| Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth Alex Kent/The New York Times |
Hegseth’s military
The New York Times |
It’s been a weird summer for the Pentagon. Its leaders depleted much of the U.S. arsenal in a war with Iran. They’ve pushed out some of the most promising generals because the officers once said or did something that looks like “D.E.I.” They had to call home an aircraft carrier when the crew became demoralized about its much-longer-than-promised deployment. Then they punished a military newspaper that covered those sailors. This week, the Army’s civilian leader threw up his hands and quit.
This is the military under Pete Hegseth, the aggressively MAGA secretary of defense — well, secretary of war, if Congress ever makes it official. Political appointees come and go from the Pentagon, and it’s their job to advance the president’s agenda. But reporting in The Times over the last year and a half shows how far Hegseth has gone to remake the agency in MAGA’s image.
The armed forces today are not the ones you grew up with. Four Times reporters — Helene Cooper, John Ismay, Greg Jaffe and Eric Schmitt — have chronicled a chaotic transformation.
What’s happened
The changes fall into three categories.
Ideology. President Trump campaigned against diversity efforts, and his defense secretary, a former Fox News host, has prosecuted that case with zeal. Hegseth has removed books from libraries and schools on military bases. Toni Morrison and James Baldwin are gone from classes at West Point, and sociology — a discipline that inherently studies identity — is no longer a major there.
Officials told a geographer on the faculty that he couldn’t teach about the human causes of climate change. Hegseth has degrees from Princeton and Harvard, but he barred officers from graduate programs at Ivy League schools because they are “factories of anti-American resentment and military disdain.”
Staffing. Hegseth says he wants to streamline the officer corps and make it more effective. But his cuts and his decision not to promote some 80 specific people — about 10 percent of the top officer corps — suggest his focus is elsewhere. More than half of the officers affected are Black or female.
Some were apparently targeted for: writing a paper on why some Black officers choose logistics roles over combat; encouraging their troops to get the Covid vaccine; and serving in Afghanistan at the same time as the military’s withdrawal there. Now much of the department is rudderless, our reporters say.
Transparency. Do you remember the first Gulf war? The generals were on TV constantly, wielding pointers and maps to explain the day’s maneuvers. After Sept. 11, similar briefings came daily. Today, we rarely hear from the brass, even though the United States is at war. The last Pentagon press conference was in May.
Hegseth says reporters cover American casualties to “make the president look bad.” (The Times has sued the administration for restricting our journalists’ reporting on the agency.) Officials also don’t answer questions from Congress about the firing of officers or the endgame in Iran. “They seem to think that any effort to engage the public endangers America,” Greg told me.
What’s at stake
Some of this is just about vibes. For generations, the Pentagon built a corps of leaders who acquired graduate degrees at top schools and spoke eloquently about global strategy. They were overwhelmingly white men, though other groups were steadily making headway. Whatever you think about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the people who led them often thought of themselves as humanists, students of history, warrior-poets.
Hegseth seems to see this as weak and unfocused. He has said women don’t belong in combat and discharged trans service members. He did away with some rules of engagement and said the department’s priority was “lethality.” He closed an office that worked to prevent collateral damage against civilians. He offers testosterone to soldiers, insists that men shave their beards (even the ones grown for medical reasons) and appears in sweaty videos pumping iron with the troops.
| President Trump and Hegseth in Dover, Del., in July, attending the transfer of a service member killed in the Iran war. Kenny Holston/The New York Times |
But other changes may systemically weaken the armed forces, experts say. The targeted firings make it look as if some types of Americans are not welcome in the military, or at least not in its leadership. And the insistence on ideological conformity makes it harder to get unvarnished advice from experienced combatants. If you want to be promoted, you have to mouth the right views.
We’ve already seen caution set in. Gen. Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, says his job is not to tell the president whether an idea is good or bad but to present a range of options and their risks. That’s a departure. His predecessors, for instance, pleaded with President Biden not to withdraw from Afghanistan. Yet when the commander in chief made his call, they carried it out.
This is the idea that underpins two centuries of military leadership: The generals can be trusted, their personal views notwithstanding, to follow orders.