War Is Hard Enough. It’s Harder When You Don’t Know Who Is in Charge.

2025 New America Fellow Seth Harp's book, The Fort Bragg Cartel, was reviewed in The New York Times.

Harp, a former Army reservist and now a lawyer turned journalist, can be tendentious, but he is correct in his central claim that there has been a “meltdown in special ops.” That’s particularly worrisome, he writes, because the secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, a former TV commentator, has been a cheerleader for “the most toxic figures” in that part of the military. Indeed, in a recent speech to a meeting of special operators, Hegseth held them out as an example for the rest of the military to follow: “When the broader force has strayed from the path, has strayed from sanity, has strayed from standards, you have been keepers of the flame.”

And so it seems that we all are doomed to continue finding new ways to pay the bills — physical, emotional, financial, moral — of wars that never seem to end.