The Pentagon, under the "leadership" of Pete Hegseth, seems to be in meltdown mode. That specific word was used by several different people to describe it, I should mention, lest I be accused of being hyperbolic. This news kind of surprised me, because while I fully did expect there to be Pentagon-meltdown stories before now, I expected them to come from a different direction entirely. I thought Elon Musk and his minions would have taken the chainsaw to the entire Pentagon structure and procurement process and it would have blown up in their faces (much like many of their other efforts has) and thus be a big scandal. But so far, that hasn't happened in a big way. Maybe Musk has been told "hands off the Pentagon" or something? At this point, it's hard to tell.

But getting back to the actual scandal (rather than my expectations of a scandal), Pete Hegseth seems once again to be teetering on the edge of becoming more trouble than he is worth to the White House. What's more, this seems to be the result of a power struggle not between Hegseth's own personal minions and the entrenched bureaucracy at the Pentagon (as might have been expected), but it seems to be coming entirely from within Hegseth's inner circle itself. Which is also kind of surprising.

The current scandalous scoop in the news is that Hegseth didn't just limit himself to a Signal chat with a prominent journalist included when he was bragging about secret war plans a few weeks back, he also had a different Signal chat going (conducted on his personal and non-secure phone), which included his wife, his brother, and his personal lawyer -- where he also shared military and national security secrets.

This time, however, it's not so much the substance of the scandal (which is bad enough) as how the whole thing came to light that is the real story. When Hegseth arrived at the Pentagon he (like pretty much every newly-installed leader of a large organization) promptly installed his own team of close advisors whom he already knew and had worked with for a long time. This is common and unremarkable. But what isn't common is that a handpicked team of top advisors would self-destruct so spectacularly within such a short period of time.

Over the past week, Hegseth fired three of these top advisors, while another one resigned. These changes will "leave Hegseth without a chief of staff, deputy chief of staff, or senior advisor in his front office," and was described by an unnamed "senior defense official" as:

There is a complete meltdown in the building, and this is really reflecting on the secretary's leadership. Pete Hegseth has surrounded himself with some people who don't have his interests at heart.

The ostensible reason the three officials were fired was a leak investigation (trying to figure out who has been leaking stories to the press), but they are pushing back hard on that accusation, calling the whole thing a smear job. Then -- right after they were fired -- came the leak of the second Signal chat, the timing of which certainly seems notable. It could be the three disgruntled fired officials leaking, but then again it could also easily be the people who fired them intentionally leaking (to smear them by inference).

This was all reported (as you might expect) with a very heavy dose of snark in some liberal media outlets:

I know it may be impossible to accept, but it turns out that a weekend cable news host with a long record of personal misconduct may not actually be capable of leading the most powerful military on earth after all. Unfortunately, it does appear that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is not living up to what the president and the entire Republican Party apparently believed was his vast potential based upon his "central casting" good looks and white supremacist tattoos. He's in trouble again and this time it's coming from inside the house.

Hegseth had already shown the recklessness and lack of judgment many of his former co-workers at Fox News, hardly a bastion of wokeness, said worried them when he was nominated. (He was known to have a very messy personal life with excessive drinking, affairs, baby mamas and even a rape charge.) He promised the GOP senators who confirmed him that he would not take a drink while serving as secretary of defense and there is no evidence he's broken it. But his judgment is even worse than his critics anticipated.

. . .

The problem is that he's so ridiculously underqualified for the real job of running the Pentagon that the whole place is starting to come apart -- and it's happening at the hands of Hegseth's own closest allies who are apparently at each others' throats.

But the most scathing takedown of the dysfunction comes not from the left but the hard right -- from the guy who quit last week (rather than, assumably, also being fired). This is a guy who is still very supportive of the MAGA agenda for the Pentagon and everything Hegseth has done. He even defended the Pentagon taking down a webpage that celebrated Jackie Robinson's military service, to show you how on board he is with the whole MAGA, anti-D.E.I. agenda.

Here's how John Ullyot, "former chief Pentagon spokesman," summed up what has been going on, in a detailed piece he wrote for Politico.

