Has Pete Hegseth lost control of the Pentagon?

**Sumi Somaskanda** (0:00)
Is the Pentagon in a state of chaos? The Secretary of the Army, Dan Driscoll, submitted his resignation after friction with the Defense Secretary, Pete Hegseth. A number of generals, officials from the Army and the Navy, have left the Department of Defense. And all of this at a critical time, with America still at war with Iran.
So why is Pete Hegseth purging top officials from the US military? And what does it mean for America's armed forces? Welcome to Americast.
Americast.

**Anthony Zurcher** (0:31)
Americast from BBC News.

**SPEAKER_3** (0:34)
Whatever you want to talk about, Abdul, keep my wife's name the hell out of your mouth because she's way out of your league.

**SPEAKER_4** (0:39)
The tide is coming. And this time, we intend to win it all.

**SPEAKER_5** (0:46)
So he doesn't want to do the job. He wants to build his ballroom and travel with Natalie on their apparently defenseless flying palace, gifted by the Emir of Qatar.

**Donald Trump** (0:58)
When I'm not around, you're going to be broke. There's not going to be anybody to report on. Nobody gives a damn about anybody else.
Wow.

**Sumi Somaskanda** (1:10)
That's like a taste of the midterms there.

**Anthony Zurcher** (1:12)
But I would say, yeah. And some of the more controversial lines, of course, had JD Vance talking about Al Said, a Michigan Senate candidate, and the John Ossoff, that famous line that set off a whole series of discussions about Natalie Harp, Donald Trump's assistant, and his flying palace. So yeah, we're right on the edge of current events here with the new headlines.

**Sumi Somaskanda** (1:34)
Great new titles, Americast team. This is Sumi in the Washington DC Bureau.

**Anthony Zurcher** (1:39)
And it's Anthony, along with Suni here. Nice to see you, Sumi. Nice to have you back.

**Sumi Somaskanda** (1:43)
Thank you for having me back. It is another one of those weeks where there is a lot to talk about. And I think one of the issues that we've been spending a lot of time on this week is just how much turmoil there is in the Pentagon at the moment. And we saw the Secretary of the Army, Dan Driscoll, formally submit his resignation. There had been rumors about this, hadn't there, Anthony? That he wasn't really getting along at all with the Defense Secretary, Pete Hegseth.

**Anthony Zurcher** (2:07)
Yeah, this has been telegraphed for a while.
So it didn't come as a shock when the word finally came. But let's underscore exactly how connected Dan Driscoll is with the US Army and the US Army. He was a college buddy or a Yale Law School buddy of JD Vance's. He was assigned by Donald Trump to be the top negotiator in Ukraine. He is considered the drone guy. So he's a guy who was brought in to help reshape the US Army to update them, to get them more cutting edge, to deal with the drone issue, which as we saw in the Ukraine War and now in this Iran War, is really one of the main new developments in warfare in the past 10 years, I would say, and yet he clashed with Pete Hegseth, the Secretary of Defense, who had been confirmed by the barest of margins last year. JD. Vance broke the tie to send him to the Pentagon, and who has been trying on his own in his own ways to change the Pentagon, to change the culture in the Pentagon, but it seems like those two men, they had very different ideas of what changes need to happen and how to go about doing them.

**Sumi Somaskanda** (3:17)
Yeah, it's interesting. Dan Driscoll is someone who was really well liked in his position in his office. I met him a few times. He would gather the press together and do these kind of off-the-record briefings, so I can't discuss what we said in those briefings or what was said. But certainly, I talked to him then separately about drones, and it was something he was extremely passionate about. We talked about Ukraine and what the US can learn from Ukraine on drone warfare and defense against drones. That really was at the heart of what he was pushing to do in the army. He talked also in his office a lot about trimming down the fat in the army, just procurement, the way things work there. That was, you could tell, a real passion of his in that position. He's young, 39
But clearly, as we've seen over several months now, he is just the latest to have a clash with the Defense Secretary. This is after, as we know, the Army Chief of Staff, Randy George, who Dan Driscoll was very close with, left as well. So you have generals who were passed over for promotions or cut loose, and now you have the Secretary of the Army, and as we said, the Chief of Staff, all leaving.