Washington Examiner’s Salena Zito has an excellent article in HotAir today reporting on her interview with Pete Hegseth and his visit to the Army War College. Very much worth reading in its entirety, first because Zito is one of the best reporters out there, and second because it’s encouraging; Hegseth gets it, and understands the massive overhaul our military needs desperately. Now if he can just pull it off.*
…. Since being announced as Trump's pick for defense secretary, Hegseth has faced resistance from the legacy press, Democrats and some Republicans, and his worst enemy of all: the very building he is set to reform.
The Pentagon's culture is legendary for its rigid hierarchy. Its home base in Crystal City, Virginia, has the population of a small city, 27,000, and directly employs 3.4 million people worldwide. And that doesn't even begin to count the contractors who work for the Defense Department, which some estimate to be just under 980,000 men and women across the globe.
It is a culture that does not like to be tinkered with.
"If you're here for the right reasons and you're not compromised and you're willing to be courageous and bold and speak clearly, and then you'll back POTUS, 100% you're a threat," he said.
"They knew that from the minute he chose me through my entire confirmation process, from the minute I walked into the building to the first initiatives we took, like DEI is dead at DOD," he said of the elimination of so-called diversity, equity and inclusion policies at the agency.
….
Hegseth isn't the first outsider to stir the wrath of the institutional DOD. On Monday, Sept. 10, 2001, then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld gave a Pentagon speech that declared war not on an adversary in hot spots around the globe but one in the very building he was standing in.
"This adversary is closer to home," Rumsfeld said. "It is the Pentagon bureaucracy -- not the people, but the processes; not the civilians, but the systems; not the men and women in uniform, but the uniformity of thought and action we impose upon them."
He lambasted waste, duplicative duties, bloated bureaucracy and gridlock. He proposed streamlining finance and procurement systems and the consolidation or elimination of duplicate defense jobs.
Less than 24 hours later, the 9/11 attacks began at the Twin Towers in New York and went on to include a farm field in Somerset County and the Pentagon itself. Rumsfeld would tell me years later in an interview that he went into the job to be a reformer, something the two wars during his tenure would never let him fulfill.
Hegseth said the speech Rumsfeld gave, rattling DOD bureaucrats to their core, was very good. "In fact, it models a lot of things that we're going to do, and I commend him for that," Hegseth said. "I would argue that what we're doing is back to basics."
"It's actually not that complicated. If you set high standards, you maintain discipline, you empower commanders, you make sure they're focused on training and readiness. You focus on lethality, and you get the troops what they need. Military education becomes a fairly straightforward exercise," he said.
Hegseth argued that under former Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden, the military got confused and was running think tanks: "We're running basic training and we're running military academies, which are training privates, lieutenants, cadets, future leaders to the war college here. Your job is not to think about the grand social justice dynamics on another continent."
Hegseth said the job of the military is to ask questions such as, "How do I maneuver an infantry battalion or an infantry brigade in the modern context where now drones are vehicle killers?"
"That's what we study at the war colleges," Hegseth said. "That's what we study at West Point. That's what we should be studying: military history, engineering science."
The 44-year-old said people can claim that DEI is just a buzzword. "It is the exact opposite," Hegseth said. "It's actually become an ethos of a place, and it infects the entire inter-dynamics of the relationships."
His plan, from education to training, is to get back to basics: "It's what you are supposed to be able to do, navigate your ship, hit your target with artillery, and are you training for those things? And are you taking care of your people? And that's a big part of the tension also."
As for how the military has changed due to the electronic warfare and drone operations used during the war in Ukraine, he said there is a lot to learn.
"We have to absolutely learn from Ukraine. Warfare has made, in many ways, a leap in just a few years, which is emblematic of how technology changes so fast these days," he said. "So from the internet and computing to quantum computing to AI, everything's multiplying rapidly. Exponentially. So are battlefield capabilities. So are hypersonics, long-range drones, cheap drones, sophisticated drones, electronic warfare, directed energy, space, cyber, you name it. All of those components are coming to bear under how we fight."
The war in Ukraine also informs us of the viability of different platforms. "So, you pay for a lot," Hegseth said. "What if you're paying for lots of Humvees or lots of helicopters that in the next war are easily defeated by cheap drones? Then you're creating a situation where in previous wars, when dynamics change, it's when tactics didn't catch up with technology."
He pointed to when the machine gun was first introduced in World War I, noting, "We were still sending waves of men across fields, and the machine gun changed everything."
The 29th defense secretary said he believes we're at a point at which long-range drones, hypersonics and counter-air operations are all changing and contesting battle spaces differently from assumptions we had made in the past. "So places like the War College and elsewhere have to be learning from what's happening in Ukraine. And we are, we're learning a lot, and it's going to make our troops more lethal and survivable in the next conflict," he said.
Hegseth said there are many hot spots that keep him up at night, but the budget process consumes more of his time and thoughts than he anticipated. He said that how and what we spend are crucial: "If we don't get that right and we don't actually rebuild the military, then I don't want to look back 10 years from now and say, 'You know what? I didn't fight hard enough to make sure we had everything we needed to rebuild the military so that my kids and grandkids had the strongest military in the world.'"
"China's not messing around, and we either match and exceed them or we fall behind. My job is to match and exceed them, to deter them. And there are plenty of people with different priorities in this town. My job is to fight for the Defense Department for the president," he said.
The questions preoccupying Hegseth are, "Have we delivered enough on this? Are we spending enough on this? Have we reprioritized this? Because that legacy lasts a long time too. So yes, I'm looking at the intel and realizing what we have up against us. But the long term is, am I doing right by the warfighters with what we're funding?"
Hegseth said what the military looks like 10 years from now will be a direct result of what they do today.
"So we need to make some hard choices right now. What is our forced posture in Europe? How do we ensure we don't get bogged down in Middle Eastern wars that keep wanting to pull us back so we have clear, limited objectives?" he continued. "How do we prioritize the defense of our own homeland? And you see that on the southern border and Iron Dome. How do we protect our own backyard in the Southern Hemisphere? And all of that is in service to saying, 'Communist China, we want to be friends with you.' We don't want war, but we're going to be the strongest nation on Earth to ensure that that never happens."
