Posting #41: The story of the Pure Pentagon…and Purging It

The story: By and large, we Americans accept the story that the Department of Defense is the most dependable and honorable of all our federal institutions. We trust DoD responsibly uses our servicemember parents, children, siblings, nieces and nephews, and friends. Our representatives, with our approval, appropriate immense amounts of taxpayer money to the DoD, and we don’t punish it for being the only federal agency unable to pass an audit required by the Chief Financial Officers Act of 1990. We report in survey after survey since 1973 that “the military” is utterly trustworthy, and we regard servicemembers as heroes and veterans as saints.

My take on the story: The current Trump administration in its second iteration disputes this familiar story. To the current temporary occupant of the Oval Office (47) and the current temporary Secretary of Defense (SecDef), the US military has been utterly ruined by the fraud and waste and anti-masculine wokeism perpetrated by their immediate predecessors. Even though 47 occupied the Oval Office previously and the current SecDef served in the National Guard, they take no responsibility for the abysmal state they claim the US military is in.

To the current occupants, only they can restore the military to greatness, to its ostensible masculine “warrior culture.” To them, the military is not dependable or honorable, cannot be trusted to use our servicemembers responsibly, and the military’s lust for taxpayer dollars is insatiable. To them, everything about the US military—the personnel, the culture, the means of communication—is spoiled and rotten. To them, the entire enterprise needs to be upended to restore what—at some mythic point in the golden past—was great. To them, the Department of Defense must return to its old name: the War Department

But the skepticism of Trump and his Secretary of Defense about the US military is not new news. They do not have an unprecedented bead on the fraught state of the Pentagon.

The Department of Defense has been known as wasteful, corrupt, and incompetent for most of its post-World War II history.

· In his 1961 Farewell Address, President Dwight Eisenhower warned the nation about the “military-industrial complex,” the “permanent armaments industry of vast proportions,” its “unwarranted influence,” and its “disastrous rise of misplaced power.”

· The complex has retained this power since at least the late-1960s and the revelation of outrageous cost over-runs of the Lockheed C-5 transport plane.

· In the 1981-1989 Reagan era, the FBI conducted an investigation called “Operation Illwind” that revealed how “some Defense Department employees had taken bribes from businesses in exchange for inside information on procurement bids that helped some of the nation’s largest military contractors win lucrative weapons systems deals.”

· The 1993-2001 Clinton administration scrupulously was “Reinventing Government” in “coordination with bipartisan congressional legislation” over the course of “several years” to “identify inefficiencies and involved federal workers in re-envisioning their jobs.” One impact was on the “bench strength” of Pentagon acquisition. In part, this was because the “reinventing” federal government subsidized the merger of major defense contractors in the expectation that the merger would reduce Pentagon costs. The reduction of competition actually meant costs rose.

· In the post-9/11 Afghanistan and Iraq wars during the Bush II, Obama, and Trump I administrations, not only did the US government borrow $8T for the wars (which had never happened before), spend huge taxpayer dollars on paying Private Military Contractors to fight those wars, lie about the course of the Afghanistan war and lie about the pretext for the war in Iraq, the Pentagon also wasted $17B in Afghanistan projects that ignored “history, culture, and warnings of failure.”

The current temporary occupants are oblivious to this history, and 47 himself notoriously has contempt for members of the military. To 47, when he was 45, people in the military were “suckers” and “losers.” To 47, who evaded the Vietnam War draft 5 times, even though John McCain was shot down as a Navy pilot over North Vietnam, was captured, and was imprisoned for 5.5 years, McCain could not possibly be a hero because of his captivity. To 47, avoiding an STD is comparable to warring in Vietnam and warrants a Congressional Medal of Honor. To 47 as 45, his major complaint about the Pentagon was the generals: “’I need the kind of generals that Hitler had,’ Trump said in a private conversation in the White House, according to two people who heard him say this. ‘People who were totally loyal to him, that follow orders’.” To 47, the military—even those who had died in service—was and is a prop to be used in photographs celebrating…him.

