A promotion list is one of the plainest documents the Army produces. Names, ranks, a recommendation, a signature line. In March, according to the New York Times, four officers came off one of those lists after the Secretary of the Army declined to take them off, and the Secretary of War removed them himself. On Monday, that Army secretary resigned. The Church has a settled answer about what a subordinate owes when he’s asked to cooperate with something he judges to be wrong. It also has a much less comfortable answer about what his refusal is worth when it changes nothing.
The News Story
Army Secretary Dan Driscoll submitted his resignation to President Donald Trump on Monday after months of escalating friction with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, according to officials and sources cited by multiple outlets. The Wall Street Journal first reported the departure Monday afternoon; ABC News, CNN, Axios, Army Times, the Washington Examiner and Al Jazeera confirmed it within the hour. A source with knowledge of Driscoll’s actions told Military Times he will leave the post effective September 3.
Driscoll, 39, had served as the Army’s civilian leader since February 2025 and was the youngest Army secretary in U.S. history. A Ranger-tabbed veteran who deployed once to Iraq, he later worked in venture capital, ran unsuccessfully for North Carolina’s 11th Congressional District in 2020, and advised Trump’s 2024 campaign. He was confirmed with the support of 16 Senate Democrats, though some senators questioned his level of experience. He held the Army post concurrently with the directorship of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms until April.
The White House praised him on his way out. “Secretary Driscoll has been highly effective in advancing President Trump’s agenda to Make America Strong Again at the Department of the Army by providing outstanding leadership during historic military operations, restoring an emphasis on readiness and lethality, assisting with negotiations between Russia and Ukraine, and more,” spokeswoman Anna Kelly said in a statement. “The United States Army is more powerful than ever thanks to his work alongside the Commander-in-Chief and Secretary of War.”
The reported points of conflict were personnel decisions. In February, multiple outlets reported that Hegseth forced out Col. David Butler, the Army’s chief of public affairs and a senior Driscoll adviser, over Driscoll’s resistance. The New York Times reported in March that Hegseth removed four officers, two Black men and two women, from a promotions list after Driscoll declined to do so. In April, Driscoll publicly broke with Hegseth’s move to force Army Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George into retirement, saying he “loved” the general. Driscoll denied resignation rumors that same month, saying he had “no plans to depart or resign.”
The Journal reported on August 21 that Driscoll had already moved his family out of the official Army secretary’s residence, and NBC subsequently reported he was weighing resignation around Labor Day. Multiple outlets report Hegseth is considering Sean Parnell, currently Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs, as a replacement.
The resignation leaves the Army without either of its top two leaders: Hegseth fired Gen. George in April and has not nominated a successor for the service’s senior uniformed post. Driscoll’s exit follows the departures under Hegseth of Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Charles “CQ” Brown, Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Lisa Franchetti, Army Vice Chief of Staff Gen. James Mingus, and Gen. Chris Donahue, commander of U.S. Army Europe and Africa. Navy Secretary John Phelan also departed earlier this year.
As secretary, Driscoll oversaw the Army’s budget, more than one million active-duty, National Guard and reserve soldiers, and over 330,000 civilian employees. He championed acquisition reform, the military’s “right to repair,” and FUZE, a $750 million rapid-prototyping program. In November 2025, he traveled to Kyiv to present a U.S. peace plan, the highest-ranking administration official to make the trip. The Pentagon did not immediately confirm the resignation when queried; Driscoll did not respond to requests for comment.[1]
Catholic Social Teaching Analysis
The Office Is Not His
Start with what a government job actually is, because the rest of the analysis is built upon it.
The Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church says that responsible authority means “authority exercised with those virtues that make it possible to put power into practice as service (patience, modesty, moderation, charity, efforts to share), an authority exercised by persons who are able to accept the common good, and not prestige or the gaining of personal advantages, as the true goal of their work.”[2] A few paragraphs later the same document puts it in administrative language: public administration at every level “is oriented towards the service of citizens,” and the State “is the steward of the people’s resources, which it must administer with a view to the common good.”[3]
Steward is the operative word. A steward answers for what he manages and owns none of it.
That term binds every man in this story equally, which is why it needs to be discussed before anybody gets named. The Secretary of the Army holds an office. So does the Secretary of War. So does a colonel running public affairs, and so does a four-star chief of staff. Not one of them owns the chair. Each is holding something on behalf of more than a million soldiers and 330,000 civilian employees who didn’t pick him and can’t remove him. Whatever went wrong between these two men since February 2025, the standard that judges it is stewardship, and stewardship doesn’t care who won.
The Compendium is blunt about where the authority in that chair comes from. It derives “its power to impose obligations and its moral legitimacy, not from some arbitrary will or from the thirst for power,” but from the moral order that precedes it.[4] And it says what happens when an officeholder forgets that: “whenever public authority… fails to seek the common good, it abandons its proper purpose and so delegitimizes itself.”[5] Nobody strips that legitimacy away from the outside. It leaks out.
The Duty To Refuse
Now the harder part.
The Compendium is direct about what a person owes when his office asks him for something he can’t give. “Unjust laws pose dramatic problems of conscience for morally upright people: when they are called to cooperate in morally evil acts they must refuse.”[6] The verb is must. The Catechism says the same about a citizen facing civil authority: he “is obliged in conscience not to follow the directives of civil authorities when they are contrary to the demands of the moral order, to the fundamental rights of persons or the teachings of the Gospel.”[7]
Then the Compendium adds a sentence almost nobody quotes, and it’s the one this story needs the most. Those who refuse “must be protected not only from legal penalties but also from any negative effects on the legal, disciplinary, financial and professional plane.”[6] The Church is saying that a man’s career is part of what conscience can cost him, and that a just institution absorbs that cost rather than making him pay it. Read the list again: legal, disciplinary, financial, professional. That covers being frozen out, having your adviser removed, watching your recommendations get reversed over your head.
