Pete Hegseth has not held a formal Pentagon press briefing since May 5th. There is a war on. Fifty thousand American troops are deployed in the Middle East. And according to people who have spent their careers in uniform, the man running the whole operation is too busy eyeing a 2028 presidential run to do his actual job.
The Republican Breaking Point
Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina is not exactly a left-wing agitator. He is a Republican, a Trump-era survivor, and a man who has spent years threading the needle between his own conscience and the demands of MAGA loyalty. This week, he stopped threading.
"I have never witnessed more inept management of the brave men and women who serve our country," Tillis wrote on social media, calling directly on Trump to fire his defense secretary. "He is intimidated by competence and retreats to ginning up culture wars instead of soberly attending to the vital work of our national defense and the health and wellbeing of our fighting force."
This is not a Democrat saying this. This is a Republican senator, one who is stepping down after repeated clashes with Trump, using his last months in office to say the quiet part out loud. When members of your own party start publicly demanding your firing during an active war, you have cleared some kind of bar.
Generals Are Calling Him a 'Clear and Present Danger'
Tillis is not alone. The Guardian reports that Randy Manner, a retired major general in the US National Guard, called Hegseth "a clear and present danger to the national security of the United States and the world." Manner, who serves with National Security Leaders for America, a group of former senior military officials, went further: "He has done more harm to the national security of the United States than any secretary of defense since the country was created."
That is not a talking point. That is a career military officer making a historical argument, on the record, about the man currently in charge of the world's most powerful military. It would be shocking in any other era. Right now it barely cracked cable news for a full cycle.
Meanwhile, the Pentagon's official response to all of this, per The Guardian, is that suggestions of disarray are "completely baseless." Sure.
The War Nobody Can Explain
Here is some context that matters. The United States has been at war with Iran since late February. More than 150 people, including 120 children, were killed when missiles struck an elementary school in the city of Minab on the first day of the conflict. The US has not formally admitted responsibility. A military investigation is, apparently, ongoing.
Strikes resumed last week near the Strait of Hormuz, hitting Iranian mainland targets and islands in the Gulf. Iranian media reported that five people, including a six-year-old child, were killed when a missile hit a wedding party in the southern city of Kuhestak. Iranian authorities called it a war crime.
And nobody, including the people advising this administration, seems to know what the strategy is. Kevin Carroll, a former army colonel and military intelligence officer who served in the offices of the defense secretary and joint chiefs of staff, told The Guardian: "We tried decapitating their leadership. That didn't work. We tried going after their missile program. We were not able to destroy it. Tried sinking the navy, but they still maintain a mining capability." Carroll's summary of the target set being pursued: "It's not clear what this target set is intended to do."
Commanders Said No. Hegseth Said Whatever.
The Washington Post reported on contents of the Secretary of Defense Orders Book from August 14th, a classified document that was leaked. According to The Guardian's coverage, it showed that Hegseth extended military deployments into the middle of next year over the formal objections of multiple commanders, who filed what are known as "non-concurs." Those commanders argued the extensions could leave the US unable to meet its commitments elsewhere and would put unacceptable strain on forces already at sea too long.
Hegseth extended the deployments anyway. The US currently has 50,000 troops and 19 warships in the region, partly enforcing a naval blockade on Iran. Nate Swanson, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council and former White House and State Department adviser on Iran, told The Guardian the move reflects an administration that has "recognized the fact that the past six months has failed, but they don't know what to do."
Swanson also suggested that Trump himself wants out of the conflict but wants to exit in a way that lets him look strong. So the troops stay. The ships stay. The war continues without a coherent objective, and the guy nominally in charge of all of it has not taken press questions about any of it in four months.
The Pentagon Is Eating Itself
It is not just external critics. The Guardian reports that internal discord at the Pentagon has broken into the open again, with the resignation of the Army secretary, fresh revelations of blocked promotions, and leaked accounts of resistance from military brass over the deployment extensions.
This is what a Defense Department looks like when it is being run by someone who, according to The Guardian, has reportedly told associates he is considering a 2028 Republican presidential run. The former Fox News host who could not get a security clearance without intervention from the White House is now, apparently, preparing his next political move while managing an active war with a nuclear-adjacent adversary.
The Pentagon has 50,000 troops in a war zone. Their bosses are leaking classified documents to the press because they cannot get anyone to listen to them through official channels. The defense secretary last answered questions from the press on May 5th. And the culture war content keeps rolling.
The Dingo Take
A retired major general calling the sitting defense secretary the most dangerous to hold the office in American history is not a partisan attack. It is a professional assessment from someone who spent a career studying what national security failure looks like up close. When that assessment is echoed by a sitting Republican senator who is specifically walking out the door because he got tired of the nonsense, you do not have a media narrative. You have a verdict.
What is genuinely staggering here is the scale of the gap between what is happening and what is being treated as normal. Kids are dying in missile strikes. Commanders are filing formal objections and getting overruled. The Army secretary resigned. Classified deployment orders are being leaked to the Washington Post by people who apparently have no other option. And the man at the center of it has not faced a formal press briefing in four months, because why would he? There are no consequences. There is no accountability. There is just the next political brand to build.
Hegseth reportedly wants to run for president in 2028. On what record, exactly? The one where he presided over a war without a strategy, ignored his own commanders, blocked promotions of people more qualified than him, and spent his tenure tilting at culture war windmills while Americans in uniform were extended into a conflict nobody can coherently explain? That record. He is betting that none of this matters to the base that would vote for him. And the horrifying thing is, he might not be wrong.
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