Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is at war. The enemy, for better or worse, is the U.S. military leadership and its traditional structure for promotions, training and procurement.

Hegseth announced his latest assault in a speech Wednesday afternoon to a cheering audience of junior officers and enlisted men and women. He mixed predictable rants about the media and “woke” ideology with genuinely radical calls for reforming how the military buys and uses technology.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is at war. The enemy, for better or worse, is the U.S. military leadership and its traditional structure for promotions, training and procurement.

Hegseth announced his latest assault in a speech Wednesday afternoon to a cheering audience of junior officers and enlisted men and women. He mixed predictable rants about the media and “woke” ideology with genuinely radical calls for reforming how the military buys and uses technology.

I’m no Hegseth fan. But I like his proposal for a new “Autonomous Warfare Command” and his plan to draft defense-tech CEOs Elon Musk and Palmer Luckey and perpetual agitator Newt Gingrich for a quick 120-day study of the future of warfare. The United States is in trouble in Iran for many reasons, but a big one was the failure to anticipate the impact of drone warfare.

Hegseth, as always, was a histrionic performer, strutting across a stage backed by a huge American flag at the Marine base in Quantico, Virginia. But this wasn’t simply grandstanding by a former Fox News TV personality. It’s part of a systematic disruption campaign organized by his Pentagon team and backed by a network of online activists. Make no mistake: They’re modern-day Jacobins, and they mean to overturn military norms as aggressively as President Donald Trump has shattered those in other spheres.

“It’s a turnaround,” Hegseth told his audience. That’s putting it mildly. It’s a revolution, in the same spirit (sorry, Mr. Secretary) as Bolshevik Leon Trotsky’s 1918 attack on a bloated “privileged caste” of Russian officers. For defenders of the Pentagon status quo, the Hegseth message was: Off with their heads!

Let’s start with the part of this military populism that seems to me destructive and dangerous. Then I’ll explain why I think some of the six radical reforms Hegseth announced Wednesday are generally sensible (and long overdue) attempts to transform a sclerotic Pentagon bureaucracy.

The damaging part is Hegseth’s rage against senior military leaders. He has dismissed 26 generals and admirals since he became defense secretary and blocked or withheld the promotions of about 55 others, according to a careful count by a congressional official who helps oversee the Pentagon. This purge has driven out some of the military’s most respected combat veterans—the very warriors Hegseth claims he wants to support.

Hegseth said Wednesday he wants to go further and slash a total of 20 percent from the general officer ranks. “The number crunchers say we fired 10 percent of the generals and admirals across the force, and that number sounds about right,” he said. “We’ve also reduced the overall number of general officer slots by an additional 10 percent. So yes, 20 percent reduction across the board.”

“By hollowing out our military leadership ranks, President Trump and Secretary Hegseth have given a priceless gift to America’s enemies,” warned Sen. Jack Reed (D-Rhode Island), the top Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, in an email. “His actions are undermining the time-tested, merit-based promotion system … [and] send a chilling message to all: Don’t give your........

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