Our Best Stuff on Turmoil at the Pentagon

Turn any article into a podcast. Upgrade now to start listening. Members can share articles with friends & family to bypass the paywall. You’re reading The Weekly, a Saturday morning recap of the best Dispatch content of the week, with some additional commentary from Managing Editor Rachael Larimore. Hello and happy Saturday. Army Secretary Dan Driscoll stepped down this week, days after meeting with President Donald Trump to discuss his concerns about Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s management of the Pentagon. Driscoll’s resignation had been expected for some time, given his frequent clashes with Hegseth. And in the wake of his departure, reports revealed a precarious state of affairs at the Department of Defense. Hegseth has fired or blocked the promotions of more than 80 generals and admirals, and, as we noted in Thursday’s Morning Dispatch, “roughly 60 percent of the two dozen senior officers he had fired for reasons unrelated to performance were black or female.” But Hegseth’s interventions have not just been about purging the military of what he views as “DEI”: On April 2, Hegseth fired Gen. Randy George, the Army chief of staff, and Gen. David Hodne, the head of the service’s Transformation and Training Command (T2COM)—the command responsible for “force design, force development and force generation.” In late June, Hegseth ousted Gen. Chris Donahue, the commander of all U.S. Army troops in Europe and Africa who was regarded as a superb special operations commander. George, Hodne, and Donahue, alongside Driscoll, had led the Army’s push to incorporate more drones into its operations. Concerns about Hegseth’s stewardship of the Department of Defense—the largest agency in the federal government and the largest employer in the United States—go well beyond firing generals. In late August, ProPublica revealed that early in his tenure, Hegseth moved to cut staffing for the Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response program, developed after the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan—over the objections of his combatant commanders. Contributing writer Mike Nelson recalled that after a U.S. strike accidentally killed 10 Afghan civilians, including seven children, during the chaotic days after the fall of Kabul in 2021, Hegseth leaped to condemn the Biden administration for withdrawing intelligence assets and hindering counterterror operations. But that’s when Hegseth was a talking head on Fox News. Now that Hegseth is running the Pentagon, he’s done “a 180-degree turn on the topic of civilian harm mitigation.” And on the first day of the Iran war in February, U.S. forces accidentally struck a girl’s school in Minab, Iran, killing more than 150 people, mostly children. Mike writes: We are marking the five-year anniversary of a tragic strike that killed innocent civilians, which had been loudly condemned by Hegseth, and which led to the DoD-wide program to prevent such incidents in the future, as we also mark the six-month anniversary of an even greater tragedy, most likely enabled by the dismantling of that program by the same person who had criticized the original incident. It appears Hegseth probably never saw virtue in protecting civilians and only saw utility in the incident as a cudgel against Biden, then-Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, and Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Mark Milley. Nor does it seem that Hegseth has any interest in the transparency and accountability he claimed to seek, as he is unwilling to tell the simple truth about the strike in Minab. Speaking of transparency, the Washington Post reported this week that the Pentagon has put several conservative influencers on the payroll. Among them, retired Air Force Col. Rob Maness has published columns at The Daily Caller and Campus Reform defending Hegseth, and retired Army Col. Kurt Schlichter has called President Donald Trump a “hero for finally fighting back against Iran” in his regular Townhall column. Neither disclosed that they were working for the Pentagon. This is not the first time Hegseth has attempted to control the national conversation about his department. For a more thorough history, we turn again to Mike Nelson. He catalogs how Hegseth has fired advisers on suspicion that they were sources for unflattering media reports about him, placed restrictions on the Pentagon press corps, welcomed MAGA-friendly new-media outlets, and—days before the story about the influencers broke—fired three senior leaders from Stars and Stripes for its coverage of challenges facing service members and their families as a result of the Iran war. Mike argues: There are obvious examples of bad behavior, spin, and a lack of forthrightness from previous administrations’ defense officials. Lloyd Austin famously concealed his health issues, both from the American people and his higher political leadership, and simply went incommunicado for days. … But the Hegseth DOD takes prevarication and pressure to a new level. It’s not enough to