U.S. Army Secretary Daniel Driscoll resigned yesterday after months of tensions with his boss, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. His resignation as the Army’s top civilian official now leaves the service branch with no civilian secretary and no Senate-confirmed generals serving as its chief of staff (the top-ranking officer), its officer in charge of operations and its commander of Army troops stationed in Europe and Africa. |
The vacancies come at a time when the Army is playing a central role in the air-defense missions protecting U.S. personnel in the Persian Gulf, as well as in the Europe-based mission of gathering and analyzing intelligence in support of U.S. operations against Iran. |
Driscoll’s departure came as little surprise to observers, given the widely reported tensions between him and Hegseth. In April, Hegseth forced out then-Army Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George, and just last week he reportedly blocked the promotions of four Army generals associated with George, with whom Driscoll was allied. |
Though Hegseth stood between Driscoll and President Donald Trump in the Pentagon’s civilian hierarchy, as a longtime friend and former close adviser to Vice President JD Vance, Driscoll enjoyed open access to the White House. As such, he reportedly met directly with Trump last week to inform the president of his intention to resign, pointing to Hegseth’s purge of the military’s officer corps as the reason for his departure. |
The overall disruption comes at a moment of no small urgency for the Army and the U.S. military more generally. In addition to the combat missions at hand, the Defense Department is seeking to jumpstart the American military-industrial base to make up for production bottlenecks in crucial weapons platforms that have been depleted to an alarming level amid the war against Iran. |
The attrition is not limited to weapons platforms. Earlier in August, the Marine Corps canceled annual exercises with its South Korean counterpart due to personnel constraints, again due to deployments to the Gulf. And the desperate conditions on board the USS Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier after nine months of continued deployment to the Gulf highlighted the strain the Iran war is putting on an already overstretched U.S. Navy. The Pacific-based USS George Washington was recently sent to the Middle East, leaving U.S. forces in the the Asia-Pacific without a deployed aircraft carrier. |
In addition to these combat-related demands, the Pentagon is urgently seeking to adapt the force to the new landscape of next-generation technological warfare. This includes efforts to integrate and expand the use of AI-driven platforms, while also making up for lost time in internalizing the lessons from the battlefield in Ukraine, particularly with regard to drone warfare and defense. |
Driscoll was appointed to oversee that transformative process because he was considered maverick enough to “move fast and break things,” but conventional enough to do so responsibly. He also enjoyed bipartisan support on Capitol Hill, in part due to his willingness to make himself accessible to both Republican and Democratic legislators alike. |
That makes for quite the contrast with Hegseth, who since becoming defense secretary in January 2025 has engaged in a slash-and-burn campaign to purge the military of anyone and anything associated with progressive policies, which Hegseth has characterized derogatorily as “woke” and “DEI.” In practice, this has meant firing highly respected top officers who happened to be Black or women, including former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr. He has also disproportionately blocked the promotions of other women and minorities to general and flag officer rank, despite these promotions traditionally being left to the uniformed chain of command. |
In addition, Hegseth has made it a priority—including since the beginning of the Iran war—to strictly enforce fitness and grooming standards, especially when it comes to body weight and beards. The latter has included removing exemptions for religious observance and for servicemembers who suffer from a skin condition disproportionately afflicting Black men that makes shaving painful. |
To amplify his message of a culture war within the U.S. military, Hegseth has now reportedly also secretly hired a team of “military influencers” comprising veterans with high follower counts on X. At a time when the U.S. is struggling to extract itself from an ill-conceived shooting war in the Middle East, the center of gravity for Hegseth is apparently the ongoing meme wars on social media. |
Since Trump’s return to the White House last year, it has become commonplace to discuss the new administration’s impact on America’s European and Asian alliances in terms of the political questions it has raised—that is to say, how solid Washington’s commitment and dependability are when it comes to its mutual defense obligations. |
Driscoll’s resignation and the reasons behind it now raise a more immediate and concrete question, both for U.S. allies but also for Congress and the American people: how solid the U.S. military’s ability is to meet those obligations. |
This may seem like hyperbole, but the disruption and damage that Hegseth’s ideological purges, politicization of the military and mismanagement are doing to the force are corrosive to morale and retention among the enlisted personnel. And every unjustified firing or forced exit of an officer can be measured in decades of lost expertise. These are losses that cannot be replaced quickly, if at all. And they compound the material erosion of the U.S. military’s warfighting ability that, under the watch of Hegseth and ultimately Trump, is turning it into a hollowed-out force. |