Hegseth is shaking up the Pentagon as the US wages war - but at what cost?

Hegseth is reshaping the Pentagon as the US fights a war — but at what price?

The United States military is caught in a struggle on two fronts.

The first is President Donald Trump’s effort to wrest the Strait of Hormuz from Iran’s control, the latest stage of his deadlocked war in the Gulf, which is pulling in US forces and equipment from across the world.

The second is a domestic culture war, in which Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth is carrying out a promised overhaul at the Pentagon, setting off bitter backlash and a series of exits, including the top civilian overseeing the US Army last week.

The turmoil has raised questions that could define the legacy of Trump’s second term. Is the US military being pushed to a level that could endanger global security? And are these changes exposing America’s remarkable worldwide alliance network to risk?

Last Monday brought dramatic news from the Pentagon.

One of its most senior political figures, Dan Driscoll, resigned as US Secretary of the Army.

Driscoll is hardly a household name in the US, let alone abroad. But his exit mattered. It was the latest turn in a power struggle inside the fortress-like Pentagon over the future of the world’s most powerful fighting force.

Driscoll had repeatedly clashed with Hegseth over the pace and nature of military reform. His departure was the latest in a long series of top officials removed or pushed aside by Hegseth.

The depth of concern was evident when Republican Senator Thom Tillis — a frequent Trump critic — called for Hegseth to be fired. “I have never witnessed more inept management of the brave men and women who serve our country,” he said.

“This is not good news. You know, for our nation, for the army,” H.R. McMaster, who served as Trump’s National Security Adviser in his first term, told CBS when asked about Driscoll’s departure. “Secretary Driscoll was pushing… a modernisation agenda to catch the army up.”

The background to Driscoll’s resignation went to the heart of questions about the US Army’s readiness. Driscoll wanted urgent modernisation by adding drones throughout standard army formations so the force could handle 21st Century warfare.

He said the war in Ukraine had shown how the battlefield had changed, with inexpensive drones and anti-missile systems challenging the US military’s huge bureaucracy and costly procurement system.

Hegseth had in fact launched much of this modernisation effort but later fell into conflict with Driscoll, according to reports, as well as with others pushing for its rapid expansion.

A source familiar with last week’s departure said Driscoll had raised concerns inside the administration about army readiness and transformation, which Driscoll said Hegseth was “blocking” specifically by firing the generals responsible.

Jon Duffy, a retired Navy captain and former White House defence policy official, said Driscoll’s resignation showed how much Hegseth had “hollowed out” military leadership at a critical time.

“You lose the [army] secretary, the chief of staff and other senior leaders driving modernisation, it creates a lot of uncertainty and it disrupts momentum,” he said.

“That uncertainty at leadership levels has downstream effects on the force,” added Duffy, who spent 30 years in the military and commanded US warships before joining the White House during the second Obama administration.

Publicly, Hegseth — a former Army National Guardsman and Fox News pundit — has devoted much of his time to demanding cultural change in the US military.

He has promised to end what he called “woke” initiatives and eliminate “stupid” rules of engagement that he said limited war fighters’ “lethality”. He scrapped diversity programmes, banned beards and complained about seeing “fat generals in the halls of the Pentagon”.

He removed or sidelined the top uniformed officers leading the Army, Navy and Air Force, along with at least two dozen generals, admirals and civilian defence officials, including some of the US military’s most decorated officers, often with little explanation.

One critic likens the changes at the top to President Xi Jinping’s political purges of the Chinese military, which are said to have left serious gaps in command structure and readiness.

“We’ve been conducting a military purge as well, and that has real effects on the ability of our military to be able to discharge its responsibilities,” Michael Schiffer, a former senior Pentagon official who covered East Asia from 2009 to 2012 under the Obama presidency, told the BBC.

“The way in which [Hegseth is] shaking them up… is bringing on board an awful lot of risk without any apparent way to be able to address or ameliorate it,” said Schiffer, now a senior fellow at the liberal think-tank the Center for American Progress.

Asked last week about Driscoll’s departure, Vice-President JD Vance defended Hegseth, saying he was in “strident agreement” about the need for a culture shift after what he called 40 years of lost wars and “military misadventures”.

