Panic at the Pentagon: Hegseth’s Culture Shift and Growing Fear in the U.S. Defense Establishment

CNN reported that Hegseth has instilled a culture of suspicion and paranoia at the Pentagon. The defense secretary has fired more than 20 senior military officials. Hegseth has pledged to carry out a fundamental overhaul of the U.S. security establishment.

U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has brought about a major change in how the Pentagon has operated in his first year and a half in office. Hegseth’s office also withholds information from senior military officials and demands frequent polygraph tests. The defense secretary has reshaped military leadership through dismissals, including senior security officials during the war. Sources who spoke with CNN described a culture of fear of the defense secretary’s wrath.

When Pete Hegseth took office as U.S. secretary of defense, he promised to fundamentally change the culture of the American security establishment and restore a “warrior culture.” In the year and a half since then, the culture at the Pentagon does appear to have changed. An in-depth CNN report found that Hegseth’s office keeps senior military officials in the dark, regularly requires polygraph tests, stokes fear across the various levels of the Pentagon, and does not manage clear work processes, all amid a war with Iran.

“More than a year after he took office, the Pentagon still lacks clear internal work processes... because of enormous paranoia,” a Pentagon source told CNN about Hegseth’s tenure. “Everything is examined on a case-by-case basis, because there is no delegation and no trust. And when there is no delegation or trust, policy decisions cannot be made.”

According to the report, almost from the beginning of his tenure, Hegseth distrusted senior officials around him, civilians and military personnel alike, and questioned their loyalty. Hegseth fired more than 20 senior officers during his tenure, removed a Navy secretary with whom he had clashed, and directly intervened in promotions across all branches of the military, thereby reshaping the senior command layer.

The dismissals and the withholding of information became central to Hegseth’s tenure, but sources told CNN that the phenomenon is not limited to the defense secretary’s office. The culture has also spread to other offices in the Pentagon and created an atmosphere of power struggles among some civilian senior officials. “In everything we did, every day, we asked ourselves: ‘Will this keep the boss in office, or will it get him fired?’” a Pentagon source told the American network.

Within the U.S. security establishment, the view has taken hold that professional survival often depends on making as little noise as possible and avoiding drawing the attention of Hegseth and his team.

Hegseth’s unusual conduct also affected the campaign against Iran. As defense secretary, he kept military officials away from planning the campaign, and as a result some members of the Joint Staff, the military’s nerve center for planning and advising the president and the defense secretary, had very limited exposure to the Trump administration’s strategic thinking. This created difficulties for military planners, who suddenly had to handle the logistics of moving American assets to the region, including aircraft carriers.

The most prominent incident reflecting Hegseth’s distrust of the military establishment came in April, when he decided to fire Randy George, the U.S. Army chief of staff, amid the war with Iran. George was fired in a brief phone call after a dispute with Hegseth over promotions and after requesting a meeting with him. Some of the defense secretary’s skepticism toward the general stemmed from the fact that he had served as an aide to former defense secretary Lloyd Austin in the Biden administration.

A few weeks later came another shake-up that surprised Pentagon officials, the firing of Navy Secretary John Phelan. CNN reported that relations between Phelan and Hegseth had deteriorated in recent months for a variety of reasons, from Hegseth’s frustration that Phelan was not advancing the administration’s priorities quickly enough to suspicion about Phelan’s close ties to Trump.

Hegseth also clashed with Army Secretary Dan Driscoll, who is considered very close to Vice President JD Vance and has also developed a direct relationship with President Trump. In the United States, it was reported that Hegseth saw Driscoll’s ties to the White House as an attempt to bypass him.

“Sometimes leaders have to do bold things when they are in office, sometimes they have to take risks. The army tried to promote leaders who are willing to do that. The current situation has frozen that idea,” a source in the U.S. security establishment told CNN.