Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is at war. The enemy, for better or worse, is the U.S. military leadership and its traditional structure for promotions, training and procurement.
Hegseth announced his latest assault in a speech Wednesday afternoon to a cheering audience of junior officers and enlisted men and women. He mixed predictable rants about the media and “woke” ideology with genuinely radical calls for reforming how the military buys and uses technology.
I’m no Hegseth fan. But I like his proposal for a new “Autonomous Warfare Command” and his plan to draft defense-tech CEOs Elon Musk and Palmer Luckey and perpetual agitator Newt Gingrich for a quick 120-day study of the future of warfare. The United States is in trouble in Iran for many reasons, but a big one was the failure to anticipate the impact of drone warfare.
Hegseth, as always, was a histrionic performer, strutting across a stage backed by a huge American flag at the Marine base in Quantico, Virginia. But this wasn’t simply grandstanding by a former Fox News TV personality. It’s part of a systematic disruption campaign organized by his Pentagon team and backed by a network of online activists. Make no mistake: They’re modern-day Jacobins, and they mean to overturn military norms as aggressively as President Donald Trump has shattered those in other spheres.
“It’s a turnaround,” Hegseth told his audience. That’s putting it mildly. It’s a revolution, in the same spirit (sorry, Mr. Secretary) as Bolshevik Leon Trotsky’s 1918 attack on a bloated “privileged caste” of Russian officers. For defenders of the Pentagon status quo, the Hegseth message was: Off with their heads!
Let’s start with the part of this military populism that seems to me destructive and dangerous. Then I’ll explain why I think some of the six radical reforms Hegseth announced Wednesday are generally sensible (and long overdue) attempts to transform a sclerotic Pentagon bureaucracy.
The damaging part is Hegseth’s rage against senior military leaders. He has dismissed 26 generals and admirals since he became defense secretary and blocked or withheld the promotions of about 55 others, according to a careful count by a congressional official who helps oversee the Pentagon. This purge has driven out some of the military’s most respected combat veterans — the very warriors Hegseth claims he wants to support.
Hegseth said Wednesday he wants to go further and slash a total of 20 percent from the general officer ranks. “The number crunchers say we fired 10 percent of the generals and admirals across the force, and that number sounds about right,” he said. “We’ve also reduced the overall number of general officer slots by an additional 10 percent. So yes, 20 percent reduction across the board.”
“By hollowing out our military leadership ranks, President Trump and Secretary Hegseth have given a priceless gift to America’s enemies,” warned Sen. Jack Reed (D-Rhode Island), the top Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, in an email. “His actions are undermining the time-tested, merit-based promotion system … [and] send a chilling message to all: Don’t give your best military advice, or you may be next.”
Many Republican senators share Reed’s worry about the officer purge but don’t express it. An exception is Sen. Thom Tillis (R-North Carolina), who isn’t seeking reelection and has broken the GOP code of silence. “What Hegseth has done is arbitrary and capricious,” he told me Wednesday. “It smacks of a person who lacks confidence and experience. No qualified executive would ever do that.”
Hegseth describes in his books how his anger at the military brass began during his service with the National Guard in Iraq and Afghanistan and subsequently deepened. “The military I loved, I fought for, I revered … spit me out,” he complained. Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Arizona), a 25-year Navy veteran and former astronaut who drew Hegseth’s wrath after the senator urged military officers to resist any illegal orders, put it plainly in an interview: “He holds some sort of grievance against senior military officers, perhaps because he wasn’t one himself.”
Hegseth removed many Black and female officers; others seem to have been purged simply because they worked with leaders he didn’t like, such as Gen. Mark Milley, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Hegseth’s interference with the promotion boards that select one-star and two-star generals drew a bipartisan rebuke from the Senate Armed Services Committee. The draft National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal 2027, approved by the committee but still awaiting final passage, “requires written justification and congressional notification before officer promotions can be delayed or withheld,” according to a summary provided to me by the committee.
The danger of Hegseth’s intervention in the promotion process is that it presents officers with an intolerable choice: Join the chorus of support for Hegseth or keep your head down. Serving officers have told me they faced that dilemma. A half-dozen retired four-stars said that it will take at least a decade to repair Hegseth’s damage to the officer corps.
With that grim prelude, let’s look at some positive aspects of Hegseth’s Pentagon revolution. His team has focused on obstacles that have blocked military modernizers for six decades — the Pentagon’s addiction to legacy weapons systems and the myriad rules and regulations that make it nearly impossible for the Pentagon to spend money wisely.
“We are in a war of attrition against the Pentagon bureaucracy every single day,” Hegseth said at Quantico. Well, amen to that. Today, combatant commanders operate what amount to fiefdoms. Each service and command insists on its own modernization initiatives, snarling Pentagon-wide transformation. Rules are so complex that only the biggest prime contractors can compete. Congress keeps buying exquisite “Cadillac” weapons when what the military needs most is more cheap drones.
Hegseth promoted six initiatives to break through this Pentagon logjam. Three of them make sense; three others might make parochialism and paralysis worse, as I’ll explain.
