A Culture of Silence: The Real Crisis Behind the Army Secretary’s Exit

[00:00:00] So Dan Driscoll's out! And supposedly it's because of a personal beef with Pete Hegseth and disagreements over how officers in the Army were being promoted or taken off promotion lists, approach to drone warfare, approach to the Iran conflict, and a host of other issues. But is this just a personality conflict between two high-ranking members of the U.S. government and one decided to punch out? Or is there a bigger problem here? Well, anytime the boss man leaves early, it usually doesn't mean things in the organization are going particularly well.

[00:00:30] Good morning and welcome to the At the Water's Edge podcast, where we look for insights beyond the headlines and take a practitioner's view on national security and geopolitics. It's the 4th of September, 2026. Let's get started! So Dan Driscoll is out as Army Secretary, and with that, the Army is without a Senate-confirmed leader. Now, yeah, there'll be someone, you know, appointed acting to serve in a stead. I'm sure they've already announced who it is.

[00:00:55] But it's absolutely critical to have Senate-confirmed leaders in different posts in the U.S. government at the highest level. You know, a non-Senate-confirmed leader, an acting director of whatever, acting secretary, just doesn't have the same organizational huasta that a Senate-confirmed leader does. And legally, they can't do all the same things. This slows down the bureaucracy. It makes process more difficult. It means that important initiatives in the Army are not going to be addressed in a timely manner.

[00:01:25] Which, when you're in the middle of fighting a war, that's bad. Now, is this just a one-off thing that the youngest secretary of the Army in history, confirmed at 38 years old, leaves after 18 months? Well, actually, it fits a much broader pattern. Now, for context, Army secretaries usually don't leave like this. You know, Dan Driscoll's predecessor, Christine Wormuth, left at the end of the Biden administration as part of her team handover. She had served in the role for four years.

[00:01:55] Before that, we had Mark Esper and Ryan McCarthy in Trump's first term. They both were there for about two years. They had normal transitions, no issues there. A lot of folks rotate out at the two-year mark. You know, these top positions are absolutely brutal, professionally and personally. So that's not unusual, resigning after 18 months is. And before that, we had John McHugh, who was actually in the position for six years, one of the longest tenures in recent decades.

[00:02:22] So this is not the norm, whether we're talking about Republicans or Democrats. Now, Driscoll is just the latest on a long list of names of senior folks who we've been seeing leaving the administration. Back in February of 2025, we saw General Brown, who was the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, get pushed out of his role. Admiral Lisa Frenchetti, the Chief of Naval Operations, and General James Sleif, the Air Force Vice Chief, all fired in the same time period.

[00:02:46] April of 2026, we had Navy Secretary John Fellum forced out Army Chief of Staff, General Randy George, General David Hahn, and Major General Green removed from their roles. Earlier this year, this past July, General Christopher Donahue, one of the most decorated soldiers from the Global War on Terror, left his job early as the four-star in charge of U.S. military forces in Europe. One of the most coveted positions in the U.S. military. Pinnacle of his career.

[00:03:15] And he said, boys and girls, I'm out. And then, recently, we have Dan Driscoll joining the list. But it doesn't stop there. Over 20 generals, admirals, and civilian defense leaders at the senior executive service level and higher have been forced out or resigned since January of 2025. If you include the number of general officers who were removed from promotions lists, either to one-star or two-star, that number rises to over 80.

[00:03:42] We've seen a reduction in four-star flag officers from 10 to 5 in that same period of time. We have had two military service secretaries resign from their posts. And, you know, try not to read too much of the statistics here, but sometimes the numbers do tell an interesting story. 60% of the dismissed generals and admirals happen to be women or persons of color. Far be it to me to read anything into that, but, you know, the numbers do tell a story.

[00:04:12] Now, anytime you have a new administration come in, there's always change over in top rules. So, is this typical for an administration coming in? Is it atypical what's going on here? And the short answer is no. No administration has ever seen this much turnover in the upper echelons of its military ranks, either on the uniform side or the civilian side. The closest corollary we have is the revolt of the admirals in 1949,

[00:04:39] where a group of Navy admirals were mad about a policy being passed about a supercarrier. And, you know, they were all fired when they came out in the press and spoke publicly about it and yada, yada, yada. But that was a handful of officers confined to one service in 1949. You know, the other example folks have talked about is MacArthur. MacArthur, but MacArthur publicly went against the president. And then also tried to get us into a nuclear war with China.

