When this editorial board reviews its assessment of U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, it is difficult not to start with one simple message: We told you something like this would happen.

After his nomination was announced, we noted that he was little more than a Fox News hot-take dispenser with scant management experience, which was "a serious deficit for someone charged with overseeing a vast bureaucracy of roughly 3 million military and civilian employees." The following month, we acknowledged abundant new reporting that delved into allegations of drunkenness and sexual misconduct as well as abject incompetence in his leadership of two advocacy groups.

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