It is hard to overestimate the sheer scale of this operation. With approximately 1.3 million active personnel, the US military has around 800 generals and admirals, spread across the globe. To have them all fly back home is a massive undertaking, entailing the global movement of thousands of high-security staff and costing millions of dollars.
The US military has highly secure video teleconferencing facilities, designed precisely for such last-minute gatherings. So, if these facilities were not good enough for Mr Hegseth’s emergency meeting, there was only one conclusion: the event in Quantico, Virginia, was of such importance and of such a high security classification that only a face-to-face meeting was considered acceptable.
And the reality? The United States’ top brass, convened in one vast auditorium outside Washington, DC, on Sept 30, was treated to a banal speech about “warrior ethos” from Mr Hegseth, who zig-zagged across the speaker’s platform and waved his arms about in the manner of a young Ted Talk lecturer.
This was followed by a long, meandering monologue from President Donald Trump, who publicly wondered at one point why his generals and admirals were so quiet. He even joked that if those in attendance did not like what he had to say, they could leave the room – but “there goes your rank, there goes your future”, he added.
The initial speculation about the super-secret nature of the occasion came to nothing – the entire spectacle was broadcast live to the world.
If this were just the latest example of “entertainment” from a US presidency famous for offbeat drama, nobody outside the US should care. Sadly, however, what has happened at this meeting does affect many other nations. For it is a harbinger of how the administration intends to run its military.
Warrior ethos
Mr Hegseth is the first US defence secretary to have no experience of the Cold War; by the time the Soviet Union collapsed, he was just 11 years old. For America’s current top military official, the key reference point is not the Cold War confrontation in which the US ultimately prevailed, often by refraining from using its military might, but rather the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan over the past quarter of a century. The two conflicts in which he served also happen to be the two conflicts into which the US poured enormous resources, but ultimately lost.
Judging by his book, The War On Warriors, published last year well before Mr Hegseth knew he’d be tapped to run the Pentagon, the culprits for the Afghanistan and Iraq disasters are obvious: left-wing politicians in Washington, cultural “Marxists”, “social justice saboteurs”, all aided by what he calls “feckless generals” who mindlessly followed political directives, shackling brave young men – yes, they were invariably men – with all sorts of rules and regulations that were impossible to follow and led to many avoidable deaths.
US soldiers were “busy killing Islamists in shithole countries”, Mr Hegseth writes, only for them to be “betrayed by our leaders”.
The answer, Mr Hegseth claims, is simple. Under his leadership and that of President Trump, there will be no more gender- and race-based promotions.
“For too long, we’ve promoted too many uniform leaders for the wrong reasons – based on their race, based on gender quotas, based on historic so-called firsts,” he told his audience in Quantico.
The days of “social justice, politically correct and toxic ideological garbage” are over, Mr Hegseth promised. “No more identity months or dudes in dresses. No more climate change worship, no more division, distraction or gender delusions.”
The “fat generals” now sitting “in air-conditioned offices” will either have to slim down or get out. Constant training – not diversity and inclusion programmes – will be the rule. And all soldiers will concentrate on what they do best: kill people with maximum lethality.
Nor are these just words. Shortly after President Trump came to power, several senior military officials were fired, including the commandant of the US Coast Guard, the chief of naval operations, and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Many were women or black.
Mr Hegseth likes to believe that his observations about what ails the US military are somehow refreshingly original. Far from it.
In reality, whenever a US war ends in defeat, the military accuses politicians of being responsible for the failure. US generals claimed that the Vietnam War could have been won if only President Lyndon Johnson had let the armed forces do what they wanted. And conversely, many argue that the first Gulf War – that of 1990-1991 that led to the liberation of Kuwait – was such a success precisely because President George H.W. Bush left the military to do exactly what they wanted.
Nor is this phenomenon of blaming politicians for military failures limited to just the US. The most famous example of the same behaviour in Europe is that of the German military after World War I. It blamed its defeat on betrayal by Germany’s political class, allegedly ruled by Jews and other limp-wristed liberals. The so-called “Stab in the Back” myth was very influential in the Germany of the 1920s and 1930s, and contributed to the rise of Nazism.