So what are the president and the SecDef doing to remake the US military that is so spoiled and rotten and unmasculine?

· They are revising history.

1. Removing portraits from the Pentagon: On the day of 47’s second inauguration, the portrait of 45’s chairperson of the Joint Chiefs, General Mark Milley, was removed from a Pentagon hall of portraits of the Joint Chiefs of Staff dating back to the first JCS chairperson, Omar Bradley (1949-1953). The portrait of Mark Esper memorializing his time as 45’s Secretary of the Army was also removed. Theirs are the only ones missing.

2. Purging at least 26-100K images from the Pentagon website. Following Pete Hegseth’s January 25, 2025 swearing in as SecDef, the Pentagon website eliminated any of what the Pentagon now calls Discriminatory Equity Ideology (“DEI”) references. This means removing images of World War II-era Navajo Code Talkers, Japanese-American regiments, the Tuskegee Airmen, Jackie Robinson, and the Enola Gay bomber that dropped atomic weapons on Japan. Images of trailblazing military women and people of color have been removed, including Omaha Tribe dancers and Rosie the Riveter. Outrage led to some of these images being reinstated and the Pentagon’s defensiveness: "The review is ongoing and meant to comply with the policy and not erase history.”

This erasure is likely to problematize recruiting of women and people of color, the very people who are enlisting the most.

3. Censoring books in the DoD schools and at the military service academies and discontinuing monthly heritage celebrations.

As a scholar of data loss at the University of Copenhagen and the director of the Bodleian Libraries at Oxford University comment,

These deletions undermine basic good government—and the historical record. Democratic governments need far more robust legal frameworks and safeguards for data that is essential to citizens’ well-being. Scientific practices may change, policies may shift, and history may be debated, but the record of government should endure, regardless of who holds power. (emphasis added)

· They are making it difficult for women to remain in service

1. The Air Force now prevents all pilots and aircrew who are in their first trimester of pregnancy from flying. The Force also prevents all pregnant servicemembers from ever flying in planes with ejection seats. The servicemembers have no choice.

They must have a flight physical every year so unless female pilots and crew are examined more frequently (which would be discriminatory), it’s unclear to me how anyone would know about a first trimester pregnancy.

It was not until 1975—the year I entered ROTC and four years before I was commissioned into the US Army on active duty—that servicemembers who were pregnant could even remain on active duty. I would not be surprised to see this policy reenacted by a SecDef who is committed to returning women to the home.

2. Defense Secretary Hegseth issued an order on March 30, 2025 that physical fitness standards for combat arms positions be “sex-neutral.” Presumably, until that date, the standards varied by age and sex, and so the new standards are likely to reduce the number of women designated female at birth from joining the combat arms.

This new policy is a ruse to exclude women from the military. As Hegseth wrote in his book, The War on Warriors (2024), “women are meant to be ‘life-givers’ and shouldn’t serve in combat roles. Dads push us to take risks. Moms put the training wheels on our bikes. We need moms. But not in the military, especially not in combat units” (emphasis added).

When I was on active duty I was not technically permitted to be in the combat arms—from which, conveniently, most generals come. As a tactical intelligence officer though, to all intents and purposes I would have been in combat. I just wouldn’t have gotten the credit for it.

And I always ran faster and longer than any of the young men.

3. They have banned transgender people from enlisting and serving openly in the US military, even though transgender people are twice as likely to serve than those in the general population. This official separation of people already in the forces may mean they miss out on veterans’ benefits.

4. They will end “a program at the Pentagon that boosts the participation of women in peace building and conflict prevention efforts that President Donald Trump signed into law in his first term” and that “multiple members [Noem, Rubio, Waltz] of Trump’s current cabinet backed the effort as members of Congress.”

5. They will make it harder to report sexual harassment, assault, and discrimination. We mustn’t, apparently, have male predators “walking on eggshells.”

