Russia’s woes in Ukraine reflect its autocracy, corruption, and dismal choices. Sounds like the Pentagon under Pete Hegseth.
Published August 7, 2026 Washington monthly
In January 2022, as a massive Russian mobilization on the borders of Ukraine materialized before U.S. intelligence and commercial satellite cameras, virtually all military experts agreed: It would only be a week or two at most, or possibly within days, before Kyiv fell and Ukraine’s independence was extinguished.
One of the most astonishing developments of the 21st century has been Ukraine’s successful resistance to what was, on paper, one of the most powerful militaries in the world. It is as if Poland had fended off the Nazi German invasion in 1939. Events in Ukraine have taught us something about the changing nature of warfare: Conventional militaries built on the 20th-century pattern are decreasingly capable of winning swift, decisive, and lasting victories.
Corruption, incompetence, and sycophancy
The lamentable performance of the Russian military also tells us something about how authoritarianism and its inevitable corruption, sycophancy, and lack of accountability breed incompetence. Corruption is the reason that Russian brigades invaded Ukraine with rations and medical supplies that were long expired, if they hadn’t already been stolen years before. Equipment was faulty and spare parts missing; the tires of wheeled vehicles, for instance, were often so old they had dry-rotted.
Even with flawless equipment, however, the Russian military would have been little better off. Its officers and senior non-commissioned officers (NCOs) are under-trained and tactically incompetent, a deficiency resulting from the fact that sycophancy and ability to work the system are more likely to gain promotion than knowing one’s job. They also believe that any military ineptitude can be made good by brutality towards the enlisted ranks. Officers’ and senior NCOs’ corruption result in frequent stealing and reselling of their units’ supplies, and many Russian NCOs are not above extorting their subordinates for money.
The current Russian military uses a formalized political officer system, known as zampolits (Deputy Commander for Political Work), a throwback to the notorious Soviet commissar system under Stalin and his successors. These officers are embedded in units to enforce state loyalty, boost troop morale, coordinate religious services, and oversee political education. Regular military officers often see them as an irritating burden that divides unit command and emphasizes political reliability over unit effectiveness.
While the Congressional Research Service notes that the Russian military has shown some ability to adapt to the lethal Ukrainian battlefield, such as switching over to small unit infiltration tactics rather than suicidal mass wave attacks, the military’s legacy promotion and personnel policies remain highly focused on patronage networks and bribery rather than proficiency.
Like the U.S. Army at the height of the Iraq war, Russia has drastically increased signing bonuses while lowering physical, mental, and character standards. This has ensured a sufficient flow of recruits, but as Jack Watling, a specialist in land warfare at the Royal United Services Institute, points out, “Pay as the primary motive for service has also created an accumulation of personnel in Russian units who are eager to avoid combat. Officers accept bribes from soldiers who don’t want to be part of an assault.”
America is not immune.
What could this picture of a blundering military with corrupt officers and under-trained soldiers serving under a venal and incompetent civilian leadership possibly have to do with the U.S. military? To most Americans, the question seems absurd, conditioned as they are to our military being bathed in adulation (certainly compared to other U.S. institutions), and told incessantly that they are the best troops in the world.
Our military has, however, suffered previous episodes of a disastrous drop in proficiency. In the wake of the post-World War II drawdown and the belief that the newly invented atomic weapon had made conventional warfare obsolete, the U.S. Army was a shell of its former self by 1950. It nearly got pushed off the Korean Peninsula in the first months of the Korean War; the near-destruction of Task Force Smith was among the most decisive defeats since the Little Bighorn.
Early in the Vietnam War, the Air Force and Navy could only manage about a 2:1 kill ratio against North Vietnamese combat aircraft (much worse than in World War II and Korea), and from late 1967 to early 1968, it fell to 1:1 against the Soviet MiG-21. The main deficiencies were unreliable missiles, the lack of internal guns on early F-4 Phantoms, rules requiring visual identification before firing, and poor dogfighting skills.