It's been a month of total chaos at the Pentagon. From leaks of sensitive operational plans to mass firings, the dysfunction is now a major distraction for the president -- who deserves better from his senior leadership.

President Donald Trump has a strong record of holding his top officials to account. Given that, it's hard to see Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth remaining in his role for much longer.

The latest flashpoint is a near collapse inside the Pentagon's top ranks. On Friday, Hegseth fired three of his most loyal senior staffers -- senior adviser Dan Caldwell, deputy chief of staff Darin Selnick and Colin Carroll, chief of staff to the deputy secretary of Defense. In the aftermath, Defense Department officials working for Hegseth tried to smear the aides anonymously to reporters, claiming they were fired for leaking sensitive information as part of an investigation ordered earlier this month.

Yet none of this is true. While the department said that it would conduct polygraph tests as part of the probe, not one of the three has been given a lie detector test. In fact, at least one of them has told former colleagues that investigators advised him he was about to be cleared officially of any wrongdoing. Unfortunately, Hegseth's team has developed a habit of spreading flat-out, easily debunked falsehoods anonymously about their colleagues on their way out the door.

Ullyot goes on to warn: "More firings may be coming, according to rumors in the building," and sums the situation up as: "In short, the building is in disarray under Hegseth's leadership." More-in-sorrow-than-in-anger, he continues: "[E]ven strong backers of the secretary like me must admit: The last month has been a full-blown meltdown at the Pentagon -- and it's becoming a real problem for the administration." And, later: "Unfortunately, after a terrible month, the Pentagon focus is no longer on warfighting, but on endless drama."

He continues his "Stay tuned, folks!" teasing of further juicy stories to come, after revisiting what now has to be called the first Signalgate scandal. He begins by listing a few of the other worst stories that have already been revealed, then ends with another teaser:

That was just the beginning of the Month from Hell. The Wall Street Journal and other outlets reported that Hegseth "brought his wife, a former Fox News producer, to two meetings with foreign military counterparts where sensitive information was discussed."

Next, the Pentagon set up a top-secret briefing by the Joint Chiefs of Staff on China for Elon Musk, who still has extensive business interests in China. After learning about it, the White House canceled that meeting.

Then came the purges. And the news keeps coming. On Sunday night, The New York Times reported that Hegseth shared details about the Yemen strike in another Signal chat that included his wife and brother.

There are very likely more shoes to drop in short order, with even bigger bombshell stories coming this week, key Pentagon reporters have been telling sources privately.

Again -- this is from a hardcore Hegseth and Trump supporter, not some liberal/woke dove.

Representative Dan Bacon, a Republican House member and retired Air Force general who serves on the Armed Services Committee, also seems to have had enough. Bacon didn't actually come right out and call for Hegseth to be sacked, but he got awfully close:

I had concerns from the get-go because Pete Hegseth didn't have a lot of experience. I like him on Fox. But does he have the experience to lead one of the largest organizations in the world? That's a concern.... If it's true that he had another [Signal] chat with his family, about the missions against the Houthis, it's totally unacceptable.... I'm not in the White House, and I'm not going to tell the White House how to manage this... but I find it unacceptable, and I wouldn't tolerate it if I was in charge....

Russia and China put up thousands of people to monitor all these phone calls at the very top, and the number-one target besides the president... would be the secretary of Defense. Russia and China are all over his phone, and for him to be putting secret stuff on his phone is not right. He's acting like he's above the law -- and that shows an amateur person. It looks like there's a meltdown going on. There's a lot -- a lot -- of smoke coming out of the Pentagon, and I got to believe there's some fire there somewhere.

This past Saturday was the semiquincentennial (a word we're all going to get used to using quite often, over the next two years or so) of American armed forces fighting for this country. And in the 250 years since the Battles of Lexington and Concord, we have previously experienced periods with incompetent military leaders before, and (human nature being what it is) we will likely experience future such periods as well.

But the question right now is how long we'll all have to suffer through the current incompetence at the top of the Pentagon's command structure.

-- Chris Weigant

Follow Chris on Twitter: @ChrisWeigant