The offenses cited by Representative Thomas Massie (R-KY) in commencing impeachment proceedings against Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth—that he initiated and sustained the war with Iran without required congressional approval, conducted military operations in Yemen and the Caribbean without such approval, and eroded protections for civilians trapped in overseas war zones—are all valid and fully justify his removal from office in accordance with constitutional precepts. But however worthy, they fail to capture his essential, unpardonable offense: strategic malpractice when commanding troops in battle.

Hegseth himself has been very outspoken about the need to cleanse the armed services of incompetent generals and admirals (many of whom, he claims, received their promotions as the result of some sort of affirmative action process) and to retain only those able to fight and win. “The previous administration wanted politically correct generals,” he told an assembly of junior officers on September 30. “We only want the top performing generals. It’s not just pass or fail…. The best move on, the worst do not.”

Secretary Hegseth wants us (and every member of Congress) to believe that he ranks among the successful generals and so should be retained. After berating Massie (“a disgruntled and defeated congressman”) and others during his unapologetic Pentagon press conference on November 10, Hegseth sought to defend his record as the ultimate commander of US forces. “By every measure,” he said of the war against Iran, “we achieved a historic military victory.”

But this is sheer fabrication. Were Hegseth to hold himself to the same high standards he supposedly set for his generals, he would have to say: “By every measure, we achieved a total fiasco in Iran,” and hand in his resignation.

To fully appreciate the magnitude of Hegseth’s incompetence, let’s recall the tasks he was assigned when ordered by President Trump to commence hostilities against Iran on February 28. As indicated by Trump in a prerecorded video address that morning, Hegseth was given four overriding objectives: (1) to eliminate, forever, Iran’s ability to construct a nuclear weapon; (2) to eliminate Iran’s ability to manufacture and launch long-range ballistic missiles; (3) to eliminate Iran’s ability to project power in the region, whether with its own military or via proxy forces like Hezbollah and the Houthi rebels; and (4) to eliminate the Iran problem altogether, by killing off Iran’s top leadership and igniting a popular rebellion.

Hegseth set out to achieve these goals with unrestrained vigor. The US military alone struck 13,000 targets in Iran during the first 38 days of fighting, and its Israeli partners struck many thousands more. From the administration’s perspective, it was a total win. In a press statement released on April 8, following the announcement of a ceasefire (that was to prove temporary), the White House declared that “the greatest fighting force the world has ever known has met those objectives with overwhelming strength and lethal precision.”

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Among the war’s ostensible accomplishments: “Iran’s ballistic missile arsenal and production capacity has been razed…eliminating its ability to project power.” Also, “Iran can no longer arm terrorist proxies.” And, although the regime was still clinging to power: “What’s left of [it] is desperate, dejected, and in denial.”

For Hegseth, this was a “decisive military victory.”

But, in fact, it wasn’t: Not one of Trump’s stated objectives was achieved by Hegseth and the forces under his command. Not one.

To begin with, the Iranian regime has remained intact and (so far as can be determined from afar) remains as entrenched as ever, with no signs of an imminent popular rebellion.

Although the Iranians have made no visible move to reconstitute their uranium enrichment program (a prerequisite for manufacturing a nuclear bomb), they have demonstrated no inclination to surrender their existing stockpiles of highly enriched uranium or to renounce their enrichment efforts entirely.

And Iran’s regional clout—now buttressed by its apparent capacity to disrupt the Persian Gulf oil flow at will—appears enhanced, not diminished.

Most significantly, Iran’s ability to project power with missiles and long-range drones remains robust, as demonstrated by repeated strikes on US bases in the region. As if to prove this point, the Iranians struck Muwaffaq Salti Air Base in Jordan on July 17, killing three US Army service members and destroying or damaging vital military equipment.

The Iranians have also continued to strike tankers attempting to traverse the strategic Strait of Hormuz without their approval, sharply constricting the world’s oil trade and keeping diesel and gasoline prices high.

From any perspective, then, the Hegseth-run war on Iran has been a total fiasco, failing to achieve a single one of its stated objectives. For these reasons alone, the self-styled “secretary of war” should resign. But the war was more than a failure: It entailed a massive strategic disaster, one whose vast dimensions are only beginning to be calculated.

The Strategic Calculus

How do you measure a strategic disaster? We begin, properly, with an intelligence failure, followed by military miscalculation and geopolitical retreat—all adding up to an astonishing contraction of America’s global clout.

Let’s start with intelligence failure, the origin of so much of the sorrow to come. Hegseth and his top lieutenants began with the assumptions that (a) the Iranian military was no match for the technologically superior US military, and (b) the Iranian regime was fragile and would be swept away once its top leaders were killed. Neither assumption has proved even remotely accurate: The Iranian military has demonstrated a remarkable degree of resilience under fire, able to inflict far more damage on US forces than was ever thought possible; and the regime has proved equally resilient, able to reconstitute itself after the loss of its top leadership on the first day of fighting.

Some of this leadership myopia can be attributed to Trump’s ebullience after the successful January 3 US seizure of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro in Caracas, and to the overly optimistic assessment of the regime’s fragility given to Trump on February 11 by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during a pivotal White House meeting. From the accounts by Jonathan Swan and Maggie Haberman of The New York Times, we know that Vice President JD Vance and Gen. Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, warned of possible risks in starting a war with Iran, but that Hegseth assured the president of a rapid US victory. With this assurance, Trump took the plunge.

But this is only part of the story. Hegseth was clearly so blinded by his faith in “the greatest fighting force the world has ever known” that he failed to consider the potential strengths of his adversary—the very first responsibility of a capable commander. The Iranians may have possessed a third-rate navy and air force, but they had also developed a substantial missile- and drone-production capacity and had hardened their launch facilities against possible attack. More importantly, the Iranians had clearly studied US military tactics and prepared for Hegseth’s air and missile bombardment by decentralizing their command and combat capabilities around the country, allowing them to absorb a massive US-Israeli assault and still conduct punishing retaliatory strikes.

