Defense Secretary calls on the military to focus and get back to fundamentals.
War Secretary Pete Hegseth’s headline-grabbing speech in Quantico this week has irked the professional commentary class but is drawing accolades from those who matter — the men and women on the frontlines of America’s defense.
Hegseth’s remarks to every general officer in the U.S. military, which called for a force-wide military reset and realignment back to warfighting fundamentals, were derided in all the usual places. The Atlantic led with “hundreds of generals try to keep a straight face.” The New York Times wrote, “his address focused on the kinds of issues he would have dealt with as a young platoon leader in the 101st Airborne Division in Iraq or as a company commander in the Guard. He talked about grooming standards. . . . He preached the importance of physical fitness . . . [he said] without presenting any evidence, that standards had been lowered across the force over the last decade to meet arbitrary racial and gender quotas” (evidence of that here, should NYT researchers need assistance for future stories). MSNBC’s header proclaimed the speech “was even worse than expected.”
Not one of the authors of these pieces was a veteran. None of them fought on combat deployments under the failed military leaders of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. And none of them were twice awarded the Bronze Star like Hegseth.
My various interactions with military pals are hardly scientific, but credibly tell a very different story than the one bouncing around the usual echo chambers. One USAF fighter pilot and graduate of the service’s elite weapons school, on the cusp of separating from service, texted me that he “may have to reconsider leaving.” Another Air Force colleague, a quiet critic of this administration, admitted, “at least we’re getting serious again.” And an old infantry officer pal, now retired, offered me a relieved “finally.”
A more scientific Congressional report in 2021 found that 94 percent of sailors interviewed said the string of high-profile operational failures was related to Navy culture and leadership problems. (Full disclosure, I worked on this report as a Senate staffer).
The reaction to the speech was reflective of the wider disconnect between people who think for a living and people who do for a living. It was a microcosm of the 2016 and 2024 elections, with high-wealth, high-status coastal smarty-pants types utterly appalled at the national electorate’s rejection of weird political fads, their plea for common sense, and exhausted need for a return to the basics of good governance. This is a fair summarization of the Biden Administration’s treatment of the Pentagon. Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas frames it as a widening ideological dichotomy between the “people who take a shower before work and the people who take a shower after work.” I always liked the French philosopher Michel de Montaigne’s quote, possibly apocryphal, “I prefer the company of peasants as they have not been educated sufficiently to reason incorrectly.” In modern America, there seems to be an inverse relationship between educational credentials and common sense.
Hegseth’s speech was a call for the military to buckle down, focus on its core purpose, and get back to fundamentals. It reminds me of Starbucks and its then-CEO Howard Schultz.
In 2008, Schultz shut down every Starbucks store for several hours of mandatory retraining. Sales were declining, and there was a perceived dilution of the coffee titan’s brand. The problem was one of culture. So, at 5:30 p.m. that February, over 100,000 Starbucks employees received intense reeducation on the “art of espresso.” The costs were considerable, an estimated $6 million to the company. The drastic step drew criticism from the business sector, annoyance from customers, and grumbling from the Starbucks ranks.
It was also successful. Schultz’s decisive action restored a disciplined focus on fundamentals. Closing thousands of stores, despite puzzlement from investors and criticism from the press, made for a high-profile operational reset that formed a key component of Starbucks’ turnaround. It improved the basic quality of the company’s product, which improved brand perception, which improved sales. Schultz’s leadership and that one important day in 2008 are still studied in business schools across the world.
The similarities between Hegseth’s remarks this week and Schultz’s radical realignment are striking. The U.S. military has been hemorrhaging recruitment numbers until recently. Its core purpose of deterring major wars failed when Russia sparked off the largest land war in Europe since 1945. China rapidly closed America’s two-decade technological advantage, and now enjoys parity or near parity with us in key war-fighting domains. Basic military standards were relaxed to accommodate cultural fads and political fancies. Military procurement programs often failed or have grossly busted their budgets and schedules. The Navy has seen more canceled or curtailed shipbuilding programs over the past 15 years than successful ones. The Air Force is dealing with 60-plus percent overruns on a simple nuclear missile replacement, technology first fielded in the 1950s. Military war colleges resemble 200-level international relations seminars rather than rigorous institutions committed to the mastery of war.
The defining characteristics of America’s post–Cold War military can be summarized as a widespread over-complication of simple things, a jettisoning of common sense, creeping politicization, an infatuation with peculiar management fads, and a slow but unmistakable erosion of the small daily disciplines whose sum total distinguishes a victorious military from a defeated one. The military has forgotten how to do the small things well. Is it any surprise it now struggles with the big things, too?
An F-15 pilot told me a story that perhaps best reflects Hegseth’s imperative to restore a decaying military culture — and the difference between the American military and most others. The pilot was exercising with the Royal Saudi Air Force a decade or so ago. Standard practice for American fighter pilots calls for an intensive debriefing after each sortie. These debriefs can often take hours. The American pilots would land after a long mission, grab a cup of coffee, and settle in for an even longer after-action report that helped them master their craft. The debriefs can be tedious and miserable, technically more intricate but spiritually akin to a long open-ranks uniform inspection that the Army and Marines demand of the rifling class. While the American pilots would be taking notes, scribbling on whiteboards, replaying their maneuvers with little model jets, the Saudi pilots would plop down, scroll through their phones for a few minutes, and then leave. The Saudis flew more modern versions of the F-15 at the time, but the Americans, in their older variant of the same jet, flew circles around them.
