The president says he isn’t getting rid of his buffoonish Secretary of Defense:
President Donald Trump said on Monday that he stood behind U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, after reports that he shared details of a March attack on Yemen's Houthis in a message group that included his wife, brother and personal lawyer.
The sloppy and possibly illegal handling of sensitive information is a good reason for Hegseth to be fired, but that is just a symptom of the incompetent, slapdash way that is running the department. Hegseth doesn’t know what he’s doing, and he falls back on his cartoonish obsession with “lethality” to try to distract from his inpetitude. His brief tenure has been marked by chaos and dysfunction, and that comes as no surprise when we recall that he had no qualifications to run a government department of this size and complexity.
Hegseth is a conventional hawk and he has been wrong on most of the big foreign policy questions of the last twenty-five years, but this isn’t about his policy views. Regardless of what he thinks the U.S. military should or shouldn’t be doing in the world, he has no business running the department. One reason why he seems to be so obsessed with firing advisers to plug leaks is that so many of the leaks expose how bad he is at doing his job.
Sharing sensitive information with his family members seems to be a regular habit. Hegseth has repeatedly included his wife in high-level meetings she shouldn’t have been able to attend. His brother is technically a Homeland Security liaison at the Pentagon (a position for which he also seems to be completely unqualified), but there would be no need for him to know details about military operations in Yemen. Hegseth is just sloppy, unprofessional, and incompetent.
Hegseth should never have been nominated or confirmed, but of course the president chose Hegseth at least partly because he was so unqualified. He wanted someone beholden to him in that position. Trump has kept Hegseth around because he wanted to have a reliable toady in charge of the military, but maybe he has become too much of an embarrassment. There are reports that the White House is looking into replacing him:
The White House has begun the process of looking for a new leader at the Pentagon to replace Pete Hegseth, according to a U.S. official who was not authorized to speak publicly.
It is a little surprising that they are looking to get rid of him. Trump has seemed pleased with how Hegseth is running his illegal war in Yemen. He said yesterday, “Ask the Houthis how he's doing.” If someone did ask the Houthis, they would probably mock Hegseth for waging a fruitless military campaign that isn’t achieving any of its stated goals. It’s not clear why Trump thinks the campaign is going so well. It is an open question how much attention Trump is paying to the war he escalated last month. It is likely that his national security team is exaggerating the success of the bombing campaign when they tell him about it.
It is no secret that the Secretary of Defense is an inept buffoon. That would be unacceptable even if the U.S. weren’t fighting an illegal war under his leadership. It’s time for Hegseth to go.
What is so maddening about the Trump appointment of Hegseth as Secretary of Defense is there was a well known and very qualified candidate for that position who would have effectively and competently implemented a policy that put America First. The name of that person is Douglas Macgregor