Is Pete Hegseth out of his depth?

Back when Pete Hegseth was still just a television presenter, the former Army National Guard officer who had served in Iraq and Afghanistan explained how he returned to civvy street. “I separated from an Army that didn’t want me anymore,” Hegseth wrote in his book, The War on Warriors. “The feeling was mutual. I didn’t want this Army anymore either.” Fast forward two years and Hegseth finds himself at the Pentagon, trusted by President Trump to overhaul America's armed forces, the leadership of which he still does not seem to want. Twenty months after he was named as defence (now war) secretary, he undertaken a purge of top commanders that shows no sign of slowing, causing turmoil, anger and resentment among the US armed forces. Hegseth appears to be a man on a mission: to eliminate wokery and what he views as an obsession recruiting and promoting military personnel to meet cultural trends that have no place in the armed forces. The 46-year-old who is loyal to a fault to President Trump has sacked more top commanders than the combined total of his seven predecessors. More than 80 rising stars have had their promotions blocked, many of them black or women. The disruption to the leadership of the military has been so dramatic that some of the key appointments, including the chief of staff of the army, remain vacant, after the then incumbent, General Randy George, an officer with an impressive pedigree, was summarily fired after clashes with Hegseth. On September 1, Dan Driscoll, the highly regarded army secretary, the top civilian job in the service, resigned and went to see Trump to complain of the damage being done by his war secretary. At a time when the United States is at war with Iran and the two big-power rivals, China and Russia, are making their moves to exploit perceived American military weaknesses, the Hegseth revolution at the Pentagon has turned the second largest office building in the world upside down. Republican Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina has urged Trump to sack Hegseth. “I have never witnessed more inept management of the brave men and women who serve our country,” he said in a social media post. Eric Edelman, defence policy chief at the Pentagon in the George W Bush administration, warned in a recent subscription-only podcast called Shield of the Republic of “the potential institutional damage that the poseur who claims he is the secretary of war is doing to both the uniformed military services and the department of defence more broadly”. “Much but not all of this personnel churn has been directed at the US army and so it was not surprising when the secretary of the army, Dan Driscoll, in the wake of all these acts of self-harm to the officer corps, resigned after warning the president about the damage being done to the fabulous military that he likes to tout which has left the army rudderless in the midst of a war,” he said. Despite the turmoil in the Pentagon, no one in the military can claim they weren’t given early warning. Hegseth’s personal mission was laid out in his 6,000-word address to more than 800 generals and admirals, summoned to hear what he wanted from them during an unprecedented gathering of top brass at the Marine Corps’ Quantico Bay base in Virginia on September 30. Overweight generals padding around the Pentagon corridors, fat troops struggling to train to the proper standards, gender-changing military personnel, beards and women in combat roles, all emerged as his pet hates. “We became the woke department, but not anymore. No more identity months, DEI [diversity, equity, inclusion] offices, dudes in dresses, no more climate change worship, no more division, distraction, or gender delusions, no more debris.” Hegseth told his stunned audience. Since then, Hegseth, the 29th defence secretary, who served in Iraq and Afghanistan as an infantry officer in the US Army National Guard, has sought out commanders who remind him of his wartime heroes, General Norman Schwarkopf who led the US and allies to victory in the 1991 Gulf War – the only US military victory in nearly 50 years – and General George Patton. of Second World War fame. However, General Chris Donahue, a commander who would appear to fit that bill, fell foul of Hegseth for reasons that have not been fully explained, and he was forced into premature retirement. Donahue who had spent much of his army career in the dark world of special forces missions had been put forward as the next supreme allied commander Europe (Saceur). But Hegseth blocked it. By all accounts Donahue was punished for being the last man to leave Kabul when all US troops were evacuated in a shambolic end to the war in Afghanistan. Trump who described the troop evacuation as “the most embarrassing moment in the history of the United States”, wanted heads to roll. Unlike two of his predecessors, Robert Gates and Leon Panetta, both regarded as distinguished secretaries of defence, Hegseth has had no experience of managing a large government department, let alone one the size of the Pentagon which is responsible for 2.8 million people, uniformed and civilian, and has a budget of nearly $1 trillion. Gates, 22nd defence secretary, and Panetta, the 23rd, were both formerly directors of the CIA. Panetta also served as the director of management and budget in the Clinton administration. However, Trump thinks Hegseth is “one of my best”. When the president secretly swapped planes in July from Air Force One via a catering truck at Ankara airport after a Nato summit following warnings of a suspected plot to assassinate him, he took only one cabinet minister with him: Pete Hegseth.

