Intentional Chaos: Kevin Baron on How Trump And Musk Are Reshaping Our National Security

Veteran Pentagon reporter Kevin Baron joined Mediaite for an in-depth discussion this week about how President Donald Trump’s second term is reshaping national security and both what news consumers and journalists can do to hone in on the stories that really matter amid what appears to be intentional chaos.

Baron, the former executive editor of Defense One, talks about his many years inside the Pentagon press corps and calls “BS” on Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s reasoning for “rotating out” legacy media outlets from their office space in the building.

During the conversation, Baron weighs in on everything from the U.S. strategy on Ukraine to whether or not Tulsi Gabbard, someone he’s known for years, can really be trusted with top-secret intelligence. Baron, who attended last week’s Munich Security Conference, digs into Hegseth’s recent missteps on the world stage and what the former Fox News host’s first weeks running the Pentagon tell us about his future leadership.

As Trump has taken a very different approach to national security this time around, placing MAGA loyalists in key roles as opposed to veteran statesmen as he did in 2017, Baron also gives his take on the doomsaying in the media and just how bad it might actually get. He also discusses what Trump is getting right and makes the case for why the media needs to cover everything Trump does, no matter how many distractions he may throw their way.

Below is a transcript of the conversation (lightly edited for brevity):

Welcome to Mediate. I’m Alex Griffing and I’m joined by veteran global affairs and national security journalist Kevin Baron. Kevin, thank you so much for talking to me today.

My pleasure.

We’re almost a month into President Donald Trump’s second term, which has been proceeding at a dizzying pace, not just for everyday Americans trying to keep up with the news, but also obviously for the journalists covering it. Kevin is a former member of the Pentagon press corps. He has kindly agreed to help us make sense of it all.

And as the longtime editor of Defense One, there really is no one better out there to talk about how Trump is currently reshaping the country’s national security apparatus and of course, our global alliances. So today we’re going to try to cover everything from what we can expect from Tulsi Gabbard. To all the various alarm bells going off regarding the gutting of the CIA and the FBI.

But I really wanted to start with a question about our new secretary of defense. Hegseth. So the former Fox News morning show host had a pretty rough week last week in Europe, which we’ll definitely talk more about. But I wanted to start by asking about his death, ordering the Pentagon to rotate out legacy media outlets like CNN, The New York Times, The Washington Post, your former employer, Politico for pro-Trump media like Breitbart, One American News Network, and The Daily Caller.

So, my question is, what impact will this have on journalists’ ability to cover the Pentagon and what does it signal more broadly about the Trump administration’s approach to the media, especially where national defense is concerned?

Well, thanks for having me, first of all. Yes, I was a Pentagon press corps daily resident reporter. I guess that’s how you would say it, meaning, that was my office. You know, I went to work in the Pentagon, to the press bullpen. You know, everyone knows there’s a White House briefing room. There’s also the Pentagon briefing room.

And, just across the hall, there are basically offices for reporters that have expanded over the years. There were, as you know, especially during the war years, and there were a lot of reporters going in and out. And it’s really coveted space and it’s space that you have to pay for if you want to have, you know, you pay for your own phone line, your own Internet connection, you don’t pay rent or anything, but you pay for your own connections there.

And so over the years, we actually had to expand that space because there were, you know, news, new news organizations being created and also more foreign press that were sending reporters to show up. So there’s actually a couple of rooms with cubicles and a long desk that’s got kind of common desks for people that kind of just show up for a day or want to plug in and report from there and leave. And then there’s also a long hallway with these small office offices that are basically studios. They’ve got cameras, they’ve got soundproofing. They’ve got on-air lights outside. And it’s ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox down the road…

I don’t remember exactly the current layout, all that to say there is limited space and it is coveted. And a lot of the smaller outlets had wanted more space like that. So a second office with a much bigger set of cubicle space had opened up several years back to more than double the space for reporters.

