A novice defence secretary lectures the brass on what it takes to win

Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth has long maintained that the US military badly needed a leader with dust on his boots to shake up a force that has gone soft and “woke”.

On Tuesday, he faced a room of hundreds of generals and admirals, whom he had summoned from across the globe, and made the case that he was that leader.

Hegseth’s vision of the military and what it should be was almost entirely defined by his 12 months of service in Iraq and his experience as a major in the Army National Guard.

Much of his address focused on the kinds of issues he would have dealt with as a young platoon leader in the 101st Airborne Division in Iraq, or as a company commander in the guard. He talked about grooming standards. “No more beards, long hair, superficial, individual expression,” he told the brass. “We’re going to cut our hair, shave, shave our beards and adhere to standards.”

He preached the importance of physical fitness. “Frankly, it’s tiring to look out at combat formations, or really any formation, and see fat troops,” he said. “Likewise, it’s completely unacceptable to see fat generals and admirals in the halls of the Pentagon.”

He maintained, without presenting any evidence, that standards had been lowered across the force over the past decade to meet arbitrary racial and gender quotas.

Fixing these problems, Hegseth said, was the first step toward repairing a military that, since World War II, had lost the ability to win wars.

To some, Hegseth’s speech was poorly matched to his audience of senior officers who, in most cases, are responsible for complex military operations such as maintenance of nuclear submarines, management of America’s global alliances or development of complex air-tasking orders, such as the one needed for the strikes on Iran’s nuclear program this year.

The officers assembled in the room listened silently. It is likely, though, that at least some of them were seething at his suggestion that their collective failure to enforce basic standards had caused, or even contributed to, the military’s failings in Afghanistan and Iraq.

“I mean, first of all, that’s like an insane insult to his senior officers, who all made their bones fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan,” said Elliot Ackerman, who led Marines in the second battle of Fallujah, Iraq, and served with a Marines special operations unit in Afghanistan.

“Those guys have got a lot more dust on their boots than he does.”

Hegseth’s speech mirrored his leadership style over his first eight months in office, during which he has focused less on meeting with his foreign counterparts around the world and more on doing pull-ups and early morning runs with troops, pictures of which are posted on the Pentagon’s social media feed.

“If the secretary of war can do regular, hard PT, so can every member of our joint force,” he told the generals, using the military abbreviation for physical training.

His speech preceded a long, rambling address from President Donald Trump, who bashed his predecessor, president Joe Biden, for the US military’s chaotic withdrawal and defeat in Afghanistan.

“I think it was the most embarrassing day in the history of our country,” he said. “And now we’re back. We’re not going to have any of that crap happen, I can tell you. That was terrible, so terrible.”

Both Trump and Hegseth were reckoning with the aftermath of one of the longest, most costly and disappointing stretches of war in American history.

Trump addressed the senior officers as a politician who had bested his hated rivals. Hegseth spoke largely from the perspective of a junior officer still burdened by the anger, pride and deep frustration of his service in Iraq nearly two decades earlier.

“He views the world from the point of view of a not terribly successful major in the National Guard,” said Eliot Cohen, a military historian who served in the State Department under president George W. Bush. “For him, it’s push-ups, pull-ups and pugil sticks. It’s aggressiveness.”

Hegseth said one of his major tasks has been to separate those officers who were truly invested in the changes that he believed had weakened the force and those who were grudgingly following lawful orders.

In his 2024 book, The War on Warriors, Hegseth maintained that women were not mentally suited to combat roles. “Women bring life into the world,” he wrote. “Their role in war is to make it a less deathly experience.”

In his speech to the generals, Hegseth struck a slightly different tone, arguing that the military had improperly loosened standards to accommodate women who may not be as able to carry a rucksack or lift a casualty on the battlefield.

“War does not care if you’re a man or a woman,” Hegseth said. “Neither does the enemy.”

But he insisted that he did not want to prevent women from serving in combat roles. Rather, he said, he wanted to hold them to the “highest male standard”.

“If that means no women qualify for some combat jobs, so be it,” he said.

His goal seemed to be to turn back the clock to the simpler, more straightforward World War II era. He noted repeatedly that this was the last time the United States won “a major theatre war”.

The nostalgia-soaked speech, though, did not acknowledge how much had changed in the past 75 years. In World War II, the entire country mobilised to fight the fascist Axis forces in a war that would change the course of history.

Today, the military Hegseth leads faces a world of complex and shifting security challenges that require the Pentagon to work through allies and partners. Often, the enemies’ actions in cyberspace or the information domain are intended to weaken American resolve and credibility without tipping into all-out war.

Hegseth’s vision of military strength left little room for these subtleties. Nor did it mention the recent deployment of National Guard soldiers to places such as Washington, DC, where they have been tasked with “beautification” missions, such as raking leaves and picking up trash.

Hegseth seemed to divide his senior leaders into two categories: “the woke” and the war fighters. Most of the senior officers in the room, he said, fell into the latter category.

“You are hereby liberated to be an apolitical, hard-charging, no-nonsense, constitutional leader that you joined the military to be,” he told them.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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