Oh, For Pete's Sake

I’ve got some skin in the national security game. My son-in-law is currently deployed on a destroyer in the Pacific. My youngest daughter’s fiancé is headed to U.S. Coast Guard Officer Candidate School this month and could find himself in harm’s way under Kristi Noem’s Department of Homeland Security or—if the United States bumbles into war the way we are now bumbling toward recession and preventable epidemics— under Pete Hegseth’s Department of Defense. My son has served as a surface warfare officer and will soon finish medical school and owe the Navy many years of service in military hospitals or Navy and Marine Corps fleet units. (I told him that if he’s lucky, he will deploy with a Marine Corps unit. He thinks I need to revise my definition of “lucky.”)

Well before Signalgate and even before his Senate confirmation, people serious about national security found Pete Hegseth seriously lacking in both substance and style. As television news personalities go, Ron Burgundy¹ would make a better Secretary of Defense than Pete Hegseth. As guys named Pete go, Pete Davidson² would be a more sober and thoughtful leader of the world’s largest and most powerful military. Ron Burgundy is a fictional character, but he seems more genuine than Hegseth. Pete Davidson is a comedian, but less of a punchline than Hegseth. (Unfortunately, the joke is on us.) Ron Burgundy and Pete Davidson would come to the job of Secretary of Defense with the recognition that they were woefully unfit for the position, a realization that will never dawn on the equally unfit Pete Hegseth.

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During Hegseth’s confirmation hearing, Senator Markwayne Mullin (R-OK) proudly announced that he had Googled the qualifications for Secretary of Defense and discovered there were none, which worked out well for Hegseth. In hindsight—and at the time, for those who were paying attention—the Senate might have wanted to add some qualifications of their own: “Ideal candidate will possess the intelligence and good judgment to not share classified information on third-party messaging apps,” for instance.

Being a TV guy, Hegseth stays on message and speaks in buzzwords and catchphrases. At a meeting just after his confirmation, with then-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General C.Q. Brown seated to his right, the newly minted Secretary of Defense said that he wanted military leaders to think outside the box. General Brown maintained his bearing, but a millisecond of awful realization crossed Brown’s face as Hegseth spewed empty platitudes as if he were playing the incompetent boss in an office sitcom. Hegseth also urged military leaders to work with a sense of urgency, which was a cliché inside the U.S. military way back when Americans hadn’t even imagined thinking inside or outside of boxes.

Hegseth and his fellow Trump appointees at the Pentagon do most of their thinking inside a box marked “Not Diversity.” In an address to a military audience, Hegseth said, “The single dumbest phrase in military history is, ‘Our diversity is our strength.’ I think our strength is our unity.” Later, Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell said, “I think the President and the Secretary have been very clear on this—that anybody that says in the Department of Defense that diversity is our strength is, is frankly, incorrect. Our shared purpose and our unity are our strength.” Not to be outdone by his MAGA bros, DoD Press Secretary John Ullyot referred to DEI as “Discriminatory Equity Ideology” and he defined it as “a form of woke cultural Marxism that Divides the force, Erodes unit cohesion, and Interferes with the services’ core warfighting mission.” My-oh-my, isn’t Johnny clever? In MAGAville, you earn extra points for creative use of the scary acronym of the day and for using “woke” and “Marxism” in the same sentence.

Diversity is not mutually exclusive with unity or shared purpose, of course, and a diverse team with unity and shared purpose will out-think, out-create, and out-fight a team of carbon copies every time. So, diversity is a strength. In the United States, diverse people have added to our strength even when we were actively throwing obstacles in their way. So, diversity is our strength.

Every Trump administration official needs a nonexistent problem that only they and Donald Trump can solve. Hegseth’s fairy tale project is “restoring a warrior ethos” to the U.S. military. As with all things that Trump administration officials say they will fix, warrior ethos is a vague concept that can contain or exclude certain qualities, depending on one’s perspective. When General Brown sat next to Hegseth and didn’t blurt, “This guy’s an idiot!” he was showing the kind of self-control I would place in the box labeled “warrior ethos.” Attention to detail would also go in there, along with professional education, loyalty up and down the chain of command, economy of force, the law of war, a sense of honor, and both moral and physical courage.

The military crews who conducted the recent attacks in Yemen had a strong warrior ethos. The Trump administration officials who discussed the attacks in National Security Adviser Mike Waltz’s “Houthi PC small group” on the Signal app did not. Waltz could be forgiven for calling his principals group a “principles group.” (“Unprincipled principals group” would have been perfect.) He could almost be praised for bringing transparency by accidentally inviting a journalist to the group, but both the vocabulary error and the invitation error show a serious lack of attention to detail. Notably, Waltz didn’t invite anyone from the Joint Chiefs of Staff to the Signal chat, but those folks are sticklers for the rules, and rules are for party poopers.

Mike Walz should not be forgiven for setting messages to disappear. That was illegal. He should resign. Pete Hegseth was predictably clueless in putting the attack timeline on an unsecure app and then saying, “We are currently clean on OPSEC.” That was illegal. He should resign.

Mike Walz later texted bomb damage assessment information to the group, including the fact that one of the targeted individuals was positively identified walking into “his girlfriend’s building,” which collapsed in the attack. It was information that could have revealed surveillance capabilities, including human assets in the area.

JD Vance responded, “Excellent.”

CIA Director John Ratcliffe said, “A good start.”

Waltz then sent symbols: Punching fist emoji, flag emoji, fire emoji.

No one in the group asked how many other people may have died in the girlfriend’s building. Our government national security team, minus the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was just giddy about bombing something. It made the boss look tough. That carelessness and callousness is part of their warrior ethos, which could be expressed as, “Yay! We killed people. (Punching fist emoji, flag emoji, fire emoji.)”

Under any other president, the National Security Adviser and the Secretary of Defense would have resigned as soon as the conversation was revealed. The Director of National Intelligence—Tulsi Gabbard, in this case—would not have lied to Congress about the content of the Signal chat and then had to backtrack on claims that no operational information was shared in the signal chat. That she hadn’t directly participated in the conversation was a weak excuse. If she didn’t read what she went to Congress to testify about, shouldn’t she just find a job that requires less homework?

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Not in the Trump administration. Accountability and doing your homework are not part of their warrior ethos. Since the story broke, Trump has said that Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg is a “sleazebag,” and Mike Waltz has referred to Goldberg as “scum.” So, blaming the guy who reveals your malfeasance is part of the Trump administration’s warrior ethos. Nothing could be less surprising.

Maybe we should have elected a President with the guts and good sense to fire people when necessary. (Punching fist emoji, flag emoji, fire emoji.)