The Purge, the Pentagon, and a Secretary of War Unraveling
Dan Driscoll is only the latest to walk away. Two dozen generals, admirals and service leaders have been fired, forced out or driven to resign under Pete Hegseth. What is left behind is a military stripped of experience, a chain of command shadowed by war-crimes allegations, and an accountability crisis reaching straight into the Oval Office.
On Monday evening, the White House confirmed that Army Secretary Dan Driscoll had submitted his resignation after just eighteen months in the job. The White House statement praised him. The reporting told a different story. According to sources across three news outlets — NBC News, ABC News and the Wall Street Journal — Driscoll’s departure was the direct result of prolonged clashes with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth over the firing of top Army generals and the direction of the service. He is the third Senate-confirmed service leader to exit under Hegseth. He will not be the last.
Driscoll had been widely regarded on Capitol Hill as one of the more competent Trump appointees at the Pentagon. He was a combat veteran of the 10th Mountain Division, a friend of Vice President JD Vance from their days at Yale Law School, and the youngest Army secretary in modern memory. Reuters reported he had raised specific concerns with the administration about Hegseth “blocking” Army transformation and readiness efforts through the firing of the generals responsible for them. When he told President Trump last week he was leaving, the president reportedly asked him to stay at least through the midterms. He said no.
That refusal, coming from a man Trump personally trusted with the Ukraine-Russia peace initiative, is not a scheduling matter. It is a verdict on the man running the Department of War.
I. A Purge Without Precedent
Since Hegseth took office in January 2025, at least twenty-five senior military and civilian leaders have been fired, forced out, or driven into early retirement, according to a tally maintained by MS NOW and corroborated by CBS News. The New York Times identified at least forty-five additional officers who were selected for promotion by professional military boards in 2026 and then struck from the lists before advancing. Military.com concluded that Hegseth is removing senior leaders faster than any defense secretary in modern American history.
The names read like a scouring of the joint force. Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr., only the second African American ever to chair the Joint Chiefs, dismissed by Trump in a February 2025 Truth Social post. Adm. Lisa Franchetti, the first woman ever to serve as Chief of Naval Operations, fired the same week. Air Force Vice Chief Gen. Jim Slife. Navy Secretary John Phelan. Army Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George, an active-duty four-star yanked from his post in the middle of a war with Iran. Gen. David Hodne of Army Transformation and Training Command. Maj. Gen. William Green, chief of the Army Chaplain Corps. Gen. Christopher Donahue, commander of U.S. Army Europe and Africa. Lt. Gen. Jennifer Short. Vice Adm. Shoshana Chatfield. Rear Adm. Milton Sands of Naval Special Warfare. And on, and on.
The Body Count
Senior military and civilian Pentagon leaders fired, forced out or driven to early retirement since January 2025, per MS NOW’s running tally.
Promotions Blocked
Officers selected for promotion by professional military boards in 2026 and then struck from the lists before Senate confirmation, per a New York Times investigation summarized by Military.com.
The Top-Down Cuts
Reduction in four-star generals and admirals ordered by Hegseth in May 2025, per CBS News, as compiled by Snopes. National Guard general officers were cut by the same margin.
Hegseth has framed the campaign as a war on what he calls “woke” and “DEI” contamination of the ranks — the same argument he made in his 2024 book The War on Warriors, in which he questioned whether Gen. Brown had earned his position on merit or on race. But independent reporting has documented a different pattern. A May 2026 Guardian investigation found that roughly sixty percent of those dismissed were Black or female officers, and that none had been cited for performance-related reasons.
“I have never witnessed more inept management of the brave men and women who serve our country.”
— Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.), calling for Hegseth’s replacement, September 2, 2026
II. The Race and Gender Pattern the Pentagon Denies
The clearest window into how Hegseth has used his authority came in March 2026, when the New York Times reported that he had personally pressed Army leaders — including Secretary Driscoll — for months to remove four officers from a one-star general promotion list. Two were Black men. Two were women. One of the Black officers had been singled out for having written a paper about Black officers’ choices to serve in support roles rather than front-line combat. One of the women was targeted because she had served during the 2021 withdrawal from Afghanistan. Driscoll reportedly refused. Hegseth struck the names himself.
The pattern is not isolated. NBC News reported the following month that Hegseth had blocked or delayed promotions for more than a dozen Black and female senior officers across all four service branches, with officials familiar with the process telling reporters that some appeared to have been targeted because of race, gender, or perceived affiliation with Biden-era policies. The Pentagon’s own regulations are unambiguous on this: the secretary may block a promotion for fitness reasons — not for identity. Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell has called every report of it “fake news.” He has never once produced the performance record he says would justify the removals.
