America's newly minted "Secretary of War" thinks he can tell America's top generals what war is really about. Does the United States need so-called warriors, or professional soldiers who understand what war is all about?
Two key takeaways emerged from Pete Hegseth’s recent performance, before the top generals charged with defending America’s national security. The first is that Hegseth, who recently reconfigured himself as America’s new Secretary of War, understands little to nothing about military affairs and national security.
Any military officer with combat experience could have told him that crowding most of America’s leading generals and admirals, along with their supposed Commander-in-Chief, into a single room is an invitation to decapitation by a potential enemy, especially when you’ve told virtually everybody in the world where and when the event you’ve engineered is going to take place.
When it comes to defense strategy, Hegseth clearly doesn’t get it, just as he failed to understand why you don’t discuss classified plans on Signal.
The second, more positive takeaway from this unfortunate event is that at least for the moment, the U.S. is obviously not under threat of attack from a foreign adversary. If the U.S. had been in any real danger, Hegseth’s idiotic blundering would have been too tempting to pass up.
As for the American generals, ordered to watch Hegseth’s performance, they listened to his dog-and-pony show in dignified silence. One has to wonder what was going through their minds as Hegseth re-enacted a series of rants developed during his years as a fill-in, weekend news anchor at Fox News.
Hegseth taking America's military leadership for fools
Jeff Danziger
Hegseth made it clear that, as his MAGA crowd sees it, the U.S. Military has been overly concerned about the rule of law and overly sensitive to cultural differences in an admittedly complex global world. From now on, commanders should feel free to act first and apologize later.
Hegseth wants his warriors to be ready to shoot when ordered to do so, and if they get the wrong target, well, that’s just too bad. No more of that willy-nilly, namby-pamby stuff that led to defeat in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, and by the way, “Woke,” whatever that means, is definitely out. So are beards, and overweight senior officers walking around the Pentagon.
Hegseth wants his warriors lean and mean, testosterone-driven white males. If women can match the physical output of male athletes, that’s OK, but no transexuals need apply.
No doubt, Hegseth failed to notice that several of the generals in the audience were African American or Hispanic. Hegseth didn’t say so directly, but the implication in his remarks was that anyone who is not white and of Northern European extraction probably reached the highest echelons of the U.S. military because of a previous administration’s desire to indulge in political correctness.
Of course, Hegseth sounds like an idiot. Everyone knew that he was unfit for the job when Trump nominated him. The only reason he actually became Secretary of War is that a Republican-dominated Congress, which had been elected to provide advice and consent, failed to do its job.
But apart from Congress’s failure to protect the country, Hegseth awkwardly raised a number of critical issues that go a long way to explaining America’s failure in recent wars.
Latest Hegseth bust
Jeff Danziger
Most armies make the mistake of fighting the previous war despite changes in what war is really about. To a certain extent America’s mistake in recent brushfire wars is that is still operating according to lessons learned in World War II.
I enlisted in the U.S. Army rather than be drafted during the Vietnam War. I spent a year and a half assigned to a Provincial Advisory team next to the Cambodian border at the entry point of the Ho Chi Minh Trail, near the area around Saigon. Many of the commanding officers, including Westmoreland, had been formed as junior officers during the Second World War.
That war was genuinely existential. If it had been lost, humanity might have been lost along with it. The only objective was to kill German Nazis as quickly and as efficiently as possible. In Vietnam, that approach translated into “Search and Destroy.” Find the enemy and kill him. But victory in Vietnam required “Winning hearts and minds.” If you lost the population, you lost the war.
How many American soldiers sent to Vietnam really understood that? When I was still with the Provincial Team on the border, the American embassy sent a political officer to identify which South Vietnamese officials might possess leadership qualities. The embassy wanted to pick the best and put them in key positions.
“Well,” I said, “The deputy province chief is a pimp. He procures village girls for his leading officers.” The political officer looked miffed. “Don’t bother me with morality,” he said. “I want to know if he is effective.” That political officer was the kind of guy that Pete Hegseth is looking for these days.
“Imagine,” I said,” that you are a 16-year-old boy living in this village, and the deputy province chief forces your sister into prostitution. What will you do next? Which side are you going to fight for? I can tell you which I would choose. It would not be American.” The American embassy didn’t get it back then. No one got it.
I remember encountering an American soldier coming back from Vietnam. I asked him what he thought of the Vietnamese. “I wouldn’t know,” he said. “The only ones I ever met were at the other end of my machine gun.”
Many of the American soldiers sent to Vietnam were from the Midwest and just out of high school. They understood nothing of Asia, international affairs, or anything outside of their hometown in the United States.
