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In the end, it was mostly blither. When Secretary of Defense Peter Hegseth announced a gathering of some 800 generals and admirals (with their senior enlisted advisers), rumors ran wild. Was the administration going to switch the commissioning oath so that officers swear fealty to the president rather than the Constitution? Was the secretary of defense going to publicly dismiss stunned three and four stars? Would he declare an American withdrawal from Europe and Asia to concentrate on hemispheric defense? Would he at least reveal the outlines of the new National Defense Strategy? None of those things happened.
Instead, we got a great deal of verbal incontinence, of two different sorts. President Donald Trump—who initially seemed not to have heard about this planned gathering, but when he did decided to join because it seemed like fun—followed the secretary with more than an hour of meandering whines, boasts, and half-hearted attempts at humor. He appeared tired, his voice raspy, his attention span even shorter than usual; he joked feebly about not wanting to trip while walking downstairs.
There was plenty of nastiness to be sure—unremitting sneers at his predecessor (particularly his autopen), rants about “left wing lunatics,” and a good many racist dog whistles. President Barack Obama he described as “bopping downstairs,” and the places where Americans were sent pointlessly were Kenya and Somalia rather than, say, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, not to mention his invocation of the two N-words (nuclear being one of them) that one should not use. And of course, there were the asides about the “animals” in the inner cities.
The post-event reporting unsurprisingly emphasized the scarier stuff, particularly the talk of “invasion from within” and the importance of being ready to fight against all enemies “foreign and domestic,” and above all using American cities as “training grounds” for the U.S. military. All bad, but—considered in the context of a speech that weaved and staggered like a drunken man in a dark alleyway—less menacing than one might think. It was Trump being Trump, playing to his base (who probably was not watching), and imagining that he had achieved great things in the space of days by issuing a few orders. What was most striking was the irony of the man who denounced Joe Biden, in effect, for senility showing some of the same symptoms himself as he lost his thread of thought, reminisced, and daydreamed on the stage.
The secretary of defense was far peppier, striding across the stage in a suit calculated to show off his athletic physique, with a giant American flag for a backdrop. It was, perhaps, a homage to the opening scene of Patton, in which George C. Scott gave a magnificent, if bowdlerized, version of a speech that Patton repeated numerous times to American units in England waiting to land in Europe. Hegseth was vigorous, declarative, definite, chopping with his hands as he narrowed his eyes to deliver his guidance. He spelled out in terms the meanest intellect could grasp the importance of physical fitness and grooming standards. He used the word lethal a lot, and also war. He stood tall.
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.
And what of the audience? They were for the most part, and entirely appropriately, silent. Trump had been forewarned that that would be the case but nevertheless seemed deflated by it. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs and his colleagues were not on the stage. The generals’ faces were, in the vast majority, impassive. But undoubtedly, there were thoughts.
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.
What Hegseth apparently never learned in his previous life was that hectoring is not inspiration, that respect for one’s subordinates’ time (which he abused by bringing them together in this way) should go hand in hand with respect for their accomplishments (which he also abused by refusing to tell them why they were being called together). He may have thought he was showing steely leadership by denouncing three distinguished retired four-star generals—Peter Chiarelli, Frank MacKenzie, and Mark Milley—by name. In fact, there were undoubtedly those present who had served under those men and valued them, and in any case, it was a loutish thing to do. But then again, there was plenty of the lout in Hegseth’s speech—in, for example, the vulgarities. (Would George C. Marshall, whom he praised, have used those words in a speech to generals? Highly unlikely.)
America’s military leadership is, thank goodness, professional, disciplined, and above all drilled in commitment to the Constitution. It has its share of sycophants and careerists, because generals and admirals are human, but on the whole, these men and women understand the standards that should animate them and the secretary infinitely better than he or the president does. And so, they kept silent. But there were undoubtedly thoughts in their heads, and monosyllabic words, of which the most printable is probably punk. Because it was a punk kind of performance.
The American military will follow lawful orders and disobey unlawful ones. It will be grateful for weapons put in its hands, and the freedom to prepare itself for war. It will be disciplined, and it will respect the offices of the secretary of defense and the president. But the two men themselves? Not much respect is due them as human beings who have, at this moment and in these ways, shown themselves unfit to lead the greatest military on Earth. Nor will they get any.
