The Purge
By 
Some insight into Pete Hegseth’s war against competence in the US Army:
These were the facts of General Donahue’s three-decade career: He had seen more combat in his 20-plus deployments than just about any officer in the U.S. military. A star in the clandestine world of special forces, he had spent years in the shadows hunting terrorist leaders. And then as the world and warfare changed, he changed with it.
He had played a central role in the U.S. military’s efforts to help Ukraine hold off a much larger Russian force, a job that inspired his vision for a new kind of combat that married divebombing drones, robotics and artificial intelligence.
Now his fate lay in the hands of Mr. Hegseth, a former Fox News host who had two deployments as an Army officer to Iraq and Afghanistan. Mr. Hegseth had come to the Pentagon vowing to weed out the “small” and “feeble” generals who he believed had failed in those wars.
What played out in the 16 months after the car ride was a clash between Mr. Hegseth and General Donahue’s supporters, who viewed him as a generational talent.
That clash, and its outcome, was described to The New York Times by more than 40 people at the Pentagon, in Congress and around the world, nearly all of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid retribution.
Related, on the “Warrior Ethos:”
The warrior ethos is no longer a useful philosophy for any military service, least of all the U.S. Marine Corps. While once that spirit offered some utility—for those who fought in the war on terrorism, it may have been a natural product of that war’s character—the warrior ethos now is largely a stumbling block to the professional and ethical development of soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines.
As it has evolved, the warrior ethos glamorizes the prowess of the individual warrior in a way that starkly contradicts the professional, ethical, and organizational nature of military service and modern warfare.
A different way of phrasing this might be to contrast between an ethos that treats Heroism as the core of warfighting against an ethos in which the need for Heroism represents an organizational warfighting failure. The former treats bayoneting an enemy fighter as a glorious moment, while the views the need to get within bayonet range of a foe as a failure to properly apply force and to protect organizational capital. Not to belabor, but Secretary Pete wants to live in the former world and the US military is increasingly in the latter world.