III. “Kill Everybody” — The War-Crimes Question
On September 2, 2025, U.S. forces struck what the administration called a Venezuelan drug boat in the Caribbean. The initial strike killed most aboard and left the vessel burning. Two survivors clung to the wreckage. Then, per a Washington Post investigation later confirmed in outline by the White House, Hegseth verbally ordered a second strike to kill them. A double-tap on unarmed men in the water.
The Former JAGs Working Group, an organization of retired military judge advocates, issued a statement calling the order and its execution “war crimes, murder, or both” if the operation was, as the administration insisted, a non-international armed conflict. Under the law of armed conflict, ordering that no quarter be given is one of the oldest and most explicit prohibitions in the modern laws of war. It is codified in the Hague Conventions. It is a war crime under the Rome Statute. There is not a serious military lawyer in the country who disputes this.
The pattern has been building for the entire tenure. Consider the record:
That the U.S. military kills civilians in war is not itself the scandal. Every military does, in every war. The scandal is that Hegseth spent his first months in office polling top commanders about cutting the Pentagon’s Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response program, which was created precisely to reduce such deaths. Every commander he polled rebuffed the idea. He gutted the program anyway. The Civilian Protection Center of Excellence — congressionally mandated under 10 U.S.C. § 184 and funded by law — was reduced from 40 personnel in January 2025 to just nine by year’s end, per an internal report obtained by The Intercept. A month into his tenure, Hegseth also fired the military’s top judge advocates general, the JAGs whose job is to keep operations legal. He has publicly referred to them, per ProPublica, as “roadblocks” and “jagoffs.”
You do not cut the people who prevent war crimes unless you are prepared to commit them.
IV. An Arsenal Depleted, a Fleet Broken
The other quiet cost of the Hegseth era is the readiness of the force itself. By August 2026, according to multiple U.S. officials briefing CNN, the American military had burned through nearly eighty percent of its stockpile of THAAD missile defense interceptors and roughly half of its Patriot interceptors. The stockpile of Tomahawk cruise missiles was similarly cut in half. The ATACMS stockpile, per reporting summarized by Sputnik and other outlets, was drained so severely one official described it as “basically none left.”
The Center for Strategic and International Studies now estimates it will take three years or more to return inventories of Tomahawk, THAAD and Patriot missiles to their prewar levels. Hegseth himself has conceded on the record it will take “months and years.” Meanwhile, U.S. allies in the Indo-Pacific — South Korea, Japan, Taiwan — are being warned to expect delivery delays on the very weapons they need to deter China. Japan’s four-hundred-Tomahawk order may run two years late.
The Navy is in no better condition. The USS Gerald R. Ford — the most expensive warship ever built — was kept at sea for 326 days on Hegseth’s watch, its longest deployment since Vietnam, and during that stretch suffered a laundry-room fire that spread through the ventilation system and sent more than 200 sailors for smoke-inhalation treatment. On the USS Abraham Lincoln, sailor families have publicly disputed the Pentagon’s claim that conditions aboard were fine, citing reports that service members were desperate enough to jump from the flight deck. Sen. Tim Kaine has already formally warned that the Ford’s extended deployment schedule is “self-perpetuating” damage to shipyard maintenance cycles and long-term Navy readiness.
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V. The Signal Chats, the Ethics Complaints, the Drinking Question
The catalogue of individual misconduct is by now well documented. In March 2025 The Atlantic revealed that Hegseth had used the commercial messaging app Signal to share the timing and details of a pending strike on Houthi targets in Yemen — a chat in which the editor of The Atlantic had been inadvertently included by then-National Security Adviser Mike Waltz. Days later, CNN and NBC reported on a second Signal chat containing similar operational details, this one including Hegseth’s wife, brother and personal lawyer.
The Pentagon Inspector General’s 84-page report, released on December 4, 2025, concluded that Hegseth had violated department policy and had sent operational details roughly two to four hours before U.S. forces carried out the coordinated Houthi strikes, creating risk of compromise that “could cause” harm to the mission and its personnel. The New Democrat Coalition, chaired by Rep. Brad Schneider of Illinois, called the IG report proof that Hegseth was “incompetent, reckless, and a threat to the lives of the men and women who serve in the Armed Forces.”