On Hegseth’s order, it was presented I think, deviously as a simple rotation. You know what, we need to bring in some of the right-wing press and it’s not fair. So we’ll just rotate them out. It’s B.S. and we know it. Meaning, for like three decades, four decades or longer, NBC News, for example, had a station at the Pentagon. They’ve had a studio where imagine if breaking news happens and you’re in the briefing room before the briefing is even over, that reporter might leave the briefing room, walk into the booth, get on air instantly to the world to say, here’s what’s happening inside the Pentagon.

It’s very crucial for both the timeliness of getting reporting out and the competitiveness. honestly, for your– you’re competing with other news. You might see the CNN reporter leave and then quickly you’ll see the Fox News to leave or someone else to head to their booth to get on air to do it. Also, for filing stories, you have to, you know, if you want to file from the building, you need to get a file there. If you don’t, the Pentagon is in the middle of nowhere in Virginia. You have to, you know, leave the building, get in a car, get to the metro, go back to your bureau, go back to your house, get online.

It gets, you know, you’re losing precious minutes and time and hours. Yeah. So. All that to say. That’s one thing.

Two, you can’t just swap people out of these booths like NBC. It’s their cameras, it’s their equipment, it’s their lines. So there’s no, like rotating in and out. It’s not an easy thing. Like you just plop the person in. It literally is moving it out and moving people in. And if the Pentagon really wanted to expand access to other media, even I think non-journalistic propaganda shops, as I call them, like Newsmax and Breitbart, all you had to do is give them another booth or find more office space.

It’s just the world’s largest office building. It’s not like it would be hard to find more office space, especially with Elon Musk coming in to cut so many people. They’re not doing that. And it shows too on the first, you know trip abroad with Hegseth where Breitbart was one of the outlets given a seat on the plane to go overseas. Those are coveted seats. They’re limited. And Breitbart has a seat. That means an actual journalistic outlet does not. So there are real implications for why these are these are important.

On the balance. Do you think it’ll change the kind of questions day in and day out that are, you know, asked within the Pentagon? Will it actually change NBC’s ability to collect information?

I don’t know it changes the ability to collect information other than it’s just inconvenient to not have, you know, an office to work out of and to communicate and plan the day with, you know, I mean, this is this isn’t like just 24-hour MSNBC, NBC Nightly News has reporting from here. The Today Show would have standard reporting from here. This is 24/7 kind of stuff. So it does impact your ability to communicate with your bureau, to plan the stories for the day, of course.

The building is actually quite accessible for journalists. We always felt pretty privileged. So by comparison, the last I heard, if you’re a State Department reporter, you can’t roam freely throughout the State Department…

But you could walk any hallway on any deck at any wedge in that office building and go right into the secretary of defense’s receptionist’s office. So it meant like there’s a lot of free exchange of information. And so, you know, none of those outlets are prevented from going to the building. And Hegseth’s team tried to make a point of saying that, and it’s true. But also neither was like Breitbart and Newsmax and those others. They can if they’re also going to get press badges, which they’ve had, that’s that.

So it doesn’t really change like anything other than– I’ll give this example. It wouldn’t matter if there are if there’s breaking news in you’re not in the building, which happens all the time. You know, if a plane crashes, something explodes, a fight, who knows? Especially back in the war days when there were daily operational updates, there was always news every day out of Iraq or Afghanistan, some new battles, some new explosions, some something. When that would happen, either you found someone, found out about it externally and we would rush to the public affairs office and try to ask questions.

At the same time. You literally get up out of your seat, you walk over there and you walk back. Or if you’re not building, you can’t do that. By the time you get there, you’ve missed it. Sometimes there are clarifying moments where a press officer will come to the press bullpen and say, ‘Hey, hey, we see what’s going on.’ You know, we heard about the thing also. We’re going to let you know or they’ll give you timing like a press conference is going to be at this time. Get ready, tell your bureaus there’s lots of planning of the news. And if you’re not there, you’re not part of that.