[00:05:06] He wanted to use nuclear weapons during the Korean War and in the unclassified versions of the testimony surrounding those talks that were held in front of Congress. We now know that when they war game that out, we dropped nukes on China. China throws every division it has at our forces in Korea. We can't hold the lines. We either we lose Korea or we pull everything out of Europe to defend Korea. And so then the Soviet unit takes over Europe.

[00:05:32] So, yeah, publicly going against the president, advocating for nuclear war and advocating for nuclear war that we would then lose. Yeah, that'll get you fired. Not quite the same thing we see going on here. Now, all this isn't happening in a vacuum. We've seen several public remarks from the administration regarding how it's treating its view of senior military leaders.

[00:05:55] The most infamous one at this point is the Quantico address in 2025, where for the first time ever, every flag officer in the military was flown to one location, a schedule that everyone in the world could see, to hear some inspirational words from Secretary of Defense. Sorry, Secretary of War. My mistake. Pete Hegseth. And basically, it was a my way or the highway speech. Here's our political agenda. Here's how we think that maps onto the military. Either get with it or get out.

[00:06:23] Now, let's hear a couple clips of what was actually said at that meeting to the assembled flag officers. Leadership changes will be made of that uncertain. Not because we want to, but because we must. Once again, this is life and death. The sooner we have the right people, the sooner we can advance the right policies. Personnel is policy. But I look out at this group, and I see great Americans.

[00:06:52] Leaders who have given decades to our great republic at great sacrifice to yourselves and to your families. But if the words I'm speaking today are making your heart sink, then you should do the honorable thing and resign. We would thank you for your service. In addition to the secretary, we got to hear from the president himself at that event.

[00:07:20] And if you want to do anything you want, you can do anything you want. And if you don't like what I'm saying, you can leave the room. Of course, there goes your rank. There goes your future. Well, it turns out Dan Driscoll and several other senior leaders in the Pentagon have decided to leave the room. Now, the issue here isn't just that, hey, administration has a set of priorities. They have a worldview. They expect people to get on board. We have civilian control of the military for a reason. You got to fall in line.

[00:07:45] How things are done are just as important as what's done with an organization like the military. And we have another example we can point to of a massive change, a direct order to get with the program or get out. And that was the repeal of Don't Ask, Don't Tell under the Obama administration. So in 2010, in Obama's first term, he began the process of repealing the Don't Ask, Don't Tell policy.

[00:08:11] One of the most controversial policies that existed regarding who did or did not qualify to serve in the military that America has had in a long, long time. Now, if you were in the military at this time while this was happening, it was interesting. It was interesting. There were a lot of strong feelings about it, you can imagine. But Obama didn't bring every general into a room and say, get with it or get out. He actually went through a deliberate decision-making process.

[00:08:38] He sought counsel from the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, all the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He took it to Congress. There was a seventh-month discussion around this and then a rollout of formal training, letting soldiers know what the New Deal was. Now, you might look at this and say, well, the outcome's the same. You have a president and his administration advancing an agenda, an agenda that you know it's going to piss off a significant amount of people.

[00:09:03] Well, the difference here is that when you go through that longer, more bureaucratic process, you include more stakeholders, you elicit more buy-in, you allow people to be heard, and even when folks disagree with the decision, they understand that there was a process that was involved, and that's okay to participate in the process and not ruin your career. And then once the decision's made, you move out.

[00:09:27] But the door is open to receive feedback the next time a controversial issue pops up. When you bring all the generals and admirals into one room and say it's my way of the highway, you shut that down. So it's easy to look at these two and say, well, we have one administration advancing a quote-unquote woke agenda, and we have another administration trying to claw it back. Well, what they're doing is one thing. How they do it matters a lot. Now, all this results in a senior leadership in the military

[00:09:56] that has learned to be extremely careful about what it says. And numerous retired officers who still have connections to those still serving have pointed this out. A basic tenet that you learn in special operations is that organizations move at the speed of trust. And they have to innovate at the speed of relevance, not perfection. Well, if there is no trust, no one's going to take risks. If no one takes risks, you can't innovate. And when you can't innovate, your enemies win. This is a problem.

