The Secretary of All Wars

Having taken the highly unusual move of summoning hundreds of generals to Quantico on September 30 — leading to speculation about radical shakeups or even coup preparations — Hegseth railed about the need to put an end to the ​“Woke Department” he inherited from the Biden administration, with its ​“toxic ideological garbage.” He went on: ​“No more identity months, DEI offices, dudes in dresses. No more climate change worship, no more division, distraction or gender delusions, no more debris.” Critical to this purge, it seems, are grooming, fitness and masculinity. Cutting beards (because ​“we don’t have a military full of Nordic pagans”), losing weight (“fat troops are tiring to look at”) and enforcing the ​“highest male standard only” are the mission objectives. 

As for strategy? Hegseth kept it simple: ​“To our enemies, FAFO.” 

In his 2020 book, American Crusade: Our Fight to Stay Free, Hegseth exploited the fact that the language of war easily slips from the material to the figurative, as well as from enemies foreign to domestic, writing: ​“Arm yourself — metaphorically, intellectually, physically. Our fight is not with guns. Yet.” 

His 2024 follow-up, The War on Warriors: Behind the Betrayal of the Men Who Keep Us Free, elaborated on the argument that the Left’s successes in the culture wars have hamstrung the U.S. ability to fight real wars (with real men). A veteran of the illegal invasions and occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, Hegseth constantly links to his self-image as a Christian nationalist soldier fighting ​“Islamists,” and the rise of MAGA is pictured as payback for a betrayal: ​“Busy killing Islamists in shithole countries — and then betrayed by our leaders — our warriors have every reason to let America’s dynasty fade away. Leftists stole a lot from us, but we won’t let them take this. Time for round two— we won’t miss this war.” And unless victory is achieved, American war and American warriors will be doomed: ​“Make no mistake about it: the Left wants to destroy the one institution standing between them and total control — the United States military. The Left captured the military quickly, and we must reclaim it at a faster pace. We must wage a frontal assault. A swift counterattack, in broad daylight.”

Beyond muzzling the media, Hegseth’s crusade against the emasculation of the warrior class is focused on two enemies: diversity and legality. The Pentagon has joined the campaign against DEI and ​“gender ideology” with its own book bans and purges of website content, and it eliminated the Defense Advisory Committee on Women in the Services. Press Secretary Kingsley Wilson declared on X that the committee was ​“focused on advancing a divisive feminist agenda that hurts combat readiness.” In War on Warriors, sounding the loudest of dog whistles, Hegseth blasted the Biden administration for promoting ​“woke ​‘diverse’ recruits” and sidelining ​“patriotic, faith-filled, and brave young Americans.” In Hegseth’s vision, the Army could be a ​“deradicalization machine.” As he declared: ​“We want those diverse recruits — pumped full of vaccines and even more poisonous ideologies — to be sharing a basic training bunk with sane Americans.” Whereas universities, which Hegseth seems to think are uniformly ​“Marxist,” are merely places where ​“underprivileged kids learn how to hobnob with the elites,” he imagines the military as the institution in which ​“potential Antifa members learn what it really means to use force for just and honorable reasons.”

In Hegseth’s worldview, justice and (“tepid”) legality are not synonymous, and his animus against diversity is only matched by his hostility to the lawyers that curb the violent projection of American power. Before joining Trump’s cabinet, Hegseth had already railed against the judge advocate generals (JAGs, derided by Hegseth as ​“jagoffs”) meant to provide independent counsel on the legality of military actions. For Hegseth, it’s the fault of lawyers that the United States hasn’t won any wars since World War II, and he has fired top lawyers for the Army, Navy and Air Force, claiming they were ​“roadblocks to orders that are given by a commander in chief.” Hegseth’s personal attorney, Tim Parlatore, who represented him in a sexual assault case and worked for Trump on the Mar-a-Lago classified documents and January 6 cases, has been tasked with reviewing JAGs, while Hegseth is now trying to redeploy hundreds of them as temporary immigration judges.

The gagging of military lawyers fits tidily with the ​“Department of War’s” pivot to a hemispheric notion of the ​“homeland,” which connects sending troops to Los Angeles or ​“war-ravaged Portland” as backup for Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the extrajudicial killings of alleged drug traffickers off of the coast of Venezuela. Hegseth has even mused about the possibility of striking cartels within Mexican territory. Meanwhile, the spurious idea that Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro is the head of a Cártel de los Soles and allied with the Tren de Aragua gang, as well as the baseless notion that Venezuela is a central conduit for fentanyl and other drugs into the United States, are being used to justify a naval buildup in the Caribbean with a clear menace of regime change. Obvious parallels are being made with George H.W. Bush’s 1989 invasion of Panama. A draft bill is going around Congress that would grant Trump powers to order military action in a ​“drug trafficking war.” Harvard Law School professor and former George W. Bush official Jack Goldsmith has referred to it as ​“an open-ended war authorization against an untold number of countries, organizations, and persons that the president could deem within its scope.”

Hegseth is profoundly at ease with this expansive and amorphous conception of war. Speaking in Panama City at the Central American Security Conference in April, he linked immigration and drug cartels with the idea that ​“the era of capitulating to coercion by the Communist Chinese is over,” referencing China’s ​“growing and adversarial control of strategic land and critical infrastructure.” This belligerent upgrade of the Monroe Doctrine was presented as backed by a restoration of the ​“warrior ethos” and encapsulated in a slogan: ​“To put America first, we will put the Americas first.” Apparently, this projection of U.S. military power across the region is ​“not globalism or interventionism,” but a ​“golden age of shared national interests.” In a Fox interview after the attack on a speedboat in the Caribbean that killed 11 people, Hegseth elaborated that here is where U.S. power should be projected, not in ​“far-flung places that had a nebulous connection to our own security in the homeland.”

As historian Greg Grandin told me, what we are witnessing in this hemispheric pivot is a regional hegemon in a fractured world trying to secure its hinterlands. In his view, the administration’s ​“war party” — Hegseth, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Drug Enforcement Agency head Terry Cole and Vice President JD Vance — thinks ​“the key to the region is taking out Maduro, after which Nicaragua and Cuba would fall, after which the more independent-minded center-leftists who sell their soy and copper to China will be easier to handle.” Whether this war party prevails is yet to be seen, though if it does, the consequences will surely be catastrophic.

Meanwhile, Hegseth has succeeded in putting an insidiously indefinite notion of war at the heart of MAGA. While Trump is marketed as the ​“president of peace” for allegedly ending seven armed conflicts, his secretary of defense is advancing a heady cocktail of the war on woke, the war on drugs, the war on ​“illegal” immigration and military action (as he once wrote, ​“Feeding a well-oiled killing machine, now that’s my jam”).

We should not forget that, as someone who described his ​“planetary purpose” as ​“destroy[ing] Islamist radicals,” Hegseth’s image of war is ultimately not secular, but a crusade. In his eulogy for Charlie Kirk (“a warrior for country, a warrior for Christ”), Hegseth declared: ​“This is not a political war, this is not even a cultural war, it is a spiritual war.” A Christian nationalist — or, more aptly, a Christian imperialist — there’s never been any real distinctions for Hegseth between these different meanings; the ​“well oiled killing machine” is always infused with ​“spirit,” with talk of God, civilization, nation, masculinity and homeland, even when what really drives it is the desperate and increasingly violent effort to use military power to shore up waning U.S. economic power, and to deflect from the root causes of its social crises at home.