Sam Stein: Situation in the U.S. Military Under Hegseth ‘Not Cataclysmic, But Pretty Close’

EXCERPT:

STEIN: “Mark Hertling, who knows what’s going on in the army, and he talks about this as like, not cataclysmic, but pretty close. You need civilian leadership. You need order, you need structure, you need trust within the ranks. And when you have purging of leaders, when you have people who are resigning because they cannot get along with the defense secretary, when you have the defense secretary secretly employing this online troll army, another discovery that we have, it just erodes the trust that you have with the Pentagon. And obviously, morale is fairly bad there, what we saw with the sailors who were on the ship for months on end, dining it off, that is indicative of low morale. And obviously, the war is not going well. One of the real flashpoints was this Washington Post story a couple of days ago, where the four-star generals gave an assessment to Hegseth saying, 'Hey, this cannot continue open-ended.' That’s bad. The leak of that is a sign that there is discontent in the ranks. And this does matter for obvious reasons. It’s a geostrategic matter, but it’s also a domestic political matter. People notice this. People see what’s going on with the war. To Ali's point, to Jeff’s point, it’s not really clear what the objectives even are at this point. It seems like we’re in a stasis where nothing’s actually happening. We claim the Strait's open, but now we have this story that says, oh, actually we have to bomb to make sure that the Strait's not attacked by the Iranians. No one quite understands this.”