There’s this great scene in The Godfather – wait, I need to be more specific – where Tom Hagen asks Michael if he knows how they’re going to come at him. He does – Vito Corleone has prepared his son well for the treacherous job he is embarking upon, and the new godfather has a plan. It involves settling all the family’s business by wiping out his enemies, including traitors within, with extreme prejudice. Which brings us to Pete Hegseth and his reign as the Secretary of War.
Yeah, he’s managed to whack the heads of some of the biggest families, Barzini and Tattaglia, but the second-tier dons like Stracci and Cuneo remain, heads down for now, but ready to pop back up should the boss stop at a tollbooth. Moe Green is still strutting around the Pentagon, and there are plenty of Carlo Rizzis and Sal Tessios who need to be taken for a ride. A one-way ride.
If we’re talking military phases, the patriots trying to fix our disastrously misled – military organizations are led, not merely managed – military have finished the attack phase. They have broken the enemy’s conventional forces on the battlefield and occupied its capital. Over the last eight incredible months, under Pete Hegseth’s leadership, the United States military has become a military organization again. The based chemo has started to fight the cancer of DEI. Failed leaders have been fired. Outsiders with an outsider perspective have been brought in and placed in positions of authority. The results are clear within our various battlespaces. The Houthis have stopped pestering us, and Iran has no nuclear program anymore. The Chinese (and others) now face a new strategic challenge – an America that is no longer in military decline. But within the Pentagon itself, the situation is not so clear.
Military leadership is about people, something Secretary Hegseth gets. The Secretary wisely – and in the face of massive resistance – trashed a terrible system for picking Army commanders, which basically threw command selection to a bunch of psychologists. Only the Pentagon, suffering from the lingering influence of Robert McNamara and his technocratic losers, could think that you could reduce the art of command to a scientific exercise. That command system was designed to pick guys who fit in, not guys who win. They would’ve said that Patton is likely to slap a soldier with combat stress and is therefore disqualified. But they would’ve overlooked the fact that when all the other generals were pulling their hair out over the German Ardennes offensive, Patton had already had his staff create and prepare to execute a plan to relieve the embattled 101st Airborne at Bastogne within 48 hours. We need more generals who can push troops as opposed to push papers, even if they sometimes push hot buttons.
To a great extent, through his example of getting out of the office and doing push-ups with Army badasses, Pete Hegseth has fixed the shattered recruiting system. It was not so long ago that veterans like me, to our great consternation and sorrow, were compelled to dissuade great young Americans from serving in a military that squandered their lives and held their beliefs in contempt. Here’s a little story about how that’s changed. I was in D.C. last week for the National Conservatism convention, and I had three young men with impeccable resumes, including one Eagle Scout, buttonhole me to seek my advice because they want to go to officer candidate school to serve in the United States military, or in one case, the Air Force. I know that path, because I tread it. And I led young Americans, so I know what we’re looking for. These guys were top-notch, and they are excellent candidates for the opportunity to prove themselves worthy of the greatest honor any American can have, the chance to lead other young Americans in war.
But those young leaders need superiors up in the clouds of lofty Olympus-on-the-Potomac worthy of them. They need senior leaders, both general officers and admirals, as well as senior civilians, who are focused on deterring war, or rapidly winning it should deterrence fail. But now we’re in the second phase of this campaign, which is quelling the insurgency following the initial conventional battle, and we all know that that’s been problematic for us over the last century. America doesn’t lose battles; it loses wars because it loses the vision and the will it needs to win them over the long haul. That’s the danger that Pete Hegseth and his team face.
But the insurgents in the Pentagon have never faced an opponent like they face now, and in that, we have an advantage. The Trump administration understands that it can just do things, and it makes no apologies about what it’s doing. This drives its enemies insane because they can’t shame Trump 2.0 into complacency and submission like they could previous Republican administrations. There are resistors resisting the authority of the guy the American people elected – in the name of Our Democracy, of course. The dumb ones make it easy for us by posting their thoughts on social media about how DEI is great or Trump is evil, or they do stupid things like not posting the president’s picture on their command leaders board. The Secretary of War has powerful allies on the outside, social media-savvy folks, some of us veterans, who can identify useful targets to use as cautionary examples. We’re watching and we’re bringing these individual nitwits to the attention of the powers that be, who promptly fire them into the sun.
