U.S. Army Secretary Dan Driscoll submitted his resignation Monday after months of friction with Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth. CBS News' Eleanor Watson has more.
Page A5From§Eachthe milkman edition — 2 September 2026
Army secretary who repeatedly warned White House about Hegseth is the one who leaves.
As it ran on the front
I wrote this down, and I want to find it before I say anything else, because I don't want to get it wrong. Here — here it is. 'Army secretary frequently warned White House about Hegseth.' That's the word, 'frequently.' Not 'once.' Not 'in a memo nobody read.' Frequently. I circled it. I do that sometimes.
Now I don't know exactly how many times 'frequently' is, and neither, as far as I can tell, does anybody else who's talking about it on the record, which is its own kind of interesting, but let's set that aside a second, because I want to walk through this the way I walk through my own garage, which is a mess, I'll be honest with you.…
…(cont) I've got a shelf in there — my wife says I should throw half of it out — and there's a fan belt in an old coffee can that I know is bad. I know it's bad because I checked it, more than once, probably more than 'frequently.' And every time I check it, I put it right back in the can instead of on the truck, because checking it feels like doing something about it. That's the part I keep coming back to. The checking isn't the fix. The fix is the new belt, installed, doing the job. A warning that gets filed is a belt that goes back in the can.
So here's what's sitting in front of me, on two separate pages of my notebook, and I want to read them back to back, because that's the only way I know how to look at anything. Page one: the Army secretary raised concerns about Hegseth's conduct to the White House, more than once, according to people who'd know. Page two, dated later, same stretch even: the Army secretary is the one who's leaving the job. Not Hegseth. The guy holding the belt.
I'm not saying those two pages are connected. I'm saying they're both true, they're sitting in the same notebook, and I don't have a third page that explains it, so I'm not writing one in.
What I keep asking myself — and I don't have this one answered either, so bear with me — is what a warning is actually for, structurally, if the person delivering it is the one who ends up walking out the door instead of the person the warning was about. In my experience, in the ordinary places I deal with — the bank, the corner store, even the toll plaza when the arm doesn't go up — when something's flagged as broken, usually the broken thing gets looked at before the guy who flagged it gets shown the exit. I don't know if that held here. I've just got the two pages.
Anyway — I should let you go, I know you've got somewhere to be. Actually, hold on, one more thing, since you're still standing there: whoever's left in that building to raise the next concern about Hegseth — do they still think somebody's going to check the fan belt, or just put it back in the can?
“Somebody raises the alarm, somebody else keeps the job — that's not an oversight, that's the org chart working exactly as designed. The guy holding the receipts is the guy they walk out the door.”
“Secretary Driscoll's departure is a personal, unrelated decision — timing means nothing here. And it's certainly not connected to those warnings, which, well, were apparently frequent, per multiple sources, but that's a separate matter entirely.”
The receipts
Army Secretary Dan Driscoll resigned early last week at one of the busiest moments for the service since the height of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front.