Two months after a senator asked Trump to fire Hegseth over "inept management" of the military, Hegseth fired the Pentagon's top military planner.

…(cont) October supplied the demonstration. On October 13 Speaker Mike Johnson nudged the President in public: "I wouldn't be watching." The daughter of a Fort Hood victim said livestreaming "isn't closure for any of us." On October 15 seventy-two former officers wrote that the broadcast "will taint the honor of the military that employs it, and a nation that allows it," and YouGov found 71 percent of respondents opposed "having executions broadcast live to the public," 18 favored it. The same day Trump wrote: "He will die, as scheduled, by firing squad, but this event will not be streamed." Seventy-two officers. Seventy-one percent. You will have noticed what moved, and it was the camera.

On October 22 the Washington Post reported that Hegseth had wanted Eisenhower's thirty-inch wartime globe delivered to his office because he found its historical significance "attractive," that such a move is normally "a deliberate process overseen by trained curators," and that his staff attempted it themselves. The globe broke.

On October 29 Hegseth fired Army Lt. Gen. Brett Sylvia, the Pentagon's top military planner, director for strategy, plans and policy, the J-5, on the Joint Staff — removed, a Pentagon official told CBS News, for apparent misconduct with classified information on the Iran and Russia-Ukraine wars. The New York Post notes Sylvia is the second general ousted from that same chair under this Secretary. The Washington Examiner sets the dismissal beside the President contemplating additional strikes on Iran following next week's elections.

So count the two columns, because nobody at the department will count them for you. Tillis spent a request, on camera, in September, and a request of that kind is spent precisely once ... Sylvia spent the chair that holds the plan for the war now under contemplation. The Secretary is staying.

Nothing here was broken except the globe. The power of removal is plenary — whole, unshared, lodged in one office — and it runs downward only: it attaches to the office above, never to the office beside. The Senate's part is advice, and advice arrives without an instrument. A general who loses the Secretary's confidence loses the chair. A Secretary who loses a senator's confidence loses a morning of coverage.

Strikes on Iran are contemplated for after the elections. The planner is gone. The man who removed the planner is not.