Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has long maintained that the U.S. military badly needed a leader with dust on his boots to shake up a force that has gone soft and “woke.”
On Tuesday, he faced a room of hundreds of generals and admirals, whom he had summoned from across the globe, and made the case that he was that leader.
Mr. Hegseth’s vision of the military and what it should be was almost entirely defined by his 12 months of service in Iraq and his experience as a major in the Army National Guard.
Much of his address focused on the kinds of issues he would have dealt with as a young platoon leader in the 101st Airborne Division in Iraq or as a company commander in the Guard. He talked about grooming standards. “No more beards, long hair, superficial, individual expression,” he told the brass. “We’re going to cut our hair, shave, shave our beards and adhere to standards.”
He preached the importance of physical fitness. “Frankly, it’s tiring to look out at combat formations, or really any formation, and see fat troops,” he said. “Likewise, it’s completely unacceptable to see fat generals and admirals in the halls of the Pentagon.”
And he suggested that fixing these problems was the first step toward repairing a military that, since World War II, had lost the ability to win wars.
To some, Mr. Hegseth’s speech was poorly matched to his audience of senior officers who in most cases are responsible for complex military operations such as the maintenance of nuclear submarines, America’s global alliances or the development of complex air-tasking orders, such as the one needed for the strikes on Iran’s nuclear program earlier this year.
The military officers assembled in the room listened silently. It is likely, though, that at least some of them were seething at his suggestion that their collective failure to enforce basic standards had caused, or even contributed to, the military’s failings in Afghanistan and Iraq.
“I mean, first of all, that’s like an insane insult to his senior officers, who all made their bones fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan,” said Elliot Ackerman, who led Marines in the second battle of Falluja and served with a Marine special operations unit in Afghanistan. “Those guys have got a lot more dust on their boots than he does.”
Mr. Hegseth’s speech mirrored his leadership style over his first eight months in office, during which he has focused less on meeting with his foreign counterparts around the world and more on doing pull-ups and early morning runs with troops that are posted on the Pentagon’s social media feed.
“If the secretary of war can do regular, hard P.T., so can every member of our joint force,” he told the generals, using the military acronym for physical training.
His speech preceded a long, rambling address from President Trump, who bashed his predecessor, President Joseph R. Biden Jr., for the U.S. military’s chaotic withdrawal and defeat in Afghanistan. “I think it was the most embarrassing day in the history of our country,” he said. “And now we’re back. We’re not going to have any of that crap happen, I can tell you. That was terrible, so terrible.”
Both Mr. Trump and Mr. Hegseth were reckoning with the aftermath of one of the longest, most costly and disappointing stretches of war in American history.
Mr. Trump addressed the senior officers as a politician who had bested his hated rivals. Mr. Hegseth spoke largely from the perspective of a junior officer still burdened by the anger, pride and deep frustration of his service in Iraq nearly two decades earlier.
“He views the world from the point of view of a not terribly successful major in the National Guard,” said Eliot Cohen, a military historian who served in the State Department under President George W. Bush. “For him it’s push-ups, pull-ups and pugil sticks. It’s aggressiveness.”
Mr. Hegseth delivered his speech at Marine Corps Base Quantico in Northern Virginia clad in an American flag belt buckle and standing in front of a giant American flag. The backdrop mirrored the portrayal of Gen. George S. Patton in the 1970 movie bearing his name.
That film opened with excerpts from General Patton’s famous speeches to the Third Army before the Allied invasion of France during World War II. Those addresses were intended to motivate inexperienced troops who were preparing for brutal combat. In them, General Patton sought to convince every soldier from the truck driver to the cook that they were essential to victory.
“Every man is a vital link in the great chain,” General Patton famously preached, adding: “Every man does his job. Every man serves the whole. Every department, every unit, is important in the vast scheme of this war.”
Mr. Hegseth, though, wasn’t speaking to green soldiers, but rather a roomful of senior officers with thousands of years of combined experience leading troops around the world. Much of that experience, he said, had been corrupted by “decades of decay, some of it obvious, some of it hidden,” inflicted on the military by “woke” political and military leaders.
Mr. Hegseth said one of his major tasks has been to separate those officers who were truly invested in the changes that he believed had weakened the force and those who were grudgingly following lawful orders. His goal seemed to be to turn back the clock to the simpler, more straightforward World War II era, when women were excluded from combat units. Mr. Hegseth said that he did not want to prevent women from serving in combat roles. Rather, he said, he wanted to hold them to the “highest male standard.”
“If that means no women qualify for some combat jobs, so be it,” he said.
The World War II era, he repeatedly noted, was the last time the United States won “a major theater war.” The nostalgia-soaked speech, though, did not acknowledge how much had changed in the last 75 years. In World War II, the entire country mobilized to fight the fascist Axis forces in a war that would change the course of history.
Today, the military Mr. Hegseth leads faces a world of complex and shifting security challenges that require the Pentagon to work through allies and partners. Often the enemies’ actions in cyberspace or the information domain are intended to weaken American resolve and credibility without tipping into all-out war.
Mr. Hegseth’s vision of military strength left little room for these subtleties. Nor did it mention the recent deployment of National Guard soldiers to places like Washington, D.C., where they have been tasked with “beautification” missions, such as raking leaves and picking up trash.
Mr. Hegseth seemed to divide his senior leaders into two categories: “the woke” and the war fighters. Most of the senior officers in the room, he said, fell into the latter category,
“You are hereby liberated to be an apolitical, hard-charging, no nonsense, constitutional leader that you joined the military to be,” he told them.
Greg Jaffe covers the Pentagon and the U.S. military.
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