Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has been busy. Over the past few weeks, he’s been rooting out programs and language related to diversity, equity, and inclusion. The U.S. military is dutifully following his lead: West Point no longer supports those ostensibly suspicious organizations such as the Native American Heritage Forum and the Latin Cultural Club, and the Army Recruiting Command has ended its long partnership with the Black Engineer of the Year Awards.
The new Pentagon boss also zeroed in on the pressing task of renaming Fort Liberty back to Fort Bragg, though it’s not exactly a reversal; Hegseth ordered that the base now honor a World War II hero named Roland Bragg (a private first class who won the Silver Star and a Purple Heart at the Battle of the Bulge) instead of the odious Confederate General Braxton Bragg, for whom it was named in 1918. This change is little more than a clumsy stunt, one that manages to insult a loyal PFC while resurrecting the traitorous general—almost certainly after searching for a hero named Bragg, just so people could use the old name with a wink and a chuckle.
Americans might wonder what all of this performative inanity has to do with arming, training, feeding, and housing the most powerful military in the world, or how any of this showmanship makes the United States safer and more capable of deterring its enemies and fighting for its interests. But Hegseth, like most of Donald Trump’s other nominees, knows that his job is not to administer a department but to carry out Trump’s cultural and political vendettas.
When a government department gets an appointee like Hegseth, it must still find a way to function every day, and those many tasks then fall to the deputies and undersecretaries. Sometimes, the effect is almost imperceptible. Ben Carson, for example, was tapped in Trump’s first term to lead Housing and Urban Development; he was out of his depth and it showed, but HUD slogged on despite Carson’s inexperience. The Defense Department, however, cannot run on autopilot. Mistakes made at the Pentagon can get people killed and endanger the safety of the nation. Unfortunately, with few exceptions, Trump’s current nominees to other top-tier Pentagon positions aren’t much more qualified than Hegseth. As with Trump’s nominations in other departments, the key factors appear to be loyalty, wealth, and ideological fervor, not competence.
Day-to-day operations at the Pentagon and other agencies are usually run by a deputy secretary. The previous deputy under Lloyd Austin, Kath Hicks, has a Ph.D. from MIT and years of experience in national defense, including at the Pentagon. Trump’s nominee to succeed her is the billionaire Steve Feinberg, who co-founded Cerberus Capital. He has no military or Pentagon experience. (Likewise, Trump’s pick for secretary of the Navy, John Phelan, is a wealthy businessman and art collector who has never served in the military or any government position.)
Below the secretary, several undersecretaries serve as the senior managers of the institution, and the news here is also worrisome. In 2020, Trump tried to nominate Bradley Hansell, a special assistant to Trump in his first term, as the deputy undersecretary for intelligence (in order to replace someone whose loyalty came into question among Trump’s advisers), a nomination that was returned to Trump without action from the Senate. This time, Trump has nominated Hansell (whose background is in venture capital) for the more senior job of undersecretary, despite his lack of qualifications. Trump has also tapped Emil Michael, a tech investor and executive at Uber and Klout, as undersecretary for research and engineering. Michael is a lawyer; his predecessor in the research and engineering post in the Biden administration, Heidi Shyu, was an actual engineer, with long experience in defense production and acquisition issues.
One relatively conventional choice among the undersecretary nominees is Elbridge Colby, a well-known defense intellectual who served as a deputy assistant secretary of defense in Trump’s first term. (He’s the type of Washington fixture whom Trump’s people usually distrust, but Colby was careful never to get on the wrong side of the MAGA world.) His views, especially regarding nuclear weapons, are alarming: He once wrote that America should consider nuclear responses to a cyberattack. But Colby is a serious choice compared with his future colleagues.
After Hegseth, Trump’s most disturbing DOD nomination—at least so far—is Anthony Tata, the retired one-star general whom Trump has put forward as undersecretary for personnel and readiness. Tata’s views are extreme: He once referred to President Barack Obama as a “terrorist,” claimed that former CIA Director John Brennan was trying to kill Trump, and pushed the conspiracy theory that Bill and Hillary Clinton had murdered several of their political opponents. Trump had to pull Tata’s nomination in 2020 as undersecretary for policy (the position Colby is now slated to get) just 90 minutes before his Senate hearing, after being told that the votes to confirm him were not there. The president is now going to send Tata back and humiliate the Republicans into voting for yet another unacceptable nominee.
The biggest risk is not that these nominees will do poorly in their jobs. They will have assistants—the same bureaucrats and experienced civil servants whom Trump and Hegseth are trying to drive from the Pentagon—who will make sure that things get done as much as possible in the midst of the chaos. The real danger will come during a crisis, when Trump needs the defense secretary and his senior staff to rise to the occasion and provide advice and options under difficult and perhaps even terrifying conditions. Although these nominees will likely serve up plenty of uninformed or irresponsibly sycophantic views at such a moment, few of them have the depth of knowledge or experience to offer steadier guidance—let alone to push back against the president when needed.
Maybe none of that matters: Trump’s first term showed that he is practically unbriefable and rarely listens to advice. Hegseth and his subordinates seem likely to spend much of their time conducting ideological warfare against their own department, with occasional breaks for tasteless public trolling. But sooner or later, Trump could face a foreign-policy crisis, and he will need better counsel than he can get from billionaire defense dilettantes and a MAGA television personality. At such a moment, Americans can only hope that someone with sober judgment and a healthy sense of patriotism—and who knows what they’re doing—emerges to do the job that Hegseth and others have left aside.
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