Hi, I'm Ben Parker from the Bullwork.

And I'm Mark Hurtling, a bulwark contributor. And with Ben, we're also the folks who are giving you command post every Wednesday afternoon and Thursday morning. So thank you for joining us. Yeah, thanks for joining us. If you are new to the Bullwork Takes Feed, where you're probably finding this video, make sure to check out the other videos in the channel. sure it's a lot more you're going to like, including our weekly command post episodes.

And a bunch of... be finding this video. Make sure to check out the other videos in the channel. I'm sure it's a lot more

you're going to like, including our weekly command post episodes, and a bunch more other stuff.

So make sure to like the video, subscribe, talk in the comments, and you can find more of this

kind of stuff at the bulwark.com. I should note, as you mentioned, we are recording this on the afternoon

of Wednesday, February 18th.

So we are watching very closely if there's going to be a bunch of news about Iran in the near

future. We're not going to be talking that today. We have a bunch of other stuff to talk about,

like the Secretary of Defense getting involved in hiring decisions of senior officers. We've got news

about Christy Nome. We've got some cleanup from the Munich Security Conference. But if there is

news about Iran, come back here. We will definitely talk about it. Yeah, a bunch of things to talk about

today. And that's why I mentioned the Wednesday afternoon taping, Ben, because it seems every week when we tape on Wednesday by Thursday morning when this comes out, there's like five morning stories breaking. So we're never catching up, but we'll continue to talk about all things military. Plus, I think today we're going to have a bunch of questions toward the end. Is that right? I know we have at least one listener question we're going to incorporate. So stay tuned for that. And please do send

us your questions. First thing we're going to talk about, you published an article in the bulwark,

America's generals shouldn't face political loyalty tests. You read about this report first from a Fox News

reporter, then later confirmed by a few other places that the

list of army officers to be promoted from colonel to brigadier general has been held up for months

reportedly because Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth personally instructed the Secretary of the Army not to

approve the list because of one guy. One guy, allegedly a Colonel Dave Butler, who Secretary

Hegzeth, his apparent objection is that Colonel Butler used to serve under someone Hankseth doesn't like.

Can you break down for us how this process works, what is going on, and how normal or abnormal this is?

Yeah, it's very abnormal, although holds are placed on general officer promotion list multiple times.

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