President Trump makes a Brilliant Choice for SecDef

Even before his inauguration, President Trump is demonstrating in his choices of personnel that his second term will be genuinely anti-establishment.  Given that we lose most of our wars, no choice is more important than that for Secretary of Defense.  By choosing Pete Hegseth, a combat experienced Army National Guard major, instead of the usual corporate multi-millionaire who will change nothing, President Trump has set in motion a renewed process of military reform.  

I was one of the people at the core of the military reform movement of the late 1970s and early ‘80s.  In the end, that movement failed because we were armed with ideas and the defenders of business-as-usual were armed with endless money.  Guess which wins in Washington.

But a president can overcome the defense industry’s billions, and with the choice of Pete Hegseth, President Trump has signaled he will personally back military reform.  How so?  Because Pete Hegseth has written a book on why we should not have women in combat units, and getting them out is the military reform that must come first.  Having women in combat units is so damaging that no other reforms can get us off our conveyor belt of lost wars until that is tackled.

The question of women in combat is not simply one of will women fight.  Some will, some won’t.  But that won’t matter because the men around them will drop the mission to protect and evacuate the women.  This is just human nature.  It is something real men do.

Worse, the willingness of the men to fight will already have been undermined by the presence of women.  Every study ever done of why men fight in combat has concluded it is not for king and country but for their buddies, the other men in their unit.  Under the stress of training and then war, they have become a band of brothers where no man wants to let his comrades down.  If the unit includes women, that cohesion never forms because the men regard each other not as brothers but as competitors for the favors of the women.  Absent unit cohesion, not only won’t women fight, neither will the men.

With their usual disregard of human nature, the left thinks it can put young men and young women, hormones raging, working side by side and just post regulations saying no impure thoughts, and they won’t behave like rabbits.  A few years ago I was on an amphib where I knew the skipper.  He had a large number of women officers.  I asked him what the fraternization rate was (female officers having sex with enlisted men, strictly forbidden by the rules).  After making sure no one could overhear us, he replied, “100% of course.  I’ve had male sailors in knife fights over the women officers.”  At that point, he no longer had a warship.

The problems don’t stop there.  With the suffocating blanket of cultural Marxism now laid over our armed forces, the men must constantly be afraid of the women.  If they displease a woman in any way, say by giving her an order she does not like, she can and often does charge him with sexual harassment.  He is then pitched out of his chain of command and into a commissar system where all the judges are cultural Marxists and he is presumed guilty until proven innocent.  The kind of men who want to fight will not hoin an entity where they must be afraid of women or, if suckered into joining, they won’t stay.  Take a look at the services’ current recruiting and retention numbers and the proof is evident.

Getting the women out of combat units and, later, out of all deployable units must be the first reform because without it, our units simply won’t fight.  Many other reforms are needed too, including redesigning our personnel system so it does not constantly undermine unit cohesion, revising our training so it flows from the fact that the modern battlefield requires a thinking private who takes initiative, and, in officer education, replacing rote processes with teaching how to think militarily, to look at a military situation and quickly know what to do to obtain a decisive result.  But the ur-reform must be getting the women out, because if we fail to do that, the other reforms will be irrelevant.  

Call your Senator and let him know you want him or her to vote to confirm Pete Hegseth.