A Republican senator called on President Donald Trump to replace Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth for his "inept" leadership, but a former White House staffer predicted the situation would need to get much worse before he would take that step.
Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC) went public with his concerns after Army Secretary Dan Driscoll announced his resignation this week over friction with Hegseth, who has pushed out other senior military officials, and former Trump communications director Mike Dubke told "CNN This Morning" that Trump would not replace his Pentagon chief at this point.
"I think it's going to, it's going to take, unfortunately, some mess-up by the U.S. military for the president to turn around and say, 'You know what, Pete, it's time to go,' because all the other things that he is doing, all of the the in terms of being lethal, in terms of the videos, in terms of the recruitment, I mean, the White House is going to talk about how great the recruitment is, and they're absolutely right," Dubke said.
The U.S. military has hit its recruitment goals for this fiscal year and enlistment reached a 15-year high, but Dubke said that obscured other institutional failures under Hegseth's leadership.
"It's gonna take some fiasco, I think, unfortunately, for this White House to decide that Pete Hegseth is not the leader that we need," Dubke said, "and the unfortunate part of that, and I'll be just, I'll end here, is that I don't know how long it will take to then bring back the military, to what, to an operational force, given how much talent has been eroded."
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