So kind of sticking with Hegseth for a second. So in many ways, he really represents the different approach Trump has taken this time around to national security. In 2017, he put a decorated general in charge of the Pentagon–

Yeah, yeah, James Mattis.

What do you make of Hegseth and what do you think the long-term implications of his leadership could be?

I think Hegseth is proving to be exactly what people expected of him, which is to be a real true yes man and believer in President Trump, which is the big difference. And maybe that’s not a good or bad thing if that’s what you want out of a SecDef versus when you appoint a general to that position, you get somebody people assume who is more loyal to the military mission, to the care of the Air Force. Maybe somebody who’s not as a purposely– doesn’t want to be involved in the politics of the White House, even though it is a political position.

It is a, you know, nominated cabinet member. So, you know, Senate approved. You’re not a general when you’re in your business suit like Jim Mattis was as SecDef or Lloyd Austin. So what we’re seeing is somebody who is loyal to Trump, who’s extremely inexperienced, especially on the world stage, who on his first trip put his foot in his mouth several times, said statements that the White House had to walk back, that he had to walk back, said statements that outraged Europe, outraged, you know, Ukraine during the middle of a war, emboldened Russia, the adversary.

All the things you do not want for a brand new secretary of defense. And I’ll give you an example. When Leon Panetta became secretary of defense after he was the CIA director and after he was the chief of staff of the White House the director of OMB and a member of Congress, on his first trip abroad, he went to Afghanistan. And in speaking to reporters and a kind of a gaggle at the end of a long day, he mentioned that there was going to be a pullout of troops or reduction of troops.

And if my memory serves me right, he gave the wrong number. I think he said like 70,000 instead of 7,000. We all kind of went, wait, what did he just say what I think he just said? And we had to make a decision as a press corps. Do we rush to report this or do we clarify with his staff? Because we all believe he just misspoke? That’s not really what happened. Sure enough, we took a beat and we clarified with the staff and he had to come back here like, get out, get the jammers, put his clothes back on, come outside, and tell us. This is what I meant when I said that.

You know, however, it was said, the press still reported what had happened, that he had misspoken on his first trip and put his foot in his mouth a couple of times, and made a couple of blunders. Our next stop on that trip was Baghdad. And I wrote a piece on the fact that Panetta was making some errors on his first trip. And his press staff didn’t like that. And they came and they called me at breakfast and said, you know, Kevin, I don’t know that you could really print this. But then later that day, he did it again in Iraq.

He said something like, We’re here because bin Laden bombed those towers. We know that’s not why we’re in Iraq. Iraq is totally different. And they had to come walk that back and they’re like, yeah, you’re right.

Hegseth has just been making some rookie mistakes on the first trip and realizing every word you say out there matters, ‘could’ is different than ‘should.’ You know 700 is different than 7,000. You know we’re going to let them in NATO. We’re not going to let them in NATO, things like this. You know, when you’re the secretary, it matters and it’s showing his inexperience.

It’ll be interesting to see how he kind of adjusts to the job over time–

Well with press relations, you know, you can he’s already in a public Twitter war with Jen Griffin, the Fox News lead Pentagon reporter, one of the most respected reporters in the Pentagon, somebody who’s done you know, she’s hosted more wounded warrior events than anybody I know. She’s been doing this for decades. And he’s been picking a fight with her publicly. I can’t remember any secretary of defense who’s ever picked a fight with a reporter publicly in this way. It’s just beyond.

Yeah, absolutely. It was really stunning to see, especially because, you know, we all know they are old Fox colleagues and you would think there’d be some camaraderie there.

Well, you know, again, you’re in charge of an organization with 3 million people and you have an enormous staff to handle these kinds of things. You know, I was at the Munich Security Conference and on the flight home sitting next to someone else who said, ‘Wow.’ She just showed me their phone. And Pete Hegseth had posted yet another Twitter photo working out with the troops at the next stop along the way. Nothing wrong with that. Other generals and sectors have done similar things.

