Pete Hegseth Seems to Have Lost Control of One of His Top Defense Department Lieutenants

I'm telling you, people. I'm beginning to have severe doubts about the management capabilities of Pete Hegseth, Secretary of Defense. Apparently, he is losing control of his subordinates. From Politico:

But since joining the second Trump administration as the Pentagon’s top policy chief, [Elbridge] Colby has made a series of rapid-fire moves that have blindsided parts of the White House and frustrated several of America’s foreign allies, according to seven people familiar with the situation. All were granted anonymity to speak freely about Trump administration dynamics.

He prompted last week’s decision, first reported by POLITICO, to halt shipments of some air defense missiles to Ukraine, which caught many Trump allies and lawmakers off guard. This week, President Donald Trump said he would reverse the decision to pause the weapons but claimed he did not know who had approved it. Colby also surprised top officials at the State Department and the National Security Council in June when he decided to review America’s submarine pact with Australia and the U.K. “He is pissing off just about everyone I know inside the administration,” said one person familiar with the situation. “They all view him as the guy who’s going to make the U.S. do less in the world in general.”

And, apparently, this jamoke has been making friends all over the world, too.

“He has basically decided that he’s going to be the intellectual driving force behind a kind of neo-isolationism that believes that the United States should act more alone, that allies and friends are kind of encumbering,” said a person familiar with the Trump administration dynamics.

If you're the kind of ambitious bureaucratic with Big Ideas, as this guy apparently is, an administration with a largely vacant president and a completely incompetent Secretary of Defense, is an ideal environment to push your Big Ideas into an actual policy agenda. In the 1980's, a bunch of schemers had only the vacant president part, and they walked the country into the Iran-Contra scandal. Ollie North just didn't have the kind of luck currently enjoyed by Elbridge Colby.

To put it crudely, Colby seems to consider the Indo-Pacific to be an American lake. To that end, he has managed to piss off the British, the Japanese, the Australians, and the New Zealanders. A deal to supply Australia up to five American nuclear submarines is hanging fire pending a Colby-inspired review at the Pentagon. Reports indicate that the US is attempting to blackjack a defense spending increase out of Australia as a price for agreeing to the deal. The review is scheduled to be completed next week.

The AUKUS review surprised some State Department officials who dealt directly with the pact. The department’s immediate guidance on how to respond to media questions about the topic appeared to underscore the lack of coordination, a State Department official said. The instructions told diplomats to say to reporters: “We are not aware of a review of the AUKUS agreement. The secretary of Defense has not requested a review of the agreement from the secretary of State.”“The way that one person from State put it to me is: ‘Who is this fucking guy?’” said a former U.S. official familiar with the policy discussions.

Are they all still wearing name-tags down there?