The army nearly fell apart in the later stages of the Vietnam War, with rampant drug use among soldiers in the field. Between 1969 and 1972, the U.S. military documented 904 official investigations into suspected “fragging” (assaults on officers, generally using grenades). By the mid-1970s, naval officers considered it too dangerous to enter enlisted quarters of a ship alone; in the late 1980s, a colonel of my acquaintance recounted that in the 1970s, when he was a young lieutenant, it could be hazardous for an army officer to enter barracks without an escort.
Anyone who was paying attention during the American occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan should be aware that the U.S. military is not at its best as a constabulary force in an environment in which guerrilla opponents live among the civilian population, and where a sufficient number of roadside bombs can render highly mechanized ground forces nearly immobile. Even to talk about a military being the “best” is relative: In which environment is it fighting, how does the enemy choose to fight, and what are the political objectives?
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I have written before that even in a so-called “conventional” conflict at which it is supposed to excel, the U.S. military has serious deficiencies. The Pentagon’s habit of purchasing high-tech weapons that are too expensive, take too long to build, and are too few to be sustained amid normal attrition has left us with a force that will quickly run out of munitions. The ill-advised war against Iran greatly exacerbated this deficiency, confronting the Pentagon with the stark reality that conflict with China would empty the U.S. arsenal in a few days. It also became clear that our military was unprepared to deal with drone warfare: Ukrainian advisors were dispatched to the Persian Gulf to teach Americans the new realities of war.
All these deficiencies are correctable, given a military and civilian leadership (including Congress) that is willing to face bad news and learn from it, and perhaps above all, be capable of letting go of outdated, over-complex, overpriced legacy systems that have established powerful constituencies within the services.
Trump’s politicization of the U.S. military
Serious though they are, these faults are minor compared to a potential slide in personnel quality. The all-volunteer military has in most cases been a conspicuous success after the draft was abolished in 1973. But beginning with the use of the D.C. National Guard during the Lafayette Square demonstration of 2020, the issue of the creeping politicization of the military has been on the table.
Just after the protesters had been tear-gassed in that demonstration, then-chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff John Milley was seen (in combat uniform) walking behind Donald Trump as the latter proceeded to St. John’s Church while ostentatiously lugging a Bible. It created the perception that the military was endorsing Trump’s action; Milley later said he felt deceived and considered resigning. In his 2023 exit speech as chairman, he said that U.S. troops swear an oath to the Constitution and don’t report to a “wannabe dictator” (Trump had previously called Milley a traitor).
During Trump’s second term, his misuse of the military has accelerated. The employment of the National Guard, and occasionally active-duty military, for policing assistance in American cities has been justified by dubious emergency declarations. Still, the real reason appears to be an impressive show of military force to cow the politicians and citizens of Democratic-run jurisdictions. That they sometimes have no legitimate mission is exemplified by the fact that D.C. national guardsmen spent much of their time emptying overfilled trash cans around the Mall because of Elon Musk’s purge of so many National Park Service staff.
Pete Hegseth: the Pentagon’s chief commissar
Consistent with all his cabinet agencies, Trump has staffed the Department of Defense with appointees who are manifestly unqualified, either professionally, temperamentally, or ethically. The principal specimen who embodies all three of these qualities is the secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, a former third-tier Fox News host. He is no better or worse than numerous other Trump cabinet members such as Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Kash Patel, Todd Blanche, or Bill Pulte. These officials have succeeded in politicizing while also largely wrecking the agencies they oversee. Why should we assume, whatever the public’s adoration of the military, that it is immune from the damage that Trump’s cronies have inflicted on other departments of government, simply because it is a larger institution?
Hegseth is obsessed with transmitting a blizzard of orders to root out and eliminate every trace of so-called DEI (removing books from DOD reference libraries, dropping courses at the military academies, even refusing to allow the services to participate in a three-decades-old event honoring women veterans at Arlington Cemetery). His ideological zealotry is reminiscent of the USSR’s Politburo member, Mikhail Suslov, who served as the country’s “chief ideologue” and maintained strict party orthodoxy from the 1940s until he died in 1982.
