Well, Petey-Boy Hegseth has lost another top aide, albeit this one resigned after being demoted for something other than SignalGate. (I’ll get to that) After tomorrow when his resignation takes effect former Pentagon Spokesperson John Ullyot will be gone. Sadly, he’ll turn back up, either at Fox or in some other role in the Trump administration, or perhaps a short gig on Fox and then back to the administration. Whatever, the point is this a-hole who was sooooooo into stamping out all mention of anything in the DOD that simultaneously celebrated good ole WHITE MALES and scrubbing any mention of women and minorities is part of the collection of Hegseth aides that are as I said in the title dropping like flies.
In the first article I read about this Ullyot glossed over the situation saying he’d resigned because he 1) Wasn’t going to play second fiddle at the Pentagon to anyone, except of course Hegseth himself (who he says he still supports) and 2) No suitable position could be found for him after someone else had taken over being the top spokesperson. (FYI I’m making a point of NOT using the old school term ‘spokesMAN’) Politico sometimes has a conservative lean to it so it’s not surprising they’d try to help Ullyot put a positive spin on things. However as this Newsweek article tells us Ullyot was asked to resign. On Wednesday he told Politico (as I’ve said) his ‘intentions’ and presumably other outlets either directly or indirectly. But today Newsweek tells us there’s more to the story:
In the statement shared with Newsweek, he said he told Hegseth that “I would be happy to stand up the Pentagon press operation on an acting basis for two months and get President Trump’s pick up to speed once he came on board.”
The statement continued: “Last month, as that time approached, the Secretary and I talked and could not come to an agreement on another good fit for me at DoD, so I informed him yesterday that I will be leaving at the end of this week.”
In a statement emailed to Newsweek on Thursday, a defense official said that “Ullyot was asked to resign.” The Associated Press also reported that Ullyot was asked to step down from his post.
John Ullyot goes back a ways with Trump. He worked on the 2016 campaign starting as Deputy Communications Director. He’d go on to hold higher level jobs in the first Trump administration. From head of communications at the National Security Council in 2019 to early 2021, then as assistant secretary for public and intergovernmental affairs at the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs from 2017 to 2019. I wonder if he was disappointed at not being named WH Communications Director, or more to his experience as Press Secretary. If not being a “blonde and blue babe” maybe HE would be doing all that lying in WH press briefings. If so it makes sense he’d be so hard-core “anti-DEI.”
However he wound up at the Pentagon in his zeal to stamp out all that wasn’t WHITE MALE and ONLY White Male he stepped in sh*t and more than once. He was responsible for controversial changes to the Pentagon Press Pool. Then with the anti-DEI EO he went to work taking down references to important female historical figures who’d served with distinction. The deletion of the Navajo Code Talkers so instrumental in the Pacific Theater in WII really blew up in his face though. Hell, even though he made a mess of it Trumpty himself made a show of honoring them at the WH during his first term. Despite the instant WTF reaction that started flowing in Ullyot tried to double down. Cronkite News had an article quoting him:
Pentagon press secretary John Ullyot defended the deletions on Monday, telling Axios that as Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had said, “DEI is dead at the Defense Department. … We are pleased by the rapid compliance across the department with the directive removing DEI content from all platforms.”
A day later the Pentagon Press Office, but NOT Ullyot himself said taking all those web pages down was a mistake. At the time the article was published however not all of them had been restored! So, it’s not like Ullyot was on firm ice when he made his latest, and for now last gaffe. Earlier this week Major League Baseball, as it has done every year since the first one in 2004 celebrated Jackie Robinson Day in every ballpark hosting a game. For those who don’t know that’s the date Robinson broke the color-barrier, becoming the first non-white to take the field in a regular season Major League game. I could write reams about Robinson but what matters for this discussion is that he also was an Officer in the U.S. Army back in WWII when it was still segregated. A racist attempt was made to “take him down’ but Robinson won at his Court Martial and would wind up honorably discharged.
He’s a part of military history, and Ullyot had ROBINSON’S information struck down! Right at the time when every year Major League Baseball celebrates him! That it seems was finally too much, and given all the other goings on Ullyot and his antics were the last thing Hegseth, who only still has his own job because Trump, even though HE PAINTS HIS FACE ORANGE is too embarrassed to fire him. As Newsweek pointed out there’s a lot of turmoil at the Pentagon. SignalGate might have fallen from daily news coverage but it’s still out there and “leaks” haven’t helped so Petey went looking for leakers and three, count em THREE top aides are on administrative leave. One was even made an example of, by formally being escorted out of the building!
