“This housecleaning will be a signal to the entire world and the American military and everybody else.” — Donald Trump, Aug. 21, 2024
There was genuine surprise at the late Nov. 12 announcement by President-elect Donald Trump that he was tapping Pete Hegseth, co-host of Fox & Friends Weekend, as his pick to lead the Defense Department, even from his colleagues at Fox News.
“What the heck! Can you believe it?” Jesse Watters said on his nightly show, to which Kayleigh McEnany, one of Trump’s former White House press secretaries, replied, “I was stunned when I saw it, but then it made all the sense in the world.”
It should be no mystery to anyone who has paid attention to Trump on the campaign trail, and took him both seriously and literally, that Hegseth, a decorated former Army National Guard infantry major who served tours in both Iraq and Afghanistan, was just the kind of anti-woke culture warrior Trump was looking for to clean house at the Pentagon.
Trump never made any secret of his disdain for the current crop of military leaders nor his plans to exercise his constitutional prerogative as commander in chief to fire them posthaste.
“When I take office, they’re going to be held accountable for what they’ve done to this country,” Trump said during a late-August rally in Asheboro, North Carolina. “I will ask for the resignations of every single senior military official who touched the Afghanistan disaster. I want their resignations immediately. And I want them on the desk in the Oval Office, the Resolute Desk. I want them on at 12 o’clock, Inauguration Day.”
Some of the lines Trump delivered at that rally sounded as if they could have been lifted directly from Hegseth’s book, published earlier this year.
“Our warriors should be focused on defeating America’s enemies, not figuring out their genders, Marxist ideologies have no place in combat,” Trump said. “If you want to have a sex change or a social justice seminar, then you can do it somewhere else, but you’re not going to do it in the Army, Navy, Coast Guard, Air Force, Space Force, or the United 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 on Warriors, spent nine weeks on the New York Times best-sellers list, including two weeks at NUMBER ONE,” Trump said in his statement. “The book reveals the leftwing betrayal of our Warriors, 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 the helm of the nation’s largest and most powerful agency in 1975 for the first of his two stints.
Hegseth has no experience managing a sprawling bureaucracy the size of the Pentagon, with its nearly 3 million military and civilian personnel and $850 billion budget that accounts for roughly half of the federal government’s discretionary spending.
But what Hegseth does bring is a fervent 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 was 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 DIE,” Hegseth argues that diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives accomplished nothing other than amplifying differences, creating grievances, and excluding “anyone who won’t bow down to the cultural Marxist revolution ripping through the Pentagon.”
In a pre-Election day interview conducted before apparently knowing he would be nominated to lead the Pentagon, Hegseth casually indicated Charles Q. Brown Jr., the nation’s top military officer, and the first black to lead a military service, should be the first general forced into early retirement.
“First of all, you’ve got to fire the chairman of joint chiefs,” Hegseth told podcast host Shawn Ryan, “Any general that was involved in any of the DEI s**t has to go.”
“When I think about my career in uniform, in almost every instance where there has been poor leadership or people in positions they’re not qualified for, it was based on either the reality or the perception of a ‘diversity hire,’” Hegseth wrote in his book.
Ironically, in a rare, first-person video recorded after the 2020 death of George Floyd, Brown, then the four-star commander U.S. Pacific Air Forces, talked emotionally about being underestimated his whole career because of his race.
“I think about wearing the same flight suit with the same wings on my chest as my peers, and then being questioned by another military member, ‘Are you a pilot?’” Brown said, a stern expression fixed on his face. “I’m thinking about the pressure I felt to perform error-free, especially for supervisors who I perceived as expecting less from 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 slogan “a bunch 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 their pilot was flying their plane because of a program that allowed lesser qualified individuals into the pilot’s chair 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.”
On women in combat, he is equally unsparing.
“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’ve redefined success in a counterproductive way.
“The Left ignored their holy grail: the 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 were 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, and which he says can be traced to the 2015 Obama administration decision to open front-line combat jobs to women.
“Most branches, led by feckless military leaders, bent their needs to the political winds and quickly brushed off the realities of human nature, biological sex differences, and combat reality,” he writes, underscoring a running theme in his polemic, namely that the military is lousy with spineless officers thinking only of their own careers, whom he labels “cowardly generals caving to beta-male politicians.”
“Our generals are not ready for this moment in history,” he concludes. “Not even close. Lots of people need to be fired.”
On the question of transgender troops, Hegseth makes a number of arguments against them serving in uniform, in one reference calling them “Men who are pretending to be women, or vice versa”
His objections mostly centered on their need for hormones and their undeployability rates because of surgical or other medical needs, but he essentially said they are “a distraction.” “It might be your thing, but it’s weird and does not add substantive value to anyone,” he argues, concluding, “For the recruits, for the military, and primarily 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 heaps scorn on the military leaders for not standing up to “social justice wokesters” pushing “anti-American, anticonstitutional Marxist philosophies,” he also acknowledges that “civilian control of the military is one of our core constitutional principles.”
The generals he’s excoriating have been guilty of little more than saluting smartly and carrying out the policies of their civilian overlords, setting aside, as they are duty-bound to do, whatever personal objections they may hold.
“Respect for civilian leaders doesn’t equate to total obedience to them,” Hegseth counters. “To state it bluntly, the realities of warfare — especially for those of us who have seen it firsthand — supersede the necessity to obey illegal commands that manifest in weakening the force and getting troops killed.”
The Wall Street Journal reports that Trump’s transition team has drafted an executive order that, if signed, would establish a “warrior board” of retired senior military personnel to identify and recommend for dismissal three- and four-star generals and admirals deemed somehow unfit for leadership.
Given the military’s bedrock ethos of remaining apolitical and following all legal orders, former Pentagon officials suggest that kind of inquisition should be unnecessary.
“There’s plenty of laws on the books to go after people who are unfit to be a general,” former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said on CNN. “And we don’t need to burden the Defense Department or the military with some kind of vigilante hit team in the White House.”
“I understand there are concerns about things the Biden administration did in the woke area, in the military, and there’s a way to solve that particular problem,” former Trump national security adviser John Bolton said. “And that’s to sit the generals down and say, ‘There’s a new sheriff in town, we’re not doing that woke stuff 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 feels botched the Afghanistan withdrawal, and seems intent on sending a message to inspire fealty.
“This housecleaning will be a signal to the entire world and the American military and everybody else,” Trump said. “They want people to be held accountable for failure and incompetence.”