Sometimes, the charge against politicians is not unfounded; US President Jimmy Carter’s micromanagement of military operations – invariably with disastrous results – is one such example. But very often, the “stab in the back” argument is designed to absolve the military of responsibility for failures, and that’s the danger that the Pentagon now risks.
It is noticeable that nowhere in Mr Hegseth’s latest book or in his angry speech to America’s top brass was there even a mention of old Pentagon diseases such as chronic turf battles between the military services, a bloated civilian-military bureaucracy, or super-expensive procurement projects that invariably end up both late and over budget. For Mr Hegseth, it seems, the real enemies of the military are only “liberals” and desk-bound “woke” generals.
US War Secretary Pete Hegseth speaking to senior military leaders at Marine Corps Base Quantico in Virginia on Sept 30. PHOTO: REUTERS
Who get to be warriors?
Military establishments everywhere also worry about the physical fitness of their soldiers, and about how representative their armed forces should be of their societies at large. Far from being original on this point, Mr Hegseth’s arguments are familiar to all military planners.
In Europe, for instance, there is a lively debate about the reduction in the number of hours devoted to physical education in schools, which means that either physical requirements have to be lowered for those accepted to military service, or the military needs to do more to get its recruits to meet its standards. There is also an active debate about the question of how inclusive the armed forces should be of women, ethnic minorities, or those of various sexual inclinations.
And, yes, there are constant accusations that Europe’s militaries are also playing their own games of political correctness. In Britain, for instance, critics frequently joke that, seemingly by sheer accident, a soldier of black or Indian descent is always placed in the front row of any British military parade, conveniently close to the TV cameras.
Clearly, the military cannot be a precise representation of society as a whole. Soldiers are expected to give up many personal freedoms that others take for granted and to do extraordinary things, such as to kill, if necessary. So, it would be silly to argue that recruitment and training standards should be lowered in order for the military to faithfully represent the nation it serves.
Yet at the same time, there is plenty of research indicating that the recruitment of people with diverse backgrounds, perspectives and skill sets is increasingly crucial as militaries deploy in new strategic environments. Emerging technologies also mean that physical capabilities are less important than they once were, so that gender distinctions may matter less.
And there are real risks in encouraging a “warrior class” which is increasingly distinct from the nations from which it recruits. The danger is that they may become a particular caste that speaks its own language, adheres to its own separate ethos and is therefore incapable of understanding the country it serves, let alone the enemy it is supposed to fight. It is hard to believe that as late as the 1990s, a top US admiral referred to female pilots in the US Navy as “go-go dancers, topless dancers or hookers”.
The key task is not to eliminate diversity programmes as Mr Hegseth is suggesting, but to make sure that no capable individuals are excluded based on irrelevant characteristics, while maintaining high standards essential for military effectiveness.
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The enemy within
Probably the most disturbing argument put forward by both President Trump and his War Secretary at the unusual gathering of top brass is that the US military should concentrate on what Mr Trump called “the invasion from within”, by which he meant US cities run by Democrats, which could become “training grounds” for the deployment of troops.
US law explicitly prohibits such deployments in anything but emergency circumstances. Yet Mr Trump has now turned his initial deployments to Los Angeles and Washington, DC, into a new strategy: Instead of confronting foreign foes, the US military will now be expected to act as an extension of the President’s domestic political agenda.
If he persists in the objective of transforming the Pentagon into a battering ram against domestic opponents, Mr Trump will quickly discover that his most significant opposition will come from the military. There is nothing that demoralises a military and renders it less warrior-like more than the idea that it is used mainly for domestic repression.
Either way, for US allies around the world, this week’s Pentagon developments are deeply worrying for the signals they send about the shift in norms and values as well as the focus of its attention. And they indicate a US administration determined to personalise power to an unprecedented extent.
One is almost tempted to ask: With allies like these, who are the enemies?
Jonathan Eyal is based in London and Brussels and writes on global political and security matters.
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