In episode 1820 of Cut the Clutter, The Print Editor-in-Chief Shekhar Gupta, profiles the US Secretary of War Pete Hegseth. He looks at Hegseth’s controversial firing of the US military’s top brass and allegations of misconduct against him. The episode delves into the structure of the US military and reforms introduced over the decades.
Here’s the full transcript, edited for clarity:
In Washington, this is the season of firings. Donald Trump, the President, has carried out his own firings. He fired his attorney general Pam Bondi just this Thursday. Just a couple of weeks earlier, Trump had already fired his equivalent of the Home Minister of America or Secretary of Department of Homeland Security, Kristi Noem. Earlier on, as we’ve been telling you, he had gotten rid of his national security adviser—not quite a member of the cabinet, but about the same rank. That was the Atlantic editor and the Signal messaging app incident that we know about. These two cabinet rank officers he has fired in a couple of weeks.
It looks like that this gave FOMO to another cabinet rank officer Pete Hegseth or Peter Brian Hegseth, now 45 going on to 46. And he also started carrying out his own firings. He fired—following this—the chief of army staff in America. This comes in a series of firings that he’s carried out. He had fired the joint chiefs of defence staff last year. He also fired a couple of other four star (Generals).
Now there’s one thing we have to remember as we discuss the firing of the 41st Army Chief of America by Pete Hegseth. This was General Randy George. He was promoted to this job in September 2023 for a four-year tenure. So, he effectively had another year and a half to go.
However, he’s been made to go now.
The important thing to remember is that, in the American system, the chiefs of army, navy, air force or marine corps, special forces, are all four-star generals, but unlike the system in India, the chiefs have no operational powers or responsibility. They don’t give any operational instructions to their combat forces. Those powers and authorities rest with commanders of the combat arms. So, the US Central Command, US Indo-Pacific Command and others have the operational power. They are also four-star generals.
America, therefore, has this very interesting system. Largest and the most powerful military in the world, no five-star general. Lots of four-star generals.
Their jobs divided. But many of those four-star generals sitting in Washington have no operational role. (There’s been) No five-star (general) after the Second World War in America.
In any case, active five stars exist only in three places in the world. Please note my words carefully. I’m not saying three countries, and I will tell you the reason why. One of these is Egypt where the five-star Field Marshal is also the President of Egypt, Al Sisi.
Then there is Haftar, a self-appointed field marshal in Libya, or one of the Libyan factions. He does not lead a country because the faction that is recognised as the country Libya, that is the Government of National Accord (GNA), is not of Haftar’s.
And the third, of course, is somebody we know very well, Asim Munir. He’s the Field Marshal in Pakistan’s super hybrid system. The American system has not had a five-star (general) since the Second World War. All these four stars divide powers between themselves.
The US Army chief General Randy George being removed will not lead to immediate impact on operations that are going on. These operations are mostly being carried out under the US Central Command based in Tampa, Florida. Not all operations, however, are taking place under one command. Centcom has most of it, but some also goes to the Indo-Pacific Command based in Hawaii.
For example, the sinking of IRIS Dena, the Iranian Navy ship in the Indian Ocean was carried out by a submarine, which served under Indo-Pacific Command.
This system in America, wasn’t so until 1986. It was a more mixed-up system, and the chiefs had more operational powers. In 1986, as part of a long debate about reforms in the US armed forces, how they should be run, and how they should be made more battle worthy and niftier in their response to challenges, the US Congress passed a law. This is called the Goldwater Nichols Act of 1986.
Goldwater-Nichols Act said that that all these four stars sitting in sitting in Washington, including the chairman joint chiefs of staff, they have different roles. For example, the army chief’s, air chief’s, navy chief’s role would be to improve training, improve equipping, develop doctrines, etc.