The top proposal is to create an Autonomous Warfare Command, “Autowarcom,” which would oversee air, sea and land drone operations the way U.S. Central Command manages conflict in the Middle East. As a pathway to “drone dominance,” Hegseth proposed what he called “Project Agincourt,” named for the 15th-century battle where the longbow revolutionized warfare — in part because arrow makers operated alongside the archers. He said the goal was to “compress innovation timelines,” a worthy objective.
My worry about Autowarcom is that it could add yet another layer of Pentagon bureaucracy. War today is global. It doesn’t have neat geographical boundaries, and nearly every weapons system in every domain will have autonomous components. The truly radical idea would be to fuse the combatant commands rather than add another. Why not be even bolder?
Hegseth’s next big idea is to draft Musk, Luckey, and Gingrich for a fast independent assessment of the future of war in the age of AI and autonomy. He calls the 120-day review “Project Meridian.” (I guess “Warp Speed” was already taken.)
The three names make sense: Musk, despite the destructive folly of his DOGE chainsaw campaign, is a proven innovator at SpaceX and Tesla. Luckey’s start-up defense company Anduril is driving advances in autonomous weapons in every domain. Anduril is also rethinking production at “Arsenal,” a huge factory in Ohio where it hopes to make weapons much faster and cheaper. Gingrich is an intellectual gadfly, but he was one of the earliest champions of the new Space Force, which the Pentagon opposed but the country needed.
A final welcome idea is building reliable supply chains, energy grids and strategic reserves for key defense bases. This unfortunately is a necessary response to China’s apparent efforts to “prepare the battlefield” for any future conflict by planting malware near the water and power supplies for military bases and choking off strategic materials like rare earth minerals. Hegseth chose a bad name for this one — “Fortress America” — because it conveys an inward-looking, hunker-down message. But the need is real.
Hegseth’s fourth proposal, “The Next Great American Base,” sounds like a TV game show. He wants to build a fancy new base for 15,000 to 25,000 troops and have states bid on land grants and tax breaks to woo the Pentagon dollars. The defense budget is already a sickening version of “dialing for dollars.” If the military needs new bases, fine. But don’t turn it into a political circus.
The last two pieces of Hegseth’s revolution — on education and religion — are steps backward, not forward. They could undermine his larger effort to create the techno-warriors of the future.
Weirdly, this graduate of Princeton and the Harvard Kennedy School wants to separate the military from America’s elite educational institutions, which he claimed Wednesday are “woke factories.” He even wants to ban civilians from tenured teaching positions at the service academies.
Wednesday, in a further assault on elites, he proposed that “America’s Corps of Cadets” should be educated through a new initiative with five institutions: Louisiana State University, Liberty University, Tuskegee University, Mississippi State University and Hillsdale College. The only relevant question is whether these institutions, two with conservative religious missions, are the best places to educate America’s best and brightest warriors. Working with smaller schools is fine but, frankly, I think the future dominance of our military would be served better by closer Pentagon partnerships with top universities like Harvard, Stanford and MIT.
The final Hegseth initiative is to expand the role of religion in the military through an enhanced “Office of Religious Affairs.” Surely, we need chaplains of every faith in battle, but is a faith-based military truly the way to leap into the future?
What I’ve learned in examining Hegseth’s revolution is that it’s well organized, and propelled by people who resent the traditional military leadership as much as he does. Overseeing the promotion process, for example, is Anthony Tata, a retired brigadier general who’s serving as undersecretary for personnel and readiness.
Tata, whose time in retirement included writing military thrillers, has crusaded against what he described in a 2018 tweet as “#DeepStateCabal.” He posted about former CIA director John Brennan: “Pick your poison: firing squad, public hanging, life sentence as prison b—-, or just suck on your pistol. Your call.” (Tata later apologized for posts that were “completely out of character.”)
An example of the deep anger that drives personnel management is Tata’s deputy chief of staff, former Marine Lt. Col. Stuart Scheller. On Aug. 26, 2021, hours after the attack on Abbey Gate in Kabul that killed 11 Marines, an enraged Scheller, then serving as a battalion commander, posted a video denouncing top military leaders who “let them down.” He was relieved of duty the next day and pleaded guilty to dereliction of duty and disrespecting officers at a court-martial in October.
What’s Scheller doing now? Hegseth announced last month that he had tasked Scheller with developing a new “Joint Warfighter Evaluation” that will shape future military promotions. Several retired four-stars described this effort to transform promotion as part of “the de-professionalization of the military.”
Behind Hegseth’s team is an ecosystem that passionately supports his hard-charging approach. A self-described “watchdog” website called Restore the Military, for example, scours the internet for information that links officers with diversity initiatives, outreach efforts or activities linked to past military leaders. It’s a series of hit lists, in effect, profiling 35 officers from the Air Force, 30 officers from the Army, 20 from the Navy, four from the Space Force and two Marines.
A large number of the targeted officers are Black or female. Slashed across some photos are the words: “Retired,” “Fired” or “Dismissed.”
The Pentagon culture that Hegseth derides has many defects. Its great strength has been that it prizes and promotes good judgment. Being a strong leader wasn’t about how many pull-ups you could do, but about whether you were tough and measured enough to lead people in battle. Hegseth wrote a book denouncing the “War on Warriors.” How strange that he’s now waging a version of it himself.
The post The good, bad and dangerous in Hegseth’s Pentagon overhaul appeared first on Washington Post.
