When Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth summoned hundreds of senior military officers worldwide to Quantico, Va., last week, fears quite naturally arose. Was a major military adventure afoot? If not, then why such a wasteful displacement?
The speech that Mr. Hegseth gave showed those fears to have been baseless. Despite a raw vocabulary and some rude provocations, he outlined a nuanced vision of the military’s purpose and its relationship to civilian society. Since that vision is starkly at odds with a great deal of what the military has been about for the past three decades, the secretary had every reason to call the top brass together and explain what was changing, as well as why and how.
Mr. Hegseth was there to announce that the Trump administration would no longer use the military’s structures to drive social change. (President Trump would later muddy that message in a rambling address to the same officers.) The trend Mr. Hegseth disparaged can be dated back to at least January 1993, when President Bill Clinton pushed for gays in the military. That effort turned into the Clinton administration’s first crisis, but over time, what is now called diversity, equity and inclusion won out.
President Barack Obama ended Mr. Clinton’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy in 2010, allowing lesbian, gay and bisexual people to serve openly in the armed forces. He approved women in combat in 2013 and in 2016 opened all combat positions to women, revising some physical training requirements in the process. In 2016 he also opened the ranks to transgender soldiers.
The first Trump administration, though it barred transgender people from serving in the military, in other ways continued this trend. In June 2020, Defense Secretary Mark Esper announced the establishment of an internal board on diversity and inclusion, with a mandate to increase minority representation among officers — along with a more public-facing advisory committee on diversity and inclusion that would do the same. During the early Trump years, inspectors general continued to investigate racial disparities in the various military branches.
So what is Mr. Hegseth complaining about, if support for D.E.I.-type programs in the military has traditionally been so bipartisan that even the first Trump administration embraced a lot of them?
Institutions like the military have only a limited capacity to take on responsibilities beyond their core functions. D.E.I. has wound up transforming the mission of institutions in which it has been introduced, making schools and businesses and hospitals concerned as much with social justice as with education or profit or health. There have been improvements and achievements, of course, but the traditional missions of institutions have often suffered. When the institution’s mission is national defense, Mr. Hegseth seems to believe, that’s too big a risk to run.
At first glance, Mr. Hegseth’s talk could be taken for a mere sloganeering intervention in the culture wars. “No more identity months, D.E.I. offices, dudes in dresses,” he said. “No more climate-change worship.” He defended his dismissal in February of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr., on the grounds that “it’s nearly impossible to change a culture with the same people who helped create or even benefited from that culture.” (General Brown was the first African American nominated to head a service branch, the Air Force, by Mr. Trump in 2020 and was named the head of the Joint Chiefs by President Joe Biden in 2023.) Mr. Hegseth described certain officers of recent years as “the first” — and here he formed air quotes — “but not the best.”
This rudeness was balanced, however, by a recognition that there is a burden of proof on the Defense Department to show that any disruptive changes it makes will serve a purpose other than nostalgia or bigotry. After all, the reforms Mr. Hegseth is proposing — which he suggested would include restoring tougher combat arms standards — are going to have a disproportionate effect on women, who are held to the same fitness standards as men for the most demanding positions. (Men and women face different basic fitness standards for admission.) Insofar as affirmative action programs are dismantled, that will, almost by definition, have a disproportionate effect on minorities.
Mr. Hegseth argued that these changes are nonetheless fair and aimed at military excellence alone. “When it comes to any job that requires physical power to perform in combat, those physical standards must be high and gender-neutral,” he said. “If women can make it, excellent. If not, it is what it is.” And so it is with race, he argued. He emphasized that racial discrimination has been illegal in the military since 1948 and promised that “those kinds of infractions will be ruthlessly enforced.”
As Mr. Hegseth describes them, diversity initiatives, whatever their merits in civilian life, have changed military culture for the worse. A main way they have done so, he implied, is by complicating lines of command in a profession where complication can be life-threatening. Oversight agencies, from inspector generals to equal opportunity programs, have created a network of whistle-blowers and watchdogs that undermines the authority of commanders. Commanders who are too accountable to civil-rights regulators become risk-averse. They develop, Mr. Hegseth said, a “walking on eggshells” culture. Risk aversion is a good thing if you are investing pension funds, but in military leadership it can make you a sitting duck.
At the heart of Mr. Hegseth’s vision is an insistence that waging war is fundamentally different from other vocations in society because it is deadly and is meant to be. “This is life or death,” he said. “As we all know, this is you versus an enemy hellbent on killing you.”
Several consequences follow from this. One is that the government’s duties to citizens who find themselves in harm’s way, fighting for their country, are not like its duties to citizens in other circumstances. There are very few ways to protect troops beyond training, equipping and leading them as best you can, Mr. Hegseth noted. In a life-or-death occupational setting, there is no room for preferential treatment like affirmative action. No soldier should ever be led or covered by someone who has been promoted for reasons other than military effectiveness. That criterion is not bigoted. It arises from a reasonable philosophy of the limited mission of the military.
Mr. Hegseth has been criticized for holding a somewhat archaic view of military engagements. Listening to him, one sometimes envisions hand-to-hand combat, rather than a world of computerized and electronic warfare. But to accuse him of archaism is unfair. In Quantico he called for “more drones” as well as “more innovation, more A.I. in everything.” Furthermore, tech does not transform the battlefield from a physical to a virtual place. On the front lines of the Russia-Ukraine war, where the newest fiber-optic drones and other information-age weapons are being used, casualties have run into hundreds of thousands on both sides. The corporeality of battle, the mortal dangerousness of it, seems undiminished.
Progressives have had a different philosophy of the military, particularly concerning its relationship to civilian society. In the 1990s, three decades after the Civil Rights Act, the Army was hailed as the most successful integrated institution in the country. It was tempting to assume that the military (with its order and hierarchy) was a more promising place for trying out a just racial and sexual order than civilian society (with its various bigotries). People once thought the same about the public school system.
But the military of the 2020s has been as overburdened by the imperatives of progressivism as schools were by the duties of racial integration in the 1970s. And if, as Mr. Hegseth argues, the hallmark of the military is not order and hierarchy but the taking and saving of lives, then it is the wrong place for such experiments in the first place.
Mr. Hegseth did not prove last week that diversity arguments are always wrong. But he made a powerful case that in one walk of American life, they are wrong more often than not.
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Christopher Caldwell is a contributing Opinion writer for The Times and a contributing editor at The Claremont Review of Books. He is the author of “Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam and the West” and “The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties.”
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