President Trump did not leave the Army sitting empty. Thursday night he named Adam Telle acting Secretary of the Army, effective immediately, hours after Dan Driscoll finished his last full day at the Pentagon.
Telle is not some stranger pulled off a donor list. He already sits inside the building as Assistant Secretary of the Army for Civil Works, the civilian who sets policy for the Army Corps of Engineers. Trump called him what the White House actually needs at the top of the largest service.
I am pleased to announce that Adam Telle, the current Assistant Secretary of the Army for Civil Works, will become Acting Secretary of the Army, effective immediately. He is a Great Patriot, who is respected by all. Thank you for your attention to this matter!
Secretary of War Pete Hegseth piled on within minutes. “Huge congrats to Adam. Strong and whip smart. He is indeed a great Patriot — and will be an immediate asset to the @USArmy.” That is not the language of a man who just got rolled.
The Washington rumor mill had already written a different ending. For days, Fox News and others floated Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell as Hegseth’s favorite to replace Driscoll. Army Under Secretary Michael Obadal was the traditional next-in-line. Florida Rep. Brian Mast’s name even circulated. Trump skipped the parade and handed the acting job to the man already confirmed, already inside, and already trusted.
How Driscoll Got to the Door
Driscoll resigned after roughly 18 months as the Army’s top civilian. He is a third-generation soldier, a 10th Mountain veteran of Iraq, and a close friend of Vice President JD Vance. In his farewell post he called the job “the honor of a lifetime” and praised Hegseth. Fine. The polite version is always cleaner than the fight that produced it.
The fight was real. For months Driscoll and Hegseth clashed over the removal of senior officers and the direction of the service. Hegseth fired Army Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George in April. George was Driscoll’s partner on the Army Transformation Initiative, the 2025 plan to strip fat and push drones, networks, and a lighter force. Acting Chief of Staff Gen. Christopher LaNeve, a Hegseth man, later killed a drone modernization effort Driscoll had championed. That is not a personality spat. That is two visions of the same Army colliding.
White House spokeswoman Anna Kelly still gave Driscoll a full send-off. She said he advanced Trump’s agenda, restored readiness and lethality, and helped with Russia-Ukraine talks. The Army, she said, is “more powerful than ever.” Then the president filled the chair.
For promotion cometh neither from the east, nor from the west, nor from the south. But God is the judge: he putteth down one, and setteth up another.
Who Adam Telle Actually Is
Telle was sworn in as the 14th Assistant Secretary of the Army for Civil Works on August 5, 2025. He was the second Trump Army appointee confirmed in this term. The Senate approved him 72-22 on August 2, 2025, with enough Democrats crossing over to make the vote look like something other than a culture-war stunt.
He is an Alabama native who graduated from Mississippi State in 2005 and spent two decades on the Hill instead of in a classroom or a battalion. Ten years with Sen. Thad Cochran. Top staffer on the Senate Appropriations subcommittee that writes the Department of Homeland Security budget. Chief of staff to Sen. Bill Hagerty of Tennessee. In Trump’s first term he ran the White House Office of Legislative Affairs Senate team and helped deliver two items the media prefers to forget: the Abraham Accords and the statutory authorization of the U.S. Space Force, the first new armed service since the 1940s.
Hagerty called him “just the leader that our nation needs in the Pentagon.” The Corps job is not a ceremonial ribbon. It runs commercial navigation, flood control, and Clean Water Act permitting. Telle has spent the last year pushing a “building infrastructure, not paperwork” line through ports and waterways. Now he is acting secretary of the whole Army.
That matters because the service is already running on acting leadership. LaNeve is acting chief of staff. Trump has not formally nominated a permanent secretary or a permanent chief. Telle and LaNeve are now the two most senior Army leaders without a fresh Senate confirmation for those exact chairs. Anyone who pretends that is tidy is selling something.
The Permanent Job Is Still Open
Acting is not permanent. White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles is running the search for a Senate-confirmed successor. Hegseth’s shop still likes Parnell, a combat veteran and the department’s public face. That conversation did not vanish because Trump picked an acting secretary on a Thursday night.
What vanished is the vacuum. Driscoll walked. The usual under secretary did not automatically slide over. The president put a confirmed patriot in the seat the same day the press was still handicapping spokesmen and congressmen. Hegseth publicly blessed the choice. That is civilian control working the way the Constitution wrote it, not the way cable bookers prefer it.
The Army does not exist to host a seminar on modernization theory. It exists to win. Standards, merit, lethality, and a chain of command that answers to the commander in chief are not optional extras. Telle’s first task is simple. Keep the service pointed at that mission while Washington argues over who gets the engraved nameplate.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
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The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
