Pete Hegseth is right to purge the Joint Staff traitors

By Grant Colby · Reporting from Amarillo · September 5, 2026

When you’re on the flight line, you don’t want the enemy knowing your fuel state, your payload, or where your blind spots are.

When you’re on the flight line, you don’t want the enemy knowing your fuel state, your payload, or where your blind spots are. You certainly don’t want some desk-jockey in the Pentagon tipping off the world that the cupboard is bare. Yet, as Al Jazeera and The Punch have reported, we’ve had a steady drip of "classified" intel leaking out about our dwindling stocks of long-range missiles and Patriot interceptors—precisely the tools we need to keep Iran in check.

President Donald Trump is right to call these leaks "treasonous statements." In a war, information is a weapon; giving that weapon to the adversary via a journalist isn't "transparency," it's sabotage. The response from the administration—subjecting roughly 50 members of the US military’s Joint Staff to polygraphs in August, with more officials from US Central Command tested earlier this summer—isn't an overreach. It is a long-overdue cleaning of the house.

The Ledger of Loyalty

The critics are already screaming. Retired Rear Admiral Donald J. Guter called the scale of these lie-detector tests "unprecedented." The careerists in the bureaucracy love that word because it suggests a violation of some sacred, unspoken norm. But norms don't win wars; deterrence does.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth isn't playing games. By creating a joint task force with the Department of Justice in July to accelerate these investigations, Hegseth is treating a security breach like the emergency it is. He has already removed or blocked the promotions of at least 80 generals and admirals. To the Beltway crowd, that looks like a purge. To anyone who has ever run a business or commanded a unit, it looks like a manager firing the people who are stealing from the company.

We have seen this pattern before. The executive branch has always had to build specialized, aggressive internal security apparatuses to stem the flow of classified information to a press that often cares more about a scoop than a soldier's life. The most famous example was the White House Plumbers under Nixon. Now, the critics will try to link Hegseth’s task force to that era to imply some sort of "dark arts" at play. But they miss the point. The shared mechanism here isn't about "fixing" political scandals; it is about the fundamental necessity of the Commander-in-Chief to stop the bleeding of state secrets. The difference is that while the Plumbers eventually spiraled into illegal break-ins, Hegseth is using the FBI and the Department of Justice to follow the law and find the traitors.

Strength Requires a Closed Mouth

The "whistleblower" industrial complex has been rotting our security for decades. We saw it with the Iraq War leak investigations, where the disclosure of field reports served more to fuel political narratives than to protect troops. We saw it again with the Edward Snowden leaks, which handed a blueprint of our intelligence capabilities to every adversary on the map. Each time, the lesson was the same: the state is only as strong as its ability to keep a secret.

The Joint Staff consists of 1,500 to 2,000 people. If 50 of them are being put under the lights, it means the circle of trust has been breached. When the Pentagon dismissed the publisher and editor-in-chief of Stars and Stripes in August, it was a signal that the era of the "embedded" leak is over.

The opposing case is that the administration is simply hiding a failure to manufacture enough missiles. They’ll argue that the polygraphs are a smokescreen for a supply chain crisis. That is a convenient narrative for the press, but it’s a strategic failure. Whether we have ten missiles or ten thousand, the enemy should never know the number. Donald Trump’s assertion on Truth Social that munitions are being manufactured and shipped as needed is the only public stance a leader should take. The details belong in the SCIF, not the New York Times.

We are heading toward a reckoning. The Department of Justice and the FBI will likely move from polygraphs to formal criminal prosecutions. I expect more generals to be escorted from the building and a drastic tightening of "need-to-know" access.

The military is not a debating society or a source for the media; it is a blunt instrument of national power. You cannot project strength abroad if you are leaking weakness from within. If the price of a secure perimeter is a few dozen disgruntled colonels and a few "unprecedented" lie-detector tests, that is a bargain I will take every single time.

Pete Hegseth is right to purge the Joint Staff traitors

The Ledger of Loyalty

Strength Requires a Closed Mouth

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