The time Hegseth wastes enforcing ideological purity or instituting quack manosphere nostrums like testing service members for testosterone levels is time unspent understanding and operationalizing the lessons learned from the battlefield of Ukraine, digesting the latest intelligence about Chinese military modernization, or grappling with what went wrong in the Iran debacle. His fixations are similar to the rest of Trump’s national security team; Secretary of State Marco Rubio has been ignoring Russia and China to focus on nonexistent threats like Cuba or the imaginary left-wing terrorist international (the real motive for the latter fantasy is to obtain a pretext to open up yet another front in our domestic culture war).
The purge of the generals
To date, Hegseth has blocked or removed about 40 senior officers from promotion lists for general officer ranks. Roughly half of these are women or members of minority groups. In the military’s “up or out” personnel system, that means their careers are effectively over. In addition, more than two dozen generals and admirals have been fired or sidelined.
In their place, Hegseth has promoted officers like Adm. Daryl Caudle, who is now chief of naval operations, replacing a woman in line for the job whom the secretary of defense had fired. Caudle had unofficially coached Hegseth in how to get past his confirmation (a breach of service ethics). He commended himself to the DOD secretariat and the White House not by his warfighting skills or strategic vision, but by parroting the party line about “woke” and making sure Hegseth and Trump heard about it.
Military procurement under Trump: the Reflecting Pool writ large
There is, however, one way to make it worse: A meddling president with a history as a fly-by-night developer who stiffs his vendors, tolerates shoddy work if it has surface glitz, and declared six bankruptcies. In his second term, Trump’s fingerprints are all over Pentagon contracting.
In June 2026, Public Citizen revealed that 14 out of the 27 donors to Trump’s ballroom project received new or expanded government contracts over just the previous six months totaling over $50 billion. Defense giant Lockheed-Martin grabbed the lion’s share, at $43.8 billion in new funding. Booz Allen Hamilton followed with more than $4.2 billion, while the data and surveillance firm Palantir, co-founded by techno-feudalists Peter Thiel and Alex Karp, received over $1 billion.
Perhaps more revealing, Trump’s sons have invested in more than a dozen tech startups that received at least $3.2 billion in direct government business (mostly with DOD) and $3.1 billion in future contract options. Five of the firms had never done business with the federal government until the Trumps invested after their father became president—a notable achievement because of the difficulty in qualifying as a first-time federal contractor, particularly with DOD.
These irregularities are almost insignificant compared to instances when Trump directly intervenes in weapons procurement. The case of the Trump-class battleship is a colossal boondoggle without precedent. If 20 to 25 of these obsolete leviathans are built as planned, the estimated total cost could range from $285 billion to $450 billion or more, based on Navy lead-ship estimates and other independent analyses. I have previously described how, in the age of ubiquitous satellite surveillance and autonomous drones, the vessels would be nothing more than target practice for any near-peer enemy. The real tragedy would be the opportunity cost for a service whose entire shipbuilding program is already an over-budget, behind-schedule shambles.
The Coast Guard is not part of DOD, but it can be transferred there if a national security crisis requires it. It is by far the smallest of the services, at 40,000 on active duty, but Trump has burdened it with potential white elephants just as he has with the Navy. Based on little more than a golf game with the president of Finland, Trump ordered 11 icebreakers to be built, the first 4 in Finland. This is well in excess of Coast Guard requirements, and no one knows where the money will come from to homeport, maintain, and crew the vessels. Perhaps the ultimate irony is that Trump’s energy policies are designed to accelerate global warming such that the icebreakers may become as obsolete as so many Spanish galleons.
In these actions, Trump is emulating Vladimir Putin, as he does in so many ways. Even as Russian soldiers are being cut down in swathes, Putin has engaged in putting prestige weapons into the active inventory. He ordered a restart of production of the TU-160 Blackjack heavy bomber, a contemporary of the U.S. B-1B (most of which are being retired). He has likewise brought two of the four mothballed Kirov-class battlecruisers, relics of the Soviet Union, into the fleet. These near-antique systems may be good for diplomatic arm-waving, but neither will solve his predicament in the war in Ukraine. Given the ability of the Ukrainians to destroy much of the Black Sea Fleet and bottle up the remainder, the Kirovs would likely prove sitting ducks. Likewise, the action in the air is mostly with drones and ballistic missiles, not heavy bombers.
