Pentagon Exodus Under Hegseth, Venezuela Oil and Democracy, Clancy Trial Deadlocked

**Michelle Martin** (0:02)
How much brain power and experience is leaving the US military?

**Steve Inskeep** (0:06)
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth dismissed many officers. The Army secretary who defended some also resigned. We have an assessment of the military taking fire from within.

**Michelle Martin** (0:15)
I'm Michelle Martin, that's Steve Inskeep, and this is Up First from NPR News. President Trump casts doubt on elections in Venezuela.

**Donald Trump** (0:25)
I just don't think they're ready yet. You know, it's very new. We took them out of a dictatorship.

**Michelle Martin** (0:30)
His energy secretary, Chris Wright, was in Caracas signing oil deals with that same regime. Is Trump choosing oil over democracy?

**Steve Inskeep** (0:37)
Also the judge told a deadlock jury to keep trying to decide the fate of Lindsay Clancy. Her lawyers contend that postpartum psychosis was behind the killing of her three children. Stay with us, we've got the news you need to start your day.
The US military has been taking fire from within.

**Michelle Martin** (1:00)
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has dismissed a stream of senior officers since the early days of the Trump administration. The dismissals began with the president's top military advisor, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. They include many officers who are women or black and people of all backgrounds with deep combat experience. This week, the secretary of the Army resigned, an official appointed by President Trump who had defended many of the officers.

**Steve Inskeep** (1:23)
And Pierce Quill Lawrence has been following all of this and has an assessment. Quill, good morning.

**Pierce Quill Lawrence** (1:27)
Good morning.

**Steve Inskeep** (1:28)
What's driving all the departures?

**Pierce Quill Lawrence** (1:30)
Hegseth hasn't offered explanations publicly for any of these firings. He has said separately that he's ridding the military of DEI hires and woke.
The Army's top civilian leader, Dan Driscoll, also appointed by President Trump, resigned this week and this has been a long time coming. Driscoll is close with Vice President JD Vance. Both are Iraq vets, they met at Yale Law School, and that may be part of why he was so prominent in the first months of this administration. But when Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth accidentally leaked US battle details to a journalist, Signalgate, there was speculation that Driscoll might replace him, and the tension has been building really ever since.

**Steve Inskeep** (2:08)
Okay, so there might have been this sort of personal tension, but was Driscoll also defending the uniform services against Hegseth?

**Pierce Quill Lawrence** (2:16)
We know of a couple of cases where that went public. It may have been in many more cases, but Hegseth has sacked more than 10 generals. He's also been quite unusually reaching down into the promotion lists to effectively end the careers of people who had already been carefully vetted. Many of those people have been black or female officers or generals who were just seem to be tainted merely by serving with distinction under the Biden administration.
I've reached out to Driscoll, I haven't heard back from him, but at least in one congressional hearing, he went to bat for a general who had been removed. And we know from a person close to Driscoll, who wasn't authorized to speak publicly, that Driscoll did have a final meeting with President Trump, where he told him that Hegseth's arbitrary firing are making it harder to modernize the military because really good people are getting fired and it's hollowing out the senior ranks. And he also told Trump that the US is losing the Iran War, that the war is draining the US stockpiles of missiles, and then Driscoll handed in his resignation.

**Steve Inskeep** (3:14)
I'm glad you mentioned the war with Iran. What do all these personnel changes mean for ongoing operations?

**Pierce Quill Lawrence** (3:19)
Yeah, like you say, this is happening while the country is at war. And besides Iran, the administration is marking a year now since it started simply blowing up boats that are coming from South America on the suspicion that they're carrying drugs, killing the sometimes unarmed people on board with no trial, no warning.
Admiral Alvin Halsey was the head of SouthCom, Southern Command, a year ago when these boat strikes began and he resigned about two years before his term was up. Halsey was among a tiny number of black flag officers. He's never spoken publicly about why he resigned. But now the administration was saying that this year of boat strikes has reduced the amount of drugs entering the US. They haven't offered evidence to support that. But it's worth noting that these strikes started as part of a buildup that toppled the Venezuelan leader, Nicolas Maduro. That operation was almost too quick to even call it a war. But a number of senior former military officials have said they think that President Trump came away from that thinking that everything always goes to plan and wars and regime changes can be easy. And now the war in Iran is into its seventh month and there's a lot of turmoil within the ranks of the US military.