It’s the smart ones you have to worry about, the ones who keep their heads down, the ones who come along with smiles and nods about how they’re with the program and on the team, and what’s that behind their back?
It’s a shiv.
Secretary Hegseth, they won’t fight you face-to-face. They will wait until you turn your back and then stick it in deep. Maybe they’ll leak, like whoever decided to talk about the alleged SEAL raid into North Korea the other day. It doesn’t have to be true – I’d be willing to bet that the only things true about the SEAL raid story are that there are such things as SEALs and North Korea – to damage the administration. The regime media will eagerly eat it up; luckily, we don’t care what the regime media says anymore, depriving our opponents of one of its most decisive weapon systems.
Other times they will attempt to help you to death. They’re professionals with knowledge of how the system and the building work, and they’re going to help you make your vision come true, Mr. Secretary. Anyone who buys that is a bigger sucker than the new second lieutenant you send to the supply room to retrieve a box of grid squares. Soon, you will find that your calendar is full of meetings – important, vital, essential meetings that require you to sit there and do nothing for 10 hours a day. And these helpful flag officers and SES civilians will tell you that they know the very best people for the biggest jobs – top men, women, and probably non-binaries, too. Digging into the background of Mr. and Ms. Helper, you’ll find that their resume is a roadmap through the failures of the last couple of decades, with plenty of rest stops at DEI sinecures and no evidence of supporting America First before January 21st of 2025.
But you won’t find any medals or scars from the battles that mattered. They didn’t fight DEI. They didn’t fight the betrayal of our troops over COVID. They didn’t fight leaving our troops to die in Kabul through a combination of high-level cowardice and gross incompetence. Oh, but they're certainly going to fight for us now. They’re certainly going to put everything on the line with 100 percent dedication to making the vision of a president they think is the antichrist come to fruition. Now, where the heck are those darn grid squares?
The challenge for Secretary Hegseth is that he’s got damaged goods to choose among for the next generation of senior leaders, because, to some extent, everybody was complicit with the previous administration and its ideology. They had to be, because they had to follow the orders of the eggplant/commander-in-chief, but the key is whether they were committed believers or soldiers who saluted when issued lawful, but dumb, orders. Yet, must we put a guy who seemed to be utterly on board with the failed program in charge of the Joint Special Operations Command, like this LTG Jonathan Braga guy? Why must it be apparent Air Force DEI enthusiast General Kenneth Wilsbach as the Chief of Staff of the Air Force? Maybe these are great guys – I don’t know them – but I’ll bet you if you went down a couple of ranks, you could find folks who are even better and baggage-free.
The person pushing such candidates is said to be Stephanie Miller, the Deputy Assistant Secretary of War for Military Personnel Policy for the Department of War. You can read what some people say about her right here. Look, I don’t know her. I haven’t met her. She might be a great patriot. But if you examine her resume, it looks like the common denominator for every key Pentagon personnel point of failure over the last couple of decades is Ms. Miller. And yet she’s still there, whispering in the Secretary of War’s ear. Can someone point to the moment in time when she suddenly stopped being with the people who were wrong and started supporting this president’s intent? In my humble opinion, the only job she should have in the Pentagon is handing out volleyballs down at the gym, and even there, I’d have my minions keep an eye on her.
So, the answer about how they’re going to come at Pete Hegseth is with smiles, and with friendly advice that leverages their knowledge of “how the building works” and “how to make things happen within the system.” There is some room for technical expertise among advisors, but military leadership is not a technocratic exercise. People are the most important thing, that and the culture they operate in. Pete Hegseth knows that instinctively, thank goodness. He just needs to dodge the threat – the courtiers, the perfumed princes, and the eunuchs who will seek to whisper in his ear and make him forget everything he knows in his gut to be true. And he needs to finish the family business.
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