Pete Hegseth has not held a Pentagon press conference since May 5. That’s more than two and a half months of silence while the U.S. fights a war. The administration is claiming some of the past few weeks fell under a “ceasefire.”
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That’s just another in a long line of lies and excuses about its fatally flawed war. It’s been a war all along.
And fatal is meant literally, because this week the Pentagon’s own number of dead troops was toyed with, edited down, diminished, denigrated. Eighteen went to 14, and then lies and excuses about the change followed.
On Wednesday, the Defense Casualty Analysis System listed 18 U.S. troops killed in the Iran war. By Thursday, it read 14. According to The New York Times, three military officials said the four missing names, troops killed in a Jordan base attack and one killed defusing a drone at Erbil Air Base in Iraq, were removed because their deaths came after Donald Trump declared a ceasefire back in April.
Muddling the count even more, the Pentagon’s acting press secretary Joel Valdez called it “temporary data disruptions.” So, troops’ deaths are now either disruptions or relegated to flimsy and erroneous data points.
These explanations are as offensive as they are galling. A ceasefire that only a faulty casualty database seems to have abided by.
The Pentagon is more comfortable managing a number than honoring the people behind it. And Trump is bragging about the “low” number of casualties compared to other presidents and other wars. Hey Donald, one is too many, you selfish “scumbag.”
Among the four troops quietly dropped from the tally: Pvt. Isabella Gonzales, 19, of Texas, and 1st Lt. Tyler Feehan, 25, of Hawaii, killed alongside Sgt. Angel Rampersad in an Iranian missile strike on Muwaffaq Salti Air Base in Jordan on July 17.
Whatever bureaucratic logic got applied to treating these precious lives as inputs and deletions on an Excel spreadsheet is reprehensible. These brave soldiers didn’t die in some gray zone. Their deaths shouldn’t be moved and lost to another Excel tab.
They died in the same war, from the same enemy, doing the same gruesome job. Erasing four names from a public list doesn’t erase those four deaths. It maligns their memories.
It just tries to make the people who are counting look better — that’s incomprehensible. And Pete Hegseth could care less. He’s more concerned with his frivolous priorities, which only proves that troop service — and deaths — are an afterthought to his nugatory and vanity-laden adventures.
While our troops were in harm’s way, Hegseth was busy with other announcements. On July 15, Hegseth posted a video unveiling mandatory annual testosterone screening for troops 30 and older, captioned in his own words: “The High-T Department of War.”
This, of course, is in character for the charade the alleged defense secretary is playing in a job he is woefully unqualified for. He can’t stop posting shirtless workout videos, preaching about “no more fat troops, no more beardos,” and implementing weight and height standards to attend Trump’s UFC fight card on the White House lawn in June.
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Sure, our troops need to be fit, but they also need their lives and reputations protected when they are at war. Disrespectfully, Hegseth has been more obsessed with his own hormone levels than explaining why his casualty count keeps shrinking.
And if all of this isn’t insulting enough. Hegseth tries to hide his incompetence by hiding behind the troops and deriding their intelligence.
At Tuesday’s Senate Appropriations Committee hearing, where Hegseth showed up asking Congress for tens of billions more to keep funding the war. Sen. Gary Peters of Michigan didn’t let him off easy, calling the administration’s handling of the war “an utter and complete failure” and telling Hegseth, “you are back now before Congress asking for almost $70 billion in additional funding” with nothing to show for it.
Hegseth’s response wasn’t to answer for the glaring lack of strategy, or acknowledge the lives behind his ever-changing casualty count. It was to accuse Peters of “smearing the sacrifice” of the troops, as if pointing out a war with no clear endpoint and a shrinking public death toll is somehow an affront to the people dying in it.
Peters didn’t back down. “You, sir, are the failure,” he shot back. “Not the men and women who are on that front line.”
I’ve been thinking a lot about one of those troops, Isabella Gonzales, who was only 19 years old. She didn’t die over testosterone levels or a waist-size standard or how much she could bench press.
She died in a war her own Pentagon started for no reason. They let her down so horrifically bad. And they charred her memory. The war she died in is run by a defense secretary who has more to say about his own physique than about her life. I wondered what she thought about all of Hegseth’s warrior talk, about his obsession with the male body, about how he was denying promotions to soldiers because they were Black or women.
Did — or does — Hegseth think for a minute about someone like Gonzales? Nope. Not in the least.
There is a difference between honoring troops and using them as a pathetic rhetorical shield whenever your appalling leadership is questioned. During the last five months of this war, Hegseth has dishonored the troops he supposedly leads.
Every week that goes by is another week where Hegseth will talk, talk, talk and try and deflect from the heroic work of our troops. He’ll be busy in the Pentagon lab putting troop DNA samples under microscopes, and worrying about their hormone counts.
And every week that goes by, families will be left wondering whether the number on the Pentagon’s website includes their loved ones lost.
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