But my reaction was, I don’t know what his Indo-Pacific strategy is, but I’ve seen him– I can tell how many pushups he’s done. The messaging coming out is so unusually disorganized and doesn’t really have a good strategy. He’s still publicly tweeting for himself is just, you know, no, no professional federal agency will let the principal do that. You know, and he’s he’s got a bigger fish to fry like Russia and China. Not Jen Griffin.

Can’t imagine Jim Mattis doing something like that, ever.

Ever tweeting? No, give me a break.

Kind of in the same vein that Hegseth is so clearly a very different situation from Mattis. Are there any other key differences you see so far? Trump early 2017 compared to now early 2024?

You know, along with this and everything else, it’s yeah, the people that he’s put in office, not just, as you said, with the difference between like a Mattis and Hegseth, but everywhere. Clearly everyone knows this.

Now these are the diehard loyalists from the inner circle who back then were hoping to get chief of staff jobs and now they’re getting or they’re on the verge of getting cabinet-level jobs, people who are people who were outright opposed to Trump, like Hegseth, like Tulsi Gabbard, who ran for president against him on the opposite side of the ticket, are now in his cabinet.

So he’s not put in place, you know, elder statesman types who can do the job for the newbie in politics. He got rid of them and you know, we used to call them the guardrails. But you know, others could just call them enablers and now so they’re gone, and that plus DOGE and Elon Musk’s blitzkrieg of cuts to the federal government. That’s probably the biggest story of all.

You know, they had the FBI, they started had CIA and now we know the coming for the for DOD the biggest agency in the United States and nobody knows what offices they’re going to target. No one knows who’s going to get out of a job, you know, at the drop of a hat. And everyone is very fearful of that. It’s one thing to fire. You know, I was at Defense One, it was a sister publication, a spinoff, a Government Executive, the old GovExec Magazine.

So I’ve covered the federal government in a large way. And a lot of my you know, my LinkedIn feed is filled with federal employees of all kinds, people who are losing their jobs at FDA and in health care, at the National Parks Service, just all across the federal government.

That’s different than I don’t know, the the assistant secretary for the Middle East. You know, the office that’s in charge of the nuclear arsenal, the office in charge of our special ops and grey war, the Pentagon’s health system, which is the largest in the world for troops and families. So all of those cuts are pending. And that’s part of this.

What’s new about Trump this time is just– it’s just chaos. It’s, you know, the axis is hitting everywhere and in the middle of trying to negotiate the end of a war with adversary Russia. These are all things Pentagon reporters have to cover. You know, they have to cover military spouses who don’t know where the kids are going to go to school or whose kids have been told, you know, you can’t study Black History Month because of the DEI crackdown. At the same time, Pentagon reporters who have to cover the Blackhawk helicopter crashing into an aircraft outside the Pentagon– just down the river and the same ones who have to cover the Munich Security Conference and the global negotiations for the war in Ukraine.

They certainly have their work cut out for them right now. Especially as they are stretched thin all over the world. And all while legacy media or big media outlets are downsizing

Indeed, downsizing, shifting. Yeah, absolutely.

Kind of sticking to Gabbard for a second. The American Enterprise Institute’s Kori Schake wrote in The Atlantic over the weekend a not-so-optimistic appraisal of Gabbard’s leadership.

She wrote, “One factor leading American allies, including, but not limited to the ‘Five Eyes’ states, their key allies, to worry about whether they can securely share intelligence with the Trump administration.’ She concluded, ‘America’s foes are surely observing the chaos in Washington and looking for espionage, espionage opportunities. And they will find them.’ Do you think Schake has or has it right here? Is Gabbard really going to be able to have such an impact so quickly?

I think the concern is justified, yes. For all those reasons, you know, similar to Hegseth, but maybe not as pronounced. Now, you know, Tulsi is not just– I call her Tulsi because I knew her for a long time before she was a member of Congress on the Democrat side.

But, now DNI Tulsi. She’s got government experience. She has national security experience. But she’s always been a real lone wolf with someone who, you know, I think made her flip from the Democrats to the Republicans and into Trump world because she was one of these Democrats who was they were kind of like the far left to the far right was closer than you realize.

