Opinion: Pete Hegseth is a dangerous failure

When Pete Hegseth stepped into the role of Defense secretary in January 2025, the former Fox News host defined his own terms for success: “Warfighting, lethality, meritocracy, standards, and readiness. That’s it. That is my job.” 

A year and a half later, Hegseth has failed to meet even his own self-imposed standards.  

The Pentagon is almost broke after wasting billions of taxpayer dollars on President Trump’s Iran quagmire. Morale is dismal among rank-and-file troops, top brass and even civilian workers. And how has Hegseth responded to growing bipartisan concerns about military readiness? With an incoherent and costly plan to test service members’ testosterone levels.

Hegseth’s stream of social media content portrays him as more fitness influencer than functional Defense secretary. He may be crushing reps on the bench press, as one recent administration account bragged, but his Pentagon is in shambles. Eventually one of America’s enemies will exploit Hegseth’s incompetence at devastating cost to our national security.

We may not need to wait long. Iranian forces have already capitalized on Hegseth’s scattershot strategic planning to launch attacks that resulted in the deaths of 17 U.S. service members since the beginning of Trump’s Iran war. Many of those deaths were preventable, like the six service members killed in Kuwait in March, despite concerns among military officials that their makeshift office space was too vulnerable to attack. Those concerns didn’t sway a strategy driven more by Trump and Hegseth’s egos than by sound planning. Six families are now left to carry an unbearable loss.

“This is not Iraq. This is not endless,” Hegseth promised in a March press briefing intended to counter rising concerns about Trump’s conspicuous haziness about what would constitute victory in Iran. But Hegseth wasn’t so eager to tout that claim during the most recent Pentagon press briefing on Monday, when officials ducked questions about the escalating war following three more U.S. troop deaths and more than 100 injuries in the past two weeks.

No one expects Hegseth to predict how the war will go. The problem is that Hegseth seems to believe he can, and with all the bravado and confidence of a news anchor who won’t be held accountable if his predictions go wrong. But Hegseth isn’t at Fox News anymore. His predictions have real consequences for our soldiers, their families, and the nation’s security and prosperity.  

Hegseth owes the American people transparency about the rising cost of this war. Instead, he’s bragging about his bench presses on Twitter.

Hegseth’s attitude — that someone else will pick up the pieces of his bad decisions — has plunged the Pentagon into both a moral and financial crisis. The Pentagon recently pleaded with Congress to move north of $4 billion from troop training and critical weapons purchases in order to cover skyrocketing Iran war operations costs. Hegseth blames “unforeseen military requirements.” But plenty of Democratic and Republican lawmakers foresaw the budget drain a war with Iran would have on the Pentagon’s budget. Only Hegseth seems caught by surprise.  

The Pentagon’s rising costs stretch far beyond prosecuting the Iran war; they reach into the everyday lives of every soldier and civilian at the Department of Defense. Poor budget planning has crippled the Pentagon’s ability to care for the 172,000 military children enrolled in its childcare program, which is struggling to staff the nearly 19,000 childcare workers it needs. Meanwhile, a proposed plan to modernize the Pentagon’s military health network, which serves millions of active and retired troops, has stalled out due to budgeting problems. 

Hegseth promised the American people a Pentagon defined by “warfighting, lethality, meritocracy, standards, and readiness.” He has delivered a broken Defense Department that can’t achieve a single one of his goals, let alone all of them. The Pentagon is burning through weapons, money and human lives only to deliver a military that is struggling to fight a war in Iran, where readiness is collapsing and where standards of care for active-duty troops and veterans are plummeting to historic levels of dysfunction.  

Hegseth may be having the time of his life as secretary of Defense, but his tenure comes at a disastrous cost to our fighting men and women and to American national security. His record is shameful, and should be disqualifying — something even Republicans acknowledge in their unguarded moments. For the good of the country, it’s long past time for Hegseth to step aside and spare the Pentagon even more avoidable suffering.  

I hear TikTok fitness influencers are making great money these days. 

Max Burns is a veteran Democratic strategist and founder of Third Degree Strategies.

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