“From this moment forward, the only mission of the newly restored Department of War is this: Warfighting,” Secretary of War Pete Hegseth said on Sept. 30, to an unprecedented gathering of hundreds of America’s generals and admirals in Quantico, Virginia. “Prepare for war,” he added.

The U.S. military is hardly prepared for the most destructive of human events, in large part because it is operating at Pentagon (slow) speed.

Hegseth, to his credit, is going to great lengths to get a bloated War Department into shape for war. Today, there are about 840 active-duty flag officers — one general or admiral for every 1,500 members of the armed services. At the end of World War II, there was one flag for every 6,000 members.

“Hegseth wasted no time in the ‘all call’ of flag officers in channeling the ghost of Gen. George C. Marshall, chief of staff of the U.S. Army in the Second World War,” Blaine Holt, a retired U.S. Air Force general, told me. “Hegseth’s comparison of the relationship between Marshall and Secretary of War Henry Stimson to his relationship with Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen. Dan Caine sent a lightning bolt through the senior-level audience. Marshall cleared the decks of ineffective generals, firing about 195 of them in his first six months.”

Marshall knew America’s army had, after the First World War, awarded stars based largely on seniority and so carried generals unfit for wartime command. He chose his........

© The Hill