Hegseth is hollowing out the Pentagon and exhausting the force he was trusted to lead.
Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina said it Wednesday, on his way out the door. He is retiring. He has nothing to gain by breaking with a Republican president and nothing to protect by staying silent. What he said was this: “I have never witnessed more inept management of the brave men and women who serve our country. 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 well-being of our fighting force.”
You do not dismiss a statement like that from a man in that position. It is the closest thing the system produces to a sworn affidavit.
I want to be careful here. I have worn this uniform. Not at its pinnacle — at the level where the orders get carried out and the families back home wait. The men and women serving now are not props for anyone’s political theater. They are nineteen- and twenty-year-olds from towns where the military was the best job going, and they were given an institution to belong to that, for all its faults, was worth belonging to. The leadership question at the top of the Pentagon is not an abstract policy question. It is the question of whether the institution is being stewarded or used.
Both parties have run the force this way for a long time. Deploy them anywhere, anytime, no clear exit. The men and women at the bottom of that posture pay for it in tour extensions, missed births, marriages that don’t survive. That is not new. What Tillis is naming, though, is something narrower. He is not naming the posture. He is naming the management of the force right now, on this Secretary’s watch. He is saying the man running the building is failing at it.
The Pentagon hadn’t changed its culture since 1945. It was overdue. A Defense Secretary who looks like a soldier and acts like the war isn’t a country club — yes. A Secretary who fires generals who haven’t done their jobs — yes. I am not defending the management class that ran the building into the ground. But there is a difference between breaking a bureaucracy and breaking the force. Hegseth is doing the second thing in the name of the first.
Look at what is actually happening on his watch. The Army has now lost its Senate-confirmed civilian leader — Dan Driscoll resigned this week, with the service left without Senate-confirmed civilian leadership at the top. The Secretary has ousted plenty of top military brass during his tenure and reportedly wants them back to Quantico before the year is out. He has replaced them, by his critics’ account, with people chosen for loyalty rather than competence. Tillis says he is “intimidated by competence.” That is a serious charge. It is also a charge that fits a pattern: when the senior leader retreats to a culture-war register and a social-media register, the officers who survive are the ones who play to that register. The officers who know how to run a real staff, plan a real operation, manage a real maintenance backlog, get shown the door.
And the backlog is real. While the cable cameras watch the workout videos and the troll posts, the force is being run hard in the Middle East. The Pentagon is quietly extending troop deployments across the region — nineteen warships, air-defense units, fighter squadrons, paratroopers — all of it described in the reporting as part of an open-ended military strategy designed to give the President options. Open-ended is the word that should stop a soldier cold. Open-ended deployments are how you break a force. You break a force by extending tours past the point families can absorb, by running equipment past the point maintenance can recover, by asking the same units to do the same high-tempo missions rotation after rotation until the maintainers are working eighteen-hour days and the crews are running on three hours of sleep in a country where the days run together. The reporting says the maintenance backlog will take years to unwind. That is years the force will be running on fumes.
I have been on the receiving end of that kind of tempo. Not the worst version of it. Just enough to know what it costs the people who are not in the briefing room when the strategy gets described. The families back home are paying first. The maintainers in the motor pool are paying second. The junior officers and senior sergeants who actually have to make the broken equipment work are paying third. The strategic logic, whatever it is, is paying for none of it.
The same administration is also negotiating a civilian nuclear deal with Saudi Arabia that, by the reporting, leaves room for uranium enrichment on Saudi soil. From where I sit, what matters about that deal is what it costs the force. A new nuclear commitment is more ships, more presence, more dependents to plan around, more things that can break at three in the morning. It is a longer table of obligations being passed down to the same men and women in the same units the Secretary is already running past the point of recovery. The Secretary of Defense is supposed to be the man who tells the President what those commitments cost the force. If he is in the room and not saying it, that is a failure. If he is not in the room, that is a worse failure.
Tillis did not flinch. He should not be the last man in the system with the nerve to say what he is seeing. The men and women doing the work don’t get to pick their Secretary of Defense. They get whoever’s in the chair when they raised their right hand. They are owed someone in that chair who knows what he is breaking. Right now they are not getting that.