Making Pete Hegseth the secretary of defense was always a huge gamble. A television host with little background in national-security or defense affairs, who topped out as a major in the National Guard, he was nominated based on the same qualification shared by most of Donald Trump’s other appointees: loyalty. And now the price of that gamble is evident. The Pentagon is careening offtrack under a secretary of defense who is firing or forcing the resignations of officers and civilian officials, not because they are unqualified but because he believes they are insufficiently loyal to him, personally.
The latest casualty of Hegseth’s ongoing purge is Army Secretary Dan Driscoll, who resigned today after repeatedly clashing with the secretary of defense. As my colleagues Nancy A. Youssef, Missy Ryan, and Michael Scherer report, a person familiar with Driscoll’s resignation said that he had “brought up concerns with the administration surrounding Army transformation and readiness and Hegseth’s blocking those efforts specifically by firing the Generals who were responsible.” In the careful circumlocutions of Washington-speak, that means that Driscoll went to the White House to complain about Hegseth, and the president sided with Hegseth.
But more issues were in play than “Army transformation.” Hegseth’s tenure has been disastrous on multiple scores. Instead of giving sound advice to the commander in chief and ensuring that America remains secure while the president fights a deeply unwise war of choice, he has been pursuing his political grievances about DEI and other pet peeves against the U.S. military. Hegseth seems to have a special animus toward the Army, an institution he claims “spit me out.” He fired Army Chief of Staff General Randy George, and he has pushed out other senior Army officers; at this point, the Army has no Senate-confirmed chief of staff or secretary. (George’s replacement, General Christopher LaNeve, so far does not have the necessary votes to be confirmed.)
Even in less dangerous times, Hegseth’s irresponsible behavior would be a hazard to American national security. The Defense Department is a huge bureaucracy; it requires a leader who understands more than the mechanics of teaching trainees how to do push-ups or how to handle a weapon. Secretaries of defense must grasp the economics of the defense industry, the nature of alliances, congressional politics, the policy process, and dozens of other issues for which Hegseth seems to care little and about which he knows even less.
In a time of war, however, Hegseth’s shortcomings may prove deadly. Leave aside his early stumbles, including the mishandling of sensitive information. Leave aside, even, that Hegseth dissembled about the severity of Iranian attacks on U.S. bases in the Persian Gulf that had succeeded in disrupting the logistical support for American forces in the theater and led to the kind of deprivations that were suffered by the crew of the aircraft carrier the USS Abraham Lincoln. Hegseth’s incompetence, and his commitment to staying in Trump’s good graces, helped launch the war itself in the first place.
Hegseth was reportedly virtually alone among senior officials in supporting Trump’s decision to attack Iran—when he should have been the one person in the room who knew better. The secretary of state and CIA director were against the idea. According to the The Wall Street Journal, even then–Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, another of Trump’s unqualified-but-sycophantic appointees, mustered the courage to give the president bad news, telling Trump that killing the reigning ayatollah and striking Iran would “likely usher in a more hard-line regime open to acquiring nuclear weapons”; that the Iranians “would rush to close the Strait of Hormuz, destabilizing the global energy market”; and that Iran “would strike U.S. forces and partners in the Middle East,” all of which happened almost immediately after Trump gave the order to go to war.
Hegseth, however, supported Trump’s fantasies of a quick victory. A man of principle would have warned his president even at the risk of his job, but Pete Hegseth is not that man.
And now Hegseth has banished another enemy, Driscoll, from the Pentagon. But as the saying goes: Play stupid games, win stupid prizes. Hegseth, more than ever, now owns every aspect of the Pentagon’s dysfunction. Yesterday, The Washington Post reported that multiple senior military leaders—those still left, that is—have warned Hegseth that the United States cannot indefinitely extend military operations against Iran. Even the chief of naval operations, Admiral Darryl Caudle (who campaigned for the job by signaling his agreement with the secretary’s culture-war obsessions), told Hegseth that the Navy cannot “sustain its current level of support for the Iran conflict because there is no anticipated end date.”
Hegseth’s response to this story was to send his spokespeople out to castigate the press for revealing classified information. In an amateurish bungle, the Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell said that the reports were “inaccurate” but also a “betrayal of the force”—leading sensible people to ask how the stories could be false and dangerous at the same time. And these were just the responses from people who are officially authorized to speak for the Pentagon; another bombshell report over the weekend revealed that the department has recruited online influencers into paid roles, but without either the influencers or the Pentagon telling anyone about their cozy arrangement with the government.
Hegseth, meanwhile, has dutifully overseen the raiding of assets from other theaters to support Trump’s war with Iran, leaving the U.S. and its allies exposed to potential threats from China and Russia. When Trump returned to office, Hegseth and others supported a reorientation away from the Middle East and Europe. Now the secretary and the other supposed China hawks have discarded those positions and dumped everything into a war that still has no clear strategy and no clear goal beyond stopping Iran from attaining a nuclear weapon it didn’t have in the first place.
Fortunately, even under the strain of a petty and incompetent secretary, and a president mired in his delusions, senior military officers are still speaking up and telling their boss the truth about America’s parlous defense situation. One of the advantages of a large bureaucracy staffed with professionals is that much of it can run and function, at least for a while, under even the most inept leaders.
But Hegseth is apparently close to getting the Pentagon he wants: Much like his boss at the White House, Hegseth seems to desire a building full of loyalists who put the boss’s personal fortunes over the national interest. Some reports indicate, for example, that Hegseth wants to replace Driscoll with Parnell—who has no significant qualifications for the post beyond his time fighting with the press on the secretary’s behalf.
The result of all this is that the United States is losing a war to a third-rate power in the Middle East. The Russians, meanwhile, are continuing their rampage in Europe and apparently considering things so perilous that the CIA director had to fly to Moscow just to warn the Kremlin off of whatever it was thinking of doing. The Chinese are watching as Trump and Hegseth have stripped the Pacific theater of its only American aircraft carrier. In the midst of this chaos, Hegseth does chin-ups while he ponders calling all of America’s admirals and generals back to another mass meeting so he can again carp at them about fat soldiers and bearded sailors.
Pete Hegseth has failed in every mission except one: keeping his job. But firing or forcing out everyone else in the Pentagon will not make Pete Hegseth into the secretary of defense America and its men and women in uniform need. With each dismissal, he exposes only his own insecurities, even as he manages to stay employed—but the people and the armed forces of the United States are paying the inevitable price of his incompetence.
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