Her initial story was as a combat veteran. She had a very, very, very high bar for U.S. intervention abroad. That’s it. And that was part of her motivation for lots of the things that the world is outraged about, like going to meet and talk to Assad and try to get the real idea of what really matters or doesn’t. And a lot of her story has been conflated and a lot of of it isn’t and a lot of it is justified. So the worry that somebody with little to no experience in the intelligence community now overseeing all of the U.S. intelligence agencies like 13, 17, whatever the number is in the coordinating body and being privy to it. Yeah. It is worrying.

But I think, honestly, the fact that Trump gets access to some of this intelligence is just as worrying because he proved in his first term to be loose with intelligence. He you know, there are lots of there’s lots of documentation of how. M anecdote I can say this is I did a reporting trip to London during the first Trump administration and we were getting briefed at the GCHQ, like their version of the National Security Council.

And I asked a senior intelligence official. You know, when you see Trump tweet out something outrageous or unexpected, like we’re going to pull all the troops out of Syria, which he did, or we’re going to pull our troops out of Nigeria, which he did. What’s your response and how do you handle that, how do you know what to believe or whatnot? He goes, ‘Well, yeah, we see those too. We pick up the phone. We immediately call our American counterparts and the intelligence agencies over there. And every time they say to us, Yes, yes, we know we saw it. We saw it also, we just don’t. Don’t worry. Hang on. We’ll figure it out. We’ll get back to you.’

Right. Even the U.S. intelligence community has to sort out and understand what the American leaders are doing, what you know, so the intelligence world, the military world across different countries is very tight-knit. They are people who have spent their entire careers with each other, interacting with each other, trusting each other. And so it’s a common reporting thing that I’d use to say when politicians may come and go and administrations may be, you know, extreme or crazy or off the beaten path. But these communities really have solemn duties that they take to heart.

And they and they’re they protect their own. So, yes, I you know, I usually agree with everything Kori Schake writes, I’ve known her for a long time. You know, your audience should know, Kori Schake worked for the George W Bush White House and has come out early and often as somebody who was, she’s an anti-Trumper, but she’s a diehard conservative.

Some people think there’s not much difference between conservatives and liberals on foreign policy, but there is, in all sorts of ways. So she’s someone she’ll never hold a place of influence in the current GOP in the current Trump White House. And I don’t know how much her impact writing for The Atlantic will have, but it’s worth saying, and I believe her.

Kind of going in a different direction. There is a lot of doomsaying out in the media, a lot of concern about institutions breaking down or backsliding – fear of Trump appeasing Russia, selling out Ukraine. There is a lot of talk about us backing away from our traditional allies. But do you see within the moves of the last month any upside to Trump’s foreign policy at all to how he is kind of changing the dynamic overseas?

You know that’s– it’s a good question. It’s an interesting question. And so there’s a couple of things you can point to. The first being perhaps NATO’s spending, Trump likes to claim because he came in tough on them last time, all the NATO countries finally got more serious and increased their defense spending budgets. You know, they’re trying to get to their target of 2%. Now, we reported actually most of those countries already were increasing their budgets.

But I think it is true to say, yeah, he scared them and he poked the bear and they reacted before he even came to office. There was talk that he will jump it up to 5% of your GDP. And now he’s confirmed that. He’s said that he would like to see that.

The Munich Security Conference this weekend really will go down in history as a pivotal moment, I think, for the entire global order. If things shake out like people are expecting. Meaning, JD Vance comes in, usually a vice president goes to that conference, and gives an extraordinary speech saying, you know, this is the new way. This is how it is repeating everything that we’ve all heard in a year on the campaign trail. But for Europeans, who may not have heard all that before.

