Is a Military Coup Unfolding at the Pentagon?
The Hegseth scandal threatens civilian control of the military
Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth is embroiled in yet another scandal, but there’s a far greater crisis lurking behind his leaky ship, one that has real consequences for America.
It is a campaign of subversion carried out by the military brass, one that is undermining the very principle of civilian control of the military. Through leaks, forced firings, insubordination and other forms of bureaucratic intransigence, the Pentagon bureaucracy is going out of its way to destroy his tenure (something he was plenty capable of himself!)
“As much as Hegseth’s detractors might be right that he is chaotic and ‘unqualified,’” a senior serving officer said in an email exchange with me this week, “he is Senate confirmed. It’s up to Donald Trump to remove him, not the uniformed military because they want someone else to lead them.”
Hegseth is, of course, a dumbass. He vows to bring back a “warrior culture” but all I see is a culture warrior. His focus on fighting “wokeness” in the military is a tedious detour into AM radio slop, especially while the U.S. is engaged in real wars in Europe, the Middle East, Africa and here at home.
Uniformed military officers and Pentagon officials I’ve talked to agree with this assessment, and they agree that those trying to defeat Hegseth are operating dangerously outside their lane. As one said to me over the weekend, “you can’t say you’re defending your oath and the Constitution while working to undermine it.”
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Monday that “the entire Pentagon is working against” Hegseth. Whatever you think of Hegseth or the hyperbole, this is not good for America.
We have a civilian in charge of the military (with the president as “commander-in-chief”) to ensure that the military is accountable to the people and their elected representatives, not to the whims of those in uniform. “If there is one basic element in our Constitution, it is civilian control of the military,” President Harry Truman once said. The general and admirals don’t get to decide their priorities, or their budget, or even their own terms of service.
As Secretary of Defense, Hegseth is supposed to embody civilian control of the military, a civilian who oversees the Pentagon, not a part of it. Yet his office has been all but hollowed out in recent days, with five of his top aides being mysteriously drummed out. This includes:
Hegseth’s Chief of Staff Joe Kasper,
Hegseth’s Deputy Chief of Staff Darin Selnick,
Hegseth’s senior advisor Dan Caldwell
Hegseth’s assistant for public affairs, John Ullyot, and
Colin Carroll, Chief of staff to the Deputy Defense Secretary.
Caldwell, one of the people fired, alluded to the dynamic in a Monday interview:
“… let's be honest, everyone knows where that's [the leaks] coming from. It's from the career staff who don't like what the president and the secretary and vice president wanna do. There's people on the joint staff that I’ve come to respect, but a lot of them are incredibly hostile to the secretary, to the president, and the vice president's worldview.”
“For all the concern people have been expressing about a constitutional crisis, we’re closer to one here than we are with immigration,” a senior retired general officer tells me.
As he and others I talked to have explained, Hegseth is being undermined and perhaps even drummed out of office by the uniformed military, aided by the permanent bureaucracy. One official told me that there had been tension between Hegseth’s office and the top commander in the Middle East over policy and priorities. A senior military intelligence specialist told me that Hegseth is near-universally loathed by the uniformed colleagues he works with.
On the rare occasion these days that civilian control has been raised at all by the press, it’s inverted to say that the firing of this or that general somehow undermines civilian control of the military. These same stories often quote generals criticizing the firings with zero awareness of the irony.
In some cases civilian control is outright dismissed as an annoying detail. Former Council on Foreign Relations president Richard N. Haas scoffed at the relevance of civilian control on MSNBC’s Morning Joe yesterday. “You’ve got, obviously, civilian primacy, but, you know, you have a civilian in the Pentagon who’s violating rules,” he said.
Instead what we get in the news media is a titillating blow-by-blow, with military brass leaking unflattering but often frivolous details about Hegseth’s conduct. It is direct retaliation on the part of the bureaucracy, what Donald Trump calls the “Deep State.”
“I’m not comfortable with a cabal of officers agitating to undermine civilian control,” the retired general officer says. He points out that liberals and Trump-haters should equally be concerned. “If Bernie Sanders were president and he was slashing the defense budget, I would imagine that people would be zealously defending him, saying that cutting back the military is the will of the American people, that that’s why they elected him in the first place.”
