Pentagon cuts a fifth of its generals the same week it ends tenure for civilian professors

…(cont) The personnel losses started well before this. Army Secretary Dan Driscoll resigned Monday, Aug. 31, after clashing repeatedly with Hegseth's office. Two days later, Sen. Thom Tillis called on the president to fire Hegseth over what he called "inept management." On Sept. 5, reports surfaced that the Pentagon had put some of its highest-ranking officials, including roughly 50 members of the Joint Staff, through polygraph tests in August, hunting for whoever leaked word of dwindling weapons stockpiles. On Sept. 15, Rep. Thomas Massie filed articles of impeachment against Hegseth over the Iran strikes. On Sept. 22, the department rolled out a new "battlefield test" for promotion to general, billed, like most things this year, as a cut to bureaucracy.

This week the bureaucracy cut itself: a 20 percent reduction in generals and admirals, with officials telling reporters they do not yet know how the cuts will be carried out or whether trimming a fifth of the flag officers, in the middle of a war, will disrupt day-to-day operations. Nobody in the building could say which duties go with them. That was Wednesday. The same week, the department decided the civilians teaching the next fifth would not get tenure either. Call it penny-ante bookkeeping if the stakes were smaller.

Survived by: three service academies, several thousand cadets, and a Senate Armed Services Committee. Preceded in death by an Army secretary who quit rather than watch, and by the plain sentence "here is how," last heard in this building some time before spring.

In lieu of flowers, the department might answer, in writing, one of the two questions it was asked this month about its own missing jet parts, before it cuts the next fifth of anyone.