Then there is the drinking question. During his 2025 confirmation, Hegseth was confronted by Sen. Mazie Hirono over NBC News reporting that current and former Fox News colleagues had described his on-the-job drinking as a source of concern. His ex-wife had told the FBI that he “drinks more often than he doesn’t.” He denied the accounts and pledged to abstain from alcohol if confirmed. He was confirmed on a JD Vance tie-breaker. Then, this April, the New York Post reported that Hegseth’s chief of staff Ricky Buria had been spreading a story inside the Pentagon that he and the secretary had donned disguises to slip past security at the Ritz-Carlton in Pentagon City for a drinking bender — an anecdote Buria’s associates concluded was a botched attempt to smoke out leakers. Buria’s willingness to spread that particular story, true or invented, tells you everything about the culture of the office he leads.
VI. A Free Press, Systematically Locked Out
In May 2025, Hegseth issued the first of what would become a rolling series of press restrictions. Journalists were banned from the offices of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, from the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps press offices, and from most of the Pentagon complex without a government escort. By September, the department was requiring journalists to sign a pledge not to obtain unauthorized information — even unclassified information — on pain of losing their credentials. Dozens of reporters, including from the Associated Press, refused. They surrendered their badges instead.
The New York Times sued in December. In March 2026, U.S. District Judge Paul Friedman ruled that portions of the guidelines violated the First and Fifth Amendments and ordered the Times’ press credentials restored. Three days later, spokesman Sean Parnell announced the Pentagon would simply relocate journalists to a separate annex and require permanent escorts. Then, in August, the Pentagon fired the editor-in-chief and a senior reporter of Stars and Stripes, the newspaper created specifically to serve American troops, citing insubordination after the journalists publicly defended the newspaper’s editorial independence. Its ombudsman had already been fired in April.
“Pete Hegseth has shown time and time again he screws up way too much to do this job. He must resign or be fired.”
— Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.), top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee
VII. Congress: A Divided Response
The response on Capitol Hill has split along predictable lines, and then, more recently, along unpredictable ones. On the Democratic side, the roster of members calling for Hegseth’s resignation now stretches into the dozens. Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut described him as a “walking, talking national security embarrassment.” Sen. Richard Blumenthal of the same state has repeatedly demanded his removal. Rep. Jim Himes, senior Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, told CNN in December that Hegseth “does not have either the character or the disposition to have the position that he holds.” Rep. Mikie Sherrill, a former Navy helicopter pilot, was among the earliest to demand he resign.
In April 2026, Rep. Yassamin Ansari of Arizona — the first Iranian American Democrat elected to Congress — introduced formal articles of impeachment against Hegseth, co-sponsored by Reps. Sarah McBride, Lauren Underwood, Al Green, Steve Cohen, Jasmine Crockett, Nikema Williams, Dina Titus, Dave Min, Shri Thanedar, Melanie Stansbury, Mike Quigley and Brittany Pettersen. In the Republican-controlled House, the resolution has no path to a vote. It was never designed to have one. It was designed to force the record.
Then came Tillis. This week, in the wake of Driscoll’s resignation, North Carolina Republican Sen. Thom Tillis publicly called on the president to replace his defense secretary, accusing Hegseth of retreating to culture wars rather than doing “the vital work of our national defense.” House Armed Services Committee chairman Rep. Mike Rogers, also a Republican, told reporters he was “tired of all the churn” and wanted stability at the Pentagon. Rep. Dusty Johnson agreed. Rep. Don Bacon, a retired Air Force brigadier general, and Rep. Carlos Gimenez have expressed similar concerns publicly. These are not fringe voices. These are the elected Republicans who ordinarily protect the defense secretary of a Republican administration. They have stopped protecting him.
And the President? Trump has been unmoved. He continues to defend Hegseth publicly, describing recent reporting as “treasonous” and warning that its sources will be hunted down. On the same day the wedding-house strike in Iran killed civilians, he publicly congratulated Hegseth on the operation. When asked whether Hegseth might be replaced, he called him “a very good guy.”
When the President Cannot See What the Country Sees
The Twenty-Fifth Amendment, ratified in 1967 in the wake of the Kennedy assassination, provides for the involuntary transfer of executive power when a president is “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.” Section 4 requires the vice president and a majority of the Cabinet to declare that inability in writing to the leaders of both houses of Congress. The vice president then serves as acting president. The declaration can be contested, and Congress has twenty-one days to sustain it by a two-thirds vote of both chambers.
