Power struggles in Washington DC are nothing new. The US capital is a one-industry town, and that industry is the politics of the single most powerful government in the world – so it is hardly a shock that it attracts ferociously ambitious people, nor that such people occasionally clash.
Against that backdrop, reports that the Secretary of the Army. Daniel Driscoll – a veteran who served in the Iraq War – is to step down from his role after clashing with Pete Hegseth, the Secretary of War, seem almost normal, when compared to the usual antics of the Trump administration.
Driscoll is believed to owe his job to a long-standing friendship with Vice President JD Vance – both men are part of tech-industry-related social networks organised in part by Palantir founder Peter Thiel – and has been staunchly in favour of modernising the US military to use tactics derived from the battlefields of Ukraine.
Shorts
Hegseth’s priorities, meanwhile, have generally been elsewhere. He has focused on rules around soldiers shaving their beards, the introduction of testosterone testing for troops, blocking the promotion of numerous women and soldiers of colour and summoning senior officers from around the world to tell them the US military would now require the “highest male standards”.