But their experience in Vietnam gradually taught them the reality of the situation. Before long, they began respecting the courage and determination of the North Vietnamese they were fighting more than the corrupt regime in South Vietnam that they were allegedly defending. After a while, enlisted men let it be known that they would defend their positions, but they refused to participate in aggressive operations.
American officers who did not get the message were fragged. A grenade or a bullet was placed under their pillow. If they still didn’t get the message, a number were shot. After a few dozen incidents, the Pentagon began to realize that its Army was disintegrating. Either the U.S. had to leave Vietnam or its fighting force would effectively be finished.
After a year and a half in Vietnam, I got out of the Army in early 1969, and then went back to Vietnam as a journalist. I stayed another four years. After Vietnam, I spent several years covering the Middle East. When the Russians invaded Afghanistan, I trekked across the mountains with a caravan of mukahideen. When Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, I was in Saudi Arabia, then in Kuwait, and after that in Iraq.
Most of these wars involved complex tribal relationships and the confusion that followed the political vacuum resulting from the collapse of colonial empires triggered by the exhaustion resulting from World War II.
The chaos created by the sudden absence of colonial administrations was further complicated by the superpower rivalry between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. The role of an army was no longer one of simply killing the enemy; it involved sorting out a culturally complex environment.
A British officer involved in the conflict in Aden, now part of Yemen, noted that the best weapon to use in an insurgency is a knife. He meant that the use of force had to be surgical. If you didn’t understand the environment and the underlying forces at play, victory became unattainable, unless, of course, you wanted to restart the colonial game. No one could afford to do that.
Afghanistan was a prime example in which tribal rivalries complicated just about everything. When I went to Afghanistan with some of Ahmed Shah Massoud’s men, I had a chance to see war from the insurgents’ point of view. I had a U.S. Defense Department map, and I checked off the name of every village that I went through. None of the names on the map matched the actual names of the villages. The map had been written in a different dialect from the one spoken on the ground.
“If the Afghans try to give you some Russian prisoners,” the U.S. consul in Peshawar told me,”please don’t bring them here.” The Russians were just as confused. I remained on a mountaintop overlooking the Panjshir Valley while Russian helicopters flew a few hundred yards over my head. I counted 60. When they see a helicopter, the Afghans cover themselves with a beige blanket that they almost always have with them. When you cover yourself with a blanket, you disappear into the surrounding rocks and become effectively invisible.
With the Russians gone, George Bush went after Afghanistan as punishment for the 9/11 terrorist attack against the World Trade Center in New York. We followed up with a considerable investment in trying to build a sustainable civil government in Afghanistan.
But once again, as in Vietnam, we weren’t careful about our associations. In a search for allies, we joined forces with some of the most brutal war criminals in recent history. Then we wondered why many Afghans refused to accept our vision of democracy.
More than that, successive administrations in Washington refused to acknowledge the diversity of Afghanistan’s population. Afghanistan spans a vast geographic area, but within that area, there is enormous ethnic diversity, particularly among the Pushtuns, Tajiks, and other tribes. Get it wrong, and you are dealing with tribal warfare as much as the original fight that you became involved in.
In the fight against the Taliban, the Afghans faced a simple equation. They knew the Americans would get tired and leave; the Taliban wouldn’t. The choice, if you wanted to survive, was simple. Yet Washington either couldn’t see that or was raking in so much money financing the war that it didn’t care. Shirley Highway runs by the Pentagon, and the promoters of the Afghan War became known as the “Shirley Highway bandits.”
The generals listening to Pete Hegseth and then the incoherent ramblings of Donald Trump know all of this. They sat in silence and listened. Trump asked why they didn’t applaud, and then joked that if they didn’t like what he and Hegseth were saying, they could always throw away their career, along with the U.S. military, and look for employment somewhere else.
Unlike the U.S. Congress that foisted Hegseth on them, most of these men and women are true patriots. They care about the United States, they care about the rule of law, and they are willing to lay down their lives to protect our way of life. They understand how a post-World War II world functions today.
Yet they have been saddled with a commander-in-chief who is obsessed with his previous opponent and who, during this fateful meeting, told the assembled U.S. command that they should turn their attention to practicing their craft on America’s major cities. The enemy, as Trump told them, is within.
Trump was clearly referring to his democratic opposition. For many of the generals, chosen to lead because they really do know what they are talking about, the true enemy was still to be determined.
Foreign correspondent and author William Dowell is Global Geneva's America’s editor based in Philadelphia. Over the past decades, he has covered much of the globe, including Iran, for TIME, ABC News and other news organizations.