The resignation of Army Secretary Dan Driscoll underlines how Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is increasingly imposing his will on the Pentagon after nearly 20 months in the role. Driscoll’s departure, which came sooner than expected, followed months of tensions with Hegseth, who has forced out or stalled the promotions of dozens of…
Page B1From§Eachthe late evening edition — 1 September 2026
Army Secretary quits in protest; Pentagon answers by opening files on seven more officers.
As it ran on the front
OBITUARY.
The presumption that an Army Secretary keeps their post absent scandal or the resignation of the President who appointed them died this week, after eight months of complications. It was young by Pentagon standards, sworn in only this year, and it did not go quietly.…
…(cont) It is survived by seven officers whose files are now open, and by a chain of command that runs, as of Monday, a little straighter and a little shorter. It is preceded in death by the norm that a Secretary of the Army answers to the Secretary of Defense on policy, not on temperament.
The deceased was born of statute, the same law that has staffed the Army's civilian leadership since 1947, back when this business still ran on paperwork instead of press releases. It grew old the ordinary way: budget hearings, base visits, the occasional testy exchange with a general who thought the civilians didn't understand logistics. Colleagues describe it as reliable, a little dull, the kind of institutional habit nobody notices until it's gone — malarkey to the people who never had to depend on it, load-bearing to everyone else.
It did not die of natural causes. It was pushed. Driscoll's resignation arrived the same week Hegseth opened reviews on seven more officers, and reporters who cover this beat will tell you, off the record, that the timing was not a coincidence, it was a memo. That's not paranoia. That's just the org chart working as designed by someone with a different design in mind.
No funeral is planned. There will be a hearing, eventually, in a room with bad lighting and worse acoustics, where someone will ask whether civilian oversight of the military still means anything, and the answer will arrive the way these answers usually do: late, quiet, and unrecorded on the transcript. That's not oversight, that's shit dressed up as process, and the dressing is coming off.
The Army itself survives, as armies do, outlasting every secretary who's ever tried to run it by fear. What doesn't survive is the assumption that the office is bigger than the man who currently occupies it.
In lieu of flowers, the Senate is asked to hold the confirmation hearing for whoever's next, and to ask them, on the record, whether they intend to keep the job past the first hard question.
“This is not personnel shuffling, this is the officer corps learning in real time what happens to the ones who ask questions. Driscoll didn't just quit, he quit and got answered with seven more files opening the same week. Whoever's next learns to keep their mouth shut, and that's the actual chain of command now.”
“Look, healthy organizations review personnel all the time, this is basic accountability, nothing unusual — wait, did I say seven officers got flagged the same week the Secretary walked? That's not what I meant to lead with. The Pentagon has full confidence in its process, that's the line I'm supposed to give you.”
The receipts
The defense secretary’s cuts, which have hit about 10 percent of the military’s top officers, are dividing the Pentagon, officials said.
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front.