And there are a lot of Europeans who were shocked stating there are a lot of Americans who are not shocked especially when it came at the same time as the news that the U.S. was seeking to negotiate with Russia and not with Ukraine. Well, the ministerial conference loves Ukraine. They would rally all around it. This is the entire professional military and national security and intelligence class. But in the transatlantic alliance plus others, the Indians are there, African nations are there, Southeast Asian nations, and China is there.

So it is quite a large event, bigger than a NATO summit. Even the fact that the Monday after the event, Macron calls an emergency meeting of the heads of states of Europe, most of them showed up, to figure out what are we going to do? What is Europe going to do? What do we want for Ukraine? What can we offer for, you know, troops to protect the eastern flank?

That’s an extraordinary moment I don’t think we would have seen if there was Kamala Harris in the White House – had they sent Tim Walz to the Munich Security Conference. Now, some may argue you wouldn’t have to have had that because, you know, the United States would have been on the same page with Europe and would have got their ducks in order and not caused this public chaos. But that’s what Trump and Vance and Elon Musk want. They like to hit the bomb button and cause, you know, an explosion that’s going to really shake things up.

There’s a lot of people in our world who think this is long overdue. Europeans think that Trump is right. The Europeans have been, you know, spending too little and recruiting too little and building and building a national security workforce too slowly for the modern times. And now they have a lot of catching up to do.

And it’s going to take, it’s not going to take a year or two. We’re not going to say four years of Trump, it’s going to take decades being able to build a defense industrial base that defends Europe, things like that. So that’s big.

And I think also what’s in you know, what things are good or bad. The Global South, I know from learning the last few months at a couple of events really sees this differently and it’s worth listening to them. You know, India’s Foreign Minister Jaishankar was on a panel this past weekend where he said– somebody had presented the idea that look, we’re not in a multipolar world anymore. We’re not a bipolar world. This may be a non-polar world for a while everybody figures out how to reshape and reorganize, it could be the law of the jungle. India’s response to that was fine by us, and the Europeans were a little surprised. What do you mean? The law of the jungle then there are no rules.

And they said, look, at least in the law of the jungle, I know that I can compete. You know, the rest of the world does not see the 1945 global order as beneficial to them. And maybe it was beneficial, but not anymore. They still can’t compete. They’re still blocked from things like the Security Council. They’re still not treated as equals on certain global organizations and stages. And that may change because Trump has pulled the United States out and forced everybody to go fight for themselves. And it’s going to be a long time to sort out.

Yeah, it’s fascinating, though. You have to wonder what it does for a sense of global stability?

Yeah. I’ll say spending, we’re all anxious to see what the first presidential budget request looks like and how it changes defense spending. Elon Musk has, you know, tweeted things like, you know, we don’t need any more manned fighter aircraft. All we need are drones.

Well, that’s, you know, maybe a bridge far. But these people are expecting if these guys do like they say as much as what we’ve seen the last first few weeks, there’s going to be massive shifts of spending away from legacy weapons systems and into computers, his world of computers, space automation, autonomy. And that’s really going to change everything when it comes to how the United States defends itself, how other countries, our allies are able to defend themselves, how much they’re going to buy, how much the United States workforce is going to design and produce, and how you can compete and stay ahead of especially China technologically.

Definitely seems like that would be a huge media story for this upcoming year.

We need more defense tech reporters.

Exactly. They’re going to have their work cut out for them. Turning to the media coverage a bit. So as somebody covering these topics for decades. Where would you focus? What are the stories that really matter right now?

We spent weeks talking about Trump taking Greenland somehow or the Panama Canal. I think some pundit said his renaming of the Gulf of Mexico, called it ‘the Gulf of Distraction.’ You know does a journalist focus more on what you’re talking about, reshaping the global world order, understanding where the spending is going, you know, the real things that affect the safety of Americans versus these distractions?

This is a good question, and I think my answer is probably not what you’ll hear from most, I think especially defense reporters. I’ve always wanted more defense reporting to cover politics because politics drives everything. Like we were just saying things like the budget. And even if they’re distractions, you have to cover them. The president says it, the president says he wants to turn Canada into the 51st state. I don’t care if it’s a joke. Holy shit. You have to cover that.