You can read the linked Newsweek article for details on all that but the saying that Everything Trump Touches Dies (ETTD) maybe applies to Hegseth too. Not that any of the former or soon to be former Hegseth pals being thrown under the bus is an actual loss to the DOD or National Security. On the contrary.
It does however make you wonder just how far Trump will go to protect Hegseth, or rather his own reputation for having put him in a job he’s totally unqualified for in the first place. If Hegseth had even a shred of honor he’d have resigned in the wake of SignalGate. Hell, he shouldn’t have accepted the nomination of SecDef in the first place. I’ve said before and will say again he had the makings of a Pentagon Spokesperson at best. And not even that if there was a competent President/Commander In Chief making appointments to important govt. jobs.
But they DOD seem to be dropping like flies from the fifth floor of the Pentagon’s E-Ring. If they have a lick of sense and career self-preservation others at the Pentagon in Hegseth’s circle will quickly look for an out. Some ‘can’t pass up’ ‘Opportunity’ or some sudden need to tend to family. Whatever. Just get out when they can still do so instead of in disgrace because that’s the fate that awaits them. Some Friday evening soon, during the end of week ‘take out the trash’ news release we’ll learn that the three other top Hegseth aides on ‘administrative leave’ have joined Ullyot by “resigning.” (After being ordered to!)
****** Zoomers, we would happily accept a small donation to defray expenses as we trek through cyberspace. It’s going to get a lot crazier, that much we can guarantee you. Thanks. Ursula ******
King Stupid needs a drunk/rapist in the post, so when he orders a nuclear strike on Iran, the ‘defense’ secretary will be either drunk or having his way with a teenage staffer. What’s the window marine for the rest of us to know? 15 minutes and no going back? Hell…when it starts, this drunk will probably be passed out in a pentagon restroom. Maybe it won’t be a nuclear strike. Maybe it will be to murder unarmed protesters in the streets. One thing for sure…terrible realities await.
I wish I didn’t agree. Read an article today in which a female doctor based in Connecticut, and born in PA,so a natural.born American citizen, received a letter from (I think ICE) the government telling her it was past time to self deport. Something similar happened to a lawyer. I am strongly considering getting a passport,and my husband as well. The problem is that Trump wants to withhold Social Security from.expats.
Fifteen to twenty minutes if we’re lucky. If Russia or China has a sub a hundred miles away they can start shooting their own nukes in response and the mushroom clouds could start within five to ten minutes depending on how deep into the U.S. mainland they’re targeted.
Damn. Lucky guess. In that scenario, I wish I was major King Kong,(Slim Pickens), riding the warhead down, flapping my cowboy hat, whooping and hollering…hell…I’m a southern boy…I can burst with a rebel yell!!! I wouldn’t want to experience the slow extinction via radiation and nuclear winter. These goddamn demons. GODDAMN GOP voters and the almost million of YOU SORRY DEMOCRATS WHO COULDNT GET OFF YOUR ASS TO VOTE. One thing I’ve learned from experience…the evil that exist in the world beyond this life worships darkness, despair, and death of the heart. Knock on the Devil’s door, invite him in, he always answers ready to destroy any hope he encounters. We collectively have NO IDEA WHAT WE’RE DEALING WITH. We’re about to find out on a scale that no one is prepared for. Of course…sitting on this side of THE GRAVE, we don’t have time for that silly supernatural superstition…we don’t believe in the Devil. I just wish he didn’t believe in us.
It’s scarier than you know. I’m sure you know about our “Tomahawk” missiles – cruise missiles that can travel with the terrain and strike with precision. As a sailor you also know about those things called SUMARINES. Yep, back in the 1960s Submarine Launched Cruise Missiles began being deployed by the USSR and we did too. From the start they could be fitted with conventional HE warheads – or Nuclear ones. Nuclear SLCMS went out of favor for a time but they still exist. Next to the U.S. Russia has had the best submarine capability although you have to think China has stolen enough of our technology that their subs have a worrying capability.
More to the point Russia has renewed development of “sea” launched cruise missiles and while fears or their “hypersonic” missiles has been crazy (that program has a long way to go despite all of Pootie’s hype) the new cruise missiles are an actual threat and deployed on surface ships. Again, it’s possible to fit them with nuclear instead of conventional high explosive warheads. Russia’s submarine capability went way the hell down after the collapse of the USSR. But those Alfas were awfully damned good. Faster than anything we had and also able to operate at lower depths than our own attack subs. Even with our advanced capability overall and superior passive sonar capabilities getting close enough to one for a kill shot with a torpedo was a tall task.