The amendment applies to the president, not to Cabinet officers. Its relevance here is that the case against Hegseth has become, at bottom, a case about the president who appointed him and continues to defend him. In April 2026, after President Trump publicly declared on Truth Social that “a whole civilization will die tonight” if Iran did not meet his ultimatum on the Strait of Hormuz, more than seventy lawmakers — including Rep. Yassamin Ansari, Rep. Jasmine Crockett, Rep. Melanie Stansbury, Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi and Sen. Chris Murphy — formally called on Vice President Vance and the Cabinet to invoke Section 4. Some Republicans, including Marjorie Taylor Greene, joined them.
The practical barriers are real and should not be minimized. Vice President Vance was Hegseth’s most vocal defender during the confirmation fight and is credibly reported to have presidential ambitions of his own that depend on the same coalition that installed Trump. The current Cabinet is composed almost entirely of loyalists selected precisely for their willingness to stay silent. No Cabinet officer has, to public knowledge, taken the first step toward a Section 4 declaration.
But the practical obstacles do not answer the constitutional question. When a president responds to documented allegations of war crimes by his defense secretary — the double-tap strike on Caribbean survivors, the Minab school, the Kuhestak wedding — by publicly congratulating him; when that same president threatens the extinction of “a whole civilization” as a negotiating tactic; when he keeps in office a Pentagon chief credibly documented to have drained the strategic arsenal, gutted civilian protection, purged the officer corps by race and gender, and endangered American troops through personal cell-phone use of an insecure app, the Framers’ question becomes unavoidable. What, exactly, would unfitness for the duties of the office look like, if not this? The answer that the amendment is politically inconvenient is not a constitutional answer. It is an abdication.
VIII. What This Says About the Country the President Wants to Lead
The through-line of the Hegseth tenure is not incompetence, though incompetence is amply present. It is a theory of American power. That theory holds that lethality is the highest military virtue; that laws of war are constraints to be shed; that officers who look, think, or write in ways the secretary dislikes are impediments to be removed; that the press exists to be managed; that Congress exists to be evaded; that the survivors of an American strike are, in the secretary’s own reported phrasing, targets to be finished off. It is the theory of a country that has decided the rules do not apply to it.
Trump chose Hegseth because Hegseth agreed with that theory. He is keeping Hegseth for the same reason. Dan Driscoll walked away because he did not.
Editorial Conclusion
A defense secretary who cannot keep his own service chiefs, cannot keep the strategic arsenal, cannot keep the trust of a Republican Senate Armed Services chairman, and cannot keep from being credibly accused of war crimes is not a defense secretary the country can afford. And a president who keeps such a man in place — over the objections of his own generals, over the resignations of his own appointees, over the warnings of his own party — is telling the country exactly what he values and exactly what he does not. The Constitution provides the remedy for that answer. What is required now is the political courage to use it.
Sources & References
- NBC NewsArmy Secretary Dan Driscoll submits resignation to White House
- ABC NewsArmy Secretary Driscoll resigns amid tensions with Hegseth
- NPRArmy Secretary Driscoll resigns after clashes with Hegseth
- MS NOWAt least 25 top Pentagon officials have departed under Hegseth
- CBS NewsThe military and civilian leaders fired or forced out since Hegseth became defense secretary
- NBC NewsHegseth intervened in promotions for more than a dozen senior officers
- NPRHegseth intervened to stop promotions of Black and female officers
- Military TimesHegseth reportedly removes 2 Black, 2 female Army officers from promotion list
- Washington Post via AxiosAll of Hegseth’s boat strikes near Venezuela that we know about
- The InterceptEntire Chain of Command Could Be Held Liable for Killing Boat Strike Survivors
- Amnesty InternationalThose responsible for unlawful US strike on Minab school must be held accountable
- Al JazeeraIran Red Crescent urges ICC probe into deadly US strike on wedding party
- ProPublicaTop commanders told Hegseth not to cut civilian protection. He did it anyway.
- The InterceptHegseth’s War Department slashed civilian protection staff, brought in AI
- CNNNearly 80% of interceptors for a key missile defense system depleted
- CSISRebuilding U.S. Missile Inventory: A Multiyear Project
- PBS NewsHourRead the full IG report on Hegseth’s Signal use
- U.S. Press Freedom TrackerHegseth restricts journalists’ access inside Pentagon
- SalonHegseth fires Stars and Stripes journalists, deepens Pentagon press crackdown
- CBS NewsHouse Democrats file articles of impeachment against Hegseth
- TIMERepublican Sen. Tillis calls on Trump to replace Hegseth
- CNNA bipartisan group calls for removing Trump using the 25th Amendment
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