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Two key takeaways emerged from Pete Hegseth’s embarrassing performance before the commanding officers charged with defending America’s national security. The first is that Hegseth, who recently defined himself as America’s new secretary of war, understands next to nothing about military affairs or national security. 

Any military officer with combat experience could have told Hegseth that putting the entire US command structure in one place, along with the commander in chief, is an invitation to any potential enemy to wipe out American defenses with a single blow — especially if you have told literally everybody in the world that the meeting is going to take place, and its exact time and location, well in advance. As far as defense strategy goes, Hegseth clearly doesn’t get it. 

The second takeaway is that the US is obviously not in any immediate danger from any foreign adversary. If it had been in danger, Hegseth’s absurd histrionics would have been too tempting an opportunity for such an adversary to pass up.

A Stony Silence

As for the American generals and admirals ordered to watch Hegseth’s performance, they maintained a dignified silence, but one has to wonder what was going through their minds as Hegseth reenacted one of his rants, developed during years as a weekend news anchor on Fox News.

The bottom line, for both Hegseth’s talk and the rambling presentation by President Donald Trump that followed, was that, as the MAGA crowd sees it, the US military has been too concerned about the rule of law and sensitivity to cultural differences — the complexities of the global stage be damned. 

Hegseth made it clear that he wants warriors ready to shoot when ordered to do so. No more of the namby-pamby stuff that led to defeat in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan! “Lethality” is in. And by the way, “woke,” whatever that means, is definitely out.

From now on, commanders should feel free to act first and apologize later (if at all). 

Hegseth made it clear that he wants warriors ready to shoot when ordered to do so. No more of the namby-pamby stuff that led to defeat in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan! “Lethality” is in. And by the way, “woke,” whatever that means, is definitely out. 

No doubt, Hegseth failed to notice that quite a few of the generals in the audience were Black or Hispanic. Hegseth didn’t say so, but the implication was that anyone who was not white and not of northern European heritage had reached the highest echelons of the US military simply because previous administrations had taken pity on them. 

Of course, Hegseth sounded like an idiot. Everyone knew that he was unfit for the job when Trump nominated him. The only reason he actually became secretary of defense after Trump nominated him is that a Republican-dominated Senate, which had been elected to carry out its Constitutional duty to provide “advice and consent,” failed to do its job. 

“No One Got It”: How the US Military Has Faltered

But apart from Congress’s failure to protect the country, the out-of-his-depth Hegseth did manage to touch on some critical issues that led to America’s failure in recent wars. 

I enlisted in the US Army rather than be drafted during the Vietnam War. I spent a year and a half as an “area specialist,” assigned to a team next to the Cambodian border at the entry point of the so-called Ho Chi Minh Trail to the area around Saigon. 

Many of the commanding officers, Gen. William Westmoreland among them, had been formed as junior officers during World War II, when the overriding battlefield objectives were to kill Nazis and seize land, and the only conceivable end of the war was Germany’s “unconditional surrender.” In Vietnam, that approach to combat became the mission that was labeled “search and destroy.” Find the enemy (North Vietnamese fighters) and kill them. 

But winning in Vietnam required “winning the hearts and minds” of South Vietnam’s civilian population. If you lost them, you lost the war. How many American soldiers assigned to Vietnam understood that? How many junior officers understood? 

When I was still with the team on the border, the American embassy sent a political officer to identify which South Vietnamese officials might possess leadership qualities. The embassy wanted to pick the best candidates and put them in key positions. 

“Well,” I said, “The deputy provincial chief is a pimp. He procures village girls for his leading officers.” The political officer looked miffed. “Don’t bother me with morality,” he said. “I want to know if he is effective.” 

He might have been just the kind of guy that Hegseth is looking for these days. “Imagine,” I said, “that you are a 16-year-old boy living in this village, and the deputy provincial chief forces your sister into prostitution. What will you do next? Which side are you going to fight for? I can tell you what I would do.” 

The American embassy didn’t get it. No one got it.

I remember encountering an American soldier coming back from Vietnam. I asked him what he thought of the Vietnamese. “I wouldn’t know,” he said. “The only ones I ever met were in front of me, and I was firing at them with a machine gun.”

Many of the American soldiers sent to Vietnam were from the Midwest and just out of high school. They understood nothing of Asia, international affairs, or anything outside of their hometown in the United States. But their experience in Vietnam gradually taught them the reality of the situation. 

