The Little Corporal Redux

The Purge of Counsel

Hawkeye1972

Mar 17, 2026

In the Second World War, German officers referred to Hitler behind his back as “the corporal” - the rank he had achieved in WW1. The contempt was specific: a man with no command experience above the squad level was now directing armies across a continent, overruling professionals who had spent careers learning what he had not.

The parallel is uncomfortable and precise. Pete Hegseth reached the rank of major. His highest operational command was a platoon. We now have a platoon leader running a war - and he spent his first year in office making sure no one with more experience than him had a seat at the table when the decisions were made.

That is what this post is about.

The Planning That Existed

A reader correctly pointed out that our previous post carelessly misstated something important: the Iran war had been extensively war-gamed. The military had spent years on exactly this scenario.

Gen. Dan Caine himself said at his first Pentagon briefing that the strikes were the result of “months and, in some cases, years of deliberate planning and refinement.” CENTCOM had maintained Iran war plans for decades. Gen. Michael Kurilla, who commanded CENTCOM from 2022 to August 2025, spent three years building the regional relationships, the Israeli coordination, and the operational blueprints that the February 28 strikes drew on.

The knowledge was there. So were the people who held it. And then, one by one, they were removed.

The failure was not that no one had thought deeply about an Iran conflict. It is that the administration built a system - methodically, over more than a year - to ensure that those people were gone, sidelined, or afraid to say what they actually thought.

That is not incompetence. That is architecture.

The Purge

On February 21, 2025 - one month after the inauguration - Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr., Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, was fired. Brown was the second Black officer ever to hold that position, confirmed by the Senate 98 to 1. He was replaced by Gen. Dan Caine, a Trump loyalist with strong credentials but no prior experience as a service chief or combatant commander.

Also fired in that first wave: the Vice Chief of the Air Force, the first woman to lead the Navy, and the top lawyers for the Army, Navy, and Air Force. Six senior Pentagon officials in the first thirty days.

Note: None of the JAG positions were meaningfully filled. All three services operated without permanent top legal officers for months. The consequences became visible almost immediately. In a September 2025 strike on an alleged drug vessel, two survivors clinging to capsized wreckage were killed in a follow-up strike ordered under Hegseth’s verbal command to leave no survivors. Legal experts and members of Congress called it a textbook violation of the prohibition on targeting combatants who are hors de combat - out of the fight. A JAG officer in the chain of command would have known that killing shipwrecked survivors is a manifestly unlawful act, and that following an illegal order is no defense.

Gen. Kurilla - the four-star who built the Iran planning and executed Operation Midnight Hammer - the June 2025 Iran nuclear site strike - retired in August 2025. His replacement, Adm. Brad Cooper, is capable, but had not been present for the years of Iran planning Kurilla oversaw. The institutional memory retired with him.

Hegseth simultaneously ordered a 20 percent reduction in active-duty four-star positions and a further 10 percent cut across all general and flag officers - roughly 900 in total, with 150 expected to be forced out. The stated rationale was DEI and bureaucratic bloat. The operational effect was the removal of a generation of institutional knowledge from the force.

Lt. Gen. Jeffrey Kruse, director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, was fired in early March 2026. The DIA had just produced an assessment directly contradicting Trump’s State of the Union claim that Iran was developing missiles capable of striking the United States - concluding that outcome was a decade away and not being actively pursued. Kruse was gone within days.

The DIA director was fired after his agency produced an accurate intelligence assessment that contradicted the president’s public justification for the war.

The Warnings That Were Given - and Suppressed

In the weeks before the February 28 strikes, Caine raised concerns internally about munitions shortfalls, absent allied support, the complexity of a sustained campaign, and the risk of American casualties - reported by the Washington Post, Axios, the Wall Street Journal, and CNN, all based on multiple sources with direct knowledge of internal meetings.

Trump responded on Truth Social, declaring Caine’s warnings “100 percent incorrect” and calling a war with Iran “something easily won.” In a Situation Room meeting that ran three times longer than scheduled, Caine could not predict what a regime-change operation would produce. That uncertainty did not alter the timeline.

Caine had reportedly consciously decided to avoid what he called the “Milley mistake” - the pattern of Gen. Mark Milley, who clashed directly with Trump and privately reassured allies that the president’s rhetoric didn’t reflect actual policy. Caine’s approach was to stay in his lane and avoid direct confrontation.

“He’s definitely pulling punches.” - Source familiar with Caine’s interactions with Trump, CNN, February 25, 2026

Meanwhile, the operational commander who would actually run the war - CENTCOM’s Adm. Cooper - was not invited to the Iran planning meetings. He had not spoken to the president since January, when the crisis began its escalation toward open conflict.

The officer responsible for executing the war was not in the room where it was planned.

The Architecture of Silence

This is not a story about institutional failure. It is a story about institutional design.

A chairman fired and replaced with a loyalist. A hundred and fifty senior officers purged under the banner of DEI reform. An intelligence director removed when his agency told an inconvenient truth. A top general publicly humiliated for privately expressing accurate concerns. An operational commander excluded from the meetings where the operation was planned.

They warned about munitions shortfalls, escalation risks, and the absence of allied support. They were fired, retired early, excluded from meetings, or learned to pull their punches after watching what happened to those who didn’t.

By the time the decision was made, the room had been carefully emptied of the people most likely to say “no” - or to say “here is what will happen if you do.”

The war-gaming existed. The expertise existed. The warnings were given.

The system was built to make sure none of it mattered.

The Little Corporal surrounded himself with generals who had learned not to correct him.

We now have a platoon leader who has done the same.

And it’s the 19-year-olds carrying rifles and taxpayers who are seeing the consequences.

If this matters to you, send it to someone who needs to read it.

Quislings@Substack

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