The SecDeaf

Our service members deserve better than this man-child at the helm

Dec 04, 2025

Pete Hegseth, the Secretary of Defense who wants you to call him the Secretary of War, has the Midas Touch: everything he touches turns to…mufflers. Seriously, this guy is not serious. His is a long running act of defiance against established norms in the military, as the Wall Street Journal reported, “In addition to [DIA Director Jeffrey] Kruse, Hegseth relieved his senior military assistant, Lt. Gen. Jennifer Short; Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. CQ Brown; Air Force Vice Chief of Staff Gen. James Slife; and Air Force Chief of Staff David Alvin. In April, the White House fired Air Force Gen. Tim Haugh, then the chief of the National Security Agency, along with the agency’s civilian deputy, Wendy Noble.

He had to get rid of the grownups so he could throw his weight around without raising eyebrows at every turn. Better to have lackeys that owe their jobs to him than seasoned professionals questioning his every performative, racist, and misogynistic move. He wasted no time in ridding the service of LGBTQ folks, people of color, and women. Only White men remain at the top.

Let me show my work:

In one his first official acts, Hegseth fired Admiral Lisa Franchetti, the first female Chief of Naval Operations for the U.S. Navy. Franchetti had served in the role since November 2023 and was the first woman to serve on the Joint Chiefs of Staff. That left no female Four Stars. He says women don’t—can’t—have the “warrior ethic.”

That’s confusing because I’m sure he’s married.

His public appearances are both performative and embarrassing—can you imagine assembling the highest ranking military leaders from around the globe—at great taxpayer expense, no less—to admonish them to lose weight and look sharp? The performative aspect of his personality is pretty easy to explain. Like his boss, he’s an attention-seeking wannabe star. His gig prior to SecDef was weekend anchor on Fox News. Save for football, television ratings plummet on the weekends. It’s where they traditionally tried out new journalists, or where, in Fox World, the newest spokesmodels—male and female—go to build their on-air chops in the hope of becoming the next Sean Hannity or Laura Ingraham.

After firing everybody with history, experience, and sober judgement, he jumped on Signal, an un-secure online platform where he shared—unwittingly—with the editor of The Atlantic, and—wittingly—with his wife and brother, neither of whom had sufficient clearance, the details of a bombing run while the pilots were in the air and at risk. A move clearly in violation of Pentagon rules, according to its Inspector General.

There were of course no direct repercussions. The ill-advised, leaky Signal chat should have cost him his job, instead, since effluence flows downhill, it cost his Chief of Staff and two others their jobs, leaving Hegseth himself undisciplined for this huge lapse of security protocol.

Never one to miss a media moment (it is said that the most dangerous place in the room is between our Secretary of Defense and the television cameras), he seems to be a permanent fixture in the Oval office. He’s right up there with Attorney General Pam Bondi, and FBI Director Kash Patel, who must also maintain offices just off the Oval. How else can they always be there? Don’t they have their own fiefdoms to mismanage?

The Secretary booted all the major news orgs from the Pentagon, and replaced them with sycophants like the vaunted journalist, Laura Loomer, and much of her conspiracy-driven cohort. Now he just fields softball questions in press conferences.

The Caribbean Killing Spree might just be the end for Hegseth, but it might not, because he’s taken the Sgt. Schultz approach, and professes to know nothing. Says he he wasn’t even in the room, but that he trusts the admiral who made the call, and who will now be thrown under the bus.

Will they run out of busses before they run out of scapegoats?

Killing unarmed survivors of an attack violates every rule in the book, as well as most of the stuff that makes us human, like the recognition of the sanctity of life, compassion, morality, and basic goodness. If wholesale murder is what is meant by the phrase, “Warrior Ethic,” include me out, as Yogi Berra would say.

The extralegal killings even upset some previously unshakable administration apologists in the Republican Senate. Enough that they said the phrase “war crimes” out loud. They promise investigations, but in this administration, Congressional actions like this are where investigations go to die. For the umpteenth time, we’ll see if this actually yields anything. Remorse, perhaps? Recrimination? More likely, lip-service.

So far, the only response from the administration is to investigate six Democratic legislators and former intelligence officers for what the President labeled “seditious behavior…punishable by death” for having the audacity to remind our troops that they must not obey illegal orders.

One wonders what, other than his own reflection, the SecDeaf sees.