Putin's most outrageous plot

While he was gathering with fellow leaders at the bizarre summit with the leaders of China, India, Iran and others in New Delhi, Vladimir Putin must have given the go ahead for one of his more outrageous acts against the West at a railway station close to the Ukraine/Poland border. A jet-powered drone with a 90-kilogram high-explosive payload crashed into a locomotive at the railway station only a short time after a train had left for the Polish border carrying VIPs, including Boris Johnson, all of whom had been attending a summit of officials in Kyiv with President Zelensky. Everyone knows, including Putin of course, that the Ukrainian government runs a train shuttle between Kyiv and Poland, and the "diplomatic train", the one that ferries important visitors very regularly, must have been on Moscow's mind for a hit for a long time. The drone didn't attack the train with the former British prime minister on board because, it seems, it left earlier than the timetable planned. The drone struck a train which had been emptied of its passengers fifteen minutes earlier after word got through that a drone was on the way. Russia has begun attacking railway stations and railway lines in Ukraine but this looked like a deliberate attempt to strike at Zelensky's latest visitors. If the drone had hit the diplomatic train and people had died, what would have happened? It doesn't bear thinking about. But it seems Putin was prepared to take the risk.

The European Union still reliant on Russia for gas supplies

After all the sanctions and bans imposed on Russia since the invasion of Ukraine nearly five years ago, it is staggering that the European Union still relies on Russia for 12 per cent of its gas requirements. The EU promises to bring this to an end in January but the way the world is going right now and the shortages everywhere in oil and natural gas because of the disruption of the energy market since the war with Iran began, it's likely this partial dependence on Russian gas will continue for longer. It's one of the gravest lessons learned by the West, that it became too sucked into cheaper Russian oil and gas when relations with Moscow were relatively stable It is true that Europe has become far less reliant on Russian energy but the fact that nearly five years later, the EU still can't fully shake off the Russian connection when it comes to energy supplies is sobering. Vladimir Putin presumably knew for certain that the West would not be able to shut off all supplies from Russia and has benefited hugely as a result, helping him to fight his war with Ukraine. Things have gone badly for Putin since the invasion but thanks to the world's demands for oil and gas he has managed to keep going and build better and more powerful weapons to hit Ukraine. It is a sad commentary on the state of affairs we see in the world today.

Everyone has underestimated the Houthis

When they started becoming a nuisance way back, the Houthi rebels as they were then called were a pain in the neck, like a cloud of mosquitos buzzing away in the wrong places. Now, they are a force to be reckoned with and are always known just by the name, Houthis. The world knows who the Houthis are because they pop up whenever they want and cause trouble. Today, they are playing a leading role in forcing oil prices up beyond $100 a barrel. They have taken control of the whole coastline of Yemen, effectively putting them in charge of the Bab al-Mandab Strait, another one of those wretched maritime choke points through which Saudi Arabia, in particular, transits its crude oil to Asia. The Houthis are saying that after their lightning military advance to grab the Red Sea coastline and key coastal towns,such as Mokha, as well as an island in the middle of the strait called Perim Island, they can dictate which tankers can transit and which can't. So far they have said their focus is to stop all Saudi tankers going through the strait. How the Houthis have managed to build themselves into such a major strike force is hard to comprehend. Of course they have had help from Iran but the Houthis are also a fiercely independent organisation and they clearly have effective leadership. Literally, no one, not the United States, not Saudi Arabia, not the Gulf states, know what to do about the Houthis. They are running rampant and getting away with it.