More than just the abstract concerns about civilian control, the stakes are very real. Now with the departures of Hegseth’s top civilian aides, the Pentagon brass is more empowered to run defense policy with minimal interference. This comes in the context of a growing war on the southern border and ongoing tensions with Iran, tensions which nearly culminated in a massive joint U.S.-Israeli strike, as the New York Times reported last week.
As the Times describes it, while Trump officials opposed military action, including Hegseth, Michael (“Erik”) Kurilla, the four-star Army general and leader of U.S. Central Command, wanted to join Israel. The military was scrambling to develop an operations plan to attack Iran, largely, according to the Times, because Kurilla was nearing retirement and wanted to go out with a bang.
Per the Times:
“... even if U.S. assistance was forthcoming, Israeli military commanders said that such an operation would take months to plan. That presented problems. With General Kurilla’s duty tour expected to conclude in the next few months, Israeli and American officials wanted to develop a plan that could be carried out while he was still in command.”
With a record number of B-2 bombers and two aircraft carriers deployed in the region, the military is doing what it does, which is to be ready when the President and the Secretary of Defense gives the order. But a military commander going rogue and “preparing” for a strike, with the added danger that he maneuvers his forces in such a way to possibly cause an inadvertent war? That’s the very reason the Secretary of Defense is in the chain of command.
Part of the reason civilian control gets so little attention is because of how much it’s been eroded already. When Barack Obama became president, he hired a retired general to be his national security advisor, and he hired retired generals and admirals as the CIA director and the Director of National Intelligence. Obama was clearly trying to shore up his national security credentials, but the move also politicized the military in that these were Democrat generals and admirals. Since then, some of those appointees (Mike Hayden, for example) have become vociferous Trump critics and regulars on the partisan circuit.
This isn’t just a Democrat problem, though. When Donald Trump nominated retired Marine Corps General James Mattis, the “warrior monk,” to be his first Secretary of Defense in 2017, it was the first time since 1950 that a retired general had been selected for the civilian position (and only the second time in U.S. history). Retired generals are forbidden by law from serving as Defense Secretary before a seven-year “cooling off” period, but Trump waived the requirement.
Mattis ended up quitting because of a dispute with Donald Trump over the president’s desire to remove U.S. troops from Syria, but the tenure left behind a sense that a retired general knew better, basically the opposite of what the Constitution sought to establish.
When Joe Biden became president, he selected retired Army General Lloyd Austin to be his Secretary of Defense. Democratic congressman Jared Golden, a member of the Armed Services committee and a Marine Corps veteran, voted against Austin. Per his statement:
“History shows that Congress has long respected and taken seriously the requirement of civilian control and provided a waiver for only the most exceptional circumstances. I do not believe we find ourselves in such circumstances today.”
Senior military officials also tell me that many of the top military commanders bristle because the Secretary of Defense was “only” a Major when he served in the military, and thus is far beneath them.
Congressman Adam Smith, ranking member on the Armed Services committee, even told Anderson Cooper yesterday that Trump’s new Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Dan Caine “seems like a decent person, but he’s [only] a three star general,” to give you a sense of that world’s obsession with rank.
I invite the congressman to consider how many wars his brilliant four stars have won. Why should they be in charge?
— Edited by William M. Arkin
This is one where I’m not sure I see it the same way you do. I think Trump’s dismantling of military leadership has already been a serious threat to the stability of the country. He deliberately fired top JAG officers to weaken military accountability and internal checks and balances. Hegseth isn’t just some bozo; he’s part of this larger effort to shit on career military leadership and send a message: fall in line or face termination. The pushback we’re seeing from military leaders is an organized system trying to defend itself against toxic leadership.
And honestly, I think if these leaders believed they could reason with Trump, they would try. But at this point, it’s obvious to everyone involved that you can’t reach him. The more you challenge him, the more he doubles down or becomes inured to his approach. So there’s no point. This resistance and sabotage is the only tools they feel they have to stop him. And make no mistake. I truly feel that if he doesn’t get undermined by military leadership, there will come a day where he will ask the military to go against American people. Personally, I think he’s just waiting for that day.
As Ken already anticipates in this article, any sign that the military will resist Trump is desperately welcome news to liberals. Concerns about constitutionality and civilian control are complicated by the manifest fact that the Trump administration acts with complete contempt for the constitutional limits of executive power. The constitutional crisis is already here.