Here is where I have to be careful. I don’t know the merits of the personnel decisions at the center of this. The Times reported that four officers came off a promotions list in March after Driscoll declined to remove them. I haven’t seen those officers’ files. I don’t know what was alleged, or by whom, or whether it was true. Anybody telling you from the outside that they know whether that removal was just is telling you about their politics.
What I can tell you is the shape of the duty. When a subordinate judges that an order asks him to do something wrong, the Church leaves him no middle option and no clever workaround. He refuses, and he accepts that refusing might cost him the job.
What A Refusal Is Worth
Which raises the question this week is really asking. Driscoll declined. The officers came off the list anyway. So what was the refusal worth?
The Compendium answers this in a neighboring context, but the answer applies cleanly to this situation. Writing about the armed forces, it says every member “is morally obliged to resist orders that call for perpetrating crimes against the law of nations,” and then this: military personnel “remain fully responsible for the acts they commit in violation of the rights of individuals and peoples… Such acts cannot be justified by claiming obedience to the orders of superiors.”[8]
Run that principle backward, and you have your answer. If obedience can’t push your guilt upward onto the man who ordered it, then being overruled can’t pull somebody else’s act down onto you. Moral responsibility sits with the person who performs the act, and it doesn’t slide around the org chart. Four officers came off a list. Somebody did that. The man who declined to do it is not the man who did it, and no amount of institutional plumbing changes which name belongs where.
So a refusal that stops nothing still accomplishes two things. It keeps the act off your own account, which is worth more than it sounds when you remember you will answer for your account, not anyone else’s. And it drags the decision into daylight, because the moment somebody has to go around you, the thing stops being routine paperwork and becomes a choice a specific person made. That’s often the only move a subordinate has, and it’s a real one.
Aquinas, quoted in the Compendium, sets the limit on obedience in one clause: “one is obliged to obey… insofar as it is required by the order of justice.”[9] That last phrase is carrying the whole load. Obedience is genuine and binding, and it runs out exactly where justice does.
Two Empty Chairs
The last piece will get buried under the personality coverage, and it’s the piece that touches the most people.
The United States Army now has no Senate-confirmed civilian secretary and no Senate-confirmed chief of staff. Gen. Randy George was pushed into retirement in April with no successor nominated. Driscoll leaves September 3. Both of the service’s top jobs are vacant at once, while American forces are actively fighting overseas.
The Compendium describes political authority as “an instrument of coordination and direction by means of which the many individuals and intermediate bodies must move towards an order in which relationships, institutions and procedures are put at the service of integral human growth.”[10] Coordination and direction are unglamorous words for something real: soldiers need to know who’s responsible for them, and their spouses need to know it even more.
The same paragraph on public administration warns against “an all-too-easy and generalized disengagement from a sense of duty,” and says the work of those in public office should be “an act of generous assistance for citizens, undertaken with a spirit of service.”[3] Empty chairs communicate a message. Every officer watching this week is learning what happens to a man who tells his boss no, and that lesson travels downward to captains and sergeants who will someday have to decide whether to raise a hand about something they’ve seen.
So here’s the practical thing I’d ask of you. When you read about a Washington fight like this one, refuse the pull to score it by team. Ask instead whether each man in it treated his office as a stewardship or as a possession, and ask it about the ones your side likes as rigorously as about the ones it doesn’t. That question has an answer, and the answer doesn’t change when the parties trade places.
And of course, pray for the soldiers, who get no vote in any of it. The 19-year-old at Fort Campbell has never heard of a promotions list dispute in March. He’ll be led by whoever this process eventually produces; he’ll be told to trust that person, and he has no resignation letter to write.
This story turns on the Church’s teaching that public office is a stewardship exercised as service, and that a steward must refuse to cooperate in what he judges wrong.
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Footnotes
- “Army Secretary Resigns After Months of Friction With Hegseth,” The Wall Street Journal, August 31, 2026, wsj.com; “Army Secretary Dan Driscoll Resigns on Short Notice amid Reported Friction with Hegseth,” Army Times, August 31, 2026, armytimes.com; “Army Secretary Dan Driscoll Resigns from Post,” Axios, August 31, 2026, axios.com; “Army Secretary Dan Driscoll Resigns amid Tensions with Hegseth: Sources,” ABC News, August 31, 2026, abcnews.com; “Army Secretary Dan Driscoll Submits Resignation after Tension with Hegseth,” CNN, August 31, 2026, cnn.com; “Army Secretary Dan Driscoll Resigns after Monthslong Rift with Hegseth,” Washington Examiner, August 31, 2026, washingtonexaminer.com; “US Army Secretary Daniel Driscoll Submits Resignation, Media Reports Say,” Al Jazeera, August 31, 2026, aljazeera.com; “Army Secretary Dan Driscoll Submits Resignation amid Tension with Hegseth,” MSNBC, August 31, 2026, ms.now; “Morning Briefing: Sept. 1, 2026, Tuesday,” Anadolu Agency, September 1, 2026, aa.com.tr. ↩
- Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2004), no. 410, vatican.va. ↩
- Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, no. 412. ↩
- Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, no. 396. ↩
- Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, no. 398. ↩
- Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, no. 399. ↩
- Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2nd ed. (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1997), no. 2242, vatican.va. ↩
- Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, no. 503. ↩
- Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, no. 400. Quoting Saint Thomas Aquinas. ↩
- Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, no. 394. ↩
Books Cited
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- Catholic Church, Catechism of the Catholic Church, Second Edition (Doubleday / Image, 2003)
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