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Pete Hegseth: Egotistical And Blind to His Own Incompetence

Pieces in both the New York Times and the New Republic look at the severe damage being done to the U.S. military by the Felon and his incompetence, former Fox News talking head Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth.  Hegseth was/is a happy cheerleader for the Felon's disastrous war of choice against Iran and takes delight in posting videos of bombs detonating on supposed Iranian targets.  He is also overseeing a purge of the U.S. military's experienced senior officers who he either deems "woke" or who have the wrong skin color and/or gender.  Only whites willing to prostitute themselves to the MAGA agenda are to be allowed in Hegseth's military.  Worse yet, he and his ego mad boss are focusing on the last war rather the quickly evolving new warfare on display in both Ukraine's war with Russia and Iran's drone attacks in the Middle East. This embracing of the past and MAGA stereotypes with little thought to the future parallels the Felon's war on clean energy in support of a slowly dying fossil fuel industry while rivals such as China embrace the new technologies with enthusiasm.  Thanks to the Felon's and Hegseth's bad decisions America is now weaker, short on allies, and less prepared than potential woes like China.  Frighteningly, there are no signs that the shit show will end anytime soon.  Here are highlights from New Republic: 

A flurry of reports from various media outlets is revealing how the unqualified secretary of defense is damaging national security with his incompetence and slavish devotion to MAGA ideology. The New York Times reported on how numerous senior positions within the Army have gone months without leadership since Hegseth fired them. The Washington Post reports that the firing of Gen. Randy George, the Army chief of staff, in April was a result of George dragging his feet on terminating the investigations of Army aviators who violated safety regulations in order to “buzz” Kid Rock’s mansion.

Additionally, ProPublica reported that Hegseth overrode military leadership who warned him not to terminate the Civilian Harm and Mitigation Response program last year. The secretary of defense did not regard preventing civilian casualties as a worthy goal of the military and eliminated the program entirely. As a result, when the United States struck Iran, it hit a school for girls, killing more than 100 and inciting international condemnation. U.S. strikes in Yemen killed at least 150 civilians. These events drive anti-American sentiment in the region and push potential allies away.

This couldn’t come at a worse time. We are witnessing, in Ukraine, a revolution in military technology and fundamentally how we think about war. Iran has grasped it, and China is leaning hard into drones and AI as part of the “kill chain.” The battlefield is becoming faster, deeper, and more lethal than anything we have seen in human history. It’s less Gulf War and fighter jets with precision munition and more Terminator, with nearly autonomous tiny drones produced by the millions every year picking off almost 1,500 people daily.

Instead of leaning into the future, however, Hegseth canceled the Army’s elite experimental assault drone brigade, which had been championed by the generals he sacked. What he has touted instead is a military that looks the way he thinks it should look.

This means no transgender people, no female flag officers, no Black men with shaving chits, no non-Christians (and none of the wrong sorts of Christians, either). The new fitness standards being ushered in by the Army require a very specific waist-to-height-ratio requirement that is not waiverable. Previously, a soldier with an atypical body was exempted from these measurements if they scored extremely well on the physical fitness tests. Thus, a skinny soldier who barely passes the physical tests would be retained and promoted over someone with a thick core who scores a perfect 500 out of 500 on the Army Fitness Test.

Hegseth’s entire plan to modernize the military was basically carried out to get rid of “woke,” to purge anyone who didn’t meet his Christian warrior image, and to sunset rules of engagement that might prevent the killing of civilians. In order to go down this route to solve a problem that didn’t exist, he needed to get rid of anyone who wasn’t on board with doing whatever they were told, even if it was a spectacularly bad idea, like giving free license to young pilots to violate safety regulations or getting rid of the people who might prevent the Air Force from bombing little girls and random fishermen to no real effect.

After 14 months of applying Hegseth’s theory that getting rid of woke and bombing with minimal rules of engagement would make the U.S. military invincible because of testosterone and looking manly in uniform, Hegseth urged Trump to test this theory and take out Iranian leadership in what he promised would absolutely, positively be a three-day special military operation. Military leadership warned against this course of action, but Hegseth won out. Now, six months into the war, Iran has the U.S. “by the balls,” according to a senior American official interviewed by Zeteo. And the amount of testosterone in them has proved immaterial. Last I checked, T levels have no impact on missile stores or production, both of which are critically low, and will be for years after the fiasco in Iran.