Before long, they began respecting the North Vietnamese they were fighting against and, after a while, they stopped fighting aggressively. The enlisted men let it be known that they would defend their positions, but they would not risk their lives to participate in the war aggressively. American officers who did not get the message were fragged. A grenade with the pin in it or a bullet was placed under an aggressive officer’s pillow. If he didn’t get the message, he might be killed by his own men. 

After a dozen or so incidents, the Pentagon began to realize that the Army was disintegrating. Either the US would pull out of Vietnam, or it would no longer have a fighting force.

Vietnam: A Lesson Not Learned

Having served for a year and a half in Vietnam, I got out of the Army and then went back to Vietnam as a journalist. I stayed another four and a half years. After Vietnam, I spent several years covering the Middle East. When the Russians invaded Afghanistan, I trekked across the mountains with a caravan of mujahideen. When Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, I was in Saudi Arabia, then in Kuwait, and after that in Iraq. 

Most of these wars involved complex tribal relationships and the confusing political vacuum resulting from the collapse of colonial empires at the end of World War II. The chaos created by the sudden withdrawal of colonial administrations was further complicated by the superpower rivalry between the US and the Soviet Union, both of which sought to fill the vacuum. 

The role of the army was no longer simply killing a well-defined enemy; it was rather the judicious application of force in a culturally complex environment. If you didn’t understand the environment and the underlying forces at play, victory became unattainable, unless you wanted to get back into the colonial game.

Afghanistan was a prime example. When I went into Afghanistan with some of the men of the anti-Russian guerrilla leader Ahmad Shah Massoud, I had a chance to see war from the insurgents’ point of view. I remained on a mountaintop overlooking the Panjshir Valley while Russian helicopters flew a few hundred yards over my head. I counted 60. When they saw a helicopter, the Afghans covered themselves with a beige blanket that they always have with them. Literally undercover, they were indistinguishable from the innumerable rocks around them. 

Once the Russians were gone, President George W. Bush went after Afghanistan as punishment for the 9/11 terrorist attacks against the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington, DC (the terrorists had trained in camps in Afghanistan). 

The US followed up its defeat of the Islamist Talibani government in Kabul, the nation’s capital, with a considerable investment in building a successor civil government of pro-Western Afghanis. But once again, as in Vietnam, we weren’t careful about whom we dealt with. In a search for allies, we joined forces with some of the most brutal war lords in the country. Then we wondered why many Afghans refused to accept our vision of democracy. 

More than that, successive administrations in Washington refused to acknowledge the diverse nature of Afghanistan’s population. Afghanistan spans a vast geographic area, and within that area there is enormous ethnic diversity. Get it wrong, and you are dealing with tribal warfare as much as the original fight that you became involved in. 

In the US-led fight against the Taliban, the Afghans faced a simple equation. They knew the Americans would get tired and leave; the Taliban wouldn’t. The choice, if you wanted to survive, was simple. 

Yet Washington either couldn’t see that, or its appointed agents were raking in so much money financing the war that it didn’t care. Shirley Highway runs by the Pentagon, and the promoters of the Afghan war became known as the Shirley Highway bandits. 

The Military’s Professional and Political Choice

The generals and admirals listening this week to Hegseth and then to the incoherent, but ominous, ramblings of Trump know all of this history. They learn it at the high-level war colleges they attend as part of their training. Tuesday morning they sat in silence and listened. Trump asked why they didn’t applaud, and then joked that if they didn’t like what he and Hegseth were saying, they could always trash their military careers and look for employment somewhere else.

While Russian President Vladimir Putin pursues a deadly war in Ukraine and keeps testing the war-readiness of our NATO allies with menacing drones, Trump told the assembled generals and admirals that our enemy is “within.” Trump was clearly referring to his Democratic — and democratic — opposition. 

Unlike the US Congress that foisted Hegseth on them, most of these men and women are true patriots. They care about the United States, they care about the rule of law, and they are willing to lay down their lives to protect our way of life. 

They understand how international conflicts today reflect a complex, post-World War II world. Yet they have been saddled with a commander in chief who is obsessed with demeaning his predecessor (their former commander in chief) in the most petty ways — and who, during this fateful meeting, told the assembled military leaders that they should turn their attention to practicing their warcraft on America’s major cities. 

While Russian President Vladimir Putin pursues a deadly war in Ukraine and keeps testing the war-readiness of our NATO allies with menacing drones, Trump told the assembled generals and admirals that our enemy is “within.” Trump was clearly referring to his Democratic — and democratic — opposition. 

For the US military high command, chosen to lead because they really do know what they are talking about, the real enemy is still to be determined. 

More to the point, are the generals and admirals, who took an oath to uphold the US Constitution, ready to resist orders that violate that oath?