As Secretary of Defense-designate Pete Hegseth is grilled by senators, with Democrats attacking Hegseth’s supposed lack of qualifications, some history is called for.
The Office of the Secretary of Defense (DoD) was created in 1947 in the Truman administration, a successor to the War Department that came to be in the George Washington era. Truman, post-World War II, was determined to modernize American military and intelligence capabilities. The DOD and the Central Intelligence Agency were key to Truman’s modernization.
In the years since, there have been 27 secretaries of defense, with Donald Rumsfeld having served twice. Once under President Ford, the second time under President George W. Bush.
In light of the attacks on Hegseth, it is worth a look specifically at seven of those 27:
- President Dwight Eisenhower’s two secretaries, Charlie Wilson and Neil McElroy, had no military experience. Wilson had been the CEO of General Motors and McElroy the president of Procter & Gamble.
- Secretary James Schlesinger had not served in the military either, yet was the secretary for Presidents Nixon and Ford. He began those two stints after a career as an academic and bureaucrat, teaching at the University of Virginia and moving on to the RAND Corporation.
- Secretary Harold Brown, a President Jimmy Carter appointee, had no military service. His career was as an academic and bureaucrat, the latter including service as secretary of the Air Force.
- Secretary Dick Cheney, a George H.W. Bush appointee, had a previous career as a politician (congressman from Wyoming, White House chief of staff for President Ford), but never served in the military.
- Secretary William Cohen, Clinton’s second secretary, was a lawyer and politician (a congressman and senator from Maine) with no military service.
- Secretary Ash Carter was an Obama appointee with a background as a physicist and bureaucrat, but no service in the military.
That is to say, Pete Hegseth — he who served in the Army National Guard with deployments to the war zones in Afghanistan and Iraq and ended with the rank of Major — stands head and shoulders when it comes to military experience above the 7 secretaries who had not a minute of service in any branch of the military, much less on-the-ground experience in a war zone as an active combatant.
The real problem here is politics — played by Democrat senators and other Trump opponents — who are apparently clueless that previous presidents of both parties have turned seven times to men with zero military experience to run the Pentagon.
There is no small irony as the Hegseth hearings unfold that it is the Democrat senators on the panel who have no idea what they are talking about when they try and make an issue of Hegseth’s wrongly alleged lack of experience in the military.
It is more than likely that Hegseth’s well-on-the-record views about the need to restore “lethality, competency, and color blindness” to the Pentagon (as he wrote in his bestseller The War on Warriors: Behind the Betrayal of the Men Who Keep Us Free) and ridding the Pentagon of woke political correctness is the real reason for the Democrat objections to him.
In fact, history shows those seven previous secretaries of defense had nothing close to Hegseth’s hands-on military experience, every one of them was viewed favorably for their performance running the Pentagon and the military experience they brought to the task.
Experience that more than qualifies Hegseth for confirmation to run the Pentagon.
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