Driscoll has submitted his resignation to President Donald Trump amid growing tension between him and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, sources told ABC News.
Page A7From§Eachthe breakfast edition — 1 September 2026
Army secretary resigns amid tensions with Hegseth as Pentagon prepares a 'permanent state of war' with Iran.
As it ran on the front
Let's be precise, because precision is the Pentagon's love language this week. Army Secretary Dan Driscoll is not being pushed out, he is 'stepping down,' a phrase the White House selected with the same care it usually reserves for troop deployments. Stepping down implies stairs, a graceful descent, applause at the bottom. What we have instead, according to reporting the administration has not contested, is a Secretary and a Defense Secretary who have spent months in what insiders call 'tension' — which is the professional term for two men who can no longer be in a room together without a third party present. But sure, stepping down.
None of this, the Pentagon wants you to know, has anything to do with Iran. The plan under discussion — a posture some analysts have called a 'permanent state of war' — is not escalation, it is 'sustained deterrence readiness,' a phrase that means the exact same thing but tests better with focus groups. This is not the Department backing itself into an endless conflict. This is the Department declining to rule one out, indefinitely, as a matter of prudent planning. Did I say indefinitely? That's not — that's not the framing we use. We use 'as long as necessary,' which, to be fair, is also indefinite, I'm realizing that as I say it.…
…(cont) The timing, Secretary Driscoll's exit landing in the same week as the Iran posture review, is coincidental in the way that all timing at the Pentagon is coincidental: technically true, structurally suspicious, and not something this office is required to explain. A building this large has many clocks. Some of them are just further along than others.
What matters, ultimately, is stability — the appearance of it, the invocation of it, the word itself repeated until it functions as a fact. The Secretary of the Army is stepping down. The nation's posture toward Iran is not escalating, it is deepening, which I promise is a different verb even though I cannot currently tell you how. The building stands. The building always stands. Somebody just has to keep walking out of it.
“Every time the brass starts talking about a 'permanent state of war,' the guy actually running the Army finds a reason to leave the building that same week. That's not coincidence, that's turnover before the questions start. Watch who's still standing when the orders finally go out.”
“This is a routine transition — Secretary Driscoll is stepping down, full stop, and the timing with the Iran posture review is coincidental. Deterrence planning is not escalation, it's prudence. Did I say indefinite? That's not the word we use, forget I said that.”
The receipts
Army Secretary Dan Driscoll is stepping down after 18 months on the job, the White House said Monday, in the latest departure of a top military leader during the Trump administration.
The US Defense Department is reportedly considering a new strategy for Iran that would entail bombing the country "periodically" in an effort to keep ship traffic flowing through the Strait of Hormuz, a plan that one analyst said would…
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front.