Former Air Force secretary: Hegseth’s Pentagon ‘dysfunctional’

Former Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall III on Wednesday called the Defense Department under Secretary Pete Hegseth “dysfunctional.”

CNN’s Kaitlan Collins asked Kendall, who served under the Biden and Obama administrations, for his assessment of Hegseth’s handling of the military and the Pentagon. The former secretary accused the Pentagon chief of doing “active harm” to the department.

“In a word, it’s dysfunctional,” Kendall continued. “I’ve worked with and had a chance to work for maybe a dozen secretaries of Defense. He’s doing active harm to the Department of Defense. It’s not passive. It’s active harm.”

The ex-official said the “enormous damage” to the department will take several years “or decades to go repair this and restore the type of system that we have had traditionally.”

“Right now, in our competition, brain power is just as important as how big somebody’s biceps are,” Kendall added later. “We need people with intellectual capital just as much as we need people who are physically capable. He’s overemphasizing this kind of, you know, ‘bro thing’ with the testosterone thing you mentioned, as well as many other things.”

“That’s not what the secretary of Defense should be worrying about. What he should be worried about is not getting us into a conflict that we have no obvious way out of,” he told Collins, referring to the Iran war as an “absolute disaster.”

Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell said in a statement to The Hill that the notion that the Defense Department “is in disarray is completely baseless and an insult to every dedicated professional and warfighter in this building who comes to work every day to defend this nation.”

“This is what reform looks like,” Parnell said. “Leading an enterprise of this scale requires bold leadership, accountability and placing the right personnel in the right places. The department operates on a disciplined ‘next man up mentality and is firing on all cylinders under Secretary Hegseth’s leadership.”

Hegseth has imposed his will on the Pentagon after nearly 20 months in the role of secretary, underlined by the recent resignation of Army Secretary Dan Driscoll. There had been tensions between the two men since they entered their roles last year, but Driscoll praised Hegseth’s support for service members in a post online, breaking his silence about his departure.

“I had the privilege of working with them to modernize and accelerate how the Army mans, trains, and equips the most lethal fighting force on the face of the earth,” he wrote. “We could not have made the progress we did without the support of Secretary Hegseth.”

But Driscoll was displeased with Hegseth’s removal of four Army officers , two women and two Black men, from a one-star general promotion list earlier this year. Hegseth has since removed the names of at least six Army officers from a list for promotions to two-star generals

Hegseth and his allies said the department does not consider gender or skin color when weighing promotions. But his barring of several promotions for officers in both the Navy and Air Force has led other former military leaders to describe the actions as damaging to the service branches.

The secretary is also losing support from Republican lawmakers over the turnover and lack of progress in the Iran war. Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.), a former member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, accused him of “inept management” of the Pentagon and called for President Trump to fire him.