{"id":41271,"date":"2025-04-21T01:06:00","date_gmt":"2025-04-21T06:06:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/?p=41271"},"modified":"2025-04-21T02:30:16","modified_gmt":"2025-04-21T07:30:16","slug":"former-hegseth-aide-in-op-ed-total-chaos-at-the-pentagon","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/?p=41271","title":{"rendered":"Former Hegseth aide in op-ed: ‘Total chaos at the Pentagon’"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

WASHINGTON \u2014 An aide to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth published an op-ed Sunday<\/a> in which he was highly critical of his former boss and suggested that President Donald Trump might soon remove him after weeks of turmoil, including leaked texts about airstrikes in Yemen and the abrupt firings of top officials.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIt\u2019s been a month of total chaos at the Pentagon,\u201d John Ullyot, who had been a top spokesman at the Defense Department before he left his job there last week, wrote on Politico<\/a>. \u201cFrom leaks of sensitive operational plans to mass firings, the dysfunction is now a major distraction for the president \u2014 who deserves better from his senior leadership. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cPresident Donald Trump has a strong record of holding his officials to account. Given that, it\u2019s hard to see Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth remaining in his position for much longer.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Defense Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ullyot, who worked in the first Trump administration, as well, also noted the firings of several top Pentagon officials in the last several days. On Friday, according to Ullyot, Hegseth\u2019s chief of staff, Joe Kasper, was removed from his position following the firings of several other senior aides to Hegseth, including deputy chief of staff Darin Selnick and senior adviser Dan Caldwell, as well as the chief of staff to the deputy secretary of defense, Colin Carroll. (Selnick, Caldwell and Carroll said in a statement Saturday<\/a>: \u201cWe are incredibly disappointed by the manner in which our service at the Department of Defense ended. Unnamed Pentagon officials have slandered our character with baseless attacks on our way out the door.\u201d)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIn the aftermath [of the firings], Defense Department officials working for Hegseth tried to smear the aides anonymously to reporters, claiming they were fired for leaking sensitive information as part of an investigation ordered earlier this month,\u201d Ullyot wrote. \u201cYet none of this is true.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ullyot said that he was not part of the purge and that he opted to leave the Pentagon when he turned down a position Hegseth had offered him. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

He described himself in the piece as loyal to Hegseth, but he also noted a series of unforced errors by his former boss. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201c[E]ven strong backers of the secretary like me must admit: the last month has been a full-blown meltdown at the Pentagon \u2014 and it\u2019s becoming a real problem for the administration,\u201d he wrote. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The op-ed was published within hours of The New York Times\u2019 reporting<\/a> that Hegseth used his personal phone to send information about military operations in Yemen to a Signal group chat that included his wife, his brother and his personal lawyer. Two sources with knowledge of the situation confirmed th<\/a>e<\/a> reporting to NBC News<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

nbcnews<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

WASHINGTON \u2014 An aide to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth published an op-ed Sunday in which he was highly critical of his former boss and suggested that President Donald Trump might soon remove him after weeks of turmoil, including leaked texts about airstrikes in Yemen and the abrupt firings of top officials. \u201cIt\u2019s been a month of total […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":41272,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1153],"tags":[26576,1359,31240],"class_list":["post-41271","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-military","tag-aide","tag-former","tag-hegseth"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41271","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=41271"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41271\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":41273,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41271\/revisions\/41273"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/41272"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=41271"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=41271"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=41271"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}