The Brooklyn Rail

Military leaders don’t like the current Secretary of Defense. They consider him a pseudo-masculine poseur and an unqualified loose cannon on deck. Hegseth has fired a lot of military leaders since becoming secretary. Now he’s forced out Army Chief of Staff General Randy George, the highest-ranking officer in the US Army and the top military advisor for the Army, in the middle of a war.

George had worked closely with the previous Defense Secretary, four-star General Lloyd Austin, before Hegseth came in. George was also close to Army Secretary Daniel P. Driscoll, who has repeatedly clashed with Hegseth. General George refused to remove four officers—two Black men and two women—from a promotion list when Hegseth told him to. The promotion list contained 29 other officers, mostly white. George and Driscoll both objected to the removal, citing the officers’ long distinguished records of exemplary service. Far-Right conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer attacked both George and Driscoll and pressured Hegseth to remove them. At the same time, Hegseth removed two other Army leaders: General David Hodne, leader of the Army’s Transformation and Training Command, and Major General William Green Jr., who headed the Army’s Chaplain Corps.

Previously, Hegseth forced out Col. Dave Butler, who worked closely with George, and Lt. Gen. Joe McGee, and he asked Admiral Alvin Holsey to resign as head of the US Southern Command. A whole host of other US military leaders have been fired, forced out, or resigned in disgust since Hegseth assumed power. This manic purging of the ranks of experienced officers has significantly destabilized the US military. A year ago, five former defense secretaries, including General Jim Mattis, Trump’s first Secretary of Defense, condemned the purge as “reckless” in a joint letter calling on Congress to hold “immediate hearings to assess the national security implications” of the dismissals, but Republican lawmakers refused to act.

Senior Army officers were angered by all of these dismissals and those of many other top three- and four-star officers with extensive experience. But firing the Army Chief of Staff in the middle of a war is seen as a new level of stupid.

When Hegseth insisted last September that 800 generals and admirals stationed around the world come in person to Quantico, Virginia to sit in a room and be insulted and berated by Hegseth, you could see them turn. The former Fox & Friends co-host announced to the seething generals and admirals that, under his command, the US military would no longer “fight with stupid rules of engagement.” He also said that “If the words I’m speaking today are making your heart sink, then you should do the honorable thing and resign.”

Hegseth is reportedly bitter about his own undistinguished and shortened military career, and is wildly unpopular with his own Pentagon and Department of Defense staff, who have taken to calling him “Dumb McNamara.” Hegseth’s insecurities and constant adolescent peacocking are anathema to the military ethos. In place of military bearing, he has the compensatory swagger of a privileged Princeton boy. Hegseth is what I would call an alpha-beta, like his father-surrogate Trump. Both are very good at performing, but not actually being, an alpha male.

The American people at large have long ago made up their minds about Hegseth. His approval rating is now below even that of Trump, at 35%, with 65% disapproving. He’s more unpopular than secretaries Rumsfeld or Cheney were in their worst periods.

Trump and Hegseth have attempted to turn the military into a political force where fealty to the dear leader trumps experience, valor, and wisdom, mirroring the way militaries work in authoritarian regimes in Russia, China, and North Korea. But the US military is resisting this transformation, no matter how many leaders Hegseth fires.

Hegseth was a citizen-soldier in the Army National Guard out of Minnesota and the District of Columbia who was commissioned as a second lieutenant out of ROTC at Princeton in 2003, and retired with the rank of Major in 2021. He guarded detainees at Guantanamo Bay in 2004, and volunteered for deployment to Iraq. When he was a civil-military operations officer in Samarra, his vehicle was hit by a rocket-propelled grenade that failed to detonate. He returned to active duty to teach at the Counterinsurgency Training Center in Kabul for eight months during the US troop withdrawal.

Hegseth was prevented from serving as a security officer for Joe Biden’s inauguration in 2021 after being flagged as a possible “Insider Threat” by the DC National Guard because of a tattoo on his arm reading “Deus Vult.” The Latin phrase meaning “God wills it” was used as a rallying cry during the First Crusade in 1095 and has more recently been adopted as a slogan by white supremacist and neo-Nazi groups. Hegseth then decided to end his military service in protest. This was after he voiced support for soldiers accused of war crimes in Afghanistan and said the military justice system’s crackdown on right wing extremism in the military was a sham. The day after the January 6 assault on the Capitol, Hegseth said on Fox News that the people storming the Capitol were “people who love our country” who had “been re-awoken to the reality of what the left has done” to their country.

On April 4, Timothy Snyder warned of “a coup attempt in which a president tries to nullify elections and take permanent power as a dictator,” using the war as a pretense.¹ Senator Mark Warner of Virginia, vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, has also sounded the alarm about Trump’s plan to override the elections in November.² And now Trump wants Congress to increase the defense budget by almost fifty percent, without offering any explanation for how that money will be spent. Hegseth’s purge of the military leadership is part of this plan.

On Easter Sunday morning, Trump posted this statement on his social media account: “Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell—JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah. President DONALD J. TRUMP.”