Fitting, really. Because Pete Hegseth has been pulling false alarms at the Pentagon since the moment he walked through its doors.
Hegseth was sworn in on January 25, 2025, as the 29th Secretary of Defense, after the Senate deadlocked 50-50 and Vice President JD Vance cast the tiebreaking vote. Everyone knew he’d be a disaster, a metaphorical hazard human who wreaked havoc on our nation’s defense.
That’s why the squeaker of a confirmation was a warning. What followed has been a systematic evacuation of experience, dignity, and any pretense of seriousness.
He started with the people. In February 2025, Hegseth fired Admiral Lisa Franchetti, the first female chief of naval operations, and recommended that General Charles “CQ” Brown, the second African American Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, be removed for his focus on diversity, equity and inclusion.
That decision left no women in the top ranks of military leadership. It didn’t stop there. Hegseth intervened to stop the promotions of four Army officers, two Black men and two female soldiers, who were on track to become one-star generals.
It was highly unusual for a defense secretary to intervene. Scratch that. It was a racist and misogynistic move by the defense secretary.
And he did it again last week, personally intervening to remove numerous highly decorated Black and female Navy service members from military promotion lists, preventing them from advancing to one-star general or admiral.
The pattern is impossible to ignore: the only generals welcome in Pete Hegseth’s Pentagon are straight, white, and male. Everyone else gets evacuated.
Then came the language. He replaced diplomatic and peace-driven messaging with rude, macho and warmongering bloviating. His chest-thumping (not to be confused with his chest presses), testosterone-drenched vocabulary of a man auditioning for a B-war movie rather than running the world’s most powerful military.
His garbage tongue wagging about “Warrior ethos.” “Lethal.” “Annihilation.” “Unleash overwhelming and punishing violence.”
He replaced strong and bold leadership with insecure and dubious chest-thumping. In the single most embarrassing moment in modern Pentagon history, Hegseth summoned 800 generals and admirals from around the world to Marine Corps Base Quantico on September 30, 2025 for an unprecedented and needless gathering where he dressed them down like a potty-mouth, crazed football coach.
Pacing back and forth in front of a giant American flag, Hegseth declared it “completely unacceptable to see fat generals and admirals” in the Pentagon. He railed against “dudes in dresses,” “climate change worship,” and “fat” soldiers, rattling off a long list of culture war grievances before the assembled brass.
Men and women who had served in combat zones across the globe, who had commanded forces, buried colleagues, and carried the genuine weight of war, sat and listened to a lowly and combustible former Fox News host tell them they weren’t skinny enough.
His garbage tongue again wagged, bragging about his plan to “intimidate, demoralize, hunt and kill the enemies of our country” and how America would no longer be constrained by what he called “stupid rules of engagement.”
Hegseth talks like someone who has a screw loose, and is so insecure about himself that he tries to sound like a leading character from an action movie versus rather than somebody with the decorum of a defense secretary.
Retired generals called the speech “shocking” and “offensive.” It was not a warrior’s address. It was a Fox & Friends segment with a live studio audience of four-star generals.
Of course, all of this preening about warrior culture comes from a man who ordered a makeup studio installed in the Pentagon so he could freshen up for TV appearances and motor-mouthed speeches to generals.
In the process, he evacuated humility from the Pentagon and replaced it with vanity, arrogance and conceit.
He posts videos of himself bench-pressing 300 pounds with his teenage son spotting him. He frequently participates in physical training alongside deployed U.S. service members and works directly with new recruits at military entrance stations.
He’s doing that, not as some goodwill gesture, but to show off.
He was caught applying makeup with his personal supply before a key war meeting with top Ukrainian officials. He wears a pocket square flag to press briefings, thinking that makes him patriotic.
He’s trying to evacuate a Defense Department driven by peace and replace it with one that is obsessed with War.
On September 5, 2025, Trump signed an executive order authorizing the use of the titles “Secretary of War” and “Department of War,” a rebranding that virtually no one outside of MAGA media takes seriously, and that most of the world’s military establishment greeted with bewilderment.
Nobody, not allies, not adversaries, not career defense officials, uses it with a straight face. And certainly not journalists, unless it's Fox News. Hegseth, like Trump, believes renaming something makes it so.
Thursday's false alarm at the Pentagon was resolved within hours. The real evacuation, of competence, of inclusion, of decency, and decorum, has been ongoing for 17 months and shows no sign of stopping.
The building was briefly cleared of bad air, but the foul odor of Hegseth still lingers.