· They are canceling mandatory training, including a unit on the laws of war. This cancellation will encourage if not enable servicemembers committing war crimes.

· They are no longer paying attention to what the SecDef calls “climate change crap,” even though DoD is a major consumer and emitter of hydrocarbons, the US military has been and will be affected by climate change, and climate change for the US military has been a non-partisan issue since World War II.

· They will give more and more private defense contractors taxpayer monies. That has begun with the awarding of contracts to SpaceX—Elon Musk’s company—to launch US military satellites into space.

· They are contemplating invoking the Insurrection Act, which would empower the US military to “behave as police, including to use lethal force to suppress insurrections, riots, and enforce the law.” This could mean military servicemembers act as ICE and facilitate the imprisoning of US citizens in foreign prisons or immigrants in domestic concentration camps and using live ammunition against domestic protestors.

· And they are promising a $1T defense budget proposal, an increase over the current budget of more 13%…the largest ever, adding to the national debt.

So what?

What might be the most radical change in the Department of Defense—and to the federal government at large—is the apparent alteration of what constitutes classified information and the alteration’s threat to national security. This change was made evident in what is being called “Signalgate,” or the early March 2025 exchange about an air attack among the SecDef, the Director of National Intelligence, the Vice President, the CIA Director, the Secretary of State, and White House advisors on the unsecure commercial messaging app, Signal.

During what became a classified information, “warrior porn” exchange, not only did the Vice President question the President’s judgment and the CIA Director reveal the name of an undercover operative on the ground, the SecDef revealed details about a forthcoming US attack on Houthi rebels in Yemen, Top Secret details that should never have appeared through any medium but a highly secure network paid for with taxpayer dollars and required to be used by these decision-makers.

The only reason Americans know about this lawless incident perpetrated by federal officials at the highest levels is because the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, was mistakenly included in the Signal text thread and, in shock, he reported the substance (and later, some details) of the classified discussion. (Equally shocking is that none of the 17 highest federal officials in the land noticed Goldberg’s inclusion until he voluntarily left the chat and that neither the acting Chairperson of the Joint Chiefs of Staff or the regional combatant commander were included in the chat.) Moreover, these classified revelations—by the VP, the CIA Director, and the SecDef—should not only have been conveyed in a secure Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility (SCIF), they should have been limited to only those who need to know. Why, for instance, would the Treasury Secretary need to know about the attack?

If that recklessness and irresponsibility are not enough for American residents and citizens, the careless attitudes of the nation’s highest officials toward keeping American secrets secure—and thereby keeping all of us safe—are staggering.

(Of course, we have plenty of instances—here, here, here, and here—when 47 was 45 and he treated classified information haphazardly. So we expect this from him. Maybe this is why 47 wasn’t on the chat and his Homeland Security advisor, Stephen Miller, gave the go-ahead for the mission.)

But now that Signalgate has occurred, the President, the Attorney General, the FBI Director, the CIA Director, and the SecDef are all downplaying this Signal episode, in order: as a media lapse; as less important than what Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, and Hunter Biden did; as “not really an FBI thing”; as “legal”; and as not classified “war plans.” In effect, these five and their minions are discounting the magnitude of the threat to the nation—and to individual military servicemembers—by the Signal participants’ irresponsible, reckless, criminal, juvenile, and treacherous chat.

So let’s contemplate the repercussions of careless US officials using a commercial messaging app to communicate classified information:

1. The American fighter pilots who would be attacking the Houthis were endangered by the SecDef’s voluntary inclusion of classified information on an insecure network. Pilots interviewed by the New York Times said they were not only perplexed by Hegseth’s refusal to admit he was wrong but that, “going forward, they can no longer be certain that the Pentagon is focused on their safety when they strap into cockpits.”

