“Maximum lethality. Not tepid legality.”
That’s the aggressive philosophy of United States Secretary of War Peter Hegseth.
And not even war will stop him from imposing his personal beliefs on the Pentagon.
The US Army’s most senior officer, General Randy George, was dismissed last week even as he strove to ensure the 82nd Airborne Division was fully equipped, supplied and ready en route to the Middle East.
It was not an unexpected move.
But the timing was.
The 41st Chief of Staff of the Army was a consummate professional.
The decorated combat veteran never publicly disagreed with his political leaders.
But, behind closed doors, General George’s reputation was of pragmatism over political expediency.
He dared to disagree with Secretary Hegseth’s order to bypass a dozen senior black and female officers for promotion without any given cause.
He dared to disagree with Secretary Hegseth’s order to strip army chaplains of their rank and make them wear prominent badges of their individual faiths.
His dismissal while en route to the Middle East with his troops puts Secretary Hegseth and the Trump administration in contention for the military purge world title.
China’s Chairman Xi Jinping is believed to have arrested, demoted or disappeared more than 30 of his most senior generals since 2023.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has fired, sidelined or assassinated at least 19 since the bungled invasion of Ukraine began in 2022.
Secretary Hegseth has dismissed 21 since taking office in February 2025.
Such wholesale eviction of experienced professionals may have political benefits. It also has practical consequences.
“The problem here is obvious — if we can’t get the best data and advice from the senior military, we can’t make good decisions about defence budgets and policy,” Independent Senator Angus King, a member of the Senate Armed Services Committees, told US media.
“But beyond this, I believe what we’re seeing points to a deeper, and much more dangerous, development — the deliberate attempt to convert our professional and stoutly apolitical military into an armed force with greater loyalty to the President than to the Constitution.”
The burden of command
“The American people deserve to know why so many of their top officers are being tossed out of their jobs,” states Professor Emeritus Tom Nichols of the US Naval War College.
“The petty vendettas of a passed-over major mattered less until the war in Iran, a conflict that may be escalating beyond American control and is now sinking both Trump’s popularity and the global economy.”
Unconfirmed US media reports suggest President Trump clashed with his top intelligence and military advisers before the Gulf War. He insisted it would all be over in weeks. He would not accept that the Strait of Hormuz would be closed.
Iran, however, was not in his chain of command.
Nor that of the war’s greatest advocate, Secretary Hegseth.
The former television host has an unhappy military history.
He was denied a place in an honour guard for President Barack Obama and was passed over for promotion while serving as a Major in the National Guard. His tattoos of the crusader-era Cross of Jerusalem and Latin war cry “Deus Volt” (god wills it) were deemed too controversial. Both have been co-opted by modern white supremacist and militant extremist groups.
So he stepped into the Pentagon’s top job openly flouting a grudge.
“It’s unacceptable to see fat generals and admirals in the halls of the Pentagon,” he proclaimed, assigning himself a mission to cull “woke garbage” from the ranks while promoting his vision of “lethality, meritocracy, accountability, standards, and readiness”.
He immediately saw the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Chief of Naval Operations, the air force vice chief, and the military’s top lawyers dismissed.
And he’s not stopped since.
Secretary Hegseth has also broken with convention, and some argue the US Constitution, to put his personal faith front and centre of his tenure.
The effusive evangelical fired the army’s top chaplain, Major General William Green, at the same time he dismissed General George. Major General Green is black.
“Why were these men fired while US forces are fighting overseas?” asks Professor Nichols. “The Defence Department has given no official reason for their dismissals, but likely they are the latest victims of Hegseth’s vindictive struggles with the army.”
Culture war
Soviet Union co-founder Joseph Stalin purged three senior marshals and 35,000 officers during the 1930s. That left his army totally incompetent in the face of Adolf Hitler’s surprise attack in 1942.
His distant successor President Vladimir Putin took a slightly different path. He surrounded himself with generals selected for loyalty over skill. He turned a blind eye to their graft and corruption in return for immediate acquiescence to his will. The hollow platitudes of these “yes men” were revealed when his army was thrown back at the gates of Kyiv by a much smaller, though far more professional, Ukrainian force.
