Pentagon Pete’s Secret Paranoid Chaos Is Leaked

Pete Hegseth has bred such deep paranoia inside the Pentagon that staff calculate every decision around whether it would get the defense secretary fired, insiders have revealed.

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The former Fox & Friends Weekend host, 45, has axed more than two dozen senior officers, forced out a Navy secretary, and personally meddled in military promotions across all four branches since taking the top job. The most senior scalp was Army Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George, 61, who was ousted in April during the war with Iran.

One Pentagon official described the daily mood as one of pure self-preservation. “Everything we did on a daily basis, we were calculating, ‘Is this going to keep the boss employed, or is this going to get him fired?’” the official told the network. “Every single day, every decision that we made, that was a planning factor.”

George’s firing was a brutal example of the secrecy. The general had requested an in-person meeting with Hegseth on April 1 to ease tensions and discuss the secretary’s priorities, according to CNN. He never got it. The next day, he was informed of his fate in a curt phone call.

The call was so abrupt that CBS News reporter Jennifer Jacobs broke the news publicly just moments later. By the time George walked back into a meeting with his staff, they had already seen it. “People had seen the tweet,” an official said. “It was awkward because everybody’s looking at him, like what is he going to say?”

What followed was a quietly devastating scene. George delivered the news with no emotion, almost lightheartedly, before his staff lined up one by one to shake his hand or hug him, according to CNN. “It was solemn—as if someone had died,” the official recalled. By the next morning, his office had been emptied.

It was later reported that Hegseth’s team suspected George of leaking a damning story to the media.

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Driscoll, the Army secretary, subsequently paid tribute to George at a House Appropriations Defense Subcommittee hearing, hailing his 42 years of service, his Purple Heart, his wife Patty, their grandkids, and their kids.

The defense secretary’s paranoia has had real-world consequences. Sources said Hegseth froze key military planners out of the loop heading into the war with Iran, leaving the joint staff with barely any insight into the planning as they scrambled to move U.S. assets—including the USS Gerald R. Ford carrier strike group—into the region.

The result, one official told CNN, was paralysis. “A year-plus later, there is a lack of clear internal processes within the Pentagon” that is “caused by mass paranoia,” the official said. “Everything is a case-by-case basis because there’s no delegation, there’s no trust. And if there’s no delegation or trust, policy decisions can’t be made.”

Hegseth has also leaned on the playbook used by Kristi Noem’s Department of Homeland Security, prioritizing slickly produced “war videos” for the White House to project an image of overwhelming success.

Chief Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell hit back hard at the CNN report when asked for comment by the Daily Beast. He branded the sources “outsiders with a clear political agenda to smear the Department and undermine Secretary Hegseth’s leadership through partisan hit pieces.” Parnell added that “every successful organization goes through leadership changes.”