Pete Hegseth, to his credit, understands a truth about the world: the job of the military is to kill people.
Hegseth, the new “Secretary of War”, is obsessed with the idea of presenting troops who are well prepared and trained for this. He refers to it as “lethality,” a word he used twice in his roughly hour-long State of the Force address Wednesday, in which he laid out his vision for this new, more violent military: a force of unified, fit “fighters,” freed from the burden of bureaucracy and norms of the past.
“No more diversity quotas, no more gender pronouns, no more identity months,” Hegseth said while pacing the stage. “Only the warrior ethos.”
If that wasn’t enough, he doubled down moments later.
“We are no longer the awakened department or the weak department,” Hegseth said, stumbling slightly over his words. “No fannies, no fatties, no trannies, no bearded guys, no weirdos, no wimps, no radicals. Just warriors. Just tough troops, ready and committed.”
To achieve this, Hegseth believes, the army must train. He wants every soldier to do physical training every day. He leads group workouts at the Pentagon, participates in PT, does pull-ups and push-ups, and flexes his muscles. Generally speaking, this is all very good for a Secretary of Defense. Go ahead, engage your troops. (Perhaps less normal is his obsession with monitoring the troops’ testosterone levels.) But Hegseth’s CrossFit crusade isn’t really about killing.
By any objective measure, the U.S. military is very good at killing. We have more bombs, more planes, more ships and better trained and equipped troops than any other country in the world. The “warrior philosophy” that Hegseth is so obsessed with is a relic of recruiting videos from the height of the war on terror, the years of bearded operatives with wiry muscles covered in Kevlar fabric, banging in doors, cutting off heads and getting their hands dirty. These guys still exist, of course. They haven’t left. If we need them again, they will be there.
But the fight doesn’t look like that anymore.
The same day Hegseth gave his speech, the United States officially withdrew from Iraq, one of the last active American presences in the wars of occupation that have defined the military for the past two decades. War is different now. It is fought with drones and cruise missiles from the decks of ships in the Persian Gulf and from dusty air bases outside the glittering oil-merchant megacities of the American Middle East. Does every soldier involved in this operation need a perfect waist-to-shoulder ratio? Does this physically impede America’s diversity, equity, and inclusion policy interests abroad? Has the existence of trans military personnel ever stopped the U.S. military from killing even a single person it wanted to kill, anywhere in the world, at any time?
Hegseth, I think, would say yes. He has a personal chip on his shoulder. “Woke” elements of the military bureaucracy once removed him from his position during Joe Biden’s inauguration because he has a tattoo on his arm that says “DEUS VULT,” a common rallying cry for a very particular type of extremist Christian nationalism. But most rational observers, those who see clearly America’s unprecedented ability to blow shit up, can recognize that all of these arguments are battles of cultural semantics that have fundamentally nothing to do with the military’s ability to kill. When it comes to “lethality,” the U.S. military is doing pretty well. If you doubt this, ask an Iraqi.
Hegseth’s consistent focus on violent language and imagery is largely a marketing tactic for what is more holistic cultural and political change. Hegseth does not want a military that reflects the cumbersomeness and bureaucracy of the American state apparatus, in the same way that Trump relentlessly strives to cut red tape and federal “waste.” There are certainly inefficiencies in the federal system, but much of this bureaucracy exists precisely for the reason Hegseth and Trump want it gone: it serves to check unitary power. Hegseth wants a united, homogenous army made up of soldiers who share his cultural prejudices, who share his bloodthirsty philosophy, and who share his religion. In his State of the Force address and many other recent public appearances, Hegseth has cited scripture and explicitly referenced his Christian faith, an unspoken assumption that he expects the men and women in uniform below him to be Christians. He wants a force that, in his own words, does not buy into “fake news” from the media, “false headlines about the length of deployments, blatantly false claims that troop morale is low, or outright propaganda.”
A more malleable military also represents a better business opportunity. The Trump administration has been shockingly effective at streamlining the process by which it can redistribute money to whatever oligarchs it chooses. The so-called War Department is no different. In his speech, Hegseth announced an initiative called “Project Meridian,” a sort of technology incubator for military contractors that will be led by Elon Musk, Palmer Luckey and, bizarrely, Newt Gingrich, who Hegseth said would be joined by “hand-picked private sector executives.”
“Their work will be focused on discovering, developing and fielding the weapons and systems that our children and grandchildren will need in their lifetimes, without any limitations or creative restrictions,” Hegseth said. “On any future battlefield, from beneath the surface to beyond the Moon, our American warriors will be armed with absolute technological superiority because we will have the foresight to prepare today for tomorrow. »
It’s the facade. There is, of course, some truth to this: the military has a lot of work to do to adapt to the new forms of warfare taking place in Ukraine. The battle has changed. But what Project Meridian represents is an evolution toward a faster, less regulated version of the military-industrial complex. There will be less surveillance. The money will go where Trump and Hegseth want it, and will be delivered to the tech barons and traditional defense contractors who curry the most favor with the administration. It’s for the good of the soldier, no matter what Hegseth says. It doesn’t make us more mortal. It just makes a select few – some of whom aren’t even Americans – that much richer.
After all, that’s the point, right? A prosperous, united Christian nation, led by titans of industry who bow only to a single leader who can reshape the world on a whim. No big guys, no weirdos, no radicals. No dissent, above all. Dissent is treason. As soldiers, and even as civilians, we should only think about how to kill. Hegseth and his hand-picked private sector will take care of the rest.
Gn headline