Now newsrooms have to make choices. And this is where newsrooms I think can make better choices and they can make choices with each other and with the entire press corps. So the defense, not every reporter at the Pentagon cares about the Greenland story.

If you’re a defense trade reporter you care about, are we going to continue selling and buying F-35 stock because this is a multibillion-dollar story. That’s– it’s a huge story about the capabilities of the military, about the defense industrial base, about manufacturing and trade, and what allies are going to buy. It’s enormous. It’s about the fundamental view of warfare and defense.

For other reporters, maybe who’s at CNN and Fox, who are covering major global affairs stories. That’s a tiny little defense industry story for the trades. Now there’s the military life kind of publications like The Stars and Stripes, where I used to work or Task and Purpose. Some great, great outlets that have to focus on things like, is military getting paid, you know, why are Black soldiers going to get drummed out of the service, you know, trans, military spouses, families recruiting, you know, the whole gamut of stories for them. They may be less interested in, are we going to invade Panama? But their readers want to know, am I my husband going to be sent to do that? Is my wife going to be drummed out of the service?

So they do cover that, too. So it runs the gamut. And, you know, usually the press corps does a good job in that briefing room of being so diverse. And you hear to the questions and a real full briefing. They’ll be questions about geopolitics. There’ll be questions about specific defense industry.

There’ll be questions about politics on the Hill, social issues. And that needs to continue. I don’t think it’s an either or game. You have to find a way to cover it all. And until the president says, I was just kidding about Greenland, never mind, let’s move on. Don’t move on, because he doesn’t think it’s a joke.

Greenland and our allies in Europe who are just– can’t believe what they’re hearing. To them, this is their life and death because, you know, they rely on the United States. They can’t think this way. And now, you know, and other countries are wondering who’s next. Anybody that Trump had a beef with or Trump ally had a beef with them, did they get to his ear. I mean, I can’t– we were talking about the Panama Canal. Right. But we have to.

Yeah, I didn’t expect that answer, to cover it all. But it makes sense.

You have to find a way to do it. And I would implore, you know, this is why when I was building Defense One, I was very fortunate to be given a pretty long leash to come up with the kind of reporters and coverage we want. You know, we started essentially from scratch and we were we were a hybrid of covering the the defense trade and industry world and the federal government because we were a spinoff of government executive, but we were owned by Atlantic Media, a partner of the Atlantic.

So we were able to cut and paste in syndication, like Hillary Clinton’s op-ed for the world, major geopolitical Atlantic stories, like that Kori Schake, one you mentioned before. Defense One is not part of the Atlantic anymore. That split up a few years back, but we set it up that way where I had reporters covering politics, covering the National Security Council in the White House and what was going on there, including the campaign trails. And we had a business reporter covering the executive leadership of the business and trade world.

And I had a science and technology reporter, who is still there, the great Patrick Tucker covering, you know, the greatest developments coming out from in that world as well. And we tried to cover a little bit of everything in one place, which is pretty rare. And, you know, it’s hard to do when you have one reporter covering each of those gigantic buckets, but it gives a good outline to readers, to a certain audience of how they’re all interconnected.

Patrick Tucker is a great byline, always a good read.

Highly endorse.

Absolutely. Speaking of just, kind of to wrap it up, for casual news consumers who are really interested in these topics but don’t really know who to follow what reporters are driving this beat. Who would you recommend? Who’s your kind of go to?

Man, there’s a lot. But I’ll say think of it like I just said, there are trades, there’s military life, and then there’s like big picture kind of stuff. And international. Gordon Lubold is one of the best on the beat. He’s like the biggest digger and gets so many scoops. He used to work for me. I’ve worked with him alongside him. He is great. Nancy Youssef is great.

Where is Gordon now?

Gordon is at the Wall Street Journal at the moment and so is Nancy now, who sits around Helene Cooper at The New York Times. Greg Jaffe just announced he was going from The Washington Post to The New York Times and returning to the defense beat. He’s an excellent, excellent report, excellent writer, you know.

