In Reply to: Does the Secretary of War know anything about war? posted by mh on October 02, 2025 at 09:18:41
Some on point barbs in the fat Orange Shytgibbon’s direction too.
There is a certain kind of Army officer who, after the excitement of company command, finds his career stalled, and who perhaps leaves the service as a major in the National Guard filled with bitterness and resentment. He may then dream of one day being in a position to make all the superior officers who failed to appreciate his leadership qualities, his insight, his sheer fitness stand to attention and hear him lay down the law about what it is to be an officer, and threaten to fire those who do not meet his standards. In this respect, and this respect only, on that stage Pete Hegseth was living the dream.In all other respects, however, he was ridiculous. While much of what he said was unobjectionable (working out and getting haircuts are good things, after all), it was the kind of thing that a battalion commander might say to some scruffy lieutenants and sergeants. Indeed, Hegseth could not help himself, using we when he mentioned those in the service. The whole point of having a secretary of defense is that he or she is a civilian, first and foremost, and not a soldier. Hegseth’s examples, moreover, were drawn primarily from the only military things he knows firsthand—that is, the kind of tactics, training, and maintenance that a captain in charge of 150 soldiers has to worry about.
His dream world is the world of Ranger school (from which he never graduated), not the actual world of complex military operations involving land, air, sea, space, and cyberspace. One could not help but suspect that his time as a company-grade officer was the high point of the career of someone whose family life was ridden with multiple failures, whose attempts to run nonprofit organizations ran aground, and whose fame and wealth came from journalism, a profession he sincerely despises. He stuck with what he knows and genuinely reveres. Unfortunately for the country, he seems unable to transcend it.They had to have been aware that, by a rough estimate, there were more than 25,000 years of accumulated military experience in that room. To be lectured on the basics of military leadership and qualifications by a secretary of defense with eight months’ experience under his belt, and a few years of active soldiering beyond that, had to have been galling. To be summoned from the four corners of the globe, at considerable expense in money and effort and time, was a waste. They knew that too.