Our ability to detect and track them was impressive and surface ships, especially those who could carry anti-sub helicopters with dipping sonar, and of course our own attack subs meant had worst come to worst we’d have been able to take out a lot of Soviet/Russian subs. That’s still true but unless I’m mistaken while Russia no longer has anything close to that old level of capability, our own anti-sub capability isn’t what it used to be either.
Of course, much of that shit is so highly classified only a handful of people in our own Navy know what we’ve got deployed and where. Which means in theory neither does Russia or China and prior to the first Trump term, and especially the aftermath when we learned he stole all that material (and god knows what else made its way to Mar A Lago and got copied!) I didn’t worry. For a time after I first got permanently attached to HQMC (in the 1980s it was at the Navy Annex in Arlington) I stood a lot of watches at OpNav Security. They wanted armed Marine grunts as guards for the Navy Command Center, and the CNO and SecNav spaces out on the E-ring although we only stood post at the Command Center itself. But responded to ‘alarm drops’ (and that funky old system would sound with false alarms sending us running!) in the top brass spaces.
Anyway at the Command Center at night, some of the C.O.s in Command (basically a Navy Captain serving as “Duty Officer” for the entire Navy) would have us come inside the Command Center itself. Some of the Duty Captains pushed for an armed Marine inside 24/7 but kept getting rebuffed. Even at night it bent procedure to have us inside instead out outside at the guard post but when the Duty Officer for Henderson Hall would make the rounds in the middle of the night we always got notice he was on the “tour” (Iwo Jima and the Pentagon) off base and would be outside at the guard post when he/she arrived.
Anyway inside the Center the bulk of the space was a big “bullpen” filled with desks and people doing what they did. It was impossible not to see (and be drawn to look at) the “Flag Plot” – a HUGE projection of the world map that showed the location of every U.S. ship (among other stuff). SURFACE ships. Subs? Well, there was a small room with it’s own solid as a brick wall locked door, and only “Bubbleheads” were allowed inside. The “Sub Plot” was in there. Not even the Duty Captain was allowed inside there, even the ones who were submariners themselves! So secretive was our sub information that a few feet inside the door there was a black wall that extended floor to ceiling. It ran I don’t know how far from side to side but enough that no one passing by the door to that space could see where that wall ended. In other words the actual sub plot, as in where all the boats were and everything else in that space were blocked off to anyone who didn’t have special clearance!
My point is that when it comes to submarine stuff maintaining secrecy was an obsession and I don’t think that’s limited to the U.S. Not a bit of knowledge was given up without resistance, although some of course is out there. I recall when Tom Clancy’s first novel The Hunt For Red October came out SecNav John Lehman freaked the fuck out, screaming “Who the hell cleared all this?” Clancy I’m sure wound up privy to some classified information but nothing in the book was classified – you just had to be willing to put in the (considerable) work of learning who to talk with and where to find the information. One Navy Lt. who saw me reading the book while on duty one night told me that while some of the technical details were incorrect the bulk of it was pretty accurate. Of course, the USSR had it’s own capability to learn all that and more but in those days the most important stuff was I’m pretty sure kept every bit as classified as it needed to be.
Again, I’m sure other countries both friend and foe are the same way. But the terrifying fact is that a Russian or Chinese sub COULD in theory manage to slowly sneek up to say fifty miles off the coast of Delaware and launch a spread of SLCMs with nuclear warheads. Cruising at fifty feet off the see and then the flat terrain between DC and the coast they could take out DC without ANY time to react! Worse, a single sub if on a “possible no return mission’ could first shoot a couple of nukes at Quantico Marine Base, Norfolk Naval Base, and a spread at both Camp Lejeune and Ft. Liberty (formerly Bragg) in NC before firing that final salvo at DC.
A huge, strategic mugging. Again, if you look at the terrain on the east coast those missiles could cruise below radar until they reached their targets and pretty much the entire command structure, as well as the lion’s share of our response capability would be GONE in a matter of seconds once the bombs detonated. It gets even worse. I could map out an even larger strategy but the only thing that stops it from happening is M.A.D. – we could do the same thing to them and they know it. They are less able to detect and track out subs lurking close to their shores and we’ve got plenty of our own SLCM’s at the ready – and a tactical plan that since the gomers couldn’t wipe out ALL our command and control (at least in time) we could do it to them. Mutually Assured Destruction. Such is the world you and I have lived our entire lives in and most people don’t realize just how close to the edge we’ve been living! There’s no small irony that “M.A.D.” is the acronym for what’s kept us all alive all thes decades!
Obviously you know much more than I do except we all understand it’s like the wildfires in California…one spark…the entire planet is phucked. I knew submariners in San Diego when I was stationed there. The running joke amongst them was if you phuck with us, we’ll turn your country into a parking lot. Problem is…we won’t survive either.