Resentiment

It is not normally my practice to quote neocons here, even those who have some useful claim to reform (or at least to “the Republican Party Left Me,” which isn’t quite reform) because whatever their useful contributions the ideological affiliation tends quite reasonably to obscure the argument for the fine audience of this fine blog. The exceptions I make tend to be on questions of that are near and dear to the academic expertise of the writer. On this point, Eliot Cohen (an expert on civil-military relations) has delivered a worthy moment of pure savagery:

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.

Pete Hegseth is a ridiculous human being at a ridiculous moment in our ridiculous history.