However, the combat commanders will have exclusive authority over operational decisions. The combat commanders, say the commander of Centcom or Indo-Pacific Command, Indopacom as it’s called, they will not be reporting to army, navy, air force chiefs. They will be reporting directly to the secretary of defence and to the president. It is that complicated, or clear, as a structure because this is laid out in law. That’s how it works in America.
Once again, his (General George’s) removal does not mean that operationally there is any hiatus in what’s going on with the American forces. That said, he’s been replaced right now by an acting general, Christopher LaNeve, who was the vice chief.
He was earlier like a staff officer, or military aide, to Pete Hegseth and is his favourite. It was generally speculated in Washington media that at some point Hegseth will get Randy George out and Christopher LaNeve will become the new chief. He’s an ex-82nd airborne officer.
Now, what exactly triggered this? A couple of things happened, though all of it is in the realm of speculation. One, just a few days back, two pilots carried out a flyby, like a salami flight, like commemorative flight in the honour of a famous musician called Kid Rock who is also a big Trump fan. This was not authorised.
They were flying an Apache helicopter. They carried out this unauthorised flight like a flyby in Kid Rock’s honour. They were put under suspension by the army. Pete Hegseth did not like it. He revoked that suspension and after that, tweeted “Carry on patriots”. You can see that tweet now.
Thank you @KidRock.@USArmy pilots suspension LIFTED.
No punishment. No investigation.
Carry on, patriots. 🇺🇸 https://t.co/Zqhv1Zx1iG
— Pete Hegseth (@PeteHegseth) March 31, 2026
If you are the army commander and you’ve suspended two pilots for doing something that you think was an act of indiscipline and your boss, the minister, has not only reinstated them discreetly but has also flaunted this on social media, that will make your position untenable.
Then, there was an issue about some promotions. Twenty-nine US armed forces officers had come up for promotions. Pete Hegseth was okay with 25 of those, all white. He had a problem with four. Two of them are black and (the other) two women. He did not want them promoted and had been putting pressure on the army chief to take those four names off. He (George) wasn’t willing to do so. Just a few days back, he (George) had sought a meeting with Pete Hegseth. He had gone to meet him but Pete Hegseth was firm that these four should be excluded. This had also become an issue. These are things that I’m reading in the American press.
Pete Hegseth, since he got this job, has been saying that the Pentagon suffers from “woke shit”, as he calls it, or “DEI (Diversity, Equality and Inclusion) appointments”. Hegseth said he’s going to clean all of this up and make the US armed forces macho and masculine once again. He’s used that reasoning and excuse to get rid of many generals. I will give you a list. This is by no means exhaustive or total because he’s fired so many generals. Let me mention some who are significant. Just after firing General Randy George, he fired General David M. Hodne, also a four star. Hodne had only been promoted in October to head the training and transformation command. Just as the Indian Army has a training command, so does the US Army. And then General William Green Jr., who was the chief chaplain of the army. It’s like the head priest of the army.
I didn’t realise that the army in America has a head priest. In India, every regiment has its own priest. Usually, larger units will have combined places of worship and they will have priests from various faiths. The US Army has a chaplain of the entire army. That chaplain has been fired. Again, we don’t know the reason, but we read that Pete Hegseth has been saying that it is not the job of the chaplain in the American armed forces to help people when they have doubts, to take their confessions, or help them, or give them moral strength, etc. He wants chaplains in the US armed forces to give soldiers religious leadership. In fact, he’s also insisting now that henceforth chaplains or religious officers in the armed forces shall not be wearing the uniform, but will be in the regular priest’s clothing, so, they are not confused with soldiers.
Then, we go a little bit backward with his firings. General C.K. Brown of the air force, who was joint chiefs of staff, and before that, only the second black air force chief. He was fired on February 25 last year, five weeks after Donald Trump was sworn in. As was Admiral Lisa Franchetti, (who was) for all practical purposes, chief of the naval staff. Admiral Franchetti was also the first woman to lead the US Navy. She was the chief of naval operations. Hers was seen to be a DEI appointment, just to put up a woman up there.
