What the Hegseth nomination means

“The military has long been a place for turning mere boys into fighting men not just by teaching them honor and sacrifice but by channeling daring, building strength, and accumulating skills,” Hegseth wrote. “The so-called elites directing the military today aren’t just lowering standards and focusing on the wrong enemy; they are overtly working to rid the military of this specific (essential) type of young patriot. They believe power is bad, merit is unfair, ideology is more important than industriousness, white people are yesterday, and safety! is better than risk-taking.”

The nomination immediately set off an outcry. “Who the f*** is this guy?” said an anonymous defense industry lobbyist quoted in Politico. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), who did not serve in the military and chairs the Senate Armed Services Committee’s subcommittee on personnel, wrote on X: “A Fox & Friends weekend co-host is not qualified to be the Secretary of Defense. … I respect every one of our servicemembers. Donald Trump’s pick will make us less safe and must be rejected.” A liberal veterans advocate called Hegseth “undoubtedly the least qualified nominee for SecDef in American history.”

The fact is that despite his impressive qualifications — Princeton, Harvard, two Bronze Stars, and professional success — Hegseth does not have the resume one would expect from a secretary of defense, most notably the management experience to run one of the largest bureaucracies in the world, with an $841 billion budget this year. But Trump clearly wanted a change in direction. 

Trump can look at past secretaries who had the right resumes and didn’t work out. Bill Clinton picked a Democratic member of the House named Les Aspin, who had decades of experience overseeing the Pentagon and turned out to be a terrible secretary of defense. George W. Bush picked Donald Rumsfeld, who had vast experience in government and had even been defense secretary before, and Rumsfeld made grievous errors in the job. Barack Obama had problems with the Pentagon, and Trump himself struggled to find the right man to run the Department of Defense, going through five secretaries or acting secretaries in the first Trump administration.

Most of all, Trump wants a Defense Department that can get things done without all the wokeness and HR department stuff that plagues modern bureaucracies. Trump has an old-movie view of the U.S. military and American generals — he frequently praises this or that general or other leader as being “straight out of central casting.” Above all, he wants military leaders who will accomplish missions rather than explain why those missions cannot be accomplished, which has been a common desire of presidents for a very long time. There is a story Trump tells that illustrates what he has in mind.

In a speech last February to the Conservative Political Action Conference outside Washington, Trump told the story of escalating the campaign to destroy the Islamic State. As he usually does, Trump got around to the subject somewhat elliptically. His discussion started with the U.S.-Mexico border and his action forcing Mexico to accept his Remain in Mexico policy. Then, Trump moved to the idea of U.S. policymakers preventing soldiers and law enforcement, such as those at the border, from doing their jobs. Then, he moved on to the people he called “television generals,” such as Gen. Mark Milley, whom Trump called “an idiot.”

Then, Trump moved on to heap elaborate praise on U.S. military men and women. The pilots on Air Force One, he said, were “better looking than Tom Cruise — and taller.” The generals were “really great,” with the exception of Milley and other “TV generals.” And then, there was Air Force Gen. J. Daniel “Razin” Caine, the man who “knocked the s*** out of ISIS.” Trump described being told by his Washington-based military advisers that it just wasn’t possible to eradicate ISIS quickly. It could take years. Progress would be incremental. But then, in December 2018, Trump flew into Iraq on a secret presidential visit, where he met Caine.

Trump went into great detail about the flight, in which the pilots used extensive safety maneuvers, no lights, steep corkscrew approach, and other stealth techniques, to land the plane in a dangerous area. First, it blew Trump’s mind that the U.S. has spent 20 years and trillions of dollars in the Middle East “and we can’t land a plane with the lights on.” What kind of success is that? Trump described going to the cockpit of Air Force One in darkness to watch the pilots. Trump became more and more anxious as the plane dove toward the airport in the middle of the night. Onstage, he started doing a little Rodney Dangerfield nervous sweating routine — “Does anybody have a towel?” — and then mockingly suggested he should award himself the Medal of Honor for his courage in riding along with the landing. (As he usually does, Trump then said the press would probably report that he said it seriously, and indeed, some did.)

Then, Trump described walking down the steps of Air Force One and meeting Caine. Trump did a little double-take comedy on Caine’s nickname and described him as looking “better than any movie actor you could get” and “the man I’m looking for” to take down ISIS. Trump said he asked Caine, “Why is ISIS so tough?” and Caine answered, “They’re not tough, sir — they just don’t let us do our job.” Trump asked how long it would take for the military to destroy ISIS if Pentagon leadership freed them to get the job done. A few weeks, Caine said, according to Trump. And that is what happened. Even if parts of Trump’s story are apocryphal, the fact is that the U.S. military quickly “knocked the s*** out of ISIS,” in Trump’s words.

The lesson Trump took from that is that the military is great but that U.S. military leadership is sclerotic, risk-averse, and overly politicized. “We have a great military, and it’s only woke at the top,” Trump told CPAC. “I don’t think it could ever be ‘woke-enized’ at the lower levels because these are great people. It was only at the top.”

So now, Trump is proposing a radical change at the top of the civilian leadership of the military. It could be a breakthrough success, rebalancing the military as a fighting force above all else. Or it could be a failure, and everyone will be asking what Trump was thinking when he put Pete Hegseth in charge of an $841 billion bureaucracy. But if voters sent any message in the election, it is that they want a change from the Biden administration and that they approve, in a big-picture sense, of Trump’s leadership in his first time in office. So now, Trump is, as promised, bringing change.

“All the criticism of him is that he’s not the expected Washington pick, and I’m just saying to you that the American people just voted against the expected Washington pick,” CNN resident conservative Scott Jennings said Tuesday night. Yes, Hegseth will have to run the confirmation gauntlet in the Senate, Jennings continued, and will have to show that he has the knowledge to do that job. “But we ought to give this man a chance, in my opinion.” That’s what the election was about.

*I should note here that I am a Fox News contributor.