How Pete Hegseth turned the Pentagon into a Black Box

By Hassan El Biali

Pete Hegseth has a word for journalists who ask inconvenient questions about America’s war with Iran. Pharisees. He said it in a speech. Out loud. Seemingly proud of it.

That tells you almost everything you need to know about how Operation Epic Fury has been covered – or rather, hasn’t been.

What a wartime press blackout actually looks like

The United States is at war. But the Pentagon has forced journalists out of the building, making it harder than ever for the press to report on what’s happening. Press conferences are rare. Hegseth takes questions only from friendly outlets. No mainstream news organisations have reporters embedded with US military units in the Middle East. Pentagon sources are increasingly reluctant to talk to journalists for fear of retaliation from the administration.

That’s not conjecture. That’s the Columbia Journalism Review, published June 2026, describing conditions during an active military campaign that has killed at least thirteen American service members and reshaped the security architecture of the entire Middle East.

“The United States public hasn’t experienced this lack of official wartime information since World War II.”

Think about that for a second. Not since before television. Not since before the satellite phone. Not since before the internet existed. This is where we are.

The Iraq comparison should embarrass everyone

Critics of embedded journalism in 2003 had a point. Reporters living with military units, dependent on them for food, transport and protection, were never going to produce the most sceptical coverage. Fair enough. In 2003, the Pentagon embedded more than 500 journalists with US and coalition forces in Iraq, with several contemporary and later accounts putting the number around 600.

Six hundred. During Epic Fury: zero.

Here’s what’s genuinely perverse about that comparison. The embedded programme in Iraq was criticised at the time as sophisticated Pentagon propaganda – reporters co-opted by proximity, producing coverage that soft-pedalled civilian casualties and framed the invasion as clean. And that criticism had merit.

But even that – even the propaganda model – was more transparent than what Hegseth has imposed. When the thing that was once attacked as government spin looks like press freedom by comparison, you’ve reached a new floor. You’ve gone somewhere underneath the floor.

The playbook, step by step

Hegseth has taken a series of escalating steps to curtail the work of the press inside the Pentagon: booting legacy press outlets from their workspaces inside the building, closing the press briefing room to reporters, and restricting reporters from going into wide swaths of the building without a government escort.

The Pentagon then demanded that journalists pledge not to use any unauthorised material – including unclassified information. Hegseth put it plainly: “The ‘press’ does not run the Pentagon – the people do.”

The people. Filtered exclusively through Pete Hegseth’s pre-approved briefings and Sean Parnell’s press releases.

When the New York Times sued – and won – the response was almost comedic in its brazenness. On March 20, 2026, U.S. District Judge Paul Friedman ruled that portions of the new guidelines violated the First and Fifth Amendments and mandated that the Pentagon restore press credentials to seven Times journalists. Three days after the ruling, Parnell announced that the Defence Department would move journalists from their designated offices into a separate annex and mandate escorts – framing the changes as necessary security measures.

Court says you broke the Constitution. You wait seventy-two hours. Then you just do a version of the same thing with different language.

What you’re actually being told instead

Hegseth declared an “overwhelming victory” in the war against Iran, claiming the regime had “begged” for a ceasefire after Tehran’s missile programme was completely obliterated. “By any measure, Epic Fury decimated Iran’s military and rendered it combat-ineffective for years to come,” he said.

He also urged reporters to “get it right”: “You wouldn’t know it if you listened to the dishonest, anti-Trump media. These cameras – they have a choice. You’re either informing the American people of the truth or you’re not.”

The truth. As determined by the man who banned reporters from the building where the truth lives.

Maybe those strike figures are accurate. Maybe 80% of Iran’s air defences really were destroyed. Maybe the ceasefire really did represent a total Iranian capitulation. I genuinely don’t know – and that’s the point. Nobody outside the administration does either, because the people whose job is to verify those claims have been systematically removed from any position where verification is possible.

Why this matters beyond America’s borders

Here’s something that rarely gets said in coverage of Hegseth’s media crackdown. This isn’t only an American problem.

Australia’s security commitments are structurally bound to US military decision-making through ANZUS. When the Pentagon conducts a forty-day air campaign against a nation with nuclear ambitions, Australian governments are implicated – through intelligence sharing, basing arrangements, consultation and alliance obligations – whether they say so publicly or not.

And they’re making those commitments based on whatever Washington chooses to share. The same information architecture that’s been deliberately degraded for the American press is the one feeding into allied capitals.

When the Pentagon operates as a black box, it isn’t just American voters flying blind. It’s everyone tied to American military power – which, in the Indo-Pacific, is most of us.

The real scandal

The most disturbing thing about Hegseth’s press suppression isn’t the suppression itself. It’s that it worked. No mass public revolt. No serious congressional investigation. A court ruling that was circumvented within three days and barely registered in the news cycle.

History will eventually produce an account of what actually happened during Operation Epic Fury – what was hit, what was missed, what the real casualty numbers were, what the strategic consequences turn out to be.

When it does, the question worth asking won’t just be what Hegseth hid. It’ll be why so few people demanded to know in real time.

Hassan El Biali is a political analyst and writer specialising in US foreign policy, international security, and Middle East geopolitics. Published in Independent Australia and Counterfire. Substack: megam226.substack.com