By predicting a swift US military victory, moreover, Hegseth saw no need to account for the possible consequences of Iranian retaliatory strikes against Persian Gulf oil shipping. Why worry about oil tankers’ safety if the war would be over in a matter of weeks? Evidently, no one in Hegseth’s inner circle foresaw the possibility of recurring Iranian drone strikes on vital ships and oil infrastructure, depriving the world of approximately one-fifth of its daily petroleum supply and sparking economic hardship around the world.

Surely, those responsible for such a mammoth intelligence failure should be removed from their posts—including those at the very top.

From intelligence failure we move to military miscalculation, another lethal command deficiency. If, like Hegseth, you believe you command the greatest fighting force that ever was, you might be forgiven for a touch of overconfidence when going into battle against a demonstrably weaker power. But when your hubris endangers the lives of your soldiers and their ability to fight, you are unfit to lead.

Most egregious, of course, is Hegseth’s failure to learn from Ukraine about the devastating impact of one-way attack drones on contemporary combat. Anyone who has followed the Ukrainian conflict—and this should have included every senior US military official—knows that drone warfare has transformed the battlefield, placing any unprotected asset at extreme risk of being targeted and attacked by long-range assault weapons, like the Iranian Shahed-136 drones employed by Russia in great numbers.

Yet Hegseth deployed tens of thousands of US soldiers, along with some of America’s most advanced military systems, at bases in the Gulf area within easy range of Iran’s own fleet of Shahed drones. Yes, those troops and weapons were protected by America’s advanced interceptors, such as Patriot and Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) missiles—but never in sufficient quantities to knock down all of the drones and missiles pitted against them. The unsurprising result: 18 US lives lost, over 800 wounded, and billions of dollars in damage to weapons and equipment.

And then there is the critical issue of interceptor use. To defend US facilities in the Gulf (along with the energy assets of US allies in the region), the Pentagon fired off a substantial share of its available supply of Patriot and THAAD air-defense missiles, leaving US bases elsewhere at greater risk of potential attack. According to a report by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a Republican-leaning Washington think tank, the US fired between 1,000 and 1,400 Patriot interceptors during the first weeks of the war, representing about half of the total US inventory at that time; it also expended 190–290 THAAD missiles, or two-thirds to three-quarters of its prewar inventory.

To stem the losses at US bases in the Middle East, Hegseth reportedly ordered US commanders in Europe and Asia to ship scarce Patriot and THAAD batteries from their areas of responsibility to the Gulf, substantially weakening US air and missile defenses in other likely hot spots.

Replacing all those expended missiles and bolstering US air defenses around the world will cost this country tens of billions of dollars and take years to accomplish, Pentagon officials acknowledge.

Add all of this up, and the outcome includes what should be termed geopolitical retreat, or reduced US political clout in the Gulf and elsewhere. As Trump and Hegseth made clear in the opening days of the war, a major US objective was to demonstrate that America’s global reach and power were greater than ever. “[The Iranian] regime will soon learn that no one should challenge the strength and might of the United States Armed Forces,” Trump declared on February 28. A victory there, coming on top of the seemingly cost-free intervention in Venezuela, would again demonstrate Washington’s capacity to project power and overcome adversaries worldwide. But the Iran venture failed, severely damaging US credibility.

It will take a long time to calculate all the consequences of this geopolitical setback, but we can begin with Washington’s apparent failure to eliminate all Iranian threats to the untrammeled flow of Persian Gulf oil. Ever since the world economy became dependent on the Gulf’s oil output, in the early Cold War era, protection of the Gulf oil flow has been viewed in Washington as a vital US interest. Following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, President Jimmy Carter told Congress in 1980 that Soviet forces were now “close to the Straits of Hormuz, [thereby posing] a grave threat to the free movement of Middle East oil.” Any attempt by Moscow or some other power to block that flow, he asserted, “will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America, and such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force.”

In accordance with this edict, Carter established the US Central Command (currently responsible for the fighting with Iran) and installed a permanent US military presence in the region. His successors, beginning with Ronald Reagan and continuing with the two Presidents Bush, have cited this so-called Carter Doctrine to justify repeated US military intervention in the Gulf. Over time, the US role in safeguarding “the free movement of Middle East oil” has become a defining feature of America’s global dominance, along with the US military presence in Europe, Japan, and South Korea. But the Iranians have demonstrated an invincible capacity to disrupt that flow, throwing into question a core component of America’s claim to global hegemony.

The US failure to subdue Iran has also undermined America’s dominant status in the other major foci of its hegemonic sway, Europe and Asia. Not only has Iran demonstrated that a medium-sized power can, under the right circumstances, hold a much more powerful force at bay—a feat no doubt being closely studied by Russia and China—but also, by eliciting such a wanton expenditure of advanced US munitions, it has actually left the US less well-equipped to counter those rivals in any future conflicts. According to that same CSIS study on US missile use, the Pentagon consumed a large share of its offensive strike weapons during the opening weeks of the war, including approximately one-third of its prewar inventory of Tomahawk cruise missiles and one-fourth of its Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missiles.

No doubt there will be other negative consequences from this geopolitical retreat, some possibly of equal concern, but we already know enough to conclude that Hegseth’s combat malpractice has resulted in a severe strategic debacle.

This, combined with his intelligence failures and combat miscalculations, would, in other countries and at other times, result in his forcible removal from office. With this not in the immediate offing, despite calls for his impeachment by prominent Democrats and Republicans in Congress, Hegseth should pay homage to the martial ideals he holds so dear, take personal responsibility for the debacle, and resign.