Ditching the Geneva Conventions
In warfare, crimes committed by any military are an abhorrent but nearly inevitable fact of life when troops see their comrades killed and their blood is up. But the armies of countries under the rule of law try to limit them by thoroughly drilling all ranks in the Geneva Conventions and other laws of war, by teaching a code of soldierly honor, and appropriately investigating incidents and punishing the guilty. Otherwise, discipline deteriorates, and armies become little better than criminal gangs.
In its war against Ukraine, the Russian military’s atrocities have been no unfortunate occasional indisciplines, but crimes planned or otherwise sanctioned and encouraged from the very top. In the totalitarian mindset, viciousness is confused with strength, and enormities committed against the enemy’s people are believed to cow them and make them submit—although it almost always galvanizes fierce resistance.
In Trump’s first term, professionals in charge of the Pentagon like General James Mattis generally kept a lid on any baser desires of the White House to misuse the military. But the president not only issued clemency to a Navy SEAL convicted of a war crime, but restored his former rank. The man was described by a unit member as “freaking evil,” and the Navy, trying to exert good order and discipline, attempted to remove him from the SEALs—but Mark Esper, a civilian who had replaced Mattis as secretary of defense, intervened to reverse the Navy’s decision and discipline the admiral involved and not the committer of a war crime.
In Trump’s second term, the lid has come off. In his previous writings, Hegseth has condemned the Geneva Conventions, alleging they forced the troops to fight “with one hand behind our back.” In his confirmation hearings, he refused to tell Senator Angus King of Maine that he would honor the conventions, which have been subsumed into U.S. law. At the outbreak of the Iran war, Hegseth stated that “This is not a so-called regime-change war,” and there would be “No stupid rules of engagement, no nation-building quagmire, no democracy-building exercise, no politically correct wars.”
Rules of engagement are typically in place to avoid unnecessary civilian casualties, abide by international law, and establish protocols to prevent friendly-fire incidents. Given that the U.S. quickly lost three aircraft to fratricide, it raises the question of whether Hegseth actually did alter the rules of engagement in a way that made such incidents more likely, and whether in that case the customarily supine Congress will ever attempt to hold him accountable.
Southern Spear: crossing the Rubicon into criminality
Operation Southern Spear, the use of the U.S. military to interdict illicit drugs from entering the United States from the Caribbean and South America, can perhaps best be seen as an exercise to condition and desensitize the military to war crimes. If that seems like a bold statement, consider the results, including Southern Spear’s success in achieving its purported objective.
To date, there have been 63 separate attack events against alleged drug smuggler vessels and 221 reported deaths, including 21 survivors for whom no attempt was made at recovery (a violation of every tenet of maritime law and custom). The Washington Post reported that in one strike, two survivors clung to wreckage, whereupon the commander of Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) ordered an additional strike to kill them (after World War II, a German U-boat commander was convicted and executed for ordering his crew to shoot the survivors of a merchantman he sunk). Trump ballyhooed the results of these actions on Truth Social: “98.2% of Drugs coming into the U.S. by Ocean or Sea have STOPPED!”
The reality, as Drug Enforcement Agency operatives have revealed and this magazine predicted, is that smugglers changed their routes and techniques. Not only is the current flow of cocaine back to its pre-strike level, but the street price is now lower, and DEA informants, fearing death, have gone underground, making investigations more difficult.
The strikes failed to accomplish their stated purpose, but Southern Spear did achieve one thing: It ensured that everyone in the naval chain of command involved in the operation, from the chief of naval operations to the lowest enlisted man pulling the trigger, is now implicated in the killings. Gangster regimes typically implicate as many subordinates as possible to bind them in a pact of guilt with the leader while cutting off dissent.
