Why Hegseth Should Go

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The Pentagon has pulled a dozen U.S. Air Force bomber aircraft out of Britain’s Fairford air base. According to sources who spoke to the Wall Street Journal and other publications, the U.S. military feared an Iranian drone strike, perhaps modeled on last year’s audacious “Operation Spiderweb,” when the Ukrainians used drones stored in freight containers to launch surprise attacks on Russian aircraft thousands of miles away. If Fairford is any indication, one year later, the United States is still no more capable than Russia of protecting its bases against drone swarms.

That humiliating retreat by the world’s most powerful military came just a few days after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s latest lecture to a military audience in Quantico, Virginia. In his address, Hegseth once again heaped praise on himself for allegedly purging the U.S. Armed Forces of “trannies” and “beardos.” “The ideological clowns are out,” he declared. “The patriotic cowboys are in—with testosterone testing on top.” One wonders what that means and why he is so obsessed with soldiers’ hormones. He announced an effort to promote adoption of new technologies with the help of Elon Musk (whose many defense-related investments make him a walking conflict of interest), drone tycoon Palmer Luckey (another administration crony), and Newt Gingrich (the elderly Republican ex-congressman who seems to have little in the way of technological expertise). Hegseth railed about the treasonous press, trumpeted the alleged successes of his war on Iran, and denied the devastating morale crisis on the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln—but had nothing to say about America’s broader strategic goals or its relationship with its many allies around the globe, who are far and away the biggest force multiplier in the U.S. arsenal.

The Pentagon has pulled a dozen U.S. Air Force bomber aircraft out of Britain’s Fairford air base. According to sources who spoke to the Wall Street Journal and other publications, the U.S. military feared an Iranian drone strike, perhaps modeled on last year’s audacious “Operation Spiderweb,” when the Ukrainians used drones stored in freight containers to launch surprise attacks on Russian aircraft thousands of miles away. If Fairford is any indication, one year later, the United States is still no more capable than Russia of protecting its bases against drone swarms.

That humiliating retreat by the world’s most powerful military came just a few days after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s latest lecture to a military audience in Quantico, Virginia. In his address, Hegseth once again heaped praise on himself for allegedly purging the U.S. Armed Forces of “trannies” and “beardos.” “The ideological clowns are out,” he declared. “The patriotic cowboys are in—with testosterone testing on top.” One wonders what that means and why he is so obsessed with soldiers’ hormones. He announced an effort to promote adoption of new technologies with the help of Elon Musk (whose many defense-related investments make him a walking conflict of interest), drone tycoon Palmer Luckey (another administration crony), and Newt Gingrich (the elderly Republican ex-congressman who seems to have little in the way of technological expertise). Hegseth railed about the treasonous press, trumpeted the alleged successes of his war on Iran, and denied the devastating morale crisis on the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln—but had nothing to say about America’s broader strategic goals or its relationship with its many allies around the globe, who are far and away the biggest force multiplier in the U.S. arsenal.

Until just a few years ago, Hegseth’s Pentagon mismanagement would have counted as a national scandal. For more than seven months of President Donald Trump’s ill-conceived war on Iran, U.S. lawmakers have shown themselves unwilling to demand accountability for policies that have resulted in manifest damage to U.S. national interests. It’s not just the Iran war, which has so far resulted in serious damage to America’s most important base in the Gulf (its naval base in Bahrain), its alienation of regional allies, or the stunning depletion of U.S. precision weapons to an extent that limits American deterrence elsewhere.

Hegseth has gone out of his way to undermine Washington’s relationships with its European allies. He has gutted the senior ranks of Pentagon leadership without explaining the criteria for his decisions (although the fact that their ranks included a disproportionate number of African Americans and women offers a clue). He has embarked on a broad campaign to curtail the powers of the internal agencies that make sure the military adheres to its own laws as well as international rules of conduct. He has repeatedly made clear his contempt for any constraints on the “lethality” of his warfighters—as he has shown with his department’s attacks on alleged drug-smuggling boats in the Caribbean and Pacific without any hint of legal procedure. (As one retired general put it to me: “It’s like you’re standing on a highway in Texas, and you see a truck going by. Maybe it’s a bunch of people in that truck. And you say, no, I think they’re carrying drugs. And then a state trooper just lights it up. You can’t do that.”) Throughout it all, Hegseth has shown serene contempt for his critics both inside and outside of Congress. His sense of his own impunity has been truly astounding—perhaps because he knows that Trump has always had his back.