[00:10:26] Now, a bad command climate isn't the only thing putting strain on the U.S. military right now. Now, there's also some basic logistical issues with how we purchase and field weapon systems. I mean, right now, we're using $4 million interceptors to shoot down $30,000 drones. This math is not good. You know, Lockheed Martin is saying it's going to take them until 2030 to be able to produce 2,000 interceptors a year, if they can actually get there. This will never work in our favor when Iran, despite being blockaded,

[00:10:55] concerns out of thousands of these things a month. We'll never be able to contend with their military capacity. And this is just Iran. And the problem isn't really a money one. We can throw more money at this problem and not get any better results. Ukraine's a great case study. They're producing 7 million drones this year they're on track for. They're putting out 9,000 a day. They are developing new hardware and software that they're putting in the field in two to three weeks. Two to three weeks.

[00:11:25] That's how fast their weapons adaptation cycle is. We've been watching this war go on since 2014. And it still takes us 12 years on average to field a new weapon system. Now, when Pete Hegseth first came into office, this is an area that he made a lot of ruckus about. He was talking about how we need to get around the big five defense contractors. They move too slow. We need to innovate faster. We need to be drone agile. All this sort of stuff.

[00:11:51] And I got to say, you know, if you're the secretary of defense, secretary of war, whatever you want to call yourself these days, and you want to leave a legacy, this is a place where you could expand a lot of political capital and make a huge difference. This is a part of the problem where you are uniquely positioned to have an incredible impact. So two months after the meeting in Quantico, Pete Hegseth did pledge to transform the entire acquisition system to operate on a wartime footing.

[00:12:18] I'm not actually quite sure what a wartime footing means, but okay, sounds good. We've supported, you know, 10,000 new firms have entered the defense industrial base. Non-traditional companies have received $120 billion in contract obligations. And the 2027 budget shifts half of munitions spend to low-cost weapons, rising to 70% by 2031. Well, the low-cost weapons systems aren't actually that low-cost.

[00:12:44] The contract obligations, eh, that assumes that the firms are actually able to fulfill those, and all of them working with prime contractors. That's a whole mess. 10,000 new firms have entered the defense industrial base. I mean, how many of those are just subcontractors to the big five? Like, this is not—we haven't fielded a new weapon system to the folks in the field for the entire six months of the Iran war. So talking points aside, it's not working.

[00:13:15] Whatever else you want to say about it, it's not working. And we see these two trends converging at the worst possible place, the warfighter. If you are a senior leader and you're looking at this war with Iran and you're trying to figure out, all right, how can we do this better? And you got a great idea. How do you bring that to the chain of command? How do you put that into the community without looking disloyal?

[00:13:39] How do you go to the secretary of defense or someone in his office who controls budget, who can move money around, and be like, hey, we have problem A. Problem A exists because we're not doing X, Y, Z very well. Here's a way we could fix it. Here's something I need. Here's a tool that we should develop. You know, here's how we can change how we do business. You can only advocate for that if you acknowledge that the reason for it is because what we're currently doing is failing.

[00:14:07] Now, Pete Hegseth is out there saying that we are winning the war with Iran. We've destroyed the militarily. We've done yada, yada, yada. And it's one thing just to look at that as propaganda and bluster. But that's the same guy who called every admiral and general into a room and said, it's my way or the highway. And then the president comes up and says, if you don't like what I'm saying, get out. You can't have buy-in into innovation.

[00:14:32] You can't have organizational trust when that's your leadership message publicly, early, and often. And it's backed up by the actions of firing more general officers than any other administration in the modern era. You can't have it both ways. Now, in the context of this, the story that we heard this week from The Washington Post about the Secretary of Defense orders book is absolutely wild. So every two weeks, there is a document called the orders book.

[00:15:02] And it's got, you know, every major campaign plan, every major theater obligation in it. And everyone who's in charge of executing those plans from every region of the world comes in, a bunch of four-star commands, comes in and says, you know, they concur with the current plan and how it's resourced. You know, they have a plan to meet their mission objectives and they have the stuff to do it. Something like defend Taiwan, defend Korea, deter Russian aggression, you know, stuff like that. They have the plan to do it and they have the resources to make that plan work or they don't concur.

