THE COSPLAY PENTAGON
Pete Hegseth thinks he’s playing a season of Survivor. He calls himself the Secretary of War, quotes Pulp Fiction at prayer services, and films photo ops in attack helicopters with Kid Rock. Meanwhile
Last week, in late April, the United States Secretary of the Navy was escorted out of the Pentagon by armed guards.
His name is John Phelan. His crime, according to people who spoke to the Washington Post for a story published Saturday, was that he’d taken his concerns to Capitol Hill about what was happening inside the building, after going first to senior officials in the administration. He was doing his job, the way he understood it.
The civilian SECNAV isn’t a ceremonial role. It’s the office, set in law, that exists to ensure civilian control of the military. Briefing Congress is part of that job. That isn’t optional. That’s the job.
By the time most Americans might have learned John Phelan’s name, his ID badge had been deactivated and a security detail was telling him to leave the building.
Sit with that image, because the longer I’ve stared at it, the worse it’s gotten. The civilian Secretary of the Navy of the United States of America. Walked out. By security.
He’s not the first official Pete Hegseth has thrown out of the Pentagon. By my count of the public record, he’s somewhere around the twenty-fifth.
Let me give you the list, because we haven’t been collecting it in one place, and the full weight of it is the entire story.
In February of last year, Hegseth fired General C.Q. Brown, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs and only the second Black officer to hold that job since Colin Powell. No public explanation was given. In his book The War on Warriors, published before he took office, Hegseth had openly questioned whether Brown got the job on merit or because of his race. That same month, he fired Admiral Lisa Franchetti, the Chief of Naval Operations, the first woman to hold the Navy’s top uniformed job and the first woman ever to serve on the Joint Chiefs. No public explanation there either.
Then came the rest. Vice Admiral Shoshana Chatfield, the U.S. military’s envoy to NATO’s military committee, fired in April. Vice Admiral Yvette Davids, the first female superintendent of the Naval Academy, reassigned in July. Lieutenant General Jennifer Short, the senior military assistant to the Secretary of Defense, fired in early 2025. General James J. Mingus, the Army Vice Chief of Staff, forced into early retirement in October. Admiral Alvin Holsey, the head of U.S. Southern Command and the senior Black officer in his service, resigned in early 2026 at Hegseth’s request. Lieutenant General Joe McGee, forced out shortly after. Colonel Dave Butler, the former spokesman for General Mark Milley, the same.
Last month, in the middle of a war with Iran, Hegseth fired three more in a single afternoon. General Randy George, the Army Chief of Staff with thirty-eight years of service, informed of his firing by phone while sitting in a meeting. General David Hodne, who ran Army Transformation and Training Command. Major General William Green Jr., the Army’s Chief of Chaplains.
The New York Times‘ count in late March put the total at “at least two dozen” generals and admirals fired or sidelined. That was before last month. The actual number is higher.
In parallel, Hegseth’s been quietly working the promotion lists.
According to NBC News reporting based on nine separate U.S. officials, he’s blocked or delayed the promotions of more than a dozen Black and female senior officers across all four military branches. In late March, in a piece I wrote at the time, I detailed how he’d personally struck four officers from the Army’s one-star promotion list, two Black men and two women, over the explicit objection of the Army Secretary. His chief of staff reportedly told the Army Secretary the President didn’t want to stand next to a Black female officer at military events. Three Marine Corps promotions blocked. Two women, one Black man. A Black colonel and a female colonel from another branch removed from a separate list with no explanation.
Add it all up and the result should make every American look up.
By late March, according to the Times, the chair and vice chair of the Joint Chiefs, all five service chiefs, and nine of the ten combatant commanders, the people who run American war, were all white men. Every one of them. That’s a return to a status quo that prevailed for decades and that the U.S. Armed Forces had been slowly correcting away from for the better part of a generation.
It took Pete Hegseth four months to undo it.
You can tell, if you watch how he carries the job, that this isn’t really about ideology. It’s about a man who shouldn’t be in the chair.