AI is beginning to sound truly scary

Progress in developing artificial intelligence (AI) systems has reached a level where experts are warning AI could destroy the human race within ten years. Most people would have seen that prediction and laughed because it seems more fantasy than reality. However, the warning came from someone in the AI industry who can see how the rapid developments could be turned against us if the new super AI systems end up in the wrong hands. The apocalyptic warning suggested that evil people might use AI to produce biological weapons which could wipe out the human race. It’s bad enough that the world is facing dramatic climate change, producing dangerous heatwaves in many countries, widespread fires and flooding from glaciers melting. There is no easy way for the world to combat these growing threats but a consensus for action among all politicians in the United States and among US allies would go at least some of the way towards finding solutions. Unfortunately, there are so many other threats and dangers, such as the war between the US and Iran, the war between Russia and Ukraine and the negative effects they are having on the world economy that the dramatic warning of AI’s capacity to ruin all our lives has not really had the impact on public opinion it deserves. When AI was first developed the focus initially was on the good it would do for humanity, particularly in medical research. But now, because the big players in developing AI, such as Anthropic, OpenAI, Nvidia, Microsoft and Google, have made such rapid advances it seems it is almost too late to stop the technological momentum. Every government in the western world now has AI experts as part of its administration. But do they have sufficient influence to bring some common sense into this new technological era? The trouble is, potential adversaries of the United States are pursuing the same dream of producing AI-controlled weapons that will, like the armed drone today, transform conflicts of the future, with robots replacing humans. China, a big-power rival of the United States, has recently demonstrated its success in producing robots that can run faster than any human being. The omens for persuading the world to step back from developing advanced super-intelligent AI systems that will replace humans – advocated last week by Senator Bernie Sanders - are not good. The world has failed to take adequate measures to stop global warming. Whatever steps are taken in the future will only help to reduce the impact of climate change on our lives, they won’t be able to stop the damage already done. It could be the same with AI. Unless measures are taken to forge an international agreement on limiting the potential threat of AI, the momentum will just carry one. Then, the warning of a threat to the human race might just be facing us all in the next decade or so.

Iran is literally asking for trouble

For reasons that only the generals of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps can explain, Iran has taken it into its head to start firing ballistic missiles at US warships. In response, US Central Command, ready round-the-clock for retaliatory strikes, struck back at five Iranian oil tankers, putting them out of action. This may make Iran think again but somehow I doubt it. If the IRGC generals could actually hit a US warship and cause damage and casualties that would be a big feather in their cap and give them motivation to try again. Every missile fired at an American ship has been brought down, and it goes without saying that if the IRGC did manage to get a missile through the defences, that would be a huge blow to the US military. Donald Trump would demand huge revenge. Trump has said this is not a war at the moment. But any damage to a US warship and the gloves would be off. The IRGC generals know this but they seem to believe that it's still worth having a go. Trump has said the confrontation is likely to continue until after the American midterm elections on November 3. In other words, these strikes and counter-strikes are going to continue until then, with Iran hoping that the midterm elections will go badly for the Republicans, and therefore badly for Trump. Sounds like a war to me.

Violence by Israeli settlers against Palestinian communities is appalling

Ed Milliband, the foreign secretary, has been condemned by Israel for accusing Jewish settlers of ethnic cleansing in their attempt to drive out Palestinian communities from their homes on the West Bank. The only experience I have had of witnessing ethnic cleansing was during the war in Bosnia when all three ethnic communities, the Serbs, Croats and Bosnian Muslims committed atrocities in efforts to expel ethnic groupings not matched with theirs. It was frightening, brutal and criminal, and up to 100,000 people were murdered, at least 65 per cent of them Muslims, and tens of thousands of women and girls were raped, again, mostly Muslims, over a period of three years from 1992 to 1995. This was ethnic cleansing on a vast scale, although not by comparison with the atrocities caused by the Nazis in the Second World War. What we have on the West Bank is an attempt by far right Jewish settlers to brutalise the local Palestinians out of their homes to make way for more settlements and to extend the territory of Israel itself. For the Palestinians driven from their homes and olive groves, it must seem like ethnic cleasing. Nevertheless, one should always be cautious about using phrases which have such terrifyingly apocalyptic historical connotations. Comparing the excessive violence shown by the Jewish settlers to the ethnic cleansing in Bosnia and, more significantly, to Nazi Germany, is, therefore, unwise, inaccurate and dangerous. That does not undermine the argument, however, that what is going on in the West Bank every day is wrong and hateful and should be condemned by everyone, including and especially by the Israeli government.