'Culture of fear within US Defence Department: Slow leakage of dissent against the administration'

To display this content from YouTube, you must enable advertisement tracking and audience measurement. One of your browser extensions seems to be blocking the video player from loading. To watch this content, you may need to disable it on this site. Cover image: © France 24 11:42 Issued on: 05/09/2026 - 17:55Modified: 05/09/2026 - 17:57 Catherine Viette is pleased to welcome Dafydd Townley, Senior Teaching Fellow in International Security at the University of Portsmouth. He argues that the turmoil surrounding Pete Hegseth points to a problem much deeper than personnel disputes at the Pentagon: The removal and marginalization of experienced officials, the weakening of professional military education, and the prioritization of political loyalty risk changing the institutional culture through which the US military evaluates strategy and challenges political authority. Keywords for this article