Your Daily Four Star

Tuesday. Hegseth has fired so many top generals that the Army is trying to adapt to drone warfare with no one at the wheel, while the war he’s running becomes a midterm albatross, strands 1,300 Navy families in limbo, and leaves an arsenal that can’t be quickly refilled. Yeah, it’s as bad as it sounds. Day 178 of the “4-week” war. Here’s what you need to know.

The Army is trying to fight a new kind of war, one dominated by cheap, deadly drones, and doing it with no one at the wheel. The Times reports that Hegseth’s serial purge, including Army Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George and the head of Army training and transformation, has gutted the senior ranks responsible for modernizing the force at the worst possible moment. It’s the same Pentagon that just disbanded the Army’s experimental drone battalion, the one unit built to absorb the lessons of Ukraine and Iran. America is falling behind on modern warfare, but Hegseth just keeps firing the people who understand what we need to do.

The war has become a campaign issue, and it’s breaking against the people who started it. Democrats now run about two-thirds of the ads mentioning gas prices, a near-total flip from 2024, most tying the pump straight to the war. VoteVets is at the center of it, posting anti-administration messages this week on more than 1,000 billboards around military bases telling veterans the fight “means higher prices for you.” Iran “has had a massive impact on the global economy,” retired Maj. Gen. Paul Eaton told Politico. “This is not a war that we had to embark upon, it is a war of choice… And the Republican Party owns this war.”

Months after the Navy rushed 1,300 family members out of Bahrain under Iranian missile fire, officials have told them they can’t return for the foreseeable future and should just pick a new duty station and start over. What was meant to be a brief displacement has become a half-year of hotels, short-term rentals, and repeated moves, with some families reporting tens of thousands in out-of-pocket costs. “We literally have been making this up as we go, because nothing is conceived to go on this length of time,” the head of Naval Forces Central Command admitted on a town-hall call. “Making it up as we go” seems to be the entire theme behind Trump’s war in Iran.

For anyone hoping cheap drones and low-cost bombs will quickly refill what this war drained: the experts say no. Industry can build affordable munitions, but that doesn’t fix the near-term hole in the high-end interceptors and long-range precision weapons burned through fighting Iran. “It could impact a 2027 endgame. And it certainly will impact being ready in 2028, 2029 for Russia or China to do something,” analyst Mark Montgomery warned. The Iran war will have security implications for years, and our troops will be less safe because of it.

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