Pete Hegseth was facing new claims of chaos in his running of the Pentagon on Tuesday in a bombshell report about his handling of aid to Ukraine.
The embattled secretary of defense was revealed to have caused confusion on three continents with a verbal order to ground planes flying military supplies to Ukraine without anyone else—possibly including President Donald Trump—knowing.
The report, by Reuters, detailed how an order from his office at the end of January led to 11 flights carrying materiel, including artillery shells, being kept on the ground in Qatar. In a matter of hours, Ukrainian authorities began to panic about the whereabouts of the critical aid—with confusion spreading from Europe back to the White House, where senior officials had no idea what was happening. In later conversations with Kyiv, the Trump administration explained the momentary pause as “internal politics,” Reuters reported.
The pause was then lifted, allowing the materiel to be transported to Ukraine.
It is the latest allegation of mismanagement to hit Hegseth, a former Fox News weekend anchor and National Guardsman with no government experience, and comes after he detailed battle plans on one Signal group chat to which a journalist was accidentally added, and on a second Signal group which included his wife and his brother.
The new report from Reuters said that Hegseth’s office issued the stop order to the private contractors on January 30, after a meeting in the Oval Office about Ukraine policy. The meeting did not end with a formal order from Trump to end all assistance—but Hegseth did anyway.
The White House pushed back on an aspect of the Reuters report that Trump knew nothing about Hegseth’s actions, saying that he was following a “directive” from Trump but did not deny that other officials had no idea what he had done.
“Negotiating an end to the Russia-Ukraine War has been a complex and fluid situation,” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told Reuters. “We are not going to detail every conversation among top administration officials throughout the process.” The White House pointed the Daily Beast to that comment; the Pentagon did not respond to a request for comment.
The details of the Reuters report show that canceling the contracted flights cost the U.S. Transportation Command (TRANSCOM) either $2.2 million—according to records reviewed by Reuters—or $1.6 million, the figure suggested by a spokesperson for the military unit, who said that one of the canceled flights was not subject to any charge.
As well as Signalgate, Hegseth has been hit by a torrent of missteps in the Pentagon. He has fired a series of officials in a probe into “leaks”—all of whom were hand-picked Republican activists, not long-term civil servants. He is reported to have threatened to polygraph the then-chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff over the alleged “leaks,” and has been bringing his wife to meetings, as well as putting up an eyebrow-raising number of pictures of her in the Pentagon.
Jennifer Hegseth is his third wife. The two married after they had a love child while they both cheated on their spouses. After their child’s birth, Hegseth had a drunken sexual encounter in a Monterey hotel with a woman who accused him of sexual assault; he denied that, but admitted to cheating on his mistress with the woman. He and his third wife met at Fox News where she was his show’s executive producer; he has also brought in one of her former producer colleagues and apparent best friends as a press aide.
Fired aides have painted a picture of a paranoid and increasingly isolated figure who puts on shows of working out with members of the forces under his command for show.
“If you look at a pie chart of the secretary’s day, at this point, 50 percent of it is probably leak investigation. Press. It’s that,” one of the fired aides, Colin Carroll, said during an episode of The Megyn Kelly Show.
“That’s a bad thing for America. It’s a bad thing for the president’s objectives,” added Carroll, who had served as chief of staff to the deputy secretary of defense. “And in order to combat that image, it’s like, ‘Hey, I’m gonna go work out with the troops.’”
When confronted about Hegseth’s blunders last month, Trump awkwardly told The Atlantic, “I think he’s gonna get it together.”
Amid other intrigue, last Tuesday, Hegseth ended the Pentagon’s Women, Peace, and Security program, which he labeled too “woke.” Trump had actually championed the program himself and it was created by two of his fellow Cabinet members, Marco Rubio and Kristi Noem.
On Monday, secretary ordered a 20 percent reduction of four star generals and admirals, the most senior of all members of the military and a 10 percent reduction of overall general-level officers in the military.
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