Facially, these strikes appear to be homicide under U.S. law, extrajudicial executions under international law, and might constitute crimes against humanity; for international law purposes, they are probably not war crimes because they did not take place in an actual war (albeit the Trump regime loves to label it as such). That said, no one is likely to face accountability; even the vanishingly small chance of indictment by the International Criminal Court is now zero, because Venezuela, where most of the destroyed vessels originated, withdrew from the court—under heavy pressure from Trump operatives. Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s campaign against the ICC is another sign that the U.S has no intention of abiding by international law.
Democracy and civil-military tension
In many, if not most, democracies, there exists a tension between civil government and the military. The former is supposed to conduct itself in open debate, transparency, and legal equality of the citizens on whose behalf and by whose consent it operates. The latter is by design hierarchical, secretive, and brooks little questioning of decisions by subordinates of higher-ups.
In the United States, this tension has boiled over on several occasions: The “admirals’ revolt” in 1949 over the Truman administration’s plan to reduce the navy’s role (and budget) in favor of air force strategic bombing; General Douglas MacArthur’s flagrant disregard of civilian direction during the Korean War; the resentment of the joint chiefs of staff’s resentment of President Kennedy’s insistence on peacefully ending the Cuban missile crisis without invading Cuba (then-air force chief General Curtis LeMay later ran on Alabama Governor George Wallace’s independent 1968 presidential ticket promising to “bomb North Vietnam back to the stone age”); the military’s incessant lying and subterfuge over enemy casualties and prospects for success in Vietnam.
The number of democracies and civilian-led quasi-democracies that have been overthrown (or subjected to attempted overthrows) is very large. South Vietnam in 1963, Brazil in 1966, and Chile in 1973 are well known (mainly because of timely assistance to the coup plotters from the CIA in each case), but Egypt in 2013, Thailand in 2014, and Myanmar in 2021 are a few of the more recent examples. Democracies are fragile, and not only because of the fickleness of the electorate or the shallow roots of civic institutions: Any group possessing well-armed men, tanks, and howitzers can overturn democracy if it so desires.
How one-party states control the military
This experience does not generally apply to dictatorships or one-party states. The Kim dynasty has maintained its rule for almost 80 years in North Korea by putting itself and its loyal party apparatchiks in iron control of the military. The Communist Party leadership in China, particularly under Xi Jinping, conducts periodic purges of the People’s Liberation Army under the rubric of anti-corruption—but mainly to assert control and ensure that politically reliable people constitute the senior ranks. Party over army was always an unshakable tenet of the Soviet Union; Stalin’s late-1930s purge of the Soviet officer corps was not only extraordinarily bloody, but it also almost fatally weakened the military in the face of the 1941 Nazi onslaught. But Stalin always feared the internal enemy more than foreign threats.
The German Army is a trenchant example. Since the 19th century, it was considered a state within a state; it had decisive influence on policy to the point where it could sometimes nullify the will of the Reichstag. By the middle of World War I, General Erich Ludendorff had become de facto dictator of Germany, displacing the Kaiser and his ministers. During the Weimar democracy of the 1920s, the army ran its affairs in secret with no checks from civil government, and consistently put its thumb on the scale against liberal and social-democratic forces in society.
This independence abruptly ended with Hitler’s seizure of power. The first major sign was when Reich president Paul von Hindenburg died, and Hitler succeeded him; he immediately had the entire military swear an oath not to the state but to himself personally. The generals were at first thrilled at Hitler’s unprecedented expansion of their budget. Still, many became dismayed by his plans for territorial expansion through military aggression (to be sure, less by moral qualms than by his precipitate timing). Several senior officers who opposed his timetable were either forcibly retired or exited via manufactured scandals.
With Hitler’s astonishing early victories, the generals fell in line. There was no dissent, and very few misgivings expressed in private, when Hitler told them that the coming war against the Soviet Union “cannot be conducted in knightly fashion,” meaning the laws of war would not be observed with respect to enemy soldiers and civilians. By the first winter in Russia, Hitler was sacking commanders wholesale who counseled prudent steps to conserve manpower, replacing them with generals who would “stand fast” regardless of strategic logic. The officer corps turned against Hitler only when defeat became inevitable, and even then, only a relative handful acted. When the assassination attempt on him failed, Hitler imposed “national socialist leadership officers” on the military, a frank imitation of the hated Bolshevik commissars.
