Army Secretary Driscoll resigns amid clash with Hegseth over reform pace

Iran war reshapes US force deployments and depletes munitions stockpiles

Senator Thom Tillis, a Republican and frequent Trump critic, called for Hegseth to be fired in the wake of the resignation.

“I have never witnessed more inept management of the brave men and women who serve our country,” Tillis said.

H.R. McMaster, who served as Trump’s first-term national security adviser, told CBS the departure was a setback. “This is not good news. You know, for our nation, for the army,” McMaster said, adding that “Secretary Driscoll was pushing… a modernisation agenda to catch the army up.”

The underlying dispute centered on military modernization. Driscoll had pushed to embed drones throughout ordinary Army formations so the force could adapt to lessons from Ukraine, where cheap drones and anti-missile systems have challenged militaries built on expensive procurement. Hegseth, according to reports, had originally initiated much of this modernization effort but then clashed with Driscoll and others over how quickly it should expand.

A source familiar with last week’s departure said Driscoll had raised concerns within the administration about Army readiness, which Driscoll said Hegseth was “blocking” specifically by firing the generals responsible.

Jon Duffy, a retired Navy captain and former White House defense policy official, said the resignation showed how far Hegseth had “hollowed out” military leadership at a critical moment. “You lose the [army] secretary, the chief of staff and other senior leaders driving modernisation, it creates a lot of uncertainty and it disrupts momentum,” Duffy said. “That uncertainty at leadership levels has downstream effects on the force,” added Duffy, who had a 30-year career and commanded US warships before joining the White House during the second Obama administration.

Hegseth’s public posture has centered on cultural change to the US military, part of what the BBC describes as a culture war at the Pentagon. A former Army National Guardsman and Fox News commentator, he has vowed to end what he called “woke” initiatives and scrap “stupid” rules of engagement he said constrained war fighters’ “lethality.” He has torn up diversity programs, banned beards and railed against seeing “fat generals in the halls of the Pentagon.” He has removed or sidelined the top uniformed officers in charge of the Army, Navy and Air Force and at least two dozen generals, admirals and civilian defense leaders, including some of the US military’s most decorated officers, often with little explanation.

Michael Schiffer, a former top Pentagon official who covered East Asia from 2009 to 2012 under the Obama administration, drew a comparison to Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s political purges of the People’s Liberation Army. “We’ve been conducting a military purge as well, and that has real effects on the ability of our military to be able to discharge its responsibilities,” Schiffer, now a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, told the BBC. “The way in which [Hegseth is] shaking them up… is bringing on board an awful lot of risk without any apparent way to be able to address or ameliorate it.”

Vice President JD Vance defended Hegseth last week, saying he was in “strident agreement” about the need for a culture shift after what he called 40 years of lost wars and “military misadventures.” “What Pete came in wanting to do was revive the warrior spirit in the United States of America,” Vance said. President Trump has continued to back his defense secretary, describing him in a phone interview with NBC News last month as “actually one of my best.” The White House told the BBC that Trump had “full confidence in Secretary Hegseth and the entire Department of War whose record of success in Operation Epic Fury, Operation Absolute Resolve, and Operation Midnight Hammer speaks for itself.”

Ezra Cohen, a former under secretary of defense during the first Trump administration, described Hegseth’s reforms as “bringing in fresh thinking and a more forward-leaning attitude.”

The leadership upheaval has unfolded as the United States wages a protracted war against Iran following Trump’s order to strike the country on February 28. The conflict has triggered a significant redistribution of US military assets. Weapons stored in Europe and Asia have been moved to replenish supplies in the Gulf, and carrier forces have been diverted from the Pacific.

Liana Fix, a Germany-based expert at the Council on Foreign Relations, said Europe is now feeling significant “blowback.” She said the lack of communication by the Trump administration with its NATO and European allies ahead of the attack on Iran left relations reeling and accelerated a strategic decision already in process to shift some US military resources away from Europe. In that context, Russian President Vladimir Putin had escalated so-called “hybrid” attacks involving armed drones or sabotage on NATO countries like Germany, she said. Russia denies carrying out the attacks.

“What [Putin] is seeing is not a united stance from the United States and the Europeans to further increase pressure on Russia… he sees that they are weakening, that there are windows and openings of vulnerabilities in Europe,” Fix said.

The drawdown of US forces in Europe now includes a cut of 5,000 troops from a total of 40,000 based in Germany, while a Biden-era plan to deploy a US battalion with long-range Tomahawk missiles to the country is being dropped. Last month, CIA Director John Ratcliffe paid a highly unusual visit to Moscow, where he is reported to have delivered a warning to the Kremlin not to test NATO’s resolve. At the same time, Elbridge Colby, one of Hegseth’s top officials at the Pentagon, was in Europe pushing countries to spend more on their own defense.

In the Pacific, Washington has also pulled resources from its primary strategic theater. Carrier forces including the USS Abraham Lincoln and the Japan-based USS George Washington have been diverted to the Gulf. The war is widely assessed to have left critical stocks of American ammunition badly depleted. According to the Washington, DC-based Center for Strategic and International Studies, the US fired about a third of its 3,000-strong stockpile of Tomahawk cruise missiles, while air defense munitions were burned up at an even higher rate, with nearly 1,500 Patriot interceptors fired out of a stockpile of around 2,300.

White House Principle Deputy Press Secretary Anna Kelly said the United States Military has “more than enough munitions, ammo, and stockpiles to serve all of the Commander-in-Chief’s strategic goals and beyond.”

Cohen, the former Trump defense official who is now a fellow at the Hudson Institute, described the president as having degraded Iran’s conventional military threat. Iran’s proxy groups are weaker than ever, he said, and in many places they have been completely obliterated, meaning “the president now has additional options and forces in the region to strike other Iranian targets, including nuclear targets, at will.”

Thousands of troops, including the 82nd Airborne Division, were sent to the Middle East more than six months ago for a deployment that is now stretching into 2027 with no obvious end in sight. Pictures last week of the USS Abraham Lincoln docking in Thailand with a rusting hull after a gruelling nine months at sea in the Gulf were pounced on by Iran, which, according to the BBC, Iranian officials tried to portray as a symbol of America’s spent efforts. Hegseth forcefully rejected claims of abysmal conditions on board. The episode reflected the broader challenge for Trump and Hegseth as they seek to transform the Pentagon while waging a costly, protracted war.