“Hegseth to announce further reduction in senior leadership positions”, 29 September 2026 (Photo via Washington Examiner — the original report)
As it ran on the front
It had been ailing a while. CBS News reported the Pentagon took months to discover that a breach had exposed information on nearly 3 million people — the discovery itself late, the count of the damage later still. It has been nearly five months since Secretary Pete Hegseth and General Dan Caine stood at a podium and said how the Iran war is going for the more than 440 U.S. service members hurt in it since March, the same span in which, Common Dreams reported, the department quietly extended Middle East deployments into 2027 without saying so out loud.
The corps meant to carry that accounting has not stayed still either. On September 1, Army Secretary Dan Driscoll resigned, the latest in what the Washington Examiner called a long line of senior leaders pushed out under Hegseth. The next day, Sen. Thom Tillis urged the president to fire Hegseth over what he called "inept management." The day after that, Hegseth's own allies told the Examiner that he and Driscoll had never been aligned on what they termed the "radical transformation" of the department's culture. On September 22, Hegseth announced a new "battlefield test" for promotion to general, pitched on social media as cutting bureaucracy and demanding "true meritocracy."…
…(cont) This week the meritocracy got smaller. Hegseth will use Wednesday's State of the Force address to announce a 20 percent reduction in the leadership positions allotted to generals and admirals, some downgraded rather than eliminated, the services given until the start of 2027 to finish the job. The same week, he ordered a freeze on hiring civilian faculty to tenured positions at the service academies, the schools that train the next generation of officers, directing that future hiring prioritize "institutional flexibility and faculty contribution to the warfighting mission" over the tenure that used to protect a professor's judgment from a general's chain of command.
Bunk, all of it dressed as reform. The department can't say how many people a breach touched or how many soldiers a war has cost it, but it has found the staff to cut and the classroom to close.
In lieu of flowers, the family asks for one briefing, on the record, with a number in it.
🍺
“They can't say how many people got hacked or how many soldiers got hurt, but they found time to cut one in five generals and freeze hiring at the war colleges. That's not belt-tightening, that's clearing the room before the questions start — fewer officers senior enough to be asked, fewer professors secure enough to teach the next one to ask. It lands on the families with someone still deployed over there, waiting on a briefing that still hasn't come.”
“Look, this is a leaner, more lethal force — meritocracy, the Secretary said it himself, cutting bureaucracy, that's just good management. The tenure freeze is about warfighting focus, prioritizing faculty who contribute to the mission, whatever that— no, that's actually in the memo. It's not about accountability, it's about efficiency, and if efficiency happens to also thin out the people who could get asked about the breach or the wounded numbers, that's a coincidence, I'm not going to say more than that.”
Secretary of War Pete Hegseth will announce plans to reduce the number of leadership positions allotted to generals and admirals by 20% during his State of the Force address on Wednesday. The services will be expected to complete the reductions by the start of 2027. Some of the positions will be downgraded rather than eliminated […]
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth directed departments on Tuesday to halt appointments of civilian staff to tenured positions at U.S. military service academies and develop hiring plans that prioritize “institutional flexibility and faculty contribution to the warfighting mission.” “The primary purpose of our Military Service Academies…
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