The latest casualty of Pete Hegseth’s disastrous tenure as Secretary of “War” is Dan Driscoll, who resigned Monday as Secretary of the Army after repeatedly clashing with the Heg.
Driscoll isn’t a liberal in lion’s clothing. He’s an old friend of JD Vance from Yale Law days. He resigned because of his concerns that Hegseth is damaging the Army’s efforts to modernize and adapt to the 21st-century battlefield environment — where drone warfare is becoming increasingly important — by firing or pushing out leaders spearheading those efforts.
A defense official in Europe told CNN that even though Hegseth talks about technology reform, he’s focusing instead on “muscles, dudes in dresses, testosterone.”
Hegseth’s tenure has been disastrous from the moment he walked into the Pentagon. Even if Trump were capable of hearing sound advice, Hegseth hasn’t come close to giving it to him. Instead, he’s been pursuing grievances about DEI, promoting testosterone, and denigrating or firing women and Black officers.
The Army now has no Senate-confirmed secretary or chief of staff (George’s replacement, General Christopher LaNeve, so far doesn’t have the votes to be confirmed).
The Iran war, meanwhile, is requiring the ongoing deployment of 19 warships, air-defense units, fighter squadrons and paratroopers across the region — straining service members and their families and creating a maintenance backlog that could take years to unwind, according to The Wall Street Journal.
TheWashington Post reports 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 Daryl Caudle (who campaigned for the job by signaling agreement with Hegseth’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? He castigated the media for revealing classified information.
I’ve known many other defense secretaries, starting with Cap Weinberger, who served as defense secretary under Reagan. I can say without fear of contradiction that Pete Hegseth is the stupidest and least qualified of them all.
Hegseth’s incompetence and determination to suck up to Trump helped launch the war against Iran in the first place.
Among the regime’s senior officials, Hegseth was the only one who supported Trump’s fantasies of a quick victory. Marco Rubio was against the war, as was JD Vance; even former Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard told Trump that a war with Iran was not winnable.
Since then, Hegseth has lied his way through more than six months of Pentagon and Iran war mayhem.
At a press briefing in March, Hegseth complained about a CNN report that the Trump administration had underestimated Iran’s ability to disrupt global oil traffic by closing the Strait of Hormuz. “Patently ridiculous,” Hegseth told reporters, adding — even as the strait’s blockage was proving to be Iran’s most powerful leverage in the war — we “don’t need to worry about it.” It was a false and insulting claim to an American public that deserved to know what the Trump regime was planning to do about soaring prices at the gas pump, directly due to that blockage.
He also denied that the U.S. bombed the school where some 175 children were killed — a claim belied by mounting evidence that the U.S. did bomb the school. Hegseth’s further insistence that the U.S. “never targets civilians” was refuted by the U.S. military’s killing of over 200 people on small boats in the Caribbean without evidence they were “narcoterrorists” rather than civilians.
Hegseth then lied about the severity of Iranian attacks on U.S. bases in the Persian Gulf that disrupted logistical support for American forces, leading to the deprivations suffered by the crew of the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln.
Hegseth evidently believes that his job is to cheerlead and defend Trump with absurd claims like “We didn’t start this war, but under President Trump we’re finishing it” and “America is winning decisively, devastatingly, and without mercy” and “we will show no quarter for our enemies.” (“No quarter” means kill everyone and take no prisoners, which is a war crime.)
In the days leading up to the U.S. attack on Iran, Hegseth spent his time criticizing “wokeness” at American universities and forcing Scouting America to abandon programs aimed at promoting diversity.
Last year, he didn’t just mistakenly share the military’s plans with the editor of The Atlantic; we now know he shared them with a second Signal group, including his wife, brother, and personal lawyer.
John Ullyot, who resigned as Pentagon spokesman, said Hegseth had brought “total chaos” to the Pentagon and that the Pentagon “is in disarray under Hegseth’s leadership.”
Hegseth dismisses war crimes, pooh-poohs the rules of engagement, and projects unequivocal belligerence at a time when the United States is rapidly losing whatever moral standing it once had in the world.
Pete Hegseth is the most incompetent person in the Trump regime — with the exception of Trump himself — and a clear and present danger to the security of the United States and the world. If Trump won’t fire him, Democrats should impeach him when (hopefully) they take over the House next January, and two-thirds of the Senate should convict him.
- Robert Reich is an emeritus professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/. His new memoir, Coming Up Short, can be found wherever you buy books. You can also support local bookstores nationally by ordering the book at bookshop.org