Down the slippery slope
There is no reason to state categorically that a similar tragedy cannot be inflicted on the U.S. military. After a year and a half, Trump’s imprint is already on the Pentagon, and while its heavily entrenched bureaucratic structure has traditionally been difficult to change, it is by no means impervious to a regime that is ruthless, lawless, and ideologically driven.
Trump’s apparatchiks have already thoroughly de-professionalized the militarized agency known as ICE. Its recruitment advertising and signing bonuses appear designed to attract the otherwise unemployable (as with the Russian Army), training has been slashed, and a culture of brutality and unaccountability prevails. Its record of unprovoked killings is evidence that the organization is well on its way to becoming a death squad in the manner of murderous gangs hired by governments in Central America. The relatives of one ICE agent who fatally shot a man in Maine described him as violent and mentally unstable, someone who never should have been given a firearm or police powers.
Should ideological (and gender and racial) purity, along with Adm. Caudle’s brand of sycophancy and office politics, become standard operating procedure at the Pentagon, we can expect DOD to become ICE with a trillion-dollar budget. As it is, the services are barely meeting their recruiting goals; but if women and minorities find their promotions blocked and careers ended, it will send a clear message to all members of the affected groups about the desirability of service life.
Approximately 20 percent of the active-duty U.S. military enlisted force is black; women make up almost 18 percent of the force. Allowing for some overlap between them, more than a quarter of the military comes from just those two groups. Including others who likely wouldn’t enlist because of a hostile ideological environment, there is no way the Pentagon would meet its future recruiting goals if Hegseth’s prejudices become institutionalized without drastically lowering mental and character standards or shifting large sums from weapons procurement and equipment maintenance towards ICE-style signing bonuses.
Bad faith, corruption, and the meretricious appeal of bad ideas have a way of seeping into and overpowering any organization and driving out the good, a Gresham’s Law of social ethics. For those who think Trump’s reign of error is time-limited, we are by no means certain that future elections will not be rigged, or that legitimate elections will be certified and the winning candidates seated (he has repeatedly expressed his desire to interfere in the balloting process). Nor can we be assured that the American voter, in the grip of ignorance, resentment, or befuddlement, will not return the same clique to power, with the help of perfectly legal gerrymandering and our archaic Electoral College.
A glance ahead
In 1992, Air Force Lt. Colonel Charles J. Dunlap, Jr., wrote an award-winning speculative piece that took the form of a retrospective letter written in 2012 by a condemned military prisoner warning against the dangers of drawing the U.S. armed forces too deeply into domestic political affairs. As it turned out, the essay, The Origins of the American Military Coup of 2012, did not predict the future. To be sure, the military is being drawn into domestic political affairs, but quite against the will of the wiser service leaders. The difference with the colonel’s speculation is that rather than being the instigator in a conspiracy against our constitutional order and the rule of law, it risks becoming a pawn of authoritarian civilians who would overthrow that order and use the military as an enforcer to cement their rule.
The Trump machine has systematically dismantled our traditional instruments of soft power abroad such as vaccinations and medicine, food aid, disaster relief, and educational and cultural exchange, all while assiduously alienating our global network of allies which, until now, has multiplied America’s international reach and influence. At the same time, it has cast aside intelligent, good-faith diplomacy as a tool, instead putting forward family members and real estate moguls as ostensible diplomats whose real goal is private business deals.
That leaves force, or the threat of it, as one of the few instruments of foreign influence remaining. Should the Trump machine, or some variation of it, persist after 2028, we can expect the military to be busy—not in defense of democracy, or vital interests, or humanitarian concerns; but advancing spheres of interest, engaging in forcible territorial acquisition, or satisfying personal obsessions or revenge fantasies. And don’t assume it will be required to observe the laws of war.
At that point, the military will be the disposable instrument of a dictatorial, one-party state: Just like the Russian army under Vladimir Putin.