[00:15:32] There's other stuff, but that's the basic idea. Well, this week, it's been reported that multiple four-star commands have come back and said that they do not concur that they have the resources they need to fulfill their obligations because of the war with Iran and the drawn resources that it's doing. Now, the Secretary of Defense spokesperson came out and said, oh, well, you know, non-concurs are commonplace. There's a robust discussion back and forth. Yeah, no, no. Even before this, that was not true.

[00:16:01] They're not commonplace. Non-concurs are incredibly rare. Non-concur, when you put that on paper, shines a big flashing red light on you and all the problems. And what you're basically saying is like, hey, somebody else couldn't give me the stuff I needed. And the plan that I inherited when I got to this job, it sucked. Someone else did a bad job. So the entire organization goes, oh, really? You think you're so smart? Okay. Prove to me that you have a problem. Nobody wants to deal with that.

[00:16:28] There are much more quiet, bureaucratically safe ways to advocate for what you need rather than to put a formal non-concur in the Secretary of Defense orders book. And everyone who has access to that book and actually has the authority to put a non-concur in it, they got that far in their career by being really good at working that system. So, no, in case you were wondering, it is not routine to see non-concurs in that document. Absolutely not.

[00:16:55] But we're seeing it now despite the purges, despite the command climate, despite the Commander-in-Chief and Secretary of War coming down and saying, it's my way or the highway if you don't like what we're saying, get out. It's happening anyway. And I know, this is like the lamest version of a wild story everywhere. Oh, Lord, they changed how they're documenting something in a document that nobody's ever heard about in the most bureaucratic organization on the planet. I got it.

[00:17:22] But in bureaucratic terms or bureaucratic organizational dynamics, this is actually massive. And what's going to be more interesting is how little we see come out of it. Probably. Oh, well. At least some folks have covered their ass for the history books, right? Now, there's a third thing of putting strain on the force right now. It's not just the command climate. It's not just the fact that we can't get the resources that we need to fight the wars that we're in.

[00:17:51] There's an old saying in the military by this old dead pression guy by Clausewitz. I know I'm pronouncing it wrong. War is continuation of politics by other means. And even when we describe warfare in the military, we use terminology like we are here to impose our will, our political will through violence. Then we'll cap it like, well, the ethical application of violence. But it is to impose your political will. That is what war is for.

[00:18:20] Well, where does political will come from in a representative democracy or republic like America? Well, it comes from the people. That's the source of political will and legitimacy as expressed through their elected representatives in the Congress. Well, 70% of America right now opposes the war. All the troops see the polls. All the troops talk to their family members. 70% of the public is against this. That's worse than the war with Iraq. Yikes.

[00:18:50] There's never been a war where six months in, 70% of the public is against it. That just doesn't happen. This is incredible. And Congress has actually passed through both houses a resolution demanding the Trump administration end the war. Because there is that pesky part about the Constitution where Congress actually has to decide when we go to war. Of course, they've advocated that responsibility for decades now. But, hey, you know, technically it is still theirs.

[00:19:15] And then, of course, they made it non-binding and refused to enforce it. So if you're in the military right now, you are involved in a war that's not declared, that the public is against, that your own elected representatives have voted against. But not willing to do anything to actually end it. You're stuck in limbo and you're seeing the entire American military get outclassed by a third-rate power who's apparently just far more clever, adept, and better at planning than our institutions are.

[00:19:45] This does not bode well. I would say morale and the active force is cratering, but they don't make craters this deep. So where does that leave us? We have the Secretary of the Army leaving the administration early and voluntarily. We have a long list of leaders who have left, some of their own volition, some not. A culture of silence that has seized the Pentagon.

[00:20:10] While we fight a war with no political backing, that is constantly highlighting the deficiencies in our defense industrial base. With the way things are right now, we're not getting any closer to solving those problems. But boy, do we need to before we get into a fight with somebody like China. Thanks for joining us today. If you want to get access to the full slide deck, not just the what was briefed, please be sure to subscribe on Substack, link in the show notes. And we'll see you guys next week.