Pete Hegseth’s Pathetic Warrior Cult Has Undermined the Military

The self-styled secretary of war’s attempts to rebrand the Department of Defense have gotten mired in a familiar pattern of failure.

Pete Hegseth and his “High-T Department of War” are having a rough go of it lately. Despite being hyper-focused on making sure U.S. troops “look like killers” and that none of them are “soft”, “fat,” or “mushy,” Hegseth’s Pentagon is burning through precision munitions stockpiles in its conflict with Iran, which despite his best efforts effectively controls traffic through the Strait of Hormuz. On top of that failure, DOD has lost Army Secretary Dan Driscoll over Hegseth’s disruption of the personnel pipeline and general mismanagement. And the cherry atop Hegseth’s failure sundae has come in the form of an impeachment effort from a Republican member of Congress over the conduct of the Iran war itself.

And yet Hegseth’s latest announcements suggest that he has learned remarkably little from his experiences. At a recent address at Quantico, he declared that the “warrior ethos has been revived” and “American deterrence is back,” even as he announced plans to eliminate 20 percent of general and admiral positions. He also briefly championed a plan to livestream the firing squad execution of Nidal Hasan, turning military violence into a public spectacle supposedly meant to demonstrate U.S. resolve, before a public backlash—strong enough to push Trump away from the planned display of public cruelty—put the kibosh on those plans. Still, the dissonance is jarring: The defense secretary is so thoroughly preoccupied with projecting toughness and glorifying lethality, all while presiding over a war that has exposed the limits of U.S. power potentially even more than its debacles in Vietnam and Iraq.

There is an older American story about what could happen when a nation selects military leaders based on their bravado and popularity among white supremacists. The Mexican-American War was one of the clearest early examples of the difference between U.S. military belligerence and effectiveness. The professional Regular Army, though small, was a highly military force whose officers understood logistics, discipline, command, and the unglamorous mechanics that allow a military to keep functioning when a war inevitably proves more difficult than the politicians who started it imagined.

However, alongside the regulars marched tens of thousands of........

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