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. This is basically the phrenology of fitness metrics, right up there with BMI.
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.
Brynn Tannehill is a Naval Academy graduate, former naval aviator, author, and senior defense analyst. She currently lives in British Columbia, Canada, with her wife and three children.
