JOHN NOONAN: The Speech the Pentagon Didn’t Want, but the Military Needed.
War Secretary Pete Hegseth’s headline-grabbing speech in Quantico this week has irked the professional commentary class but is drawing accolades from those who matter — the men and women on the frontlines of America’s defense.
Hegseth’s remarks to every general officer in the U.S. military, which called for a force-wide military reset and realignment back to warfighting fundamentals, were derided in all the usual places. The Atlantic led with “hundreds of generals try to keep a straight face.” The New York Times wrote, “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. . . . He preached the importance of physical fitness . . . [he said] without presenting any evidence, that standards had been lowered across the force over the last decade to meet arbitrary racial and gender quotas” (evidence of that here, should NYT researchers need assistance for future stories). MSNBC’s header proclaimed the speech “was even worse than expected.”
Not one of the authors of these pieces was a veteran. None of them fought on combat deployments under the failed military leaders of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. And none of them were twice awarded the Bronze Star like Hegseth.
My various interactions with military pals are hardly scientific, but credibly tell a very different story than the one bouncing around the usual echo chambers. One USAF fighter pilot and graduate of the service’s elite weapons school, on the cusp of separating from service, texted me that he “may have to reconsider leaving.” Another Air Force colleague, a quiet critic of this administration, admitted, “at least we’re getting serious again.” And an old infantry officer pal, now retired, offered me a relieved “finally.”
A more scientific Congressional report in 2021 found that 94 percent of sailors interviewed said the string of high-profile operational failures was related to Navy culture and leadership problems. (Full disclosure, I worked on this report as a Senate staffer).
The reaction to the speech was reflective of the wider disconnect between people who think for a living and people who do for a living. It was a microcosm of the 2016 and 2024 elections, with high-wealth, high-status coastal smarty-pants types utterly appalled at the national electorate’s rejection of weird political fads, their plea for common sense, and exhausted need for a return to the basics of good governance. This is a fair summarization of the Biden Administration’s treatment of the Pentagon. Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas frames it as a widening ideological dichotomy between the “people who take a shower before work and the people who take a shower after work.” I always liked the French philosopher Michel de Montaigne’s quote, possibly apocryphal, “I prefer the company of peasants as they have not been educated sufficiently to reason incorrectly.” In modern America, there seems to be an inverse relationship between educational credentials and common sense.
Well, to be fair, our educational system sucks.
Plus: “The defining characteristics of America’s post–Cold War military can be summarized as a widespread over-complication of simple things, a jettisoning of common sense, creeping politicization, an infatuation with peculiar management fads, and a slow but unmistakable erosion of the small daily disciplines whose sum total distinguishes a victorious military from a defeated one. The military has forgotten how to do the small things well. Is it any surprise it now struggles with the big things, too?”