Pete Hegseth is ready to stir the Pentagon

There was genuine surprise at the announcement at the end of November 12 President-elect Donald Trump that he was tapping Piet Hegsethco-host of Fox & Friends weekendas his choice to lead the Defense Department, even from his colleagues at Fox News.

“What the heck! Can you believe it?” Jesse Watters said on his late-night show, to which Kayleigh McEnany, one of Trump’s former White House press secretaries, responded: “I was stunned when I saw it, but at the time it made perfect sense.”

It should be no mystery to anyone who paid attention to Trump during the campaign and took him both seriously and literally, that Hegseth, a decorated former National Guard infantry major who served in both Iraq and Afghanistan, is exactly the kind of the anti-woke culture warrior Trump was looking for to clean house at the Pentagon.

Trump has never made a secret of his disdain for the current crop of military leaders, nor of his plans to exercise his constitutional prerogative as commander in chief to dismiss them as quickly as possible.

“When I take office, they will be held accountable for what they did to this country,” Trump said at a rally in Asheboro, North Carolina, in late August. “I will demand the resignation of every senior military official involved in the Afghanistan disaster. I want their dismissal immediately. And I want them on the desk in the Oval Office, the Resolute Desk. I want them on by 12 o’clock, Inauguration Day.”

Some of the statements Trump made at that meeting sounded as if they could have been taken straight from Hegseth’s book, which was published earlier this year.

“Our fighters should focus on defeating America’s enemies, not finding out their genders. Marxist ideologies have no place in the struggle,” Trump said. “If you want to have a gender transition or a social justice seminar, you can do it somewhere else, but you’re not going to do it in the Army, the Navy, the Coast Guard, the Air Force, the Space Force or the United States. States Marines. Sorry.”

Trump specifically mentioned the book, along with Hegseth’s degrees from Princeton and Harvard and two bronze stars, as among his qualifications for the job.

“Pete’s recent book, The war against warriorsspent nine weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, including two weeks at NUMBER ONE,” Trump said in his statement. “The book exposes the left’s betrayal of our fighters, and how we must return our military to meritocracy, lethality, accountability and excellence.”

If confirmed, Hegseth, 44, would be the second-youngest defense secretary after Donald Rumsfeld, who was 43 when he took over the helm of the nation’s largest and most powerful agency in 1975 for the first of his two stints. country.

Hegseth has no experience managing a sprawling bureaucracy the size of the Pentagon, with its nearly 3 million military and civilian personnel and an $850 billion budget that accounts for about half of the federal government’s discretionary spending.

But what Hegseth does bring is a passionate belief that diversity programs are a toxic form of discrimination, that women are not equal to men in combat, and that transgender people have no place in the military.

If he were auditioning for the job, he couldn’t have written a more Trumpian manifesto than his book, which was subtitled “Behind the Betrayal of the Men Who Keep Us Free.”

In a chapter titled “Supporting DEI Means Soldiers Dying,” Hegseth argues that diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives have accomplished nothing more than widening disparities, creating grievances, and excluding “anyone who does not want to bow to the cultural-Marxist revolution that is sweeping through it. the Pentagon.”

One day before the elections interview conducted before he apparently knew he would be nominated to lead the Pentagon, Hegseth casually indicated that Charles Q. Brown Jr., the nation’s top military officer, and the first black to lead a military service, would be the first general should be one who should take early retirement.

“First of all, you need to fire the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff,” Hegseth told podcast host Shawn Ryan, “every general who was involved in any of the DEI cases needs to go.”

“When I think about my career in uniform, almost every instance where there was poor leadership or people in positions for which they were not qualified was based on the reality or perception of a ‘diversity hire,’” Hegseth wrote in his book.

Ironically, in a rare first person video Recorded after the death of George Floyd in 2020, Brown, then the four-star commander of the U.S. Pacific Air Forces, spoke emotionally about being underestimated throughout his career because of his race.

“I’m thinking about wearing the same flight suit with the same wings on my chest as my colleagues, and then being questioned by another military member, ‘Are you a pilot?’” Brown said with a stern expression on his face. “I think about the pressure I felt to perform flawlessly, especially for supervisors who I felt expected less of me as an African American.”

