"Brute" Force

“The fatty folds of the Defense Department establishment grow ever more ponderous, enveloping and suffocating under their great weight the ability of our armed forces to perform the warlike work for which they were created.”

At first glance, the above quote seems like something that might have been said by a Trump administration official or a Republican senator or congressman. It refers to a bloated “establishment,” after all. A second look, though, reveals that this cannot be the case: There’s no reference to “woke” or “DEI”, and nothing is labeled as Marxist or Communist. Also, the statement is too artfully composed. I mean, look at that beautiful sentence!—the juxtaposed alliteration of “fatty folds” in the first clause and “warlike work” in the second, the imagery of “ponderous” folds of fat “enveloping and suffocating under their great weight . . .”¹

The person who wrote that sentence would fit into the current Trump administration like a bowling ball in a bag of donuts, or like Marine Corps Generals James Mattis and John Kelly fit into the first Trump administration. Back then, Trump had an idea in his head of what Marine Corps general officers were like, but it was a caricature of the real thing. Trump wanted “Mad Dog” Mattis, not some guy who read books and thought about setting the example and the unintended consequences of proposed actions.

One could imagine Donald Trump’s initial excitement over a Marine general nicknamed “Brute,” a name which brings to mind a guy who hangs out at some sketchy bar with his associates, Knuckles and Sluggo.² “Not many people know this,” Trump would say, “but they call him ‘Brute.’ That’s quite a name, Brute. He’s a really tough guy, like nobody’s ever seen before, quite frankly. He’s going to do great things, not at all like Biden—Biden crime family and DEI—destroying our country.”

However, it was Brute—Lieutenant General Victor H. “Brute” Krulak—who wrote the sentence quoted at the beginning of this piece, and—as I have already pointed out—he would not have been a good fit for the Trump administration. Krulak, who died in 2009, was not afraid to tell truth to power. In an Oval Office meeting with President Johnson in 1966, he told Johnson that bombing enemy supply lines—a major part of the President’s strategy—was not working. Krulak suggested mining and bombing the North Korean ports to stop the flow of goods where it started. Johnson showed him out of the office. The constant fawning over and capitulation to Donald Trump that is required from everyone in his orbit would not have sat well with Brute Krulak. There might have been a scene, one like nobody’s ever seen before.

Back to that quote: It appears in the conclusion of Krulak’s 1984 book, First to Fight: An Inside View of the U.S. Marine Corps. Two paragraphs later, Krulak writes, “In short, the Pentagon is an inflated bureaucratic pyramid, perched precariously on its point, and the first wind of real war is likely to blow it over.” Again, MAGA-ish, but not. Again, good writing, though pushing the edge of the alliteration envelope. He continues a couple sentences later with, “The Marines are an assemblage of warriors, nothing more. Paper massaging³ and computer competitions do not kill the enemy, which is what Marines are supposed to do.”

Brute Krulak was a warrior. He was suspect of bureaucracy and thought the Department of Defense should focus primarily on the warfighter, a far-from-uncommon attitude despite Pete Hegseth’s pretending that he invented it. It would have been an affront to Brute Krulak’s warrior ethos to see a makeup studio installed in the Office of the Secretary of Defense.

Brute Krulak was also a thinker who paid attention to details, unlike Hegseth, who talks about attention to detail but then shares sensitive information about upcoming military operations with people who have no need to know.⁴ When he was a first lieutenant stationed in Shanghai in 1937, Brute Krulak got word that the Japanese were about to conduct an amphibious operation. He borrowed a tugboat, and, accompanied by a Navy lieutenant and a photographer, went out to observe the action. What caught his attention were the Japanese landing craft with their wide bows and pointed sterns. When the landing craft reached the beach, their flat bows opened downward and became ramps for soldiers and vehicles to exit.

Krulak later saw those boats out of the water for repairs and noted how they were constructed below the waterline. He wrote up a 13-page report with photos, sketches, and specifications and sent it to a Navy office in Washington, DC, where it was filed away and labeled as the product of “some nut in China.” When Krulak was transferred to Quantico, Virginia, he visited the Navy office where he had sent his report. On learning that the Navy still wasn’t interested, he didn’t give up. He went back to Quantico and began building a balsa wood model of the Japanese landing craft, which he later used to brief the Commandant of the Marine Corps. Eventually, a boat builder named Andrew Higgins was awarded a Navy contract to build landing craft of the same basic design. If not for the tenacity of Brute Krulak, U.S. troops may have been delivered to the beaches of World War II in vehicles less capable than the Higgins boat.

Young Lieutenant Victor Krulak was instrumental in the development of amphibious landing craft because he was able to decide what information was important and pay close and sustained attention to it. He hadn’t already jumped to the conclusion that a landing craft must have a pointy bow and a wide stern and an anchor to pull it back into the surf. He wasn’t a pointy-bow idealogue.

Brute Krulak wrote much of the National Security Act of 1947, which cemented the Marine Corps’ existence as a separate service. He was ahead of his time and influential in shaping amphibious warfare, helicopter tactics, and counterinsurgency operations. He created real change and has had a lasting impact because he did not jump to conclusions based on what he wanted to be true.

The Trump administration has borrowed “move fast and break things” from the military but misapplied it. Their version looks more like what warriors would call “running to your death.” They are breaking things without truly understanding them because they push downward with ideology rather than properly analyzing reality and letting the details on the ground pull them toward better ideas.

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Krulak wouldn’t fit in the Trump administration, but he’s exactly what they need: someone not afraid to say that the emperor has no clothes, someone who always has an outsized impact, someone called Brute.

I should mention that Victor Krulak was dubbed “Brute” as a midshipman at the Naval Academy because he was 5 feet 4 and 120 pounds when he reported for Plebe Summer. In more ways than one, I was not kidding about outsized impact.⁵