A Musk in Moscow & Hegseth’s War at Home

News and notes on the fears of the professional class in Washington: the military mobilization in L.A., impending layoffs at State, and the curious saga of Elon Musk’s father in Moscow.

Even if sending in the Marines to L.A. is partly about alpha optics in this specific instance, for the country’s national security professionals, this all opens up a whole new world of extremely thorny, consequential, and constitutional questions. Photo: Spencer Platt/Getty Images

Julia Ioffe

June 10, 2025

In between doing burpees and always-on-camera “P.T.” with the troops, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has declared, over and over again, that the American military needs to get back to “warfighting.” Now, less than six months into his term, the U.S. is indeed deploying troops, including an active-duty Marine combat battalion—not to a war zone, but to America’s second-largest city, to deal with a protest that absolutely did not merit it. Warfighting, it seems, actually means fighting political wars at home.