Bawitdaba and the War Department

The chopper came in low over the Potomac at sundown, beating the air like a man who had something to prove and a song stuck in his head, and inside it was Robert James Ritchie — known to the algorithm as Kid Rock — sitting beside the Secretary of War in matching grins, two grown men in helmets laughing at something only they could hear, while somewhere over a Foot Locker in Anacostia the rotor wash blew the toupee off a Pentecostal preacher who thought the rapture had finally arrived early and on schedule.

This was Monday, April 27. The official cover story, filed straight into the inbox of every defense reporter still on speaking terms with the building, was that Pete Hegseth and Robert "Kid Rock" Ritchie had flown in AH-64 Apache attack helicopters over the National Capital Region as part of "America's 250th." The semiquincentennial. The birthday party for the corpse. They were filming, the Pentagon spokesperson said with a straight face, content for Memorial Day, content for the 250th, and content for something called the Freedom 250 tour — a concert circuit for which our singer-songwriter has graciously pledged a thousand free tickets per stop for service members and veterans, a number that would warm the heart of anyone who cannot do basic division.

The thing about this — the thing the Pentagon press office would prefer you forgot, because they have approximately four hundred other fires to put out at any given moment, including a Senate caucus that has started describing their boss the way you describe a dog that has begun growling at children — the thing about this is that we have been here before.

We were here in early March. A pair of Apaches from the 101st Airborne, out of Fort Campbell, conducted what the military, in a press release that read like a hostage note, called a flyover near Kid Rock's estate in the Nashville area. They also conducted, on the same day, what can only be described as a Sopranos-style drive-by of the "No Kings" protest in downtown Nashville. The Army opened an investigation. The pilots were suspended. Hegseth, who has the temperament of a man who got his job through a process that did not involve a single follow-up question, stepped in and lifted the suspension before the inquiry could finish chewing.

And so, having quashed the probe, the Secretary was now repeating the exact behavior that had occasioned the probe — except this time on purpose, on the books, with photographs, with a hashtag, with a Department of War X account literally named @SecWar because someone in the White House decided last year that "Defense" was insufficiently masculine and renamed the building as if we were the Klingons.

This is where I want you to picture me, sitting in a basement in Maryland with a pile of cold lo mein and three browsers open, refreshing the @SecWar feed and trying to determine whether what I was reading was a Pentagon press release or a fan post on a Kid Rock subreddit. The answer, I regret to inform you, is: yes.

Kid Rock is a patriot and huge supporter of our troops. The War Department is wasting no time celebrating America's 250th — home of the free because of the brave.

So wrote the Secretary of War, going for the patriotic-and-supports-the-troops daily double on a single tweet. Reading this sentence is like watching someone try to assemble Ikea furniture without the instructions while everyone else in the room is on fire. The phrase "wasting no time" is doing the heaviest lifting in modern English. The Apaches are not, in fact, wasting any time. But they are wasting tens of millions of dollars in rotorcraft, the afternoon of several certified combat pilots, and the dignity of a 101st Airborne unit whose grandfathers stood at the road junction at Bastogne and said NUTS to the Wehrmacht. Now they are saying yes to the camera marshal for Bawitdaba.

Rep. Jason Crow of Colorado, who sits on the House Armed Services Committee and has been criticizing Hegseth in the manner of a divorce attorney quietly building a paper trail, did not see the comedy. "Spending your taxpayer dollars to give Kid Rock 'joy rides' on Apache helicopters?" he asked on the platform formerly known as Twitter, because we are now a country where a sitting congressman must use a billionaire's website to publicly request that the Defense Department please stop lending the cavalry to a recording artist whose tour schedule has somehow become an operational priority.

Hegseth, for his part, is not having his best month. The Pentagon — sorry, the WAR DEPARTMENT — is in what the trade calls turmoil. Senators in his own caucus are losing confidence. One of them, on background to this very newspaper, used the word "uneasy." When a Republican senator deploys the word uneasy, what he means is I would push him into a wood chipper for a chicken sandwich. The Department's $1.5 trillion budget is on the calendar for Senate review. The Secretary's response to all this — in the precise moment when he should be courting Susan Collins and looking grave on Sunday shows — has been to spend Monday afternoon shooting B-roll with the man who recorded Bawitdaba.

There is a thing that happens to empires in their dotage. The army stops being for fighting and starts being for content. The currency depreciates. The senators get older. The young men volunteer for Apache crews because they want to fly combat missions, and they end up flying establishing shots for a tour promo. The 101st Airborne — Easy Company, Bastogne, the screaming eagles — has been reduced in the year of our lord 2026 to the role of the touring band's pyro guy. Somewhere in a barracks at Fort Campbell tonight, a twenty-two-year-old who joined to be Dick Winters is sitting on his bunk doomscrolling Crow's post, watching his Secretary of War cosplay as a roadie, and wondering what exactly he is part of.

The dispatch I keep waiting for someone to file from inside the building is the one where a war planner stands up in the Tank, slams a folder shut, and says: "Mr. Secretary, with all due respect, sir — Iran is sinking ships in the Strait of Hormuz, six of our people came home from Kuwait in flag-draped boxes last month, and we are using the most lethal attack rotorcraft on planet earth to film a 250th-birthday TikTok." But that dispatch is not coming. It is not coming because the people who would file it have been replaced by people who think war is a brand. The vibes are, as they say, immaculate. The vibes are also felonious.

The empire ends not with a bang but with a music video. Anyway.