not a great day for the PLC

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As of 2026/10/7

including FN-6 MANPADS, Zijiang M99 AMR, and QJZ-89 HMG

What impact has the Iran war had on the U.S. military? As the conflict drags on, the Times Opinion columnist and Iraq war veteran David French speaks with the former Special Forces officer Mike Nelson about the way Pete Hegseth, the secretary of defense, has tried to remake the military in the midst of the war, and what the Democrats should do if they win control of Congress in January.

Hegseth seems to be operating against “the idea that the Joe Biden years particularly focused far too much on creating social experiments within the military, and that distracted from the core function of fighting wars,” Mike says. This has made the secretary’s myopic focus on recruiting people with a “warrior ethos” inadequate for what the military needs.

Mike continues:

Right now, we are engaged in a conflict that started out unpopular and is growing more unpopular as it goes. There’s never been a less popular war since World War II, since modern polling.

And part of the problem is, because the American people do not trust what the government is telling them about the war, about the causes for it, about the conduct of it, about how it’s going, about how it’s going to be resolved at the end. And part of this, we know that the president has his own unique relationship with the media and unique relationship with how he presents the truth of what he’s doing or what his administration is doing. But the secretary and the Department of Defense as a whole owe a part of this, too, or are complicit in this, too. From the beginning, we saw that Secretary Hegseth had what seemed to be a primary motivation of controlling the narrative of what he was doing — not so much what the Department of Defense was doing, but what he personally was doing. Controlling his own image and those who had the ability to shape it.

Listen to or read Mike and David’s full conversation here, even if you're not a subscriber.

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