Your Daily Four Star

Wednesday. One reason Hegseth fired the Army’s top general now looks like, in part, related to a helicopter stunt for Kid Rock, and believe us when we say we wish we didn’t just type that. Elsewhere: A judge has allowed Trump’s election order to the USPS to move forward, possibly affecting the mail that carries troops’ ballots; Iran and Oman cut a Hormuz deal that leaves the U.S. on the outside; and the Marine Corps rediscovers that vaccinating troops is a readiness issue. Day 179 of the “4-week war.” Here’s what you need to know.

Days before Hegseth abruptly fired Army Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George, the Post reports, George was pushed by the service’s No. 2 general to shut down an investigation into an unauthorized Apache helicopter flyby of Kid Rock’s Tennessee estate, a probe George insisted on running by the book to see if safety rules were broken. He refused; Hegseth killed the investigation anyway, cleared the crews himself, and fired George on April 2. The general who leaned on him to quash it, Chris LaNeve, is now could be in line to run the Army, pending confirmation.

Iran’s Revolutionary Guard said Wednesday that the U.S. is the thing standing in the way of reopening the Strait of Hormuz and that Iran and Oman have already settled their shares of the waterway, including who collects the revenue from running it. They added that the strait stays shut until Washington accepts Iran’s terms. Trump’s response, on Glenn Beck’s radio show, was to insist the strait is already open: “A lot of oil is pouring out,” he said, waving off the occasional “drone or a rocket.” He also told Al Jazeera he’s “in no hurry” to negotiate and has “no time schedule at all,” this after saying last week the two sides were done talking. So Iran and Oman are divvying up control of the world’s most important oil chokepoint, complete with tolls, while the president assures a radio audience everything’s fine. A reminder that this war was launched to get the “unconditional surrender of the regime.”

A federal judge just cleared the way, for now, for Trump’s order letting the Postal Service refuse to deliver mail ballots to anyone not on a state-verified eligibility list, and two dozen states sued Wednesday to stop it, the latest round in the administration’s push to tighten who can vote by mail before November. The stated targets are noncitizens and people purged from the rolls, but no one depends on mail voting more than troops deployed overseas and disabled veterans who can’t get to a polling place, so this could affect them in the end, too. When the White House starts deciding which ballots the Postal Service will and won’t carry, it’s putting a hand on the exact system service members have trusted to make their votes count since the Civil War.

Reality is a stubborn thing. In April, Hegseth scrapped the military’s flu-shot mandate with a video about “medical autonomy,” declaring that making troops get vaccinated “weakens our warfighting capability.” This week the Marine Corps started putting it back, requiring flu shots again for recruits, health-care workers, and Marines who are deploying or on hazardous-response teams, after conceding that influenza “has the potential to significantly impact force health and mission readiness.” That’s not a new discovery. George Washington had the Continental Army inoculated against smallpox in 1777 because a sick army can’t fight, and every serious commander since has known that a vaccine is a readiness tool, not a culture-war prop. The anti-vax crowd is relearning, one outbreak at a time, what Washington figured out before there was a United States. Congrats, guys.

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