Pete Hegseth is a wrecking ball

It is difficult to fathom the damage President Donald Trump is doing to America's national security. He is making our nation more vulnerable than it has been at any time since the cloudiest days of the Cold War. Trump administration scandals come with such speed and frequency that it's easy to get lost in the weeds. One minute you're reading about potential war crimes in the Caribbean. The next moment there's a news alert about Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth's ongoing purge of generals. Then you click over and read a story about depleted stocks of some of America's most important munitions. ADVERTISING That's a fraction of the havoc the administration has wrought. In a strange way, the very frequency of the scandals works to the administration's advantage. Each new story distracts us from the last one, and we don't have a minute to pause, take a deep breath and look at the whole picture. Let's take that deep breath now. Before I do, I want to be careful not to be too alarmist. Our military is still highly capable, and we have watched it successfully execute some extraordinarily difficult missions during Trump's second term. The capture of President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela and the rescue of two downed American airmen from the heart of Iran were remarkable feats of skill and courage. There are also signs that the Navy has been slowly, painstakingly making progress toward reopening the Strait of Hormuz — traffic through the strait is well below prewar averages, but some ships are getting through. Just as the Trump administration miscalculated when it launched its war on Iran, the Iranian regime may have miscalculated when it refused to cease hostilities after winning what would have been a decisive victory through the memorandum of understanding it negotiated with the United States. It's comforting — I guess — to know that Hegseth can't undo the effects of a generations-long commitment to excellence in just 20 months. That's the end of the good news. From the top down, Trump is replacing the highly imperfect meritocracy of American public service with an idiocracy, and his corrupt idiocrats are creating profound short-, medium- and long-term harms to American national security. The short-term damage is serious enough. Even just to achieve what is at best a stalemate in the Persian Gulf, the administration has created a critical shortage in interceptors that can shoot down missiles and drones and in other precision munitions, including some of our most advanced offensive weapons. At the same time, to maintain the stalemate against Iran, the United States is drawing resources from other, more dangerous theaters of potential conflict. There are now no active carrier battle groups in the Pacific region, for example, exactly when China has ramped up its military activities around Taiwan. The lack of interceptors is escalating the crisis in Ukraine. Russia is able to pound Kyiv and other Ukrainian cities with ballistic missiles virtually at will, creating a critical vulnerability for the Ukrainian war effort. Just recently, for example, Kyiv endured the longest sustained bombing campaign on the Ukrainian capital since the opening days of the war. The Economist has also reported that Russian President Vladimir Putin is planning to throw hundreds of thousands of additional troops into the fight, and he's provoking NATO with a series of incursions so severe (including, according to the German government, an attempted drone attack at Leipzig/Halle Airport in Germany) that it prompted John Ratcliffe, the CIA director, to visit Russia to reportedly warn Putin against any further aggression. As long as Iran — a long-standing ally of Russia that's closely linked to its neighbor through the Caspian Sea — remains in the fight, it can continue to deplete our interceptors to the point where it might take years to bring our stocks back to acceptable levels, even if we ramp up production at immense cost. All of this is taking place against the backdrop of terrible self-imposed wounds to America's alliances. There are obvious immediate risks, for example, to withdrawing troops from allied nations or shortening military exercises with South Korea, but the damage done by engaging in trade wars with allies and threatening aggression against Greenland (remember that?) can't be repaired by just one administration. Our allies learned an important lesson from Trump's second election. It's not just that Trump is mercurial and unreliable, it's that the American electorate is mercurial and unreliable. More than 77 million Americans compared Trump's first term with Joe Biden's only term and said, 'More Trump, please.' Even if the next Democratic president tries to reconcile with our allies, every allied government will be asking itself, 'How long will this last?' Every prudent allied government will hedge its geopolitical bets, and that can harm the United States in incalculable ways. Our allies fear not just that they've lost Trump, but even worse, they fear that they've lost a substantial portion of the American people. The long-term threat is to the character and competence of the armed forces. They are becoming politicized, and the politicization of a military can both destroy its combat effectiveness and turn it into an instrument of domestic oppression. If you are under the delusion that Hegseth's purges are about competence more than loyalty — a welcome corrective to the excesses of DEI programs — well then, as we say in the South, bless your heart. The sycophancy that pervades Trump's second term is creating perverse incentives. I was struck by a recent piece in The Dispatch (where I used to write and still contribute to podcasts) by Mike Nelson, a former special forces officer who is a member of the Atlantic Council's Counterterrorism Project. Nelson focused on Chris LaNeve, a lieutenant general and the commander of the 8th Army in Korea. LaNeve video-conferenced in to Trump's inaugural ball to praise Trump, and Trump praised him right back. 'Is this man central casting or what?,' Trump said, 'If I'm doing a movie, I'd pick him to play my lead.' Trump did exactly that. 'In February 2025,' as Nelson writes, 'Hegseth fired Air Force Lt. Gen. Jennifer Short as his senior military adviser and named LaNeve as her replacement.' Months later, Hegseth fired Gen. James Mingus, the Army's vice chief of staff. And who did the White House name to replace him? You guessed it — LaNeve. That's not the end of LaNeve's meteoric rise. Again, here's Nelson, 'Six months after that, Hegseth fired the occupant of the Army's top job, Gen. Randy George,' who was serving as chief of staff, 'and — to quote Gomer Pyle — surprise, surprise, surprise, LaNeve has been serving as the acting chief of staff since and is Hegseth's pick to permanently fill the job, although he seems to face some pushback from GOP senators.' Maybe LaNeve is genuinely gifted enough to merit those promotions — I can't say — but the chain of events has set a terrible example for future commanders. If you pay close attention to the news, you know that my list of negative developments is woefully incomplete (for example, granting the Pentagon an ownership stake in a Venezuelan oil venture is more reminiscent of the way that the Chinese or Iranian militaries work than the way the United States military is supposed to), but it should suffice to paint a clear picture. The combination of corruption, stupidity and sycophancy — the Pentagon was recently caught surreptitiously employing conservative media influencers who reliably defend Hegseth online — that pervades the Trump administration is now infecting the Pentagon at the moment that our most powerful enemies are becoming more aggressive. I loved my time serving my country. It was one of the great honors of my life. If anything, I'm biased toward viewing the military in general and the Army in particular through rose-colored glasses. But my view is getting darker. Terrible leadership of even the most virtuous institutions can have terrible consequences. If history teaches us anything, it's that the battlefield is the most unforgiving place on earth. This article originally appeared in The New York Times. © 2026 The New York Times Company