The resignation of the Secretary of the Army might not be the most attention-grabbing piece of news coming out of the Trump administration, but there’s good reason to pay attention to what the resignation, and the man himself, tells us about the state of the American military under Pete Hegseth. Before he left, Dan Driscoll met with Trump to discuss his concerns about the damage Hegseth has done to the military.
The New York Times reports:
In a meeting with the president, Mr. Driscoll complained that Mr. Hegseth had fired some of the Army’s most combat-tested leaders, imperiling its efforts to modernize the force, military officials said.
He also warned Mr. Trump that the firings and blocked promotions have damaged morale, causing some in the military to question the fairness of a promotion system that is supposed to be apolitical and merit-based, senior officials said.
Mr. Hegseth’s purge does not appear to be driven by job performance, but rather is part of a broader effort by the defense secretary to fashion a force, particularly at senior levels, that is aligned with his political and ideological views, according to military officials.
That ideological alignment has a specific shape: NPR reports Hegseth also blocked the promotions of Black and female Army officers who had Driscoll’s backing. When Hegseth took over, the Army had 10 four-star generals on active duty; it now has five. Across the military more broadly, Hegseth has fired or blocked the promotions of more than 80 generals and admirals, roughly 10% of the armed forces’ top officer corps, with no sign of slowing down.
Driscoll is far from the caricatured version of woke, weak leadership that Hegseth continually insists our military leadership is full of. He’s a personal friend of JD Vance and a Trump political appointee, and he was leading modernization efforts, including a much-needed focus on drone warfare, that even Trump praised. But according to officials, that wasn’t enough to survive a purge aimed less at performance than at loyalty. The fact that Hegseth’s demands for compliance with his own personal agenda override even a Trump political appointee is a deeply worrying sign for the state of our military.
The Executive Watch is a project of the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism, and its flagship publication The UnPopulist, to track in an ongoing way the abuses of the power of the American presidency. It sorts these abuses into five categories: Personal Grift, Political Corruption, Presidential Retribution, Power Consolidation, and Policy Illegality. Click the category of interest to get an overview of all the abuses under it.
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