Half a year in, Donald Trump’s failing war in Iran has one uncontested finding: the United States Military is performing admirably, and the man running the Pentagon is not.
It’s hardly a partisan verdict; it is one affirmed empirically by wire services, by inspectors general, by four-star officers who put their objections in writing, and, until three weeks ago, by the reporters of Stars and Stripes. What began as a targeted military operation against Ayatollah Khamenei and senior elements of the Iranian regime — purportedly a planned regime-change war against a rogue, unaccountable theocracy that has been an ever-persistent adversary of the United States — a regime-change war that I, and many other hawks, have advocated in support of for years — has morphed into the most catastrophic blunder in the history of the United States. Nobody in this administration, in six months since combat operations were initiated, has bothered to explain what follows — politically, morally, strategically, or practically. This war has left the United States, its allies in Europe, the Middle East, and across the world less safe. It has threatened the entire global economy. Six months is quite a long time to fight a war without a casus belli that could be synopsised in a single sentence. In fact, this administration has not even provided one.
The buck stops with the President, as Harry Truman once proclaimed. President George W. Bush commented on how fitting the Oval Office was round, since “there are no corners you can hide in.” President Donald Trump, in 2017 in response to the anecdote by Mr Bush, merely opined that “there’s certainly no corners.” Mr Hegseth did not start this war; President Trump did. But Mr Trump did choose Mr Hegseth to run it, a decision that will prove monumental as a testament to the failure of this presidency. By readiness, by accountability, by the honour of the institution, by the simple willingness of a Cabinet officer of the United States of America to say I take accountability, it is I who am responsible rather than pointing elsewhere.
Mr Hegseth has not said it. He is determined to run the Department of Defence as a fanatical cult, one that will not tell the truth about the war it is losing. Mr Hegseth lies about the progress of the fighting. Mr Hegseth lies about the condition of the people and ships doing the fighting. Mr Hegseth punishes the reporters whose job is to tell sailors what their own government will not. He has spent the magazines America needs for the next war. He has spent six months blaming commanders, blaming the press, blaming predecessors, blaming the fog of war itself when cornered. A Defence Secretary who cannot attest to his own decisions in a war he is running has no business remaining in the office.
He must go.
His care for the military is comparable to a negligent landlord. Six months of incompetent warfare have diminished the capabilities of the United States Military in the extreme. Combat health, medical readiness, the capacity to treat and evacuate the wounded have been gutted as much as 90 per cent in some places. CENTCOM’s operational reserve has fallen from sixteen to one; whether this metric is entirely precise or not is less relevant than the direction of travel. What is the duty of a Secretary of Defence? Consensus, convention, and conviction dictate it is to ensure the next war can be fought after the current one. The shepherd of the flock that is the men and women who serve admirably in uniform. By all accounts, Mr Hegseth spends that margin as though it is a debt never to be called upon.
Formal non-concurrence is how the chain of command is supposed to work; it means officers write, in letter, that a plan endangers force and mission both. It is the only language the Pentagon takes seriously. Mr Hegseth received no fewer than five objections from EUCOM, PACOM, SOUTHCOM, and the Chief of Naval Operations. Both Army and Air Force signed on — since when do they get along? Instead of answering these, with the diligence his office demands, Mr Hegseth offers bizarre platitudes about “maximum lethality”, “the right testosterone levels”, and an aversion to “tepid legality.”
Who pays for these inadequacies? The United States Navy in particular. Reuters reports that munitions have dwindled to a point of nearly no return, with virtually all ATACMS and PrSM stocks, along with the majority of Tomahawk, Patriot, and THAAD inventories, having been committed. Reporting on the Lincoln’s logistics strain and crew fatigue amid the longest deployment without a port call bore fruit in stories of deck safety concerns, broken plumbing, mouldy showers, inoperable laundry facilities, a lack of fresh food — no milk or fruit — resulting in a service eating its own seed corn. Conditions grew so dire that sailors had to be physically restrained from committing suicide by jumping overboard.
But most damning of all against Mr Hegseth are the dead children.