“What Pete came in wanting to do was revive the warrior spirit in the United States of America,” Vance said.

In a statement, the White House told the BBC that President Trump had “full confidence in Secretary Hegseth and the entire Department of War whose record of success in Operation Epic Fury, Operation Absolute Resolve, and Operation Midnight Hammer speaks for itself”.

Trump has kept backing Hegseth, standing by him through controversies such as Signalgate and describing him in a phone interview with NBC News last month as “actually one of my best”.

Ezra Cohen, a former Under Secretary of Defence in Trump’s first administration, called Hegseth’s reforms “bringing in fresh thinking and a more forward-leaning attitude”.

But the reported tensions among military leaders and the stalemate with Iran have raised questions about the future of the US military at a pivotal moment.

Trump’s order to launch strikes on Iran on 28 February triggered a major global redistribution of US military resources over the following months. US weapons stored in Europe and Asia were moved from those regions to replenish supplies in the Gulf.

Europe is now experiencing significant “blowback”, according to Professor Liana Fix, a Germany-based expert at the Council on Foreign Relations.

She said the Trump administration’s lack of communication with Nato and European allies before the attack on Iran left relations badly shaken and sped up a strategic decision already underway to shift some US military resources away from Europe, especially as Trump complained that European allies were not contributing enough.

Prof Fix said that in this context Russian President Vladimir Putin had stepped up so-called “hybrid” attacks involving armed drones or sabotage against Nato countries such as Germany. Russia denies carrying out the attacks.

“What [Putin] is seeing is not a united stance from the United States and the Europeans to further increase pressure on Russia… he sees that they are weakening, that there are windows and openings of vulnerabilities in Europe,” she told the BBC.

Last month, CIA Director John Ratcliffe made a highly unusual trip to Moscow.

He is reported to have warned the Kremlin not to test Nato’s resolve. But at the same time, one of Hegseth’s top Pentagon officials, Elbridge Colby, was in Europe urging countries to spend more on their own defence.

Washington had announced a reduction of 5,000 from the 40,000 US troops stationed in Germany, while a Biden-era plan to send a US battalion with long-range Tomahawk missiles to the country was being abandoned.

The reductions in Europe fit the Trump administration’s strategy, which predates the Iran war. It views the Pacific and Washington’s rivalry with China as America’s top national security challenge.

But while the consequences of the Iran war have intensified Trump’s frustration with Europe and accelerated some US military shifts away from the region, they have not immediately strengthened the US presence in the Pacific.

In fact, Washington has also drawn resources from there. Carrier forces were moved from the Pacific to the Gulf, including the USS Abraham Lincoln and later the Japan-based USS George Washington.

The war is widely judged to have badly depleted critical American ammunition stocks. The US fired roughly a third of its 3,000-missile stockpile of Tomahawk attack missiles, according to the Washington DC-based Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS).

Its air defence munitions were used at an even faster pace, with nearly 1,500 Patriot interceptors — used to shoot down aircraft and cruise and ballistic missiles — fired from a stockpile of about 2,300, according to the CSIS.

White House Principle Deputy Press Secretary Anna Kelly said America’s “military might” was “stronger than it’s ever been”.

“The United States Military has more than enough munitions, ammo, and stockpiles to serve all of the Commander-in-Chief’s strategic goals and beyond,” she said.

Meanwhile Ezra Cohen, the former Trump defence official who is now a fellow at the Hudson Institute, said the president had reduced Iran’s conventional military threat.

Iran’s proxy groups are weaker than ever, he said, and in many places they have been completely destroyed, meaning “the president now has additional options and forces in the region to strike other Iranian targets, including nuclear targets, at will”.

The strikes could still happen again. Thousands of troops, including the 82nd Airborne Division, were sent to the Middle East more than six months ago for a deployment now stretching into 2027 with no clear end in sight.

Hegseth, meanwhile, strongly rejected claims of terrible conditions on board. But the battle over the narrative reflected the challenge facing Trump and Hegseth as they try to transform the Pentagon while fighting a costly, drawn-out war.