Secretary Hegseth insists his motives are noble: “An entire generation of generals and admirals were told that they must parrot the insane fallacy that ‘our diversity is our strength’. Of course, we know our unity is our strength”.
Others aren’t so sure.
“Hegseth began his tenure by acting against what he sees as a Pentagon infested with DEI (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion) hires,” argues Professor Nichols.
“He pushed for the removal of the then-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, C.Q. Brown, who is Black, and he fired a raft of female military leaders, replacing them all with men.”
That is Trump administration policy.
“Our goal is to assemble an army of aligned, vetted, trained, and prepared conservatives to go to work on Day One to deconstruct the Administrative State,” reads its governing document, the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 Mandate for Leadership.
The chapter on defence was written by the first Trump administration acting Defence Secretary Christopher Miller.
“Miller’s chapter called explicitly for decapitating military leadership, referred to career generals as ‘Barack Obama’s generals’, and laid out plans to prevent their promotions, force early retirements, and replace them with loyalists,” argues US air force Veteran and security analyst Chris Armitage.
He believes this process is well and truly underway: “The officer replacing [General] George is General Christopher LaNeve, a former Hegseth aide who called into Trump’s inauguration ball from South Korea to congratulate the president.
“A military commanded by generals who called into the inauguration ball is a military that will carry out whatever domestic deployment the administration decides to call necessary.”
The Pentagon hasn’t explained why it dismissed Generals George and Green.
The two professional soldiers have so far remained silent out of loyalty to their oaths.
That leaves US military insiders and analysts to speculate.
Deus vault
Major General Green, as the army’s chief chaplain, is believed to have pushed back against an order from Secretary Hegseth to cull the army’s faith and belief code.
It is comprised of more than 200 faith-affirming statements designed to accommodate the many versions of Christianity, Islam, Buddhism and more that its service members may adhere to.
Secretary Hegseth wants this reduced to 31 Christian-centric statements.
He also ordered chaplains to replace their rank badges with symbols of their faith so as to “be seen among the highest ranks because of their divine calling”.
The 29th Secretary of Defence (since renamed Secretary of War) belongs to the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches (CREC).
The sect’s founder, Doug Wilson, promotes a fundamentalist approach to Christianity.
This includes total submission of women to their husbands and fathers, and that biblical law overrules all earthly laws. And he wants the US to become a religious state, with all positions of power reserved for Christians only.
Whether or not Secretary Hegseth adheres to all these beliefs is unknown.
But his tenure at the Pentagon has been marked by Constitution-bending scheduled prayer services and religion-based restructuring. He also invited Doug Wilson to deliver a sermon at the Pentagon in February, shortly before the assault on Iran.
Secretary Hegseth’s religion also features prominently in his public capacity as Secretary of War.
“Grant this task force clear and righteous targets for violence,” he intoned at a recent Pentagon prayer service.
“Give them wisdom in every decision, endurance for the trial ahead, unbreakable unity, and overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy.”
It’s a vision of holy warriors fighting holy wars on behalf of holy men.
And that’s at odds with the US military’s 250 years of professional adherence to the US Constitution and Capitol Hill.
“For all his tough talk, he fails to recognise the true strengths of the US armed forces,” argues Centre for American Progress security analyst Allison McManus.
“The US military has become the most effective and powerful fighting presence in the world not because of brute lethal force, but because of its professionalism and precision.”
The lessons of history came at a brutal cost on the battlefields.
And the question remains the same: Can politically expedient generals deliver the overwhelming, decisive, clear victories their political leaders demand?
“The US military can survive an awful lot of replacements when the bench is this deep. What it cannot as easily survive is a culture in which senior officers understand that candid advice and institutional integrity are liabilities rather than assets,” an American Enterprise Institute report concludes.
“The damage will show up when the country needs a general willing to say ‘no’ and finds that those officers were long ago replaced by those who wouldn’t.”
Jamie Seidel is a freelance writer
