TV News LIES

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth asked the Army’s chief of staff, Gen. Randy George, to step down from the post and retire immediately, a Pentagon official told The Hill on Thursday.

The Army did not immediately respond to The Hill’s request for comment.

The Pentagon confirmed George’s retirement, who served as the Army’s 41st chief of staff.

“The Department of War is grateful for General George’s decades of service to our nation. We wish him well in his retirement,” Pentagon chief spokesperson, Sean Parnell, said in a statement.

The Army’s current vice chief of staff is Lt. Gen. Christopher LaNeve, who was previously Hegseth’s military aide, will serve as the acting chief of staff, a Pentagon official told The Hill.

“General LaNeve — a generational leader — will help ensure the Army revives the warrior ethos, rebuilds for the modern battlefield and deters our enemies around the world,” Hegseth said of LaNeve in January.

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During his briefing on the Iran war last week, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth suggested that Americans take a knee and pray to Jesus for the success of U.S. forces in the Middle East. A few days later, he read out a sermon praying that “wicked souls” be “delivered to the eternal damnation” in the fight against Iran.

The Defense secretary has increasingly used his bully pulpit to promote his combative, controversial brand of Christianity. While the Pentagon says Hegseth is embracing America’s proud history as a Christian nation, some experts and veterans worry that Hegseth’s move to inject the military with more explicitly religious sentiments threatens to divide America’s forces.

“The ideological consolidation of the military is something that we have historically not wanted. We want the military to be diverse. We want the military representative of the American people,” he added.

“I think it’s extremely concerning the way that he is operating. It’s concerning to me as a Christian, and it’s concerning to me as an American,” said Matthew Taylor, a visiting scholar at Georgetown University’s Berkley Center for Religion, Peace and World Affairs.

Hegseth, who was deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan before becoming a Fox News host, has presided over prayer services in the building led by controversial Christian pastors and revamped the military’s Chaplain Corps, and official Defense Department social media posts often amplify ultraconservative Christian views.

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Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has reportedly blocked the promotion of two Black and two female Army officers to be one-star generals.

The New York Times reported Friday that Hegseth for months pressed senior Army leaders, including Secretary Dan Driscoll, to remove the officers’ names but was repeatedly refused. Then earlier this month, Hegseth struck the names from the list, which is being reviewed by the White House before being sent to the Senate for final approval.

Asked about the report, Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell called it “full of fake news from anonymous sources who have no idea what they’re talking about and are far removed from actual decision-makers within the Pentagon.”

He did not address Hegseth’s decision to pull the four officers from the promotion list, only saying that promotions “are given to those who have earned them.”

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A federal judge in California has blocked the Trump administration from designating Anthropic as a supply chain risk to national security and cutting off the AI company’s work with federal agencies.

Anthropic sued the Defense Department and other federal agencies this month after the Pentagon labeled it a "supply-chain risk to national security." President Donald Trump said he would also ban the use of Anthropic’s products across other federal agencies.

“Defendants’ designation of Anthropic as a 'supply chain risk' is likely both contrary to law and arbitrary and capricious,” U.S. District Judge Rita Lin of Northern California wrote in her order Thursday night. “The Department of War provides no legitimate basis to infer from Anthropic’s forthright insistence on usage restrictions that it might become a saboteur.”

Lin paused her order for a week to allow the administration time to appeal.

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The US has launched another strike on a vessel in the Caribbean, killing four people, the US Southern Command said.

The command, which oversees combatant operations in Latin America and the Caribbean, announced on X that it had conducted a “lethal kinetic strike on a vessel operated by Designated Terrorist Organizations”.

Wednesday’s strikes brings the total number of deaths to at least 163 people since the defense department began attacking alleged “narco-terrorists” last September in more than 45 strikes.

Without including evidence, the US Southern Command said that “intelligence confirmed the vessel was transiting along known narco-trafficking routes in the Caribbean and was engaged in narco-trafficking operations.”

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The U.S. war in Iran is taking a mounting toll on America’s military, with rising casualties, dwindling munitions stockpiles, a sidelined aircraft carrier and numerous downed aircraft just three weeks into the conflict.

At least 13 U.S. service members have been killed, while another 232 have been injured since the U.S.-Israeli war against Tehran began on Feb. 28. In addition, some 16 American aircraft have been destroyed, the USS Gerald R. Ford aircraft carrier was damaged in a laundry room fire earlier this month and American forces are quickly blowing through stocks of air defense and long-range munitions.

Now, with reports that Pentagon officials have made detailed preparations for deploying U.S. ground forces into Iran — a move that is almost sure to be met by fierce retaliation from Tehran — those losses could quickly increase. Experts say the developments in the Middle East threaten U.S. security in other areas of the world, namely the Indo-Pacific.

“The problem, I think, is several-fold,” said Seth Jones, a former Pentagon official now with the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “You’re taking an area that is not your top priority, and you’re now sort of blown through readiness and maintenance issues with aircraft and ships that will be important for a China contingency operation.”

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