I read a chunk of Peter Hegseth’s book, The War on Warriors. What I learned is that Trump is picking cabinet members in a way that is surprisingly rare but very smart.
Cabinet picks tend to be experienced in government, or top business management, or both and generally in sympathy with the President’s world view, at least not resistant to it.
Trump, rather than picking people with prior success in running large operations who can also be expected generally to do what the President asks, is picking less credentialed people he won’t have to ask to do anything because they are as passionate and more knowledgeable than he about what needs to be done.
Hegseth knows what Trump wants done better than Trump does. He just needs to be confirmed and let loose.
What the two men agree on, passionately, is getting the military unwoke so it can recruit, train, and affirm warriors. Trained warriors, Hegseth, a warrior himself, explains, are not ordinary people, though they may start out ordinary. They are brave, willing to die for their country, and, more important, willing and able to kill for it. Honing the skills that support bravery and make efficient killers is their daily pursuit.
Of the Light Brigade, Tennyson wrote “theirs was not to reason why.” More precisely, it was not theirs to reason why, in that moment. Warriors perform profound acts of moral reasoning, but long before battle. They make a prior decision their country is worth dying for and killing for. They do not review that decision each time they receive an order or must give one.
For this reason, Hegseth sees that the real problem with the woke in arms is not their disgusting preferences, their hostility to the normal and healthy, or even the divisiveness of their identity politics.
All these things are bad enough. The real problem, however, is that wokeness multiplies debilitating moral claims and considerations prior to any action. The reason the woke appear deficient in common sense is that they pile up distractions to any decision confusing themselves and others. They so often sound silly because they are so often lose hold of the main question.
As anyone who has ever been a boss knows, picking the right people for a job is hard. Picking the right person who is also the right race, the right gender—among so many choices!!!--has the right prejudices and always speaks with the right sensitivities makes it all impossibly complicated. You end up with Kamala Harris as your Vice President.
As Hegseth explains, however, for the military the woke problem goes beyond the heightened difficulty of finding and promoting the right people. A military force can operate only on the assumption of instant obedience to all lawful orders, with the list of unlawful orders sufficiently brief that for most warriors the issue should never arise.
Wokeness compromises this fatally by multiplying diverse and dubious moral claims and thus reasons to question an order.
The warrior then finds himself repeatedly obliged—worse, tempted—"to reason why”, in particular and in the moment. This is a disaster.
The warrior commitment is that, having made one commanding decision that his country deserves his loyalty, he puts aside his right to “reason why”.
This is a commitment hard to maintain and easy to lose hold of. That’s why, as Hegseth explains military life is ordered to reinforce that prior commanding decision and suppress individual objections. Multiplying supposed moral considerations multiplies temptations to debate or even dissent. That will cripple a fighting force.
Documenting how badly the woke brass have already confused and demoralized officers and other ranks, Hegseth argues cleaning them out must be job one. The right man to do this will be someone who has lived with these disastrous leaders and cannot be blandished, deceived or distracted by them. Putting a major in charge of reviewing the generals and colonels who have made him suffer this mess is populism at its best.
Hegseth is the right man for job one, but that it must be job one is unfortunate. Still awaiting after the woke mess is cleaned out will be a far more challenging job: replacing the two-thirds (at least) of our current force with one fit to defeat a modern enemy.
Very good article, but the issues Vigilante has with wokeness extend to almost all areas of life. I am a scientist, and the "multiple demands" of modern woke thinking produce bad science because they distract from the central issue. If you are afraid of making an unpleasant discovery, don't become a scientist. If you dislike war, don't become a soldier. And don't get your buddies killed by second-guessing the mission.
As always Richard you're not a parrot for others, but rather a thinker of new and fresh ideas.