The top echelon of Pete Hegseth’s Pentagon has dissolved into a circle of mutual recrimination and enmity worthy of a Mexican standoff from a Quentin Tarantino film.
Three top aides were ousted about a week ago over accusations of leaking, and then the chief of staff whom the other aides accused of conspiring against them was moved out of his role, before getting ousted, too. Were the aides leaking, or wrongfully accused? Was the chief of staff protecting Hegseth, or his own power? What haven’t we yet learned?
Who knows, and who, really, at the end of the day cares about petty rivalries?
The chaos has fed juicy press accounts of the ugly, tangled bureaucratic struggle and made it open season, once again, on Hegseth. Although this is all very interesting for Beltway observers, it only matters insofar as it is making reforming the Pentagon, and preparing it for a no-kidding war with China, more difficult, if not impossible.
Hegseth has been blaming disgruntled former employees for the leaks and “hoaxsters” in the media for driving the story. It doesn’t speak well of his management skills, though, that this meltdown has happened among his own closest advisers. This isn’t “the Deep State” resisting Hegseth but the people he brought in to help control the bureaucracy collapsing into total dysfunction.
Of course, Hegseth’s advocates never claimed that he was a great administrator. They touted his reform agenda, youthfulness, loyalty to Trump, and communication skills. The hope was that he’d find someone else to run the building for him. That’s where he’s failing.
Since Trump doesn’t like to bow to media feeding frenzies, Hegseth is likely to survive and get another bite of the apple.
He’d be well advised to realize that he needs a very strong, experienced chief of staff who has a relationship with the generals, knows the defense industry, and has the deft political touch to manage the building, the White House, and Capitol Hill. This person is almost certainly not in Hegseth’s current circle of trust (which seems to have inevitably shrunk as he has become embattled). The secretary should dismiss ideological litmus tests that could narrow the options further in what is already an inherently small pool of people. Whether a new chief of staff is a restrainer or a hawk, he or she is not going to be deciding whether to launch wars or not; this person simply needs to be competent. A good place to look is current or former staff directors or policy directors of the armed services committees on Capitol Hill, and top defense executives.
The sooner the focus can get back to the reforms Hegseth is pushing, the better. Those include creating greater lethality in the military, fixing the war colleges, promoting leaders focused on war-winning, putting more of an emphasis on physical fitness, and streamlining the budget process and ensuring spending goes to the most urgent priorities.
“It’s a slip and not a fall,” Abraham Lincoln once famously said. Hegseth has stumbled badly, but with the right help, it needn’t be a fall.