Senator Thom Tillis sat down with 60 Minutes this week and named his greatest regret in public life: the vote that confirmed Pete Hegseth as Secretary of War. He wants the man out. He called Hegseth, along with Kristi Noem, a poster child for people who should never have been given the authority they hold. The timing is the tell. Tillis is retiring. He cast the deciding Republican vote that forced a 50-50 tie and sent the nomination to the vice president. Having secured the outcome, he now writes a book and performs remorse for a network that has spent a year treating the Pentagon as a costume department. A senator with nothing left to win from the voters of his own party can afford candor of a certain kind. What he cannot afford is honesty about whose interests he has actually served.

North Carolina is not a bystander in the defense budget. Fort Bragg, Camp Lejeune, Cherry Point, Seymour Johnson, and the contractor archipelago that feeds them move an enormous sum of federal money through the state every year. Some of that money returns, in the ordinary way of the modern Congress, as campaign support, as district projects, as the quiet understanding that a member of the Armed Services Committee will protect the flow. Hegseth has spent his tenure cutting at precisely that arrangement: standards over process, the force over the front office, the warrior over the permanent staff that treats the services as a jobs program with uniforms. A secretary who reduces the tributary is, to the man who lives on the tributary, unfit by definition. Fitness, in this vocabulary, means deference to the institution that confirmed him.

The troops have rendered a different verdict. When the Secretary of War walks a flight line or a formation, the cheer is not staged by a communications shop in Raleigh. It is the sound of men who spent a decade being managed by people who regarded readiness as a public-relations problem. Tillis answers to the other constituency, the one that measures national defense by appropriations, earmarks, and the survival of familiar contractors. He mistook a confirmation for ownership. Hegseth has declined to be owned. That is the grievance dressed up as statesmanship, and it will not survive contact with the force that has already chosen its side.

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