Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s “State of the Force” address had it all, said David Ignatius in The Washington Post: “the good, bad, and dangerous.” In September's histrionic speech, Hegseth strutted back and forth across a stage, combining culture-war rants “with genuinely radical” reforms. He declared he wanted “no fatties, no trannies, no beardos, no weirdos, no wimps, no radicals” in a military he’s refashioning with high-testosterone lethal patriots. He accused the media of treason for reporting his military’s Iran failures, and revealed he plans an overall 20% reduction in generals and admirals, continuing a purge that’s already eliminated 10% of top officers. But Hegseth also announced some sensible “attempts to transform a sclerotic Pentagon bureaucracy,” unveiling an “Autonomous Warfare Command” to oversee drone operations and enlisting tech founders Elon Musk and Palmer Luckey and former Republican House speaker Newt Gingrich to study the future of warfare. Quite intentionally, Hegseth is overturning “military norms as aggressively as President Trump has shattered those in other spheres.
Hegseth only proved again that he’s “manifestly unfit for his job,” said Tom Nichols in The Atlantic. His speech was “a partisan disgrace,” filled with childish insults and resentment. He’s creating an Office of Religious Affairs and directing cadets to get degrees at conservative Christian schools like Hillsdale College, instead of elite “woke factories” like Harvard. To “redefine the future of national defense,” Hegseth is giving his “three wise men” in Musk, Luckey, and Gingrich just 120 days. The overall goal is to ensure the military becomes “a MAGA-looking, MAGA-sounding, MAGA- believing, and MAGA-supporting Christian praetorian guard,” said Rachel E. VanLandingham in MS.now. “The ideological clowns are out,” Hegseth proclaimed, but he’s “the real ideological clown—and a dangerous one at that.”
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