Pete Hegseth, Junior Officer - by Jay Kuo - The Status Kuo

S E E D E D   C O N T E N T

An unexpectedly harsh assessment of his performance comes from inside the Pentagon.

Jay KuoOct 22, 20255175694Share

Following his cringe-inducing performance before the nation's top commanders, summoned at great cost and risk from across the globe, Hegseth once again stands in a harsh spotlight.

And that's an odd place for a "Secretary of War" to be, when you think about it. Most Americans could not name a single other Defense Secretary in recent history. That's as it should be, because the job is supposed to be behind the scenes, not squarely in front of the cameras.

But in front of the cameras is where Hegseth has chosen repeatedly to place himself, whether it's doing chin-ups with RFK Jr., flying around like a Top Gun pilot, or lambasting a distinctly unimpressed group of the nation's top military commanders for allowing too much "woke" in the armed forces.

Criticism is bubbling up and splashing across mainstream culture. Recently, we saw Colin Jost on Saturday Night Live deliver a brilliant read of Hegseth as a raving homophobe and misogynist.

The critiques are coming from the conservative pundit class, too. Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan, herself no bleeding heart liberal, recently called Hegseth a "drama queen who makes things feel jarred and fevered." Her critique was devastating:

Mr. Hegseth gave a TED Talk, a weirdly self-reverential one. He paced the stage like a strutting, gelled bantam, like an amped-up actor with rehearsed gestures and expressions and voice shifts.
"You might say we're ending the war on warriors. I heard someone wrote a book about that." Mr. Hegseth is author of a book called "The War on Warriors." I guess he wants us to buy it.

For the non-ornithophiles, a bantam is a highly aggressive small male chicken. It's admittedly hard to get the image of a "strutting gelled bantam" out of our heads now.

But the latest takedown of Hegseth came not from the comedians or the punditry, but rather from inside the house. The Pentagon itself, that is. No less than the conservative Washington Times interviewed several top military commanders. And if what they had to say is indicative of the general views of the top brass, Hegseth is in trouble. More importantly, Hegseth may have trouble delivering what his boss wants.

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Great drag moments still happen in the military

The reporting by the Washington Times is extensive, so I'm going to highlight just a few choice words by senior military officials, who collectively dragged Hegseth to filth.

On the speech itself, senior officials called it many things, none of them flattering.

• "A massive waste of time"

• "If he ever had us, he lost us"

• "Grandstanding"

• "Embarrassing"

• "Theatrical"

• "Below our institution"

• "It seems like it's all about one guy here"

In the theatre business, when a new show opens, anxious producers pore over reviews looking for "pull quotes" that could still be used to promote the show, particularly if the reviews themselves are less than stellar.

In the Washington Times piece, there were no usable pull quotes for Hegseth, except perhaps that recruiting has improved ("Look! He's just in like Top Gun!") and that his own Pentagon spokesperson, Sean Parnell, could still manage to praise him, though producing significant cringe with the whole "warrior" thing:

"Secretary Hegseth's speech cemented a new but familiar culture we refer to as the warrior ethos. His message was simple: promotions and combat assignments will be given based on merit and ability, not diversity quotas. The war on warriors is over; political correctness has no home at the Department of War," Mr. Parnell said. "Physical fitness standards will be high, uniform and sex-neutral, ensuring our warriors are prepared to fight and win in any arena, no matter the circumstances."

Priorities and politics

Apart from that infamous speech, much of the military's criticism of Hegseth's leadership centered on his priorities and politicization of the armed forces. Specifically, there is a prevalent view that Hegseth operates with a "junior officer's mentality." And that, officials say,

has led him to micromanage policies about issues such as military facial hair standards and press access to the Pentagon, sometimes at the expense of the much broader portfolio of a typical defense secretary.

"Mainly what I see from him are not serious things," one current senior officer told the paper. "It's, 'Why did this service member tweet this?' Or internal politics and drama. That's mostly what I see."

A more experienced Defense Secretary would be focused on bigger issues. Numerous officials interviewed, including military officers and current and former Defense Department employees, described Hegseth as having the mentality of a midgrade officer. This has "often led him to fixate on issues that otherwise could be left to the services or lower-ranking officials." Instead of strategic readiness, Hegseth has been "deeply focused on fitness, grooming standards and other issues that typically don't reach the desk of the defense secretary."

Further, while the military has long prided itself on being apolitical, Hegseth has brought his own culture war bugaboos into policy, resulting in some real damage to the command structure and morale. His purging of top female and racial minority leaders, for example, has had a lasting negative impact. Officials interviewed by the Washington Times argue that

the firings, early retirements and resignations that have amassed over the past eight months will fundamentally weaken the military.

"Across the services, we are bleeding talent, talented generals and flag officers, for what appears to be the opposite of a meritocracy," one current senior officer noted. "There are people being held back from promotions, or being fired, or removed for sometimes unknown reasons, often for favoritism, or just simple relationships."

Moreover, Hegseth's leadership style, which has been marked by extreme paranoia—including forced polygraphs—and mass firings, even of his closest advisors, has left the entire Pentagon unsettled:

Sources described an atmosphere of uncertainty and fear, with hirings and firings sometimes seeming to come out of nowhere.

"Leadershipwise in the building, I can tell you the level of chaos is unprecedented," said a former Defense Department official. "Even the teams that I was on, people were fired overnight for no given reason." He added, "New people were brought to the team with no clear role. There was just a lot of backbiting and mistrust and general unprofessionalism going on. And quite frankly, that's carried through, and I think you saw that in the large number of civilians who left the department."

All of this has eroded trust to the breaking point—and all at a critical juncture for the military.

The problems with Pete

Hegseth is already under pressure as a result of various missteps that have dominated the headlines, ever since the media realized that the guy in charge does very stupid things—such as texting war plans on insecure Signal chat groups to which a reporter was somehow invited.

Here is just a smattering of stories from this month alone :

• Hegseth's excited announcement of a Qatari military base in Idaho, hurriedly walked back by the White House;

• The Pentagon press corps' collective rejection of new press restrictions, leading to no mainstream press inside the building;

• Admiral Alvin Holsey's resignation from the Southern Command following reported disagreements over the military's policy of sinking alleged civilian drug smuggling vessels and killing all on board, including innocent fishermen;

• Two survivors of those U.S. military strikes who were repatriated without being charged with drug smuggling, now able to tell their stories; and

• Falling shrapnel from live artillery fired over I-5 that nearly hit Vice President JD Vance's security detail.

These mistakes, embarrassments and increasingly illegal uses of the military are forcing a reckoning. They also come at a critical inflection moment: The military's increasing loss of confidence in Hegseth is manifesting just as Trump has telegraphed his plans to deploy troops into U.S. cities.

As evidenced by recent internal National Guard documents, there are already many within the military who are deeply troubled by the unpopularity of troop deployments into urban areas such as Washington, D.C. They are concerned about many Americans' increasingly negative view of the armed forces, particularly should they actively participate in securing a police state for Trump.

For its part, the military command appears eager to return to the business of defending the country from foreign enemies, instead of targeting civilians and wasting time on wholly trivial matters.

As one current army general put it, they came to Quantico expecting to hear about a new strategic initiative, "Not about fucking haircuts."

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