How War/Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth intends to immediately improve the U.S. military by dismissing as many as 20 percent of its generals and admirals remains an open question — one more entry, critics note, on a growing heap of unanswered issues piled on the Pentagon's front table. Filling those positions requires presidential nomination and Senate confirmation — a formal lever Congress holds over the military's top leadership.

Writing in an opinion column for Alternet, veteran editor Terry H. Schwadron argues that rather than stressing military brainpower and effective management at a time when drone innovation and artificial intelligence are revealing new battlegrounds, Hegseth has stayed fixed on what ideal military members should look like and on anything that smacks of diversity and inclusion.

Even as Hegseth boasts of U.S. dominance over Iran and of American strength in the Middle East and Asia, Schwadron writes, the secretary appears to be taking the military on a circuitous tour of "lethality" talk while leading a series of unexplained and odd strategic and tactical consolidations. It remains unclear how threatening any of this is to Iran, Russia, or China.

Bomber Withdrawal From RAF Fairford

In recent days, the United States has hurriedly removed a dozen B-52 and B-1 bombers that had operated out of RAF Fairford in Britain since the opening days of the Iran war — and for decades before. The B-52 Stratofortress and the B-1 Lancer are the long-range heavy bombers at the core of the American bomber fleet, aircraft that have anchored U.S. forward deployments for decades. The withdrawal followed a foiled terror attack on the base by a handful of Iranian British dual citizens and concern that a drone attack on the installation could follow. A pullout — or retreat hardly seems the signal of military dominance, Schwadron argues, particularly with 50,000 American service members still stationed on under-defended bases across the Middle East, and it hardly reflects the warrior-above-all approach Hegseth espouses.

At the same time, President Donald Trump is talking about deploying a third aircraft carrier group within striking distance of Iran, presumably to back up his tough talk about "annihilating" a country of 93 million people.

Meanwhile, Trump wants weapons, nuclear reactors, and a Space Force in space while talking about taking oil fields from vanquished foes. "Our military conversation is out of whack," Schwadron writes.

'No Fatties, No Wimps — Just Warriors'

Hegseth delivered a "state of the force" address to selected military troops in which he declared that he now wants a fit, lethal army. "No fatties, no trannies, no beardos, no weirdos, no wimps, no radicals—just warriors," he said, emphasizing strict enforcement of fitness, grooming, and uniform standards — as if, in Schwadron's view, that were the main issue facing the military. On Thursday, Hegseth promised to livestream a Gladiator-like military execution from Fort Hood, a decision the columnist calls unneeded and anti-humanitarian, and one that appeared to embarrass those inside the Pentagon.

Who Is Hegseth Persuading?

In Congress, members from both sides of the aisle are increasingly asking publicly what Hegseth is doing and questioning why Trump will not act to bring him under control. Those questions carry practical weight: the Pentagon's multi-hundred-billion-dollar annual budget, its senior appointments, and its exposure to investigative hearings all run through Capitol Hill. Hegseth himself, Schwadron notes, sees no bounds in breaking with tradition against partisan politics — going so far as to speak of promoting himself as a presidential candidate.

It is widely believed that Hegseth is being kept in office in part because he refuses to rule out deploying troops to polling places or to U.S. streets if the election does not follow Trump's wishes — not because he sees strategic advantages others miss or leads brilliant military tactics.

The column lays out a series of criticisms: this is the same Hegseth, Schwadron writes, who will not be honest with the public about casualties among American service members or among Iranians and other targeted groups; who is either in denial of, or resistant to acknowledging, the rate at which the most expensive U.S. weaponry is being used in Iran while defenses are drawn down elsewhere across the globe; who sees the next target just over the horizon in Cuba or Greenland without follow-up on where the U.S. has already launched combat; and who is widely cursed by troops held for months in the Middle East without basic services and without any understood purpose for being there.

Should the November election result in a Democratic change in majority in one or both houses of Congress, Hegseth is emerging as the top candidate for a public roasting over the outstanding questions he has created with divisive hiring and promotion policies and short-term strategic thinking. Committee chairs — and with them the power to convene hearings and issue subpoenas — change hands with the majority in each chamber, which is what turns oversight from rhetoric into procedure.

New initiatives introduced by the secretary have included the development of autonomous warfare technology and partnering with non-Ivy League universities for officer recruitment. Most of his initiatives, however, have concerned military culture as Hegseth personally sees it, as opposed to studies of trends, the column notes.

The underlying question, Schwadron writes, is who Hegseth's intended audience actually is — because he appears to have trouble focusing on current forces, recruitment targets, or the management of a hulking Department of Defense.

The Wall Street Journal saw his recent address as a polarizing attack, one that even accused the press of "treason" for publishing what is leaking out of the Pentagon — leaks that flow because Hegseth will not answer straight questions for fear of public criticism, according to the columnist. For Hegseth, revived culture-war grievances mean that the Pentagon is "no longer the woke department or the weak department."

"Does it feel as if the U.S. military is feared around the world?" Schwadron asks in closing.

Terry H. Schwadron retired as a senior editor at The New York Times, served as Deputy Managing Editor at The Los Angeles Times, and held leadership roles at The Providence (RI) Journal-Bulletin. He was part of a Pulitzer Gold Medal team in Los Angeles, and his team shared in several Pulitzers in New York.

This article is based on commentary and analysis originally published on Alternet.