Hegseth has fired numerous other top military officials, which Representative Adam Smith, the ranking Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee, describes as an unprecedented purge. “No secretary of defense has ever fired this many high-ranking senior people in his first year on the job,” Smith told me.
Most officials believed George had been doing a good job in modernizing the military in various ways, the congressman said, but George seems to have fallen victim to a “personality clash” with Hegseth. “It seems like Hegseth got into a pissing match with him over blocking promotions,” Smith said, adding that this is “undermining confidence in leadership” right “in the middle of the Iran war fiasco,” which “makes it worse.”
These are all glaring leadership abuses and failures. Yet Hegseth is well suited to surviving them—because he knows how to navigate Trump’s personalist rule. Hegseth is intensely loyal to Trump, and his willingness to bend or break laws to humor Trump’s whims is unquestioned. After Trump threatened, during this week’s prime-time speech, to vault Iran “back to the stone ages,” Hegseth obsequiously repeated Trump’s language, tweeting: “Back to the Stone Age.”
