Daily Beast chief global affairs columnist David Rothkopf offers what he contends is “The Devastating Proof Pete Hegseth Has Gone Full FUBAR.”
[T]here are few questions more certain to break the brains of even the most worthy intellectuals than this: Who is the worst member of Trump’s cabinet?
It may, indeed, be impossible to answer. Is it the former heroin addict HHS secretary who snorted cocaine off toilet seats, collects raccoon penises and opposes modern science? Is it the anti-environment interior secretary who seems like he will not be happy until every American has an endangered species for breakfast each morning? Is it the deputy White House chief of staff who sleeps hanging upside down from barn rafters and subsists on a diet of the blood of small rodents? The invertebrate secretary of state? The soon-to-be-official attorney general who sees his job as mob lawyer to the capo di tutti capi in the Oval Office?
Increasingly, however, it is becoming clear that in terms of the deep damage they have done to the United States, the sheer scope and scale of their manifold failures, the degree to which they are despised by those they are supposed to be leading, and the urgency with which we should all demand their removal from office, no one compares to our posturing, vapid, incompetencemaxxing Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth.
After that somewhat uncharitable setup, he proceeds.
Hegseth, who has been a disaster since even before he was confirmed by the somnolent U.S. Senate, had committed the one sin for which there is no absolution in Trumplandia: He made the Jabba the President look bad.
Uncharitable, I say again.
Experts in the military and veterans of the Department of Defense with whom I have spoken consider Hegseth not only to be the worst SecDef in our history—by a mile, but also believe his record is the most egregious example of defense management malpractice in our history. And that’s saying something, since this is the country that gave us the Vietnam War, the Iraq War, the Afghanistan War, blank check support for Israeli genocide in Gaza, and drunken-sailor levels of defense spending that have actually weakened us while strengthening our rivals worldwide.
Wars which dragged on for many years (in the case of Afghanistan, decades), cost the lives of thousands (in the case of Vietnam, tens of thousands) of American service members, and achieved none of the sought-after political aims are a high bar to clear on the malfeasance front.
The case against Hegseth is so extensive that it is difficult to keep track of all of his missteps, dumpster fires, and catastrophic omnishambolic cluster-goat rodeos of fiascos. His time in office will be studied for years in graduate-level classes in FUBARology.
Any single act of his s–tshow of a tenure would have been enough for any president committed to national security to demand his resignation or any Congress actually cognizant of their Constitutional responsibility to impeach him. One can only hope a change in the control of Congress leads to the kinds of investigations and consequences his redolent record demands.
That’s colorful, but supplies no proof, devastating or otherwise.
Most recently, it has come to light that in the course of the disastrous war with Iran, the United States has recklessly depleted the stockpiles of many of its most vital munitions, including Patriot and THAAD air defense systems, Tomahawk cruise missiles and vitally important precision-guided weapons like ATACMS and PrSMs. Indeed, reports suggest that, according to Reuters, the U.S. has used up “virtually all” of these latter two types of weapons systems.
The consequences of such reckless mismanagement are massive. They leave the U.S. and its allies vulnerable to foreign attack. They make it almost impossible for Trump to continue to wage the Iran war as he has been. (Which may not be a bad thing.) They will stifle our ability to provide critical systems to Ukraine to defend it from Russia. (Which Trump may embrace, given his sympathies in that war.)
This is a topic I’ve addressed many times, going back to before the onset of hostilities and as recently as yesterday morning. Given that the war was entirely one of the administration’s choosing and has seemingly achieved none of its stated objectives, it’s highly problematic.
But what’s the evidence that this is Hegseth’s fault? We know from pre-war reporting that President Trump’s hand-picked Chairman of the Joint Chiefs warned him of the issue in the run-up to the war. Unless Hegseth countermanded that advice—and I have no reason to think he did—it’s the President’s responsibility to assume risk.
Once the President gave the Go order, and Iran predictably responded by launching drones and missiles at American bases and the infrastructure of allies and partners in the region, deploying our integrated air defense systems would seem to have been the only viable alternative. Letting American service members and local noncombatants die in an ongoing war because we’re saving our interceptors up for a possible future fight with China would be a hard sell.
The stockpiles will take years and cost hundreds of billions to restore. Throughout that time, U.S. interests will be more vulnerable than they have been for decades. Further, our adversaries know what has happened and, because geopolitics, like nature, abhors a vacuum, will step in to take advantage.