[D]etails of military operations are usually kept so secret that even the service members taking part in them are “locked down.” That sometimes means they are not allowed to speak to others who do not have a need to know, let alone tell people about the plans, the fighter pilots interviewed said. In aircraft carrier “ready rooms,” where flight squadrons spend their time when they are not in the air, crews burn instructions to destroy them.

The pilots reported that Hegseth’s behavior was “infuriating,” “mind-boggling,” and “extremely cavalier.” “If you can’t admit when you’re wrong, you’re going to kill somebody because your ego is too big.”

Will pilots who think they are being led by careless, unserious people stay in the service?

2. Allies will be reluctant to share intelligence with the US. After this episode—and those Trump as 45 committed—allies are less likely to share intelligence with the United States. Canada’s former intelligence chief, for instance, has characterized the Trump II administration’s efforts to downplay the Signalgate episode as “very worrying,” and leading to a rethinking of how to share intel among the “Five Eyes”: the US, Canada, the UK, New Zealand, and Australia. “They’re just trying to clean it up from a political perspective. That worries me.”

As a former CIA officer and member of the Trump I administration concludes, “Allies already hesitant to share their countries’ secrets with the US, because of valid counterintelligence concerns regarding Trump’s affinity for Vladimir Putin, will clam up even more rather than risk their sources being compromised by Trump’s appointees.” He adds, “I suspect these directors’ own subordinates will prefer not to share restricted handling information with them going forward.”

3. There is every indication that this careless Signal chat was not a new occurrence and instead was standard operating procedure (SOP). None of the 17 participants objected to chatting on Signal, none of them noticed that there was a journalist on the thread, and none of them protested when the VP, the CIA Director, and the SecDef revealed classified information. This suggests they commonly communicate in this mode. In fact, it was subsequently found that the person who originated the chat and invited the journalist, the (now former) National Security Advisor, Mike Waltz, has “conducted some government business over personal Gmail accounts” and that “Waltz’s team set up at least 20 Signal group chats to coordinate official work on issues including Ukraine, China and Gaza, and repeatedly discussed sensitive information.”

This suggests that the persons responsible for informing the president about national security are quite willing to endanger us all.

4. It is probable that Signal was used by US officials to evade the Federal Records Act of 1950 and the Presidential Records Act of 1978. It was lore that, despite frequent cautions about retaining all documents from his first administration Chiefs of Staff, 45 regularly tore up and flushed down the toilet many, many documents. His disdain for these laws—and others—that mandate preserving all federal records in the National Archives continued when he took a hoard of classified and unclassified documents to Mar-a-Lago and refused to give them up.

So it’s not impossible that a unique Signal feature that “disappears” a chat after a designated period of time is also SOP. In fact, one of the screenshots taken by the inadvertently-included-in-the-chat journalist “shows this particular chat was set to automatically delete messages after four weeks.” The former CIA-officer-and-Trump I-official cited above is convinced that this disappearing feature permits US officials to avoid the law:

I believe the reason these officials risk interacting in this way is to prevent their communications from being preserved as required by the Presidential Records Act, and avoid them being discoverable in litigation, or subject to a subpoena or Freedom of Information Act request.

The public watchdog group, American Oversight, is suing the Trump administration for violating the Federal Records Act, saying that “the Signal chat amounted to a secret back channel.” Indeed, as part of the case, the CIA’s chief data officer testified that the chat had been effectively deleted from the CIA Director’s account.

The scholar of data loss and the Bodleian Libraries director cited above comment, “As a 2022 report from a British think tank put it, Signal and similar apps essentially create black holes in democratic accountability, systematically undermining proper record keeping to circumvent public oversight.”

5. It is probable that some of the 17 participants were using their private phones in the Signal chat, a known cybersecurity risk. According to The Guardian, the Signal app “is popular among journalists for its sophisticated encryption but cannot be downloaded on devices issued by the federal government, meaning those involved in the discussions were probably using private phones.” This use of private phones is forbidden because they are not secure and are easily hackable. A former White House official also reported that the 17 participants were likely using personal devices “since in most cases, Signal cannot be downloaded onto official federal devices. This alone creates a host of cybersecurity issues.”