Meanwhile, female drone operators in Ukraine are playing a crucial role in killing Russians faster than new ones can be recruited, and transgender people are helping to fight the largest army in Europe to a standstill. I’m also not seeing many Ukrainians or Iranians griping about how stubble makes them too unprofessional to fight.

At the end of the day, Hegseth is what he is: an ideologue who never made it past the rank of major in the National Guard, and he wasn’t a particularly good one at that: His own unit revoked his orders and refused to deploy him in 2020. He never saw things beyond the viewpoint of a guy who chafed at rules of engagement that didn’t let him blow stuff up and kill things with impunity. He never went to the War College. Never worked in industry. Never did a Pentagon tour as a civilian or as a member of the armed services.

He’s basically your random infantry captain who managed to somehow get promoted to the most powerful position in the world’s most powerful military on the strength of being a TV personality on a network that was ride-or-die for the president and despises the same sorts of people he does. He came in with the attitude that he knew better than all these other people with far more experience, who had seen the military from every angle over the decades, and he is willing to fire anyone who pushes back on his ideas. This is perhaps the worst example of someone being promoted way above their aptitude next to Trump.

Trump and Hegseth keep claiming that they’re restoring the American military. To the rest of the world, it looks like chaos and weakness caused by people too egotistical and incompetent to know they’re incompetent: the Peter principle and the Dunning-Kruger effect all rolled into one.

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Six Months In, Iran’s Regime Stands

As noted in a prior post, the Felon is desperate to keep the news media from reporting on his lost war with Iran - something which alone makes it worth writing about - and is busy creating chaos with his new trade war with Canada (which seems to have been planned as poorly as his Iran adventure if Canada can turn off electricity and block Great Lakes marine traffic if it wants to do so) and, of course bloviating about "election fraud."  The reality is that the Felon has made a huge mess with his war of choice which has left the USA looking diminished, short on critical munitions, some allies trying to make accommodation with Iran, viewed as more untrustworthy, with Iran in control of the Straight of Hormuz, and Americans suffering economically at home. Much of what we are witnessing was predicted, but the Felon in his typical narcissistic and hubris filled nature ignored all such advice. The end result is that there is no end in sight to the conflict, Iran is left able to attack shipping at will - thus putting the conflict back on the front page - and a weakened USA is reduced to imposing more economic sanctions in the likely false hope that it will force Iran to surrender. The whole debacle is a masterclass in what not to do.  A piece in the New York Times reviews the current stalemate:

It was supposed to be quick. Still, six months after the U.S. and Israel launched massive airstrikes on Iran, the conflict drags on. The Trump administration has replaced its military war with an economic one, but the result is likely to be no different, analysts said, with a lack of American clarity about goals, a decline in American credibility and a strategic defeat.

One thing remains constant, however. The ordinary people of Iran are bearing the brunt of the war, victims of both the United States and their own leaders.

The Iranian leadership, increasingly dominated by military men, sees its own survival as the nation’s, and it considers the sacrifices of ordinary Iranians as a necessary act of patriotism and even martyrdom. It has been ever more ruthless in stamping out the slightest signs of dissent.

It is hard to dress up what has clearly been an American failure to bend Iran to its will, despite the might of the combined American and Israeli militaries. Not only has the Islamic Republic survived, but it effectively controls the Strait of Hormuz. It has strengthened its influence in the region, with even the countries it was bombing a few months ago trying to reinvigorate ties with Iran.

“The war has failed to deliver U.S. objectives,” said Sanam Vakil, the director of the Middle East and North Africa program at Chatham House.

Suzanne Maloney, an Iran expert and head of foreign policy at the Brookings Institution, judged the war a failure. “We did a lot of damage to Iran, but they have come out stronger than before,” she said. Iran’s neighbors have decided they must find a modus operandi with an Islamic Republic that is not going away.

American credibility among allies has suffered along with Mr. Trump’s own reputation for avoiding costly, interminable wars in the Middle East and promoting “affordability” at home. And it has made his promise to liberate ordinary Iranians look hollow.

“This war has really overtaken the Trump presidency,” Ms. Maloney said.  “Operation Epic Fury” began with a joint American-Israeli surprise attack on Iran, which killed the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and many of his officials, while badly wounding his son and now successor, Mojtaba.

