Jennings: Does Anyone Have Any Confidence in Pentagon’s Leadership? Give Pete Hegseth a Chance

PHILLIP: “The other part of it is that he has the ability to just appoint the people he wants to do these things, and that is literally what he is doing. I hear what you’re saying, but it’s also — there is nothing secretive about what is happening. He is just putting those people in.”
JENNINGS: “Does anybody have confidence in the current leadership of the Pentagon and the way the defense situation has been operating for the last several years? I mean, from the Afghanistan pullout, which was an extreme debacle for which no one was held accountable, we’ve had spy balloons flying over the United States, we built a $300 million pier as a public relations stunt which wound up killing an American service member. I would say I’ve had just about enough of the so-called insiders running the Defense Department. I think we ought to give Pete Hegseth a chance.”
BERNSTEIN: “You think that’s about insiders?”
JENNINGS: “All the criticism of him is that he is not the expected Washington pick. And I am just saying to you that the American people just voted against the expected Washington pick. He has 20 years in service, Afghanistan, Iraq, two Bronze Stars, Princeton, Harvard. Yeah, he is on TV, but so are the rest of us. I think he ought to be given a chance.”
PHILLIP: “I think that is really interesting, because you highlighted a bunch of things that the civilian leadership of the country decided on, and the military, their job was just to execute.”
JENNINGS: “How did it go?”
PHILLIP: “I’m just saying — “
JENNINGS: “I mean, how did it go?”
PHILLIP: “In terms of the decision making, you are assigning decision-making responsibility to the military over things that civilians were responsible for.”
JENNINGS: “You make a good point. The civilian leadership made decisions, and then the people they put in charge at the Pentagon carried it out. And it was all pretty much a disaster. So now we have a new president , who I think got elected in part because of some of those disasters, and he is going to put in some of the non-insiders in charge of not just this agency but a bunch of them. Now, look, you know, they have to perform. We have 53 U.S. senators that are Republicans and Pete Hegseth, he is an American hero, the man won two Bronze stars for his service and he has been a champion for veterans. I mean, he will have to go up there just like everybody else and prove his knowledge of how to do this job. He is not immune to that. But we ought to give this man a chance, in my opinion.”