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Secretary of Whatever Pete Hegseth is nervous. Everyone at the Pentagon knows it. 

How do they know Pete is shaking in his loafers? That five-sided building is just like a small town. There are coffee stations and lunchrooms and cafeterias all over the building. People talk. 

And what they’re talking about is how weirdly frightened the boss is.

You want to know what commanders do when they’re scared that they’re losing their grip? They issue new standards about grooming. Haircuts will be to this length on top and that length on the sides. 

Hegseth’s Pivot on Shaving

Last month, Hegseth ordered a new standard for facial hair. But it’s not a new standard, really. It’s an old one with a racist twist. Hegseth’s order commanded all servicemembers to be “clean shaven and neat in presentation for a proper military appearance.” It’s been that way forever. But look at the next sentence: “When authorizing individual exceptions, commanders must apply consistent criteria and appropriately consider the Department’s interests in safety and uniformity.”

You want to know what he’s talking about there? Waivers given to Black soldiers who suffer from ingrown hairs and a pimpled surface of the skin on their faces because of the curly nature of their facial hairs. Close shaving can cut the hairs at or even beneath the skin surface and cause the sharpened end of the hair cut by a razor blade to grow back into the skin, often resulting in infection. A common way to deal with this problem in civilian life is to grow a beard, because shaving can exacerbate the ingrown-hair problem, causing infections in clogged hair follicles.

The rest of Hegseth’s memo sets out the new process to receive shaving waivers. They must be in writing, and they must be accompanied by medical treatment. If a person still requires a waiver after a year of medical treatment, he can be separated from the service.

Apparently, the previous system of waivers for beards was too woke, too liberal, too DEI for macho tattooed white-boy Hegseth. Those days are over.

Mirror, Mirror…

The other thing nervous leaders do is try to control their image, the way the press covers them. Hegseth moved to make new rules for the press covering the Pentagon last week. NBC News reported Hegseth’s new rules this way:

Journalists who cover the Defense Department at the Pentagon can no longer gather or report information, even if it is unclassified, unless it’s been authorized for release by the government, defense officials announced Friday. Reporters who don’t sign a statement agreeing to the new rules will have their press credentials revoked, officials said.

So, bye-bye free press at the Pentagon. Hello King of All Censors, Pete Hegseth! Secretary of Whatever had already banned reporters from large areas of the Pentagon unless accompanied by an escort officer. He took away the small workspaces that had for years been given to organizations such as NPR, NBC, Politico, and CNN and replaced them with conservative outlets like Newsmax, the Daily Caller, and the Washington Examiner. Hegseth posted on X that under his new regime, reporters can “wear a badge and follow the rules — or go home.”

How’s that working out for you, Pete? The Washington Post, The New York Times, and other news outlets have begun including a paragraph in their published stories alerting people working at the Pentagon that they can contact reporters secretly on their Signal accounts, giving their names and Signal addresses.

“Help us report on the Pentagon,” the Post’s alert says. “The Washington Post wants to hear from Defense Department civilians and service members about changes within the Pentagon and throughout the U.S. military.”

This week, Hegseth made yet another new rule: All speeches given by Pentagon employees or members of the military must now be approved before they are agreed to. The new rules allow for broad controls on who gets to give speeches where, limiting appearances to groups that the Pentagon considers to be “professional.” Last summer, the Pentagon withdrew several generals and department civilians from appearing at the Aspen Security Forum.

Hegseth, a former host on the Fox News program Fox & Friends, still regularly appears on his former network.

A General Meeting

And then yesterday came news that Hegseth has ordered an unknown number — possibly hundreds — of general officers and naval flag officers back from their commands to a big meeting at Quantico Marine Base outside of Washington, DC, in Virginia next week. 

The generals and admirals are ordered to appear with their noncommissioned officer counterparts, who in the US Army are command sergeant majors. No reason was given for the meeting. 

The Washington Post reported — from its confidential sources via Signal, apparently — that Hegseth’s order to the generals is “sowing confusion and alarm after the Trump administration’s firing of numerous senior leaders this year.”

There are 800 generals and flag officers spread out in assignments around the world. Forty-four are four-star generals or admirals. Military commanders in Europe, the Middle East, and from the Asia-Pacific theater are among those ordered to appear at the Hegseth-helmed meeting next week.

Hegseth issued a directive in May that the number of general officers in all the services must be cut by at least 100, including a 20 percent reduction in four-star generals. Hegseth has already fired several of the top generals at the Pentagon, including the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the chief of naval operations, the commandant of the Coast Guard and the Air Force chief of staff and vice chief of staff. The Washington Post reported that the list of those Hegseth fired “includes a disproportionate number of women.”

Who knows what Hegseth plans to do next week when he has all the top military commanding generals and admirals gathered in one place. 

I think it’s likely that he will make a formal announcement in their presence of the reduction in the number of generals that he intends to carry out. It’s likely that he will try to reinforce his obsession with ending “wokeness” in the military, perhaps even having the generals and admirals and senior NCOs sign some sort of pledge to end DEI and “woke” practices in the manner Hegseth has already done, by cancelling celebrations like Black History Month. Already, Hegseth has stripped Pentagon hallways of pictures of former commanders who were women or Black.

Hegseth probably suspects that the senior military leadership lacks respect for him. The highest rank he achieved while on active duty and in the reserves was major.

The thing Hegseth likely fails to understand is that the corps of general officers in all the services have had 30-year careers. They served with each other when they were lieutenants and captains and colonels. Many of them are classmates from West Point or Annapolis or the Air Force Academy, or they graduated from ROTC together. 

There is a bond between them that goes deeper than just friendship. During the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, many of them served alongside each other in combat. They flew jets off aircraft carriers or commanded ships sent to the seas off war zones. They flew Air Force jets and bombers together.

They know each other, and most of them have respect for each other. They don’t know Hegseth, except for what they’ve read about him in the press or seen on television. They know he had a serious drinking problem and was credibly accused of sexually abusing a woman he met at a conference in a hotel. It was a serious enough incident that he paid her $50,000 to sign a nondisclosure agreement and drop her lawsuit against him.

The other thing that Hegseth has no understanding of is what it is like to command a very diverse array of soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines. The percentage of Blacks in the uniformed services is nearly twice their percentage in the population at large. More than 17 percent of those serving in uniform are women. Latinos make up about 17 percent of uniformed service members.

The generals who will gather in Virginia to listen to Hegseth on Tuesday know exactly what it’s like to command such a diverse force.

I’ll just bet they’re waiting with bated breath to hear Hegseth with his right-wing and religious tattoos tell them all about how Pete’s New Pentagon wants them to command soldiers, sailors, airmen, women, and Marines. 

Adapted, with permission, from the Lucian Truscott Newsletter. A graduate of West Point, Lucian K. Truscott IV has had a career spanning five decades as a journalist, novelist, and screenwriter.