How any President, Secretary, or officer of the United States responds to that tells you all you need to know. Mr Hegseth’s Defence Department fired a Tomahawk missile at a schoolhouse of children and then spent months refusing to say the sentence that honour requires: it was ours. Iranian authorities estimate the toll at the bombed school in Minab as high as 168. American accounts, while more conservative, still place the number at above 120. Even if the Iranian source is credible, nobody can dispute that the dead were overwhelmingly children. Any death is a tragedy. There is no situation in war in which excess or unjustified deaths can be completely avoided. Wars can survive a terrible mistake, but what they cannot survive is a Pentagon that refuses introspection and to take any accountability as to what happened. The American people, the world, and even the Iranian people — to whom we harbour no animosity — deserve to know how the mistake happened, who approved the target, and what, if any, change has been made to the targeting process since. A Secretary who meets dead children with evasion has abdicated his office and duty to the nation. His evasion likely stems from cowardice; Mr Hegseth cannot admit to gutting CENTCOM’s civilian protection staffers prior to the outbreak of the war. CENTCOM was adamant they needed nine of their sixteen staffers to operate efficiently; Mr Hegseth left them with one, in sync with his quoted contempt for “politically correct and overbearing rules of engagement.”
Two decades ago, horrific images and revelations of prisoner treatment at Abu Ghraib nearly cost the United States its moral credibility as a power. The Bush administration understood that renegade soldiers, outside of the rule of law and acting unaccountable with impunity, would do more damage to the United States than any insurgent offensive could match. The power of America comes, as Bill Clinton described, via the “power of our example, not the example of our power” — America’s legal restraint, its adherence to constitutional norms, and the fact that an officer can refuse an unlawful order, no matter how powerful the man who commands it be, is a manifest testament to its exceptionalism.
Twenty years later, that credibility is all but shot. Mr Hegseth’s prescription for unidentified boats in the Caribbean was the now circulating “kill anybody”, which, if substantiated, is a law-of-armed-conflict question that a Secretary should be desperate to resolve rather than leave unanswered. In Mr Hegseth’s worldview accountability and institutions are obstacles — the things that made America a shining city on the hill to the rest of the world are “woke” and “restraining.” When all is said and done, America will surely have lost credibility it spent twenty years rebuilding.
One of the most beautiful things in a liberal democracy is the ability of a free press to hold leaders to account. It is why the Founding Fathers, in their infinite wisdom, sought fit to enshrine freedom of speech, press, assembly, and petition in the first constitutional amendment. A free press makes accountability possible; it is why tyrants fear the media more than anything else.
Which, presumably, is why Mr Hegseth moved against Stars and Stripes on 21 August, personally dismissing the staff of the paper that has documented and covered the armed forces since victory in World War II. Does a Secretary confident in his own troops and his belief that their concerns are “exaggerated” truly need to move against reporters? Or are these the actions of a timid man who fears what they may say?
The House has already drawn the proper conclusion, though it will be for posturing rather than effectiveness. Representative Yasmin Ansari of Arizona, among others, filed articles of impeachment against Secretary Hegseth, on the basis of initiating an unauthorised war (recall that even Bush sought fit to petition Congress for conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq), law-of-armed-conflict violations, mishandling of classified documents (recall when Republicans used to pretend to care about this), obstruction of oversight, politicisation of the Department of Defence, and bringing discredit upon the office he holds. Whether the House or Senate will operate upon these articles is a straightforward question — a Republican-controlled Congress, effectively a puppet of Donald Trump’s wishes and whims, has absolutely no chance of doing so. This is a separate and unencouraging question. What any semblance of justice requires is that Mr Hegseth is removed from office, whether by remedy of impeachment or a leap of faith that presumes Mr Trump has any semblance of sanity left and would move to dismiss him.
The Iranian regime — the Islamic Republic, that makes a mockery of both labels — is a fascist theocracy, riddled with corruption, rotten to the core, fundamentally irredeemable, guilty of some of the most egregious human rights violations on this Earth. Toppling the mullahs, the IRGC, or whatever it be that runs counter to what is good, is a noble aim. The incompetence, negligence, and dereliction of duty by both President Trump and Secretary Hegseth does not negate the fact that action against this regime is good. Nobody doubts the character of the regime; if the universe has any sense of justice Khamenei will face a thousand judgements from below. The case against Pete Hegseth does not rest on any sympathy for those utterly worthy of contempt.
Where the case does rest is upon his contemptible conduct in his tenure — which has left us weaker, humiliated, condemned, authoritarian, and left with a Secretary who merely shrugs: not me.
Nor should any of this touch the soldiers; the men and women in uniform have performed above and beyond in a war whose objectives their commander-in-chief cannot articulate. The men and women of the United States Military embody everything that Mr Trump and Mr Hegseth have proved themselves not: principle over person, duty over self-interest, honour and courage. It is a testament to the force that soldiers like these can be produced in a war this badly led. They deserve a Pentagon and a Defence Secretary worthy of them.
Pete Hegseth must go, not as a slogan, but as the plain conclusion the record compels any person of conviction to arrive at.