We Need To Talk About Pete Hegseth

Guest Opinion by Lee McInnis

A former boss was talking to me about a problem I had with one of my team members. He said, “If it’s lack of training or lack of clear directions, you can fix that. But if they aren’t telling you the truth, that’s an integrity issue, and it’s a choice on their part… a very deliberate choice on their part, and that’s all you need to know about them.”

Let’s apply that standard to our Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth. Covering every lie he’s told in office would take too long, so let’s go over some of the lies he’s told since the start of the war with Iran.

On March 13^th, the Defense Department reported that the first six days of the war cost $11.3bn. That aligned with most estimates that the war was costing $2bn a day. Six days later, the Pentagon requested a supplemental authorization of $200 billion for the war. “It takes money to kill bad guys,” Hegseth said. At $2bn a day, that’s about 100 days of war. They said it would last six to eight weeks. That doesn’t seem too far off the mark.

Fast-forward to July 27, Hegseth, in sworn testimony before the House Armed Services Committee, said the first 146 days of the war had cost $37.5bn. If you do the math, for days 7 to 146, the cost dropped by nearly 90%, to $268 million a day. That just doesn’t add up.

On March 13, Hegseth said Iran’s armed forces had been rendered “combat ineffective.” That claim was clearly false.

On April 7, Hegseth claimed, “all military objectives had been met,” and that a two-week ceasefire would allow for negotiations with Iran. It’s hard to say whether Hegsethwas actively lying in this instance, since the campaign’s military objectives were never really clear, but the war didn’t end.

The next day, he said that Iran’s missile inventories were destroyed. That is almost laughable.

In late July, the Pentagon reduced the official death toll from the war from 18 to 14. They said that the fictitious ceasefire with Iran had not formally ended, so 1st Lt. Tyler James Feehan, Staff Sgt. Michael Emmanuel Swinton, Sgt. Angel S. Rampersad, and Pvt. Isabella Gonzales, who were killed by Iranian strikes in July, would not be officially classified as combat casualties. Sources said Hegseth directed this.

And the untruths continue. The Pentagon is hiding the exact number of U.S. personnel wounded and the nature of their wounds. They’re hiding the extent of facilities and equipment destroyed by Iranian attacks. We don’t know how severely our critical weapons stocks have been depleted.

Now we learn that months of accelerated operations and no port call have led to conditions on the USS Abraham Lincoln that are so bad, sailors and Marines are attempting suicide to end their misery. Why has the Lincoln only been in port two days since deploying in November? Hegseth completely underestimated Iran’s capabilities, and it is not safe in any port in the region.

Hegseth says the problems on the Lincoln have been overblown. We have to ask, “Why should we believe you?”

Pete Hegseth is either incompetent, a liar, or both. Through all of this, no Republican on the House Armed Services Committee has said a word. Someone must stand up for our military personnel. The men and women of our armed forces deserve better.

It’s time for Congress to demand Hegseth’s resignation, and if the Republicans don’t have the nerve to do it, it’s time to vote them all out.

Lee McInnis is an Alabama native with 30-plus-years of experience in the U.S. Army and the Defense Intelligence Community. During that time, he held multiple senior leadership jobs, and deployed to Iraq once and Afghanistan twice. He is the Democratic nominee for Alabama’s 3rd Congressional District seat.

For more information on McInnis and his campaign, visit https://leemcinnis4alabama.com.

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