This is the man who climbed into an Apache attack helicopter to film a photo op with Kid Rock. The Apache is a $30 million aircraft armed with a chain gun and Hellfire missiles. Kid Rock is, well, Kid Rock. When pilots from his own Army got in trouble for an unauthorized flyby at Kid Rock’s house, the Secretary of Defense personally intervened to quash the investigation.
This is the man who, at a Pentagon prayer service marking the opening of Operation Epic Fury, tried to quote scripture and instead quoted, word for word, a Samuel L. Jackson speech from Pulp Fiction. When the press caught it, he doubled down. Last week he suggested the line might appear in some future edition of the Bible.
This is the man who’s started calling the Pentagon press corps “Pharisees.” Who calls himself, on the Department’s official accounts, the “Secretary of War.” Who blew up at a House Armed Services Committee hearing on April 30 and had to be quieted by a Republican on his own side. Whose own former Newsmax colleague, Greg Kelly, used the word “DESPICABLE” on social media this past weekend to describe the Phelan firing. About whom Saturday Night Live opened its show this weekend with Colin Jost holding an oversized glass of scotch and a deadpan that wrote itself.
Pete Hegseth seems to think he’s playing a season of Survivor. The job, in his head, is the show. The alliances, the tribal council, voting people off the island, performing for the cameras. That’s not the job. The job is sitting in a windowless room with people who know more than you do and listening long enough to absorb what you didn’t know walking in. A real leader earns the respect of the room. He doesn’t need a security detail to remove the people who tell him things he doesn’t want to hear. He truly doesn’t understand any of this.
What Hegseth’s doing is closer to cosplay.
You’ve seen the stories about teenagers slapping ICE on a ball cap and pretending to be federal agents to scare their neighbors. That same energy is what the Pentagon feels like now. He’s not the only one in this Cabinet running the bit. Kristi Noem spent the better part of last year doing tactical-gear photo ops at the border before she got fired in April. The pattern is the same. Image where substance used to live.
The senior national security leaders I worked alongside for thirty years didn’t want attention. They actively avoided it. The instinct of a serious operator at that level is to stay off camera, because the work doesn’t tolerate the distraction and the people doing the work don’t tolerate a boss chasing followers. The job is the opposite of a TikTok feed. It’s not a stage for dance routines and rage bait. The good ones I knew would rather have eaten glass than post a thirst trap from the cockpit of an attack helicopter.
This is what happens when you get rid of the programs that widen the pool of qualified applicants. You’re left with the cosplay version.
The rest of the world has reached a verdict the people inside Hegseth’s own building aren’t yet allowed to say out loud.
Look at the receipts and decide for yourself. He built a career arguing women didn’t belong in combat and put the argument in print. Within weeks of taking office, he fired the first woman to ever hold the Navy’s top uniformed job. He wrote, in his own book, that the second Black Chairman of the Joint Chiefs since Colin Powell may have gotten the job on race rather than merit, and then fired him too.
He’s struck Black officers and women from promotion lists at a rate we haven’t seen in modern times.
His chief of staff reportedly told the Army Secretary the President didn’t want to stand next to a Black female officer at military events. He has no understanding of anything outside a very small worldview that was forged in a Fox News green room. If it walks like a duck and talks like a duck, you don’t need me to call it a duck. And underneath all of it, he’s a clown.
The trouble is the clown is signing the orders.
He runs the people who fly the Apaches, the people who guard the nuclear weapons, the people we send into rooms in places I won’t name to do work I can’t describe. People who depend on the integrity of the chain of command above them to make it home alive.
That chain has been breaking, methodically, for fifteen months now. By a man who confused a line from a Tarantino movie for the word of God and decided to run with it.
Phelan tried last week. He got walked out for it. The country deserves to know what happens next.
Dexter Ingram is a counterterrorism expert with over 30 years in national security. He served as a Naval Flight Officer, led the State Department’s Office of Countering Violent Extremism, and ran the 89-nation Global Coalition to Defeat ISIS. He is the founder of IN Network and author of “National Security Careers: The Ultimate Guide to Breaking In” and “The Spy Archive: Hidden Lives, Secret Missions, and the History of Espionage.”
Truly, it breaks my heart what this man has done. It also makes me incredibly angry. Where and when does it end?
Susan Nergaard