These appointments were made by Joe Biden and Lloyd Austin, his secretary of defence. He was the third four-star general to become secretary of defence and the first African-American amongst them.
Then, vice chief of the air force, James Silfe, was also made to retire early. All top military lawyers were fired.
As a result of all this upheaval in the corridors of Pentagon, Pete Hegseth is referred to as ‘Dumb McNamara’. Who was McNamara? Many people of my generation would remember and if you’ve been following anything on Vietnam War, you will remember that Robert McNamara was the longest serving US Secretary of Defence between 1961 and 1968. Those were the peak years of the Vietnam War. He was, at one level, seen as somebody who got America more mired in the Vietnam War. At the same time, he carried out big-time military reforms in America. So, he’s not remembered that poorly. In fact, he’s remembered with quite a bit of respect. Before that, he was a business executive. He was the first non-family president of Ford Motor car company. After ceasing to be secretary of defence, he also served as president of the World Bank. He was a smart guy, a very powerful guy in the Pentagon. Now, this one (Hegseth) is flaunting the same kind of power except he’s being called dumb. I will take you through some other discussions on why he has earned that epithet for himself.
Some of this comes from the language he’s using. For example, he said to the Iranians, “We negotiate with bombs. You have a choice as we loiter over Tehran. When IRIS Dena was sunk, he said the next day “silent death”—almost (as if he was) enjoying it.
He’s somebody who carries a great sense of grievance with the armed forces. He did not serve as a regular officer. He was in the National Guard. He had come in through the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps. He was a Princeton student. At Princeton, because he didn’t like wokeness or liberalism, he had started publishing something called the ‘Princeton Tory’—Tory for conservatives—where he ran articles questioning the idea that if a man has sex with a drunk or passed-out woman, who is in no position to say ‘yes’ or ‘no’, then the question of consent doesn’t apply. That history has chased him in the course of time.
Hegseth joined the armed forces through the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps process. I would say the closest parallel I can find is the Territorial Army in India. So, he was almost like a Territorial Army officer in the National Guard. However, he did volunteer to serve in Iraq and got two bronze stars for that. He finished up as a Major and always had a grievance that the armed forces did not treat him well.
They threw him out. In fact, the expression that he used is “spit me out”. He wrote a book about his grievances, ‘The war on warriors: Behind the betrayal of the men who keep us free’. He became a bit of a media star in 2017 when he joined Fox and Friends as an anchor. Fox is very popular, as you know, with the American Right and with MAGA (Make America Great Again) crowd. That’s how he rose and there he started saying that the Pentagon is infested with DEI hires and women who’ve not necessarily been promoted on merit.
In Pentagon, he’s also been having a fight with the army secretary Dan Driscoll. If I read American media, they are full of stories about the fight between him and Driscoll, the army secretary. So far, it looked like Driscoll has had some immunity because he was at Yale with (Vice President) J.D. Vance and is friends with J.D. Vance. However, Randy George, the general who’s been fired now, was also being protected by Driscoll. Randy George has been fired, and it looks like the army secretary’s days are numbered.
To understand how Washington works, I will tell you a couple of more things. One, I told you that General Randy George had asked Pete Hegseth for time (for a meeting). One of the reasons he had asked him for time was to request him to stop interfering with day-to-day affairs of the army, particularly appointments, promotions, stuff like that. That did not work, obviously. This, the fact that tension was building up and that he (George) was on the verge of being fired, was revealed by no one else than Laura Loomer, who became famous in India just recently because she came for the India Today Conclave. She’s a great conspiracy theorist and a Trump supporter, MAGA supporter. She had tweeted just a little earlier that Pentagon was thinking of firing General Randy George.
Now, what did General Randy George do?