Weeks of intense bombing destroyed much of Iran’s air force and navy and badly damaged its missile program. But the population did not rise up and the leadership did not fracture.

Iran’s military restored many of its missile launchers and attacked key American allies in the region as well as American bases, which were inadequately defended. It effectively shut down the Strait of Hormuz and caused global economic disruption.

The original “Operation Epic Fury” has been replaced with what Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent on Monday announced as “Operation Economic Outcast,” designed to isolate Iran further and crash its badly damaged economy. . . . . Despite rhetorical flourishes about D-Day and the fall of the Berlin Wall, Mr. Bessent did not indicate how long this economic war will last, what instruments it will use or what it aims to achieve.

“There is no clear articulation of America’s goals,” said Esfandyar Batmanghelidj of the Bourse & Bazaar Foundation, a research organization based in London. “But if you don’t define behavior change, sanctions as coercion fail.”

Iran, already the target of many thousands of sanctions, is considered unlikely to surrender because of a few more. More likely, analysts said, is that the country will respond in time by escalating its attacks on ships in the Persian Gulf and on American allies, which could produce another round of American bombing.

With American objectives unclear, the confusion is real in Tehran, too, said Ali Vaez, the Iran project director for the International Crisis Group. They will wonder, he said: “Does the U.S. want to achieve collapse, capitulation or compromise?”

Given that Iran’s leaders see the effort to strangle them as another form of warfare, Mr. Vaez said, the new American strategy has two risks. If it fails, the only option left is to return to military escalation. And if it works, it may lead Iran to escalate to break the U.S. naval blockade.

Iran’s public-facing leadership, including President Masoud Pezeshkian and Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, the parliamentary speaker, has been blunt about the economic imperatives to ending the war. They have warned of the consequences of hungry people and economic collapse.

They nonetheless take a consistent line on negotiating with Washington, insisting on a return at minimum to the June Memorandum of Understanding, which Mr. Trump signed but now says is “over.” They also continue to negotiate with Oman about managing the strait in a way Washington is unlikely to accept.

But the stalemate is also risky, said Ellie Geranmayeh, an Iran expert with the European Council on Foreign Relations. “There is an increasing view in the White House that you can’t deal with this Islamic Republic,” she said. “It’s a dangerous moment, with both Tehran and D.C. concluding that no deal is possible with the other.”

Jeremy Shapiro, a former State Department official now at the European Council on Foreign Relations, remains puzzled why Mr. Trump has not taken any of the available offramps to ending an enormously unpopular war at home. By pushing even more economic sanctions, he said, Trump officials “are pretending they’re still fighting instead of pretending that they’ve won” — or admitting that they’ve lost.

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The Felon Is Desperate to Get The Iran War Out Of The News

The Felon rushed to go to war against Iran based on the assurances of Benjamin Netanyahu and Pete Hegseth and over the warnings of the intelligence services of how Iran could seize control of the Strait of Hormuz. Even Tulsi Gabbard (of whom I am NOT a fan) foretold the situation America now finds itself trapped.  With the Felon's poll numbers in the toilet and Republicans worried that they may lose control of both houses of Congress, the Felon is desperate to get coverage of the war out of daily news feeds.  Hence, perhaps the insane trade war with Canada which has spooked many in Michigan, New York and elsewhere with the prospect of electricity shortages and still further reduced trade with Canada. This desire to shift news coverage likely even extends to increase claims of election fraud from the Felon and his sycophants. The irony is is that Iran is well aware of the Felon's self-created debacle and may take its own measures to make sure the war and high gasoline prices remain constantly in the news cycles.  A piece in The Atlantic looks at the desperation of both the Felon and the larger GOP.  Here are highlights:

For months, [the Felon] President Trump has been unable to bring the conflict with Iran to a close. A massive bombing campaign lost its effectiveness, and U.S. munitions supplies ran low. Diplomacy lagged, as leaders in Tehran remained content to deliberately prolong the process and harden their control over the Strait of Hormuz. Even the current pseudo-cease-fire—as deeply uneasy as it is—has done little to meaningfully lower the cost of energy around the globe.

With few options remaining, the Trump administration has settled into a potentially lengthy campaign of economic pressure, pledging to squeeze Iran until its leaders have no choice but to seriously return to negotiations. But that tack could prove toothless if the U.S. doesn’t also punish the nations that still do business with Iran and keep its economy afloat—and Trump has historically shown little willingness to stand up to the likes of China and Russia, or even North Korea, which has a strategic alliance with Tehran.

