully we’ll turn that around. I hope so. I always have hope. Thank you. Thank you so much.
LAWRENCE WILKERSON: Now is the time that tries men’s souls terribly.
SCOTT HARRIS: Absolutely. Thanks again, Colonel Wilkerson. Good night.
LAWRENCE WILKERSON: Take care.
SCOTT HARRIS: Bye-bye.
LAWRENCE WILKERSON: Take care. Bye-bye.
SCOTT HARRIS: That’s retired U.S. Army Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson. He’s now a senior fellow at the Eisenhower Media Network.