He’s a veteran of Afghanistan, Iraq, and fought in those places. He’s had combat commands in those places. He carried out some heavy-duty reforms in Pentagon, particularly with the US Army. For example, the US Army had developed a light tank called M10 Booker, which was supposed to take troops through machine gun fire, mortar fire, etc. He cancelled that programme. He abandoned that programme, saying that this tank will now be taken down by a $1,000 Kamikaze drone. He was also working on the development of a new version of M1 Abraham tank, called M1 E3. That would be faster, lighter, more effective and safer. So, he was carrying out a fair bit of reform. However, it looks like Pete Hegseth thought he was not sufficiently loyal to Donald Trump’s agenda and also bothered too much about legalities of warfare.
Randy George also started an experiment called ‘Transformation in Contact’, because these days, soldiers don’t go to fight each other with bayonets. So, he was setting up 3,000 soldier units armed with drones, artificial intelligence, and non-contact warfare, etc. He was busy with a lot of modernisation. That, obviously the new guy will come and will have his own view.
I will share some writings on Pete Hegseth from American media. One of these talks about how he, along with the entire Trump crowd, are vice signallers. Just as you have virtue signallers, people who say ‘do this, this is the right thing to say, be politically correct’. This phenomenon is the opposite of that.
Principles of modern warfare, legality in modern warfare tells you to use minimal violence, and to treat prisoners well. This lot, however, talks of maximum lethality. These are words that Pete Hegseth has used: “Maximum lethality, not tepid legality; violent effect, not politically correct.”
This, I see in some American writing, is almost like a movie villain’s language.
He’s also been quite gung-ho about going to war with Christian prayer. It’s not as if Christian prayer has not been used before going to war. I read this in an Atlantic article. In 1944, General George Patton, before taking his third army into what was like his final battle against the Nazis, was worried about the weather. It was very stormy, and he called the third army chaplain to pray to God to improve the weather to take the stormy clouds away. The writers here say it’s one thing to invoke divine help for something like this, but on the contrary, the way Pete Hegseth has done it is almost like the jihadis who he dislikes so much or who his people dislike so much.
On Lent, he said, for example, “Let every round find its mark against the enemies of righteousness and our great nation.” Then he prays to God to give his soldiers wisdom in every decision, endurance for the trial ahead, unbreakable unity and overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy. The author says that modern warfare in Christianity also teaches you great responsibility. Christ himself preached mercy. It’s a different matter that he was tortured to death.
Pete Hegseth’s own life is colourful. Let me just put it like that. Three marriages, some divorces, many allegations of sexual misconduct. At least, in one case on the record, he has paid a woman and made a settlement, with a woman who accused him of raping her.
In one case, the story came out that he secretly paid a rape accuser in 2017 and then he was forced to step down from two charities that he was working for, Veterans for Freedom and Concerned Veterans from America. In both the cases, allegations included financial mismanagement, sexual impropriety and personal misconduct.
Again, from the same writings, on 29 May 2015, at a bar at Cuyahoga Falls in Ohio, he got drunk there and joined a crowd as they were shouting, “Kill all Muslims, kill all Muslims, kill all Muslims.”
If you look at all the things that he’s been accused of, then a lifelong issue with drunkenness seems like a minor indiscretion. (But) It is not a minor indiscretion, particularly when you command the largest and the most powerful armed forces in the world. I’m not saying that he comes as a Jack Daniels adult to work these days. But that’s the history that has followed him.
The other thing that’s made him famous obviously are his tattoos. He has the big Jerusalem tattoo on him with the line “Deus Vult”, which means “God wills it”. That is the slogan that Christian crusaders had used during their campaigns, and is seen to be extreme.
That is also a slogan that was used by those who stormed the Capitol Hill to protest the election result against Donald Trump on 6th of January 2021. It was because of these tattoos that he was removed from duty on the inauguration of Joe Biden in 2021. He (Hegseth) later called it anti-Christian bigotry.
He’s now a very important character in the Trump team and if he survives there, India will also have to keep on dealing with him at various points of time, the third four-star general to become secretary of defence.