1. United States
2. S.C.
3. Letter

"It's been wholesale, and I think it's hurt the military." The man saying that about Pete Hegseth is not a Democrat. He is Don Bacon, a Republican on the House Armed Services Committee and a retired Air Force general, and he is not the only person in Hegseth's own party who has quit defending him. Bacon went on CNN this weekend and put numbers to it. Hegseth has pushed out close to 20 admirals and generals, Bacon said, and he knows many of them by name and vouches for them as some of the finest officers in the force. "We had the head of U.S. Cyber Command fired for no reason," he told the network. He is being generous about the reasons. Officers were flagged for closeness to Mark Milley or service under Biden, and the purge fell hardest on women and people of color, all of them shown the door with no explanation owed to anyone. It got brazen enough that Congress passed a rule forcing the Pentagon to state in writing, within five days, why any senior officer is removed. A defense secretary now has to be ordered by law to explain his own firings. Bacon is not alone on the right. Thom Tillis, another Republican, accused Hegseth of running the building on bro-culture bravado instead of restraint and judgment. The deeper trouble for Hegseth is not in the Senate. It is inside his own headquarters. He grew so sure he was surrounded by traitors that his Pentagon drafted a plan to put thousands of its own people under nondisclosure agreements and random lie detector tests, broad enough to reach everyone from clerks to four-star generals. A whistleblower attorney who reviewed it said it was not about foreign spies. It was a loyalty test, built to keep the workforce afraid. It had already backfired once. When Hegseth's team turned polygraphs on staff during an earlier leak hunt, one of his own advisers refused the test, went over his head to the White House, and Trump's people ordered Hegseth to stop. The man hired to purge the disloyal had his own appointee defy him, and the administration took the appointee's side. Hegseth's answer has been to chase the people reporting it. His spokesman waved the accounts off as stale workplace gossip. He threw news organizations out of the Pentagon and made the reporters who remain sign a pledge not to publish even unclassified information without approval. He has built a department where four-star generals get wired to a lie detector so he can find out who is talking. The answer is the people who used to be loyal.