Gloria Steinem, the activist and journalist who personified the women’s movement, has died at 92. The Times conducted a visual investigation into the attack this week on a wedding in southern Iran that killed at least five people and injured at least 67. American forces, we learned, dropped the bomb.

The leader of those forces in Washington is Pete Hegseth, the secretary of defense. It’s been a weird summer for the Pentagon. Its leaders depleted much of the U.S. arsenal in a war with Iran.

They’ve pushed out some of the most promising generals because the officers once said or did something that looks like “D. E. I.” They had to call home an aircraft carrier when the crew became demoralized about its much-longer-than-promised deployment.

Then they punished a military newspaper that covered those sailors. This week, the Army’s civilian leader threw up his hands and quit. This is the military under Pete Hegseth, the aggressively MAGA secretary of defense — well, secretary of war, if Congress ever makes it official.

The armed forces today are not the ones you grew up with. Four Times reporters — Helene Cooper, John Ismay, Greg Jaffe and Eric Schmitt — have chronicled a chaotic transformation. Ideology.

President Trump campaigned against diversity efforts, and his defense secretary, a former Fox News host, has prosecuted that case with zeal. Hegseth has removed books from libraries and schools on military bases. Toni Morrison and James Baldwin are gone from classes at West Point, and sociology — a discipline that inherently studies identity — is no longer a major there.

Officials told a geographer on the faculty that he couldn’t teach about the human causes of climate change. Staffing. Hegseth says he wants to streamline the officer corps and make it more effective.

But his cuts and his decision not to promote some 80 specific people — about 10 percent of the top officer corps — suggest his focus is elsewhere. More than half of the officers affected are Black or female. Transparency.

Do you remember the first Gulf war? The generals were on TV constantly, wielding pointers and maps to explain the day’s maneuvers. After Sept. 11, similar briefings came daily. Today, we rarely hear from the brass, even though the United States is at war.

The last Pentagon press conference was in May. Hegseth says reporters cover American casualties to “make the president look bad.” (The Times has sued the administration for restricting our journalists’ reporting on the agency.) Officials also don’t answer questions from Congress about the firing of officers or the endgame in Iran. What’s at stake Some of this is just about vibes.

For generations, the Pentagon built a corps of leaders who acquired graduate degrees at top schools and spoke eloquently about global strategy. They were overwhelmingly white men, though other groups were steadily making...