Tuesday, September 01, 2026
Hegseth’s Pentagon Lurches off the Rails
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Monday, August 31, 2026
Sunday, August 30, 2026
The Felon/GOP's Obsession Wit "Blood and Soil"
Nine years ago this month, America was introduced to what was then called the “alt-right” and is now pretty much just “the right.” On Aug. 11, 2017, we witnessed what had been advertised as a “Unite the Right” rally in which a large group of young white men marched in Charlottesville, Virginia, carrying tiki torches and chanting, “Jews will not replace us” and “Blood and soil!” The next day, a young counterprotester named Heather Heyer was killed by an alt-right participant who drove his car through the crowd at high speed. President Donald Trump famously announced that there were “very fine people on both sides,” and it was clear to many Americans just where he and the Republican Party were heading.
It was startling at the time to hear those chants. They seemed like something out of the history books. Such open antisemitism was a vestige of the Klan and neo-Nazi marches of the past, and the words “blood and soil” had no American antecedent at all, at least not the specific term. They are associated with the Nazis, derived from the German völkisch movement, which romantically valorized the agrarian people as the backbone of society and evolved into the eugenics and ethnic cleansing programs under Adolf Hitler.
A large faction of the modern American right has now adopted this idea to promote nativism and white nationalism, calling it “Heritage American” and basically positing the idea that only people of European ancestry are appropriate to live in the United States. But it’s actually even more specific than that. A true heritage American would be able to trace their ancestry to the colonial period, to Anglo-Protestant and Scotch-Irish early settlers.
The most famous of those pushing the Heritage American idea is Vice President JD Vance, although he doesn’t use the term. In his speech at the 2024 Republican National Convention, he declared, “America is not just an idea. It is a group of people with a shared history.” . . . People will not fight for abstraction, but they will fight for their home.”
Vance has said that he looks forward to being buried in that old cemetery himself, as will his children. But as political analyst Mona Charen noted, “his children are the product of a marriage between himself and the daughter of recent immigrants. Her ancestors are buried in India. Is that their ‘homeland’? Are his children less American than he [is]?”
Aside from that important point, what Vance says is simply not true. Americans have fought for “abstractions” plenty of times, including two bloody World Wars, both of which were fought on foreign shores. If you ever had the chance to talk to World War II veterans, you know they believed they were fighting for “freedom” against the scourge of fascism. Setting aside Pearl Harbor, any real threat to the “homeland” was mostly an abstraction in itself. And all the literature about the American Revolution itself is rife with the passionate cries for liberty and equality, not paeans to “the land.”
The late Gordon Wood, the preeminent scholar of the revolutionary period, explained that there was no common lineage, even at the nation’s founding. Hence, these “Heritage Americans,” thinking they are the one true bloodline, are deluded. There were three quarters of a million people of African descent, thousands of Native Americans, people from every European nation and quite a few from elsewhere. The country was always a nation of immigrants and, according to Wood, a widespread concern at the time was that forming a national identity could be difficult.
But we did — around the Declaration of Independence and the belief in individual liberty and equality, as formalized in the Bill of Rights. America is the only country on earth that organized itself this way, but as Wood pointed out, we had no choice. Unlike other countries, we were literally not “a people” until we became a nation.
Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch — one of the justices who voted in the minority in Trump v. Barbara, holding that the Fourteenth Amendment does not guarantee automatic birthright citizenship to the children of undocumented immigrants or temporary visitors — was quizzed heavily on the idea of America as a creedal nation when he recently made the rounds flogging his children’s book. His response caused much agita among the Heritage American types. “Our nation is not founded on a religion,” Gorsuch said. “It’s not based on a common culture even, or heritage. It’s based on those ideas. We’re a creedal nation. And I hope we take a moment to reflect on that and to recommit ourselves to that.”
The justice’s mention of religion is what struck a nerve because the insistence that the country was founded explicitly as a Christian nation is fundamental to the Heritage American belief system. That specific argument has been going on forever, and Vance and others — like Tucker Carlson — who have jumped on this bandwagon, know it to be a potent signal to the powerful evangelical bloc. To have an avatar of far-right jurisprudence espouse the belief that America is, in fact, a creedal nation and was not founded on Christianity was a welcome shock.
As the Atlantic’s Toluse Olorunnipa reported, various red states are now attempting to pass laws disallowing naturalized citizens from holding office, essentially creating a group of second-class citizens. This is yet another attempt to create a “blood and soil” nation out of one that was built on something else entirely.
America has never perfectly lived up to those ideals, and the struggle to do so continues to be painful for those who have yet to fully benefit from the nation’s promise. It’s always two steps forward, one step back. But attempting to redefine the country as white nationalist völkism is a fool’s errand. Wait until Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito discovers that he doesn’t qualify because his family didn’t emigrate to the U.S. until the 20th century, and Donald Trump will be mighty disappointed to find out that he and four of his five children are not true Americans because their mothers were born in another country. Once you start pulling on this thread, the whole thing starts to unravel.
As Wood wrote, “since the whole world is in the U.S., nothing but the ideals coming out of the Revolution and their subsequent rich and contentious history can turn such an assortment of different individuals into the ‘one people’ that the Declaration says we are. To be an American is not to be someone, but to believe in something.”
For the record, on my mother's side, I would be a "heritage America" because I have ancestors from England who arrived in Massachusetts in the early 1600's, English and Scottish ancestors who arrived in Charleston, South Carolina in the early 1700's, and French ancestors who arrived in New Orleans shortly after the city's founding. Yet, since I am gay, the authors of Project 2025 would no doubt say I do not qualify.
Saturday, August 29, 2026
Pete Hegseth: Egotistical And Blind to His Own Incompetence
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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