By Tom Nichols
Wednesday, March 04, 2026
The United States is at war. Americans, at such a time,
might expect their government to speak to them regularly and report on U.S.
goals—and casualties—but so far, they have gotten little beyond prerecorded
videos of the president and some sound bites from various officials. Even
Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has held only a few briefings.
Perhaps the Pentagon chief’s reluctance to speak to the
press is just as well, because many Americans would be alarmed to realize that
their sons and daughters in combat are being overseen by a person as callous as
Pete Hegseth.
This morning, the defense secretary gave a briefing on
the war that quickly degenerated into Trumplike bombast. (Wisely, the Pentagon
scheduled this at 8 a.m. eastern time, when most of the country is either
sleeping or busy starting their day.) Hegseth apparently prefers to sound more
like a Call of Duty player leading a raid than a sober and judicious
secretary of defense: “Death and destruction from the sky all day,” he said,
along with other empty phrases such as “We’re playing for keeps.” (As opposed
to what, exactly?)
Most reporters are now accustomed to Hegseth’s
drama-laden antics. But even by the low standards he has set, he managed to
shock many of them when he cynically used the deaths of U.S. military personnel
to air his own grievances with the press.
On Sunday morning (local time), an Iranian drone hit a
makeshift operations center in Kuwait. The Pentagon says that six Americans are
dead. Not only is this event a tragedy, but it also requires an explanation:
The drone reportedly snuck through U.S. defenses without setting off any
alerts, and struck a target that now seems to have been unduly
vulnerable to aerial attack.
The defense secretary, the man who is supposed to carry
this news to the American public and mourn with them, instead whined about the
unfairness of it all. “When a few drones get through or tragic things happen,
it’s front-page news. I get it,” Hegseth told the reporters, military
personnel, and civilians gathered this morning in the Pentagon. “The press only
wants to make the president look bad, but try for once to report the reality.
The terms of this war will be set by us at every step. As I said Monday, the
mission is laser-focused.”
“Tragic things happen”? Hegseth said this as though it is
unreasonable to look any closer at such events. He seems unable to grasp that
the deaths of Americans are not merely a public-relations problem: When a drone
slips through U.S. defenses and kills six members of America’s armed forces,
the deaths of those servicepeople are the story. The people of the
United States deserve to know what happened and why. Hegseth complaining that
he’s not getting credit for all of the drones that didn’t get through is like
an airline executive responding to an air disaster by growling about all of the
planes his company made that didn’t crash.
My colleague Nancy Youssef was at the Pentagon this
morning, sitting just three rows from the podium. I asked her what the
atmosphere was like after Hegseth’s heartless remark. She told me that his
comments “sent a stunned silence through the briefing room.” Even members of
Hegseth’s staff, she said, seemed to flinch at what he was saying. “Some put
their heads down,” she said, while others just looked around. Someone in the
room then said: “That was one of the most insulting things I have ever heard,” quietly
but audibly and, as far as Nancy could tell, to no one in particular.
Unlike Hegseth, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Dan
Caine opened his remarks by grieving the deaths of the fallen soldiers, saying
that “it’s with profound sadness and gratitude that I share the names of four
of our six fallen heroes.” He didn’t have the names of the other two, because
while Hegseth was griping about media coverage, the U.S. military was
completing the next-of-kin notification. (The names could be publicly released
as soon as later today.) “Our nation stands with you,” Caine told Gold Star
parents, wounded warriors, and their families, “and we are eternally grateful
for your courage, your resiliency, your devotion to this mission and to our
nation.”
The contrast was unsettling. For years, defense
secretaries and top generals have carried the anguish of decisions that have
led to troop deaths. Former Defense Secretary Robert Gates has said
that he wept as he read the stories of the fallen; some generals have carried
photos of those lost under their command—even into their retirement. Hegseth,
instead, noted the losses almost in passing, and used them as a vehicle for his
ongoing beefs with the press.
But Hegseth wasn’t content merely to carp about the
coverage of American deaths. After expressing his irritation at the press, he
decided to trash America’s allies. Instead of simply praising Israel—America’s
only ally in this war—he took a needless shot at other nations, saying that
U.S. allies in the past provided only “ancillary benefits” in global conflicts
because they were “maybe willing but not as capable” as the Israelis. Hegseth
made this preposterous claim in front of military people who had fought in
previous wars alongside these allies—and who saw many service members from
these nations sacrifice their life alongside their American comrades.
Hegseth is now holding more press conferences, according
to Nancy’s reporting, because some White House officials have privately
conceded that they are losing the communications war. The Trump team should
have seen this coming: When Hegseth kicked the press corps out of the Pentagon
last fall—including reporters from The Atlantic—for not agreeing to
publish only Pentagon-approved news, some reporters warned department officials
that such a move might make it harder for the public to understand America’s
operations overseas, Nancy told me. Now the United States is involved in a major
war, and no one in the Pentagon, the White House, or the State Department seems
able to explain why without contradicting one another.
In the midst of all this, Hegseth provided at least one
moment of clarity: He showed, yet again, why he is an execrable choice to lead
the Pentagon. Like his boss, he does not talk to the American people so much as
put on performances for them, and this morning, he played the role of the Fox
News pundit castigating other journalists. But the people in the briefing room
were doing their job trying to get the facts. Unlike Hegseth, they are taking
their responsibilities seriously: This is not a game, it’s not a TV show, and
it’s not some adolescent test of wills.
Pete Hegseth, if he
does not resign, should at least get out of the way and let better men than
him talk to the nation and to the press. No one is asking for classified
details to be revealed in public; no one expects Periclean rhetoric from a
talk-show host. But the people of the United States deserve more of an
explanation of what’s happening in this war, and they certainly deserve more of
an encomium for their fallen children than “Tragic things happen.”
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