If nothing else, the new approach allows the White House to say it’s trying something and then—importantly—to stop talking about the war. Part of the plan, Trump advisers and allies tell us, is to try to push Iran to the background, while hoping that gas prices come down even a little and that Republicans can shift the nation’s focus to more politically palatable topics ahead of the midterms.

That won’t change the reality on the ground in the Middle East: Alliances have been strained, the U.S. military has been overtaxed, and Iran wields far more power in the region than it did at the beginning of the war, about six months ago. But it could allow Trump, a master of distraction, to turn to other priorities—a trade war with Canada! Claims of election fraud! . . . . . “We’re just trying to hang on until the midterms,” one Trump adviser told us.

At this moment, strategists in both parties believe that the Democrats are favored to capture the House. And despite a GOP-friendly Senate map, the upper chamber is viewed as a toss-up. Trends were already working against Republicans: Traditionally, the party out of power tends to do well in the midterms, and over the past decade, Trump supporters have seemed less inclined to vote when his name isn’t on the ballot. The president hasn’t done much to help, and his poll numbers have plunged, even on the economy and immigration, his usual strengths. Republicans, fearing hostility, have largely opted to forgo town halls this summer, skipping what tends to be an effective way to reach constituents.

Republicans have been urging the White House to wrap up the conflict and reduce its drag on the nation’s economy—and their reelection chances. But a solution has proved elusive. Trump’s goals for the conflict were never well enunciated and have shifted many times. Gone are lofty promises about regime change or preventing Iran from having a nuclear program. Instead, the president has privately told his political allies that once the Strait of Hormuz is reopened, he is inclined to simply declare victory and move on . . . . But even that has proved vexing: Iran has continued to menace ships traveling through the strait and has insisted upon charging a fee or toll. Other countries in the region have declared that unacceptable—the strait was, after all, open and free before the war—though Trump has waffled on whether or not he could live with it.

Republicans have signaled to the White House their approval of its new economic pressure campaign, which was announced by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent earlier this week. . . . Some in the administration believe that emerging divides in Tehran’s leadership could prompt talks. And if the new sanctions did bring Iran to the table before November, then maybe a renewed stab at diplomacy could juice the markets—and provide an 11th-hour boost for Republicans.

Trump has been bored of the war for a while. Aides have been pushing him to focus on the economy to help Republican candidates, but he has continued to downplay the nation’s affordability challenges, much to his aides’ chagrin. And while Trump remains furious at Iran’s unwillingness to bend, aides have persuaded him to give the new plan a chance. . . . The regime seems willing to endure significant hardship, and its own citizens’ struggles, to maintain its grip on power. And the new approach carries its own political risks. If Iran proves resilient again, the pressure campaign may have to stretch beyond the midterms, leaving prices high in the interim.

The U.S. military has not struck Iran in weeks. This month’s relative reprieve follows a long pattern of using force to try to extract concessions from Iran and failing. After a 13-day strike campaign in July, the U.S. military privately assessed that extending the campaign would lead to diminishing returns—and worsen the nation’s extraordinary munitions shortage.

A July 27 assessment by the Center for Strategic and International Studies concluded that the war has significantly depleted U.S. air-defense stocks—particularly of Patriot and THAAD interceptors—and that replenishing those munitions to prewar levels would take years. Last week, Raytheon announced it had been awarded a $22.9 billion contract that would “dramatically accelerate the production of Tomahawk cruise missiles.” Still, the administration insists its stockpile is robust.

There have been other costs to the American military: Eighteen service members have been killed, and bases in the region have been damaged. The USS Abraham Lincoln’s 5,000 sailors and Marines spent more than 270 consecutive days at sea without a port visit; the carrier’s extended deployment was marked by reports of food and supply shortages, plumbing problems, and declining morale.

Trump has never been one to show much discipline, and could lose patience with the waiting game. But Iran also gets a say in determining what happens between now and November. More punitive American sanctions are likely to provoke a response from Iran, particularly because its leaders want the U.S. to feel the costs of the war. Iran is also watching the midterm elections closely; some officials fear that Trump could become more aggressive in the weeks after ballots are cast. That could prompt Iran to escalate first—and once more put the war back into voters’ minds. 

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