merely offer the administration’s narrative of events, but officials try to dictate who is even allowed to report the news, to control those who do, to punish those who divert from its preferred characterization, and blatantly lie to the American public. Nick Catoggio also tackled Hegseth’s propaganda ploy in Boiling Frogs. While he shares Mike Nelson’s disdain, he also thinks it’s a little silly in at least one way, noting that the influencers “are located deep inside the MAGA swamp politically, far away from where they might put a meaningful dent in mainstream opinion.” Silly, perhaps, but also dangerous: Meritocracy, military restraint, institutional neutrality: Is it any surprise that a guy who regards liberal ideals like those as sissy stuff might also reflexively disdain norms against the government using furtive means to try to influence public opinion in its favor? And is it further any surprise that that guy would be enough of a lunkhead to recruit a coterie of chuds as “feds” who are only capable of influencing people whose opinions are already in his favor? The truth is that Hegseth doesn’t really “do” strategy. As the sort of postliberal who believes there’s nothing wrong with the U.S. military that can’t be fixed by making it more like the Russian military, he simply defaults to “more ruthlessness” when attempting to solve a problem. On that cheery note, I should probably let you get to your holiday weekend. On the bright side, college football is back! If you need me, I’ll be on the couch watching ESPN’s GameDay before turning my attention to my beloved Buckeyes. Thank you for reading. The Constitution established a representative regime among coequal citizens in which the people elected delegates who formed only one part of an elaborate architecture of offices designed to operate under the rule of law and protect their natural rights. It was this combination—popular sovereignty and coequal citizenship exercised through representation; the division of government into distinct branches, each with checks and balances on the others; all governed and limited by a constitution, the rule of law, and natural rights—that made the new government a republic, not a pure democracy. Alexander Hamilton argued that these modern institutions would guard the American republic against the tumult and upheaval of the ancient experiments in liberty. He wrote in Federalist 9 that they are “powerful means, by which the excellencies of republican government may be retained.” We do not live in that republic anymore. After Jordan’s conquest of the West Bank during Israel’s 1948 War of Independence, the territory’s remaining Jewish residents were expelled or fled the area. Following Israel’s takeover of the territory during its 1967 Six-Day War against a coalition of Arab states, many Jews returned to the West Bank communities that they and their families had left decades earlier. But in recent years, some radical fringes of the settler movement have attempted to lay claim to the entire West Bank, 40 percent of which is outside of Israeli civilian control, culminating in incidents like a recent settler attack on the Palestinian village of Qusra, where extremists besieged Palestinian homes and disrupted residents’ daily lives. Like many econo-political concepts, capitalism is slippery to define. A colleague of mine used to say, “Capital is what happens when property rights are respected,” and there is something to that, and one can put together a very libertarian definition of capitalism that encompasses freedom of exchange and contract with sensible limits touching externalities, fraud, some kinds of unofficial coercion, etc. But there is more to American capitalism than free enterprise and free exchange. That was true before the nakedly fascist economic policies of the Trump administration were put into place, but the rise of Trump and Trumpism should, perhaps, occasion some reflection. The many excellent arguments offered by my anarcho-capitalist friends notwithstanding, capitalism as we know it happens in a complicated nest of rules, institutions, norms, laws, etc.—and it also happens in a culture, a factor that is perhaps given short shrift. When some obvious fraud, abuse, or Wile E. Coyote-level business scheme runs amok—Theranos, the worst of Enron, a good deal of the current business model of social media companies—we not only act surprised but are surprised. … Americans make heroes of entrepreneurs, and we are right to do so—but getting involved in starting a business does not liberate a man or woman from the ugly fallen facts of the human condition any more than becoming a priest or a teacher does. Best of the Rest What’s the Matter With Utah? How a state trapped by its own history became Congress’ most aggressive threat to public lands—and suddenly out of step with a changing conservative West. Rachael Larimore is a managing editor of The Dispatch and is based in the Cincinnati area. Prior to joining the company in 2019, she served in similar roles at Slate, The Weekly Standard, and The Bulwark. She and her husband have three sons.