Fundamentals matter, particularly when you have a committed opponent. John Wooden, with ten NCAA men’s basketball championships on his coaching resume, was famous for it. “It’s the little details that are vital,” he said, “little things make big things happen.” Just so in the military, where little details and little disciplines and little masteries of equally little things cumulate in a force full of fighting men and women who have the willpower to overcome the harsh realities of modern combat.
To hear the mainstream account of Hegseth’s speech, you’d think the Secretary called the entire command element of the United States Armed Forces for a high school pep rally rather than a pragmatic call for the military to get back to basics. The outcry from the press, almost comical in its absurdity, made it clear that the media needs to get back to basics, too, not just the military.
Several reports lauded the generals for not applauding. They weren’t supposed to. The Joint Chiefs of Staff attend every State of the Union address with hands folded, every time, regardless of speaker.
NPR found a retired general to call the speech “an insult,” but omitted the fact that the general was a Biden political appointee. The Guardian quoted former fighter pilot Amy McGrath, but neglected to mention she ran for Congress twice as a Democrat.
An Axios headline warned, “Hegseth to Generals: Embrace MAGA or Quit.” But there was no mention of MAGA in his remarks. The most frequent use of the word ‘great’ was not a reference to a political slogan, but rather the line: “I look out at this group and I see great Americans, leaders who have given decades to our great republic at great sacrifice to yourselves and to your families.”
MSNBC said the speech “crossed a dangerous line,” but it was unclear which line was crossed. The columnist, who may have had too much espresso that morning, said “he excoriated a crowd of decorated veterans who have braved battlefields and made life-or-death decisions,” but Hegseth cast no such aspersions on the uniformed military in attendance, focusing instead on reversing unhealthy political policies implemented by past political leaders.
Yet the reforms he advocated are unassailable to any normal, thinking adult. Politics should have no place in the military. Merit should guide promotions, not gender or racial quotas. Discipline is important. The chain of command should be simple, vertical, and protected. Adversity is necessary in training. Military members should master the small things like personal grooming and uniform maintenance, and pass fitness tests. Generals should lead by example. Training requirements irrelevant to war should be eliminated. Training should also be realistic. Cultural focus should be on fighting and winning wars. Intake pipelines like boot camp should be difficult and harden troops for combat. Fitness standards should be aligned to battlefield requirements, not gender.
Yes, this should have been an all-hands meeting, not another ignorable Pentagon email. And yes, generals are expected to lead by example. And yes, despite the claims of the New York Times and others, the senior ranks of the military have an ethical obligation to enforce the reasonable and lawful commands of Senate-confirmed political leadership. And also yes, there is real value — as with any big organization- in looking every leader in the eye and stating “this is our new direction. This is important. You are expected to implement these reforms. If you cannot do what is lawfully expected of you, the proper and honorable action is to resign and retire in quiet dignity.”
The military has had a rough few decades. So why did the obvious even need to be stated by the Defense Secretary? Why is that statement of the obvious, at eye level, so controversial and appalling to people in DC and the press corps? Why is the act of removing political influences from the military deemed political, rather than the politicization itself?
Ask any successful CEO, coach, or any leader who leads in a competitive arena. Culture matters. Military culture especially matters because it instills discipline and cohesion. It ensures that soldiers act with unity under pressure. It builds trust and shared identity, so individuals are willing to sacrifice for the group and mission. It sustains resilience in hardship, creating the mindset that turns organized units into effective fighting forces. This has been true since the Sumerians, and it is still true today.
It may be time for those in the thinking class, the laptop class, the professional managerial class, the newsrooms, and the classrooms to all take a hard look in the mirror. Their opposition to things that work, from education standards to crime to immigration enforcement to economics to regulations, has become the defining difference between political parties today. One party, not without its faults, generally believes in doing things that work — high standards, merit, achievement, termination of non-performers, elimination of red tape, simplicity of vision, and building focused institutional cultures. The other believes deeply in things that don’t work — politicizing apolitical institutions, hiring based on race and gender, eliminating standards, ignoring the need for discipline and resilience, promoting for the wrong reasons, clogging workplaces with fake keyboard jobs and silly training regimens, to name but a few. In an NGO, a nonprofit, or a college campus, that might be tolerable incompetence. In the combat arms profession, mismanagement can be fatal.
The speech and the outcry over the speech are a reflection of those two ideological camps. It is sad and telling that politicizing the military is applauded in newsrooms, while efforts to restore its apolitical nature are branded political.
A fighting culture, not cultural fads, wins wars. That was the message transmitted to the brass at Quantico. Returning wayward institutions to fundamentals and founding principles is an unobjectionable, obvious, and uncontroversial notion. The media covering the remarks could have learned a thing or two themselves.