In fact, the NSA had issued a warning about Signal vulnerabilities in February 2024:

“A vulnerability has been identified in the Signal Messenger Application,” began the NSA’s bulletin. “The use of Signal by common targets of surveillance and espionage activity has made the application a high-value target to intercept sensitive information.”

That Signal cannot be downloaded onto official federal devices means the SecDef could not copy and paste details of the Houthi attack into the thread and, astonishingly, had to physically and deliberately type them from a classified document into the unclassified chat.

Who of the US opponents and allies are listening in?

6. The SecDef already had demonstrated his scorn for following laws and preserving national security.

First, the Wall Street Journal reports that the SecDef brought his wife to two meetings with other countries’ military leaders where “sensitive information was discussed.”

She probably doesn’t have a security clearance and has no need to know.

Second, the WSJ also reported that Hegseth “brought his brother, Philip Hegseth, a podcast producer, on official visits” to Guantánamo Bay and Asia. It subsequently was revealed that the SecDef’s brother had been appointed as the “senior adviser to the secretary for the Department of Homeland Security and liaison officer to the Defense Department.” Reportedly, when Hegseth led Concerned Veterans for America (and was forced out), he hired Philip Hegseth when the younger brother was only a college student.

This most recent appointment may have violated a 1967 federal nepotism law.

Third, the New York Times reported that Hegseth invited Elon Musk to the Pentagon, where there were plans to brief Musk about the “U.S. military’s plan for any war that might break out with China.” Despite Hegseth’s denying these briefing plans, the Wall Street Journal confirmed them. Axios reports that it was 47 who, when he learned about the planned briefing, “ordered staffers to kill it.”

Musk has clear conflicts of interest as “a leading supplier to the Pentagon and has extensive financial interests in China.” His need to know is nonexistent and, even more, is compromised by his being a defense contractor.

Fourth, reports as of April 20, 2025 indicate that on the same day (March 15) Hegseth shared information in a Signal chat about the upcoming attack on Yemen, he shared the same information with a different Signal group chat—that he had initiated, and on his private phone—that included his wife, his brother, and his personal attorney.

The New York Times reported on April 22, 2025 that the operational details about the upcoming attack Hegseth provided in both Signal chats “came from U.S. Central Command through a secure, government system designed for sending classified information” (emphasis added).

This is an astonishing breach.

More than eight weeks later after Signalgate, only Mike Waltz, the National Security Advisor, has paid a price for this reckless use of Signal. The Trump administration declared on March 31 that the case was closed. An investigation is being conducted…but by an Acting Inspector General who has his position only because the SecDef fired the previous Inspector General. It looks like punishment of most of the high-ranking officials--because they are high-ranking--will not happen.

What can Americans expect of the current Department of Defense and other national security officials when only a scapegoat—Mike Waltz—pays the price for such an egregious violation?

Do we feel more secure by the Pentagon’s revisions of history, obstacles to women’s and transgender people’s service, canceling of instruction about the laws of war, abandoning attention to climate change, giving more and more taxpayer money to private defense contractors, and calling for a trillion-dollar defense budget?

Can we expect future crises to be treated responsibly?

If these in-name-only national security guys are willing to break the law, when will they command servicemembers to break it?

Among the many horrors of this 110-days-old administration, the world’s most powerful military—the US Military—now poses an existential threat to the United States. Not only does it enable with its profligate treatment of classified information dedicated and capable enemies looking to do us harm, it threatens the lives of US servicemembers, threatens potential shooting wars (Panama? Greenland? Canada? Iran? Taiwan?), threatens the safety of our nuclear arsenal and potential exchanges, and threatens long-standing allies.

Now we have the biggest military budget of all time with the most powerful killing gadget of all time in the hands of, apparently, middle-aged adolescent bros who act as though they’re sharing porn over their effing phones.

Egad.