How Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth brought the culture wars to the military

Dave Davies (0:00)

This is Fresh Air, I'm Dave Davies. When President Donald Trump nominated Pete Hegseth, Secretary of Defense, he said he liked Hegseth's central casting looks and tough warrior mentality.

In a speech at the US. Marine Corps Base Quantico in Virginia last week, Hegseth told an audience of junior officers and enlisted leaders they should be proud of the culture change he's brought to the military.

Pete Hegseth (0:24)

The only focus, as you know, in your formations should be training, readiness, accountability, discipline and lethality. And when you pursue those things, you don't have to walk on eggshells. No more social engineering, no more weaponized IG policies. The complainers, the ideologues and the poor performers are no longer in the driver's seat. No more silly PowerPoint trainings or drag queen shows.

No more diversity quotas, no more gender pronouns, no more identity months. Only the warrior ethos.

Dave Davies (0:59)

Well, Hegseth still champions the policies he came in with. Our guest, veteran Pentagon reporter Greg Jaffe, says Hegseth's performance is generating increasing blowback from members of Congress, including some Republicans. Hegseth's firing and sidelining of senior military officers and his lack of communication about those moves and the nearly eight-month-old war in Iran has left many on Capitol Hill unwilling to approve his budget requests or confirm his nominees for Pentagon Posts.

Unbowed, Hegseth has announced new initiatives, among them construction of a massive new military base in the United States and Project Meridian, a study of the future of warfare with key roles for Elon Musk and Newt Gingrich.

Greg Jaffe covers the Pentagon and the United States military for the New York Times. Before joining the Times, he spent 13 years at the Wall Street Journal and 15 years at the Washington Post. He's also the author of The Fourth Star, a book about four army generals who commanded US troops in Iraq. We recorded our conversation yesterday. Greg Jaffe, welcome back to Fresh Air.

Greg Jaffe (2:06)

Thanks for having me.

Dave Davies (2:08)

You covered the Pentagon and the military for a long time. You've seen a lot of secretaries of defense. What were your early impressions of Pete Hegseth when he was nominated?

Greg Jaffe (2:19)

My first big impression is that he's different in the sense that he's a culture warrior, in a way that no other secretary of defense has. So he comes to the Pentagon via Fox News, where he's a TV host on the weekends, and is really steeped in right-wing culture wars.

Usually secretaries of defense do everything they can to protect the military from our divisive politics and those culture wars. Hegseth was really the first secretary of defense I've seen in a lifetime who invited that into the Pentagon, and made it a central plank of his identity and leadership.

Dave Davies (2:58)

Right. Certainly a different approach. It's interesting, some secretaries of defense have had backgrounds in corporate America. Hegseth served in Iraq and Afghanistan in combat?

Greg Jaffe (3:09)

He did, in Iraq in combat and in Afghanistan, it was primarily in a staff position. But in Iraq, he had a fairly intense combat experience. He's in a place called Samara, there's a giant mosque bombing which really kicks off the Iraqi Civil War in 2005 and 2006

So it's an intense one-year deployment that I think leaves a real impact. It's something he carries with him. In fact, he writes in his book, The War on Warriors in 2024, before he comes into the Pentagon, that it was sort of the defining experience in his life.

And he was almost sad to leave it because it was so intense. And I do think the other thing he carries to the Pentagon, beyond the sort of culture wars, is a lot of the grievance and anger that soldiers felt, and troops generally felt, over losing the Iraq and Afghanistan war. Iraq was not a loss, but it's certainly a mixed outcome. Afghanistan feels a lot like a loss. And he brings a lot of that grievance and anger and desire to blame somebody for that loss into the Pentagon with him.

Dave Davies (4:13)

Does he make a case in that book that he and other soldiers were prevented from defeating the enemy by commanders who were afraid of whatever, being aggressive or because of rules on civilian casualties?

Greg Jaffe (4:26)

Yeah, so there's a variety of villains in his book. Among the biggest are the Judge Advocate Generals or JAGS, the lawyers, who he sees as shackling the military with these really restrictive rules of engagement that prevents them from being as lethal as they need to be on those battlefields and has them kind of being cautious and looking over their shoulders rather than prosecuting the war intensely.