By Tom Nichols
Monday, August 31, 2026
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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