Pentagon calls disarray claims ‘completely baseless’
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth faced fresh calls to step down this week from a Republican senator and a retired major general, as the Army’s top civilian leader resigned after repeated clashes over blocked promotions and the firing of senior commanders.
Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina, who is leaving the Senate after clashes with Trump, urged the president on social media to fire his defense secretary. “I have never witnessed more inept management of the brave men and women who serve our country,” Tillis wrote. “He is intimidated by competence and retreats to ginning up culture wars instead of soberly attending to the vital work of our national defense and the health and wellbeing of our fighting force.”
Retired Maj. Gen. Randy Manner of the U.S. National Guard — a force in which Hegseth also served — and a member of National Security Leaders for America, a group of former military leaders, accused Hegseth of weakening U.S. security. “The secretary of defense is a clear and present danger to the national security of the United States and the world,” Manner said. “He has done more harm to the national security of the United States than any secretary of defense since the country was created.”
The Pentagon has rejected the criticism, calling suggestions that the defense department is in disarray under Hegseth “completely baseless.”
Tensions over Hegseth’s priorities reached a head this week when Army Secretary Dan Driscoll — a friend and ally of Vice President JD Vance — resigned after repeatedly clashing with Hegseth over blocked promotions and the firing of senior commanders. A source familiar with Driscoll’s resignation told CNN that Driscoll had voiced concerns “surrounding Army transformation and readiness and Hegseth’s blocking those efforts specifically by firing the generals who were responsible.”
The New York Times reported that Hegseth had blocked the promotions of seven officers to two-star general rank, the latest in a series of personnel moves. A large proportion of those blocked or fired have been Black or female, the Times reported, a pattern that aligns with Hegseth’s stated campaign against “woke” diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives. Driscoll’s departure drew a public rebuke from Tillis, who wrote: “Dan was the right man at the right moment to lead our Soldiers and Army civilians.”
U.S. strikes on Iranian targets near the Strait of Hormuz resumed this week after a month-long lull. The strikes hit mainland Iran and Iranian islands in the Gulf, and Iranian media reported that five people, including a six-year-old child, were killed in the southern city of Kuhestak when a missile struck a wedding party. Iranian authorities labeled the deaths a war crime.
The episode echoed strikes on the city of Minab on 28 February — the first day of the war — when more than 150 people, including 120 children, were killed when missiles hit an elementary school, according to Iranian and international reporting at the time. The U.S. has not formally admitted responsibility for the Minab strike, though officials have said it is under military investigation.
The latest strikes were quickly followed by disclosures that Hegseth had extended U.S. military deployments in the Middle East — where the U.S. currently maintains 50,000 troops and 19 warships, partly to enforce a naval blockade on Iran — into the middle of next year. The extensions were ordered after several commanders in other sectors voiced formal objections, known as “non-concurs,” arguing that the deployments could leave the U.S. unable to meet its commitments elsewhere and subject forces to additional strain at sea. The objections were recorded in the Secretary of Defense Orders Book dated 14 August, a classified document whose contents were leaked and reported by the Washington Post.
Kevin Carroll, a former Army colonel and military intelligence officer who served in the offices of the defense secretary and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, questioned the war’s strategy. “I’m not sure what the strategy is here,” Carroll said. “What’s the enemy’s center of gravity that we’re going after? We tried decapitating their leadership. That didn’t work. We tried going after their missile program. We were not able to destroy it. Tried sinking the navy, but they still maintain a mining capability. We could easily take out their energy infrastructure. But that would drive the price of oil much, much higher, and lead to retaliatory attacks on the energy infrastructure of our Gulf allies. It’s not clear what this target set is intended to do.”
Nate Swanson, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council and a former White House and State Department adviser on Iran, said the deployment orders reflected the administration’s decision to embrace a policy of long-term economic blockade. “It’s a recognition of the fact that the past six months has failed, but they don’t know what to do,” Swanson said.
Hegseth, who has not held a formal Pentagon briefing since 5 May, has reportedly told associates he is considering a bid for the 2028 Republican presidential nomination. Critics have accused him of focusing on “cultural” issues and his own political future rather than on the war, at the cost of talented career officers.
The former Fox News host has previously railed against “fat” generals and instituted testosterone tests for service personnel, and drew fresh criticism this week for a social media post that appeared to body-shame two Canadian female teenage cadets amid the trade war between the U.S. and Canada. In a podcast, Joe Walsh, a former Republican congressman who is now a Democrat, accused Hegseth of “fucking online harassment” and denounced the defense secretary as a “punk.” Hegseth has also drawn accusations of war crimes for ordering strikes on alleged drug-ferrying boats off the coasts of South America.
Hegseth is not the first defense secretary to face scrutiny over a far-off American war. Robert McNamara drew sustained criticism as defense secretary during the Vietnam War, and Donald Rumsfeld was faulted for inadequate planning for the occupation of Iraq after the 2003 invasion. Paul Eaton, a retired major general who trained Iraqi troops after the invasion and now advises VoteVets, an advocacy group for progressive military veterans, said Rumsfeld’s failings paled in comparison with the current situation. “Rumsfeld had ‘next war-itis’, which was a contributing factor to Bush firing him after the shellacking that the Republican party had in the [2006] midterms,” Eaton said. “All this sounds faintly familiar with what we’re going through right now. But this is infinitely worse because we had a lot of other very smart people to corral the bad ideas coming out of Rumsfeld. [This time] we’ve had the whole removal of seasoned men and women who have learned things the hard way most of the time in combat. If you fail to plan, plan to fail, and what we’re seeing in the Iran war is just evidence.”
Michael O’Hanlon, a defense and strategy expert at the Brookings Institution, said the armed forces had enough “bench strength” to survive Hegseth’s purges without imminent collapse, but lamented the loss of key individuals who could not easily be replaced, including Gen. Chris Donahue, who recently stepped down as head of U.S. land command in Europe and Africa. “We haven’t had a TV talkshow star with a strong partisan and cultural agenda wind up as secretary of defense,” O’Hanlon said. “There may be some echoes of previous secretaries, but the political and culture stuff is Pete Hegseth through and through. He’s going to wind up being known as the guy who fought Trump’s culture wars for him — and maybe failed to help Trump stay out of trouble in the Iran war, depending on how bad that gets.”
Manner said Hegseth was drawing on “readiness accounts” — funds intended to train the rest of the force — to pay for the Iran war. “These are for training the rest of the force,” Manner said. “So the rest of the force is losing training hours, equipment and money for maintenance and operations. The rest of the military is significantly degraded.” Manner said his conversations with serving officers echoed the concerns recorded in the leaked orders book. “I have firsthand knowledge of people who are serving on active duty who echo the exact same concerns that we are headed to a situation where we can no longer defend Taiwan, that we are very unlikely to be able to defend even, quite frankly, South Korea,” he said.