What has happened should be a massive scandal. It should put to rest once and for all the idea that somehow the GOP has any kind of competence when it comes to national security. It also does not reflect well on the military top brass who went along with the decisions that put us in this position.
What is it that the military top brass were supposed to do? Disobey the lawful orders of the commander-in-chief?
But, of course, it is hardly the only current scandal associated with Hegseth’s benighted tenure.
There is, in addition, the Iran War itself. Hegseth, along with foreign policy hobbyists Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, reportedly urged Trump to enter the conflict despite masses of intelligence and military planning that guaranteed it would turn out just as it has.
The U.S. has wrought mayhem, sacrificed the men and women of our military, generated enormous civilian casualties, destabilized the region, and rocked the global economy in an illegal conflict that should never have been undertaken, has benefited the United States in precisely zero ways, and is likely to leave our adversaries stronger and our allies at greater risk and alienated from us.
To the extent Hegseth lobbied for the war, which every administration over at least the last twenty-five years avoided precisely because they understood the risks, he deserves his share of blame for its consequences. But, again, the President made the call — reportedly against the advice of his Vice President, Secretary of State/National Security Advisor, and JCS Chairman.
But again, neither the mismanagement of the war nor the folly of entering into it fully capture the devastating consequences of Hegseth’s tenure. We have also seen the DOD cover up the casualties associated with the war, which would be an administration-ending violation of the trust of the American people at any other time in our history.
That lack of transparency has carried over into a systematic effort by Hegseth to end vital press access within the Pentagon. His is the least transparent DOD in our history. Given past efforts by the department to obfuscate their errors and worse, this is really saying something.
This is indeed problematic, although it’s rife across the administration. Transparency has been declining for many years now, but this team has taken it to extraordinary new levels.
Even as the DOD seeks a massive $1.5 trillion budget, 50 percent more than any of the recent past’s already excessive defense budgets, there have also been serial revelations about massive waste, fraud and abuse in defense spending.
This includes pursuing militarily useless vanity projects like the Trump class battleships (obsolete since the 1940s), the massive Golden Dome air defense system (a technological impossibility that will devour hundreds of billions before it is declared a failure), and even billions spent on Trump pet projects like a new $7 billion fleet of icebreakers. It also includes awarding big contracts to companies controlled by the president’s children and allies.
Again, Hegseth is not the logical target of wrath here.
Beyond all this, we have Hegseth’s gutting of the military’s top leadership as a consequence of his uncontrolled sexism and racism, systematic discrimination that has cost the U.S. massive amounts of vital experience in top jobs.
We have his similarly rooted campaign to bury the teaching of the role of women and people of color in our military history and his promotion of his own, extreme religious views. We have the turmoil on his top staff.
This does indeed seem to be Hegseth’s doing, although it was an agenda advertised before Trump selected him for the post. It’s problematic for many reasons. While, in almost all instances, the replacement had comparable experience, we definitely discarded talented people, often for no justification other than that they dutifully carried out the policies of the previous administration.
We even have, if you can remember back that far, his role in the Signalgate controversy in which he provided sensitive information to a reporter in a way that was an egregious violation of the most basic kinds of operational security.
Everyone involved in that fiasco, including Vice President Vance and Secretary of State Rubio, is culpable for their gross violation of operational security. But it was then-National Security Advisor Mike Waltz who set up the chat and mistakenly added The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg.
Indeed, Hegseth’s tenure has been (and continues to be) such a screaming tragedy of a calamity of a debacle that it has generated deep unrest, discontent, and low morale throughout the military.
We feel its costs daily and will continue to do so for many, many years to come. Each additional minute he serves will be measurable in dollars wasted, strength depleted, lives lost, and vital American institutions diminished.
The only question is whether Trump is, as Hegseth might describe it, high T enough to actually fire his fair-haired Fox News boy.
Thus far Trump has only been able to summon the will to fire women in his Cabinet. Admittedly, they deserved to go. But Hegseth is the Kristi Noem of Tulsi Gabbards of Pam Bondis. The fact that he could keep his job while they lost theirs—and highly respected top military brass did too—could well be the most egregious example of white male privilege in U.S. history. Which is saying something since, contrary to what Trump and Hegseth think, U.S. history is, at its core, a story of white male privilege.
It seems simpler than that to me. Trump has surrounded himself with loyalists, many of whom have little to no traditional qualifications for the high-level posts to which they’ve been appointed. Competence, as traditionally understood, is really beside the point. So long as Hegseth continues to please Trump, he’s safe.