But something may finally be changing. On Oct. 8, Hegseth announced that the Department of Defense will livestream the execution of Nidal Hasan, the convicted terrorist who killed 13 people at an Army base in 2009. The news triggered dismay from both Democrats and Republicans—most strikingly from Vice President J.D. Vance, who publicly said that he didn’t plan to watch. A few days later, Trump himself declared that the decision to air the execution wasn’t final and expressed misgivings about the idea to some of his advisors. Has Hegseth finally gone too far?

U.S. Rep. Thomas Massie suddenly looks very prescient. On Sept. 15, the Republican congressman introduced a resolution to impeach Hegseth. Many media outlets ignored Massie’s proposal; the New York Times, for example, didn’t even deign to mention it at first. The paper may have followed a simple logic in deciding that it was a nonevent: Why report on a measure that stood little chance of getting a two-thirds majority in the Senate? Many observers assumed that the lame-duck Massie—a long-standing anti-Trump Republican who lost his Kentucky district’s primary earlier this year to a Trump-backed candidate—didn’t have the game to mount a serious challenge.

Yet subsequent events have shown that Massie might be on to something. One day after he introduced his resolution, House Speaker Mike Johnson abruptly announced that he was adjourning the House until after the November midterms. His move prompted speculation that he was keen to avoid a floor vote on Hegseth’s impeachment, suggesting that the defense secretary has become damaged goods. Pollsters then found that 51 percent of Americans approve of the defense secretary’s impeachment (including 22 percent of self-identified Republicans). The Iran war is hugely unpopular among many Republicans, a discontent that reaches well into Trump’s MAGA base. And Hegseth has angered many members of Congress from both parties with his cavalier rejection of their demands for transparency on budgets and casualty figures.

The eight articles of Massie’s resolution were calculated to remind House members of Hegseth’s aggressive encroachment on congressional prerogatives. The text accuses the defense secretary of ignoring the 1973 War Powers Act, which specifically requires congressional authorization for war; ignoring laws that minimize civilian casualties (in reference to the U.S. missile attack on a girls’ school early in the Iran war); and illegally abducting a foreign sovereign leader (former Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro). It indicts Hegseth for “extrajudicial killings” in the war on drugs. And it also assails him for threatening to retaliate against U.S. Sen. Mark Kelly, one of several ex-military officers who called on current members of the armed forces to reject illegal orders, as well as for his vows to punish other former service members for criticizing the Defense Department. Massie’s resolution rightly characterizes these offenses as an egregious infringement of the freedom of expression.

It’s a powerful case. In addition, Hegseth is at the center of massive policy failures that don’t necessarily meet the strict “high crimes and misdemeanors” bar set by the U.S. Constitution for impeachment. The defense secretary’s startling disinterest in strategic planning or foreign policy would have been a big problem on its own—but it is a deficiency fatefully compounded by his dogged willingness to follow his commander in chief into one of the biggest and riskiest overseas adventures in a generation. Neither Hegseth nor Trump has yet to articulate why curtailing Iran’s nuclear program necessitated an all-out war to topple the government in a country of 93 million people. Nor have they addressed how the United States should go about balancing this effort with deterring China in the Indo-Pacific or protecting U.S. interests in Europe.

Hegseth’s single-minded devotion to lethality illustrates the point. His obsession is a bizarre strategic priority for a military that has already demonstrated a considerable capacity for killing in recent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Historically speaking, by the way, few countries can rival Nazi Germany’s military in sheer lethality: Hitler’s troops killed upwards of 20 million people during World War II, but Germany still lost the war.

The same contempt for rigorous thinking extends to Hegseth’s efforts to depict himself as a heroic reformer. That the Defense Department urgently needs modernization is beyond dispute. Just take the military exercises in April and May in which participating Ukrainian drone operators dramatized just how far the U.S. has fallen behind on the modern battlefield: The Ukrainians managed the simulated destruction of an entire U.S. armored brigade. (It should be noted that quite a few Ukrainian soldiers—who have successfully held one of the world’s biggest militaries at bay—wear beards and don’t always correspond to Hegseth’s vision for the male physique.) Obsessing over waist-to-height ratios and personal grooming will hardly address the festering inefficiency of Pentagon procurement or the shortcomings of domestic defense production. Reforms require careful knowledge of the matter at hand. Hegseth is a change agent who seems to have minimal understanding of the thing he’s trying to change.

As the proud embodiment of a war that seems to be losing supporters by the day, Hegseth looks increasingly like a political liability. The New York Times recently reported on several Republican candidates who have called for an end to the war during their midterm campaigns. Trump knows that his failed new forever war is a liability. At this point, few political observers in Washington would be surprised to see Hegseth become Trump’s fall guy for the Iran debacle. Impeachment might not even be needed in the end.

This post is part of FP’s ongoing coverage of the Trump administration. Follow along here.