Something genuinely odd is going on over at the Pentagon.

Unlike Michael, I don’t personally know any of the officials recently dismissed from the Department of Defense, and can’t vouch that they’re “good men with great reputations.” I do know that the known facts point to at least one official going on a leaking rampage quickly after taking the job.

Hegseth didn’t get sworn in until January 25, and most of his staff started work in late January or early February. By March 17, Tucker Carlson was posting on X, “a strike on the Iranian nuclear sites will almost certainly result in thousands of American deaths at bases throughout the Middle East, and cost the United States tens of billions of dollars. The cost of future acts of terrorism on American soil may be even higher. Those aren’t guesses. Those are the Pentagon’s own estimates.”

Carlson could have learned about those Pentagon estimates from anybody who had access to them, but if I were looking for a leaker, I would start with the particular Hegseth adviser whom Carlson publicly praised as a “man of genuine integrity, high intelligence and principle . . . committed to his country . . . a wonderful person.” Occam’s razor, and all that.

Something genuinely odd is going on over at the Pentagon. To hear former Pentagon press secretary John Ullyot tell it in Politico, three longtime loyal aides to Hegseth — senior adviser Dan Caldwell, deputy chief of staff Darin Selnick and Colin Carroll, chief of staff to the deputy secretary of Defense — were falsely accused of leaking and dismissed; he writes, “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 worked in the Pentagon until last week.)

Maybe Hegseth’s team is lying, or maybe the dismissed staffers are lying, or maybe Ullyot is lying. Those of us outside the organization can’t tell who’s lying, but the public accusations and counteraccusations are not reassuring. (Amidst all these accusations of leaking, somebody’s still minding the store, right?) And it’s clear somebody’s still leaking; last week’s New York Times was full of details about the administration’s internal deliberations about what to do about Iran’s nuclear program and differing opinions about the Israelis secretly proposing airstrikes on Iranian nuclear sites.

Hegseth is younger and less experienced than the typical secretary of defense. The staff around him is younger and less experienced than the typical top Pentagon staff. We were told that reforming the byzantine Pentagon bureaucracy would require outsiders and upstarts and fresh faces — newcomers who weren’t part of “the establishment” or “the system.” Maybe that’s the case, but outsiders, upstarts, and fresh faces come with their own problems. Perhaps one of them is an eagerness to influence the administration’s internal deliberations by strategically leaking to the press.

So far, the kids don’t seem alright.