“The dumbest phrase on planet Earth in the military is ‘our diversity is our strength,’” Hegseth said in his recent podcast interview. And on Fox in June, he called the tagline “a load of garbage.”

“Only the most racist passenger would be offended to discover that his pilot is black, but no passenger would be happy to know that his pilot was flying his plane because of a program that allowed less qualified individuals to sit in the pilot’s seat in the name of ‘inclusion’, he argued at one point. “Forget DEI. The acronym should be DIE or IED. It will kill our military worse than any IED ever could.”

He is equally uncompromising about women in combat.

“It’s not that individual women can’t be courageous, ambitious and honorable. I know many phenomenal female soldiers. The problem is that the left needs every woman to be as successful as every man, so they have redefined success in a counterproductive way.

“The left ignored their holy grail: science,” he argues. “Men have greater bone density, men have more muscle mass and men have more lung capacity. Men are, gasp, biologically stronger, faster and bigger. Dare I say, physically superior. These are established scientific facts, all of which have been completely ignored by the ‘party of science’.”

The result, Hegseth argues, is a “sham system” of gender neutrality in which standards are lowered so women can meet them, which he says can be traced back to the Obama administration’s 2015 decision to open frontline combat jobs couples for women.

“Most departments, led by lousy military leaders, have bent their needs to the political winds and quickly dismissed the realities of human nature, biological sex differences, and combat realities,” he writes, continuing a running theme in his polemic underlines that the army is bad, with spineless officers who only think about their own careers, whom he labels as ‘cowardly generals who pander to beta-male politicians’.

“Our generals are not ready for this moment in history,” he concludes. “Not even close. A lot of people need to be fired.”

On the issue of transgender troops, Hegseth makes a number of arguments against them serving in uniform, in one reference calling them “men pretending to be women, or vice versa.”

His objections focused mainly on their need for hormones and the extent to which they were unavailable due to surgical or other medical needs, but he essentially said that they were ‘a distraction’. “It may be your thing, but it’s weird and doesn’t add substantive value to anyone,” he argues, concluding: “For the recruits, for the military and especially for the security of the country, transgender people should never be allowed to serve. It’s that simple.”

There is an irony in the fact that while Hegseth disdains military leaders for not standing up to “social justice rabble-rousers” driving “anti-American, anti-constitutional Marxist philosophies,” he also recognizes that “civilian control of the military is one of our fundamental constitutional principles.”

The generals he satirizes have been guilty of little more than shrewd saluting and carrying out the policies of their civilian overlords, overriding, as they are bound to do, whatever personal objections they may have.

“Respect for civilian leaders does not equate to total obedience to them,” Hegseth counters. “To put it bluntly, the reality of warfare – especially for those of us who have seen it firsthand – supersedes the need to obey illegal orders that manifest in weakening forces and killing troops.”

The Wall Street Journal reports that Trump’s transition team has drafted an executive order that, if signed, would establish a “warrior council” of retired senior military personnel to identify and dismiss three- and four-star generals and admirals deemed somehow unsuitable for leadership recommended.

Given the military’s fundamental ethos of remaining apolitical and following all lawful orders, former Pentagon officials suggest such an inquisition should be unnecessary.

“There are plenty of laws in place to deal with people who are unfit to become generals,” former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said on CNN. “And we don’t need to burden the Department of Defense or the military with some vigilante team in the White House.”

“I understand there are concerns about the things that the Biden administration has done in the woke area, in the military, and there is a way to solve that particular problem,” said Trump’s former national security adviser John Bolton . “And that’s to get the generals to the table and say, ‘There’s a new sheriff in town, we’re not doing those woke things anymore.’ I think they would say, ‘Yes sir,’ and that would be the end of it.

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But Trump feels betrayed by some generals, especially those he believes bungled the withdrawal from Afghanistan, and appears intent on sending a message to inspire loyalty.

“This cleanup will be a signal to the entire world, the U.S. military and everyone else,” Trump said. “They want people to be held accountable for their failure and incompetence.”