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IMO, it's a combination of three factors. The first is that Iran is, by any metric, a far more militarily capable adversary than Iraq or Afghanistan. Middle Eastern countries aren't all the same. Iran is a wealthy, technologically advanced nation with a population of 100 million people. They've developed drone tech that is being used extensively by Russia in the Ukraine war, and they have access to some of the more high end Russian equipment in return. That doesn't put them on par with the US, or even close, but they're a significantly greater military threat than anything the US has faced in a very long time.
The second factor, as you rightly point out, is that Hegseth's leadership has been disastrous. Of course, a change at the top doesn't suddenly lobotomize all the career officers who have been there for years. But Hegseth is using the military recklessly and without any regard for safety, and he's feeding the worst instincts of a command structure that has always had a serious problem with over confidence. Throw in a side order of relying on sycophantic AI for advice just to make that worse.
The third factor is that for decades now the US Military has had serious training and readiness issues. Anyone who gets to work alongside them (and I know plenty of people who do) will generally agree on one thing; they're just not very good. The overall level of competence, professionalism and expertise displayed by a US soldier falls well below the average for NATO. And those are the guys that actually get deployed. In the run up to Iraq and Afghanistan there were multiple brigades that simply could not deploy because they were so incompetent that they failed their work ups. This is why units are getting pulled from existing deployments to go to Iran; they know the people on deployment can pass work up, and they can't say that for anyone else. The US Military has spent decades pissing away the world's largest military budget without actually maintaining a force wide level of readiness commensurate to that budget.
Put all that together, and you get the mess that they're in now. God help them if they actually try to invade Iran, it'll be a bloodbath.
It's already been a bloodbath, from Tehran to Lebanon. We just don't seem to count Arabs and Persians in the tally.
Also doesn't help that American propaganda hinges on never admitting we've ever done anything wrong. So we can lose an entire fleet in the Gulf, and the Navy will deny it happened for three presidents.