Pete Hegseth’s Military

Good morning. Gloria Steinem, the activist and journalist who personified the women’s movement, has died at 92. She challenged sexist assumptions, helping women expand their sense of self-worth and gain more equality in their lives. We have more on her life below.

And The Times conducted a visual investigation into the attack this week on a wedding in southern Iran that killed at least five people and injured at least 67. American forces, we learned, dropped the bomb.

The leader of those forces in Washington is Pete Hegseth, the secretary of defense. I’m going to turn to my editor, Adam Kushner, for a look at Hegseth’s tenure.

It’s been a weird summer for the Pentagon. Its leaders depleted much of the U.S. arsenal in a war with Iran. They’ve pushed out some of the most promising generals because the officers once said or did something that looks like “D.E.I.” They had to call home an aircraft carrier when the crew became demoralized about its much-longer-than-promised deployment. Then they punished a military newspaper that covered those sailors. This week, the Army’s civilian leader threw up his hands and quit.

This is the military under Pete Hegseth, the aggressively MAGA secretary of defense — well, secretary of war, if Congress ever makes it official. Political appointees come and go from the Pentagon, and it’s their job to advance the president’s agenda. But reporting in The Times over the last year and a half shows how far Hegseth has gone to remake the agency in MAGA’s image.

The armed forces today are not the ones you grew up with. Four Times reporters — Helene Cooper, John Ismay, Greg Jaffe and Eric Schmitt — have chronicled a chaotic transformation.

What’s happened

The changes fall into three categories.

Ideology. President Trump campaigned against diversity efforts, and his defense secretary, a former Fox News host, has prosecuted that case with zeal. Hegseth has removed books from libraries and schools on military bases. Toni Morrison and James Baldwin are gone from classes at West Point, and sociology — a discipline that inherently studies identity — is no longer a major there.

Officials told a geographer on the faculty that he couldn’t teach about the human causes of climate change. Hegseth has degrees from Princeton and Harvard, but he barred officers from graduate programs at Ivy League schools because they are “factories of anti-American resentment and military disdain.”

Staffing. Hegseth says he wants to streamline the officer corps and make it more effective. But his cuts and his decision not to promote some 80 specific people — about 10 percent of the top officer corps — suggest his focus is elsewhere. More than half of the officers affected are Black or female.

Some were apparently targeted for: writing a paper on why some Black officers choose logistics roles over combat; encouraging their troops to get the Covid vaccine; and serving in Afghanistan at the same time as the military’s withdrawal there. Now much of the department is rudderless, our reporters say.

Transparency. Do you remember the first Gulf war? The generals were on TV constantly, wielding pointers and maps to explain the day’s maneuvers. After Sept. 11, similar briefings came daily. Today, we rarely hear from the brass, even though the United States is at war. The last Pentagon press conference was in May.

Hegseth says reporters cover American casualties to “make the president look bad.” (The Times has sued the administration for restricting our journalists’ reporting on the agency.) Officials also don’t answer questions from Congress about the firing of officers or the endgame in Iran. “They seem to think that any effort to engage the public endangers America,” Greg told me.

What’s at stake

Some of this is just about vibes. For generations, the Pentagon built a corps of leaders who acquired graduate degrees at top schools and spoke eloquently about global strategy. They were overwhelmingly white men, though other groups were steadily making headway. Whatever you think about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the people who led them often thought of themselves as humanists, students of history, warrior-poets.

Hegseth seems to see this as weak and unfocused. He has said women don’t belong in combat and discharged trans service members. He did away with some rules of engagement and said the department’s priority was “lethality.” He closed an office that worked to prevent collateral damage against civilians. He offers testosterone to soldiers, insists that men shave their beards (even the ones grown for medical reasons) and appears in sweaty videos pumping iron with the troops.

But other changes may systemically weaken the armed forces, experts say. The targeted firings make it look as if some types of Americans are not welcome in the military, or at least not in its leadership. And the insistence on ideological conformity makes it harder to get unvarnished advice from experienced combatants. If you want to be promoted, you have to mouth the right views.

We’ve already seen caution set in. Gen. Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, says his job is not to tell the president whether an idea is good or bad but to present a range of options and their risks. That’s a departure. His predecessors, for instance, pleaded with President Biden not to withdraw from Afghanistan. Yet when the commander in chief made his call, they carried it out.

This is the idea that underpins two centuries of military leadership: The generals can be trusted, their personal views notwithstanding, to follow orders.

GLORIA STEINEM

Gloria Steinem, the feminist crusader, has died at 92. She helped usher in cultural transformations across virtually every facet of American life, from the boardroom to the courtroom to the bedroom.

For more than half a century, she personified the women’s movement and became its most enduring symbol; “her tinted aviator glasses and curtain of streaked-blond hair parted in the center made her one of the most recognizable women in the world,” my colleague writes.

Her death was announced in a post on social media, which did not give a cause. It said she had died peacefully at home, surrounded by loved ones.

What caused last week’s devastating flood in the Himalayas? Experts now think the bedrock gave way below a glacier. Part of the mountainside had moved by more than a foot in the month before the catastrophe, and when it collapsed, it released enough debris to fill 70 football stadiums. That slurry flowed at 30 times the rate of Niagara Falls and exceeded 100 miles per hour as it raced downstream. The Times used satellite images to diagram the disaster. See what happened here.

325

— That is how many kakapos, a critically endangered parrot species, are in New Zealand now, after a mating frenzy this year delivered 90 new chicks. In 1995, there were just 51. Read about their surprising baby boom.

THE CLIPPERS

The N.B.A. imposed the largest punishment in its history on the Los Angeles Clippers and their owner, Steve Ballmer. A yearlong investigation determined that they circumvented the league’s salary-cap rules to help funnel millions to a star player, Kawhi Leonard.

The Clippers will lose five first-round picks — selections in 2029, 2030, 2031, 2032 and 2033 — and will be fined $30 million, the league announced.

RECIPE OF THE DAY

My pal Emily Weinstein, who runs NYT Cooking, has brought back The Weeknight 100, a bounty of easy dinner recipes well worth bookmarking for use over the next few months. I’ll start with this chile chicken and bean guisado, cinnamon-tinged and warmly spicy.

LEANNE IS LISTENING

“If you are a woman of a certain age and your algorithm is a deluge of pitches for magnesium,” Ginia Bellafante writes, “it is probably also full of Leanne Morgan.” The comedian has become a breakout star at 60, with a fan base that stretches from the churchgoing Southeast to the elite corridors of Hollywood. “It’s so rare, at this point, that someone delights me and makes me laugh so hard,” Judd Apatow said. Read about how she got here.

Ekjhalak Hindi