Some of the others. Jeff Schogol at Task and Purpose covers military life in a real fun way, but gets to the heart of what a lot of the military cares about. I think, again, I mentioned Jen Griffin at Fox is phenomenal, and Courtney Kube at NBC is phenomenal. Martha Raddatz. Some of these reporters are legends at ABC, been there forever, doing great work. David at CBS, you know, CBS News, these are reporters who have been doing it for decades.

And people that I had the privilege of learning under, you know, the Pentagon beat of reporters. It actually has pretty small amount of turnover. I feel very privileged to have found a foothold into it as a Stars and Stripes reporter and then worked my way into other organizations for many years. But you never leave the press corps. You just kind of shift desks. And when someone gets you moved on or there’s, there’s an opening, there’s just a little bit of shift, a little bit of turn. But it’s a pretty tight-knit group of people.

You travel the world with them. They become friends of yours. They become colleagues as you’re competing with them. It often felt like, you know, my my workspace wasn’t the newsroom I worked for. It was the press corps I was working in. And so it’s hard to find anybody you don’t think is great in that setting.

Definitely. And the way you frame it earlier, I think it’s a way I never really conceptualized it, you are covering not just the military but you are covering a community so much more than just, you know, the geopolitics. These are millions and millions of people’s lives.

I’ll leave you with if I can. You know when I got on the beat, got a seat in the building it was 2008, near the end of where Obama was coming in for the first time. And I had a sense that Obama got elected saying we’re going to end the war in Iraq and we got to plug it up in Afghanistan a little bit. But there was a sense like, I missed it, like I missed the Iraq war, I missed the chance to cover something so monumental.

Even the surge at 2006 was kind of starting to die off. And I just thought, well, I guess I’ll just cover the retrograde of all the equipment coming back home. You know, it’ll be different. And like, boy, was I wrong. You know, it’s endless there.

But a senior reporter said to me, you know, a couple of things. It takes a good 3 to 5 years of covering the Pentagon to really get sourced up. And remember, the military is a closed society where, you know, you don’t get recruited as a general. You work your way up.

So I have a buddy who likes to tell people I knew Lieutenant Colonel Petraeus, you know, long before there was a General Petraeus who commanded the war. And that’s true. You meet people on their way up the ranks and you form relationships, up the ranks.

And while you’re doing that, like I said earlier, the breadth of coverage that you have to work on is just extraordinary. We would do profiles of wounded warriors and interview their families. Then you would do something on military health care. Then you would do, you know, the congressional budget process and then you’d have to know the numbers of how many B-2s are being bought and what what the, you know, individual cost is. Then there would be a missile launch from North Korea and you’d have to, you know, get sourced up on Asia.

Then there would be the pivot to China. Then it was back to, you know, the after Trump had come in and the ISIS, then it was ISIS. This was coming back right when ISIS was dying. I said, okay, everyone’s really focusing on China. This is really this is really a change.

And I have a stack of China books that I got for myself and just I’m like, man, I haven’t thought about China so deeply since college. I got to get back into this and I wasn’t even halfway through them when the Ukraine war started and Russia invaded Ukraine and we all went, my God, Russia, like, who knows anything about Russia anymore?

And you got to pivot to that. So it’s very wide, it’s very shallow, but it’s so, you know, it’s so rewarding as a journalist to be able to go into all of those topics, to have to know all those topics. It’s very exciting and it’s a real, I think, privilege and honor to be entrusted with that kind of reporting in a place like the Pentagon. So really, I’m so happy I got a chance to do it. And I would encourage anybody out there who wants to try to go for it.

Thank you so much for sharing your time and expertise with us today.

Thanks for having me.

You know, covering the Pentagon is probably going to be one of the essential stories of the Trump years.

I think it always will be. So we’ll keep our eyes on it. Thanks, man.

Thanks so much. Really appreciate it.