Why We Need a Secretary of Defense Who Belongs to the National Guard

President Trump’s nominee for Secretary of Defense has an unusual background.  Instead of the usual wealthy corporate CEO, Pete Hegseth is a major in the Army National Guard.  As such, he has acquired combat experience in Fourth Generation wars, wars we lost.  He seems to care about that, perhaps to the point of questioning both why and how we fight such wars.

That would be valuable in a Secretary of Defense.  But the fact that he serves in the National Guard is important for reasons that lie closer to home.  The first is that in a world where Fourth Generation wars are becoming the norm, our most important armed service is the National Guard.  No longer does it exist to support the active duty Army in a major land war on the far side of the world, because we are unlikely to fight such wars.  Rather, in the face of Fourth Generation war, the active duty forces, and not just the Army, exist to support the National Guard – and the Coast Guard, which protects our maritime frontiers.

At present, we are being invaded by a variety of Fourth Generation entities, most of them coming to America as migrants and refugees.  Those entities include cartels and gangs, people hired by foreign governments or corporations that provide mercenaries, believers in alien religions, ideologies, or “causes,” etc.  They are joined by 4GW forces generated on our own soil, people who give their primary loyalty not to America but to something else, something they are willing to fight for.

This is the real threat we face, and it lands directly in the lap of our police and National Guard.  In some places, the local police are already overwhelmed, to the point where they need state troopers or National Guardsmen to help them maintain some level of public safety.  The state arose to provide order, safety of people and property, and when it can no longer do that it loses its legitimacy.  The National Guard is a more important prop for the state’s legitimacy than are any of the active duty armed forces.  It is unlikely we will be calling in F-35s to bomb our own cities or armored divisions to flatten them, a la Gaza.

The second reason our country needs a Secretary of Defense from the National Guard is that with climate change, domestic disasters are becoming more frequent and more devastating.  If the purpose of our armed forces is to keep Americans safe in their homes, the National Guard offers more than can the active duty forces.  The Guard is better trained and equipped for such missions, and the reason most Guardsmen enlisted was and is to help their neighbors.  In turn, members of the National Guard are not seen as threats the way some Americans might regard the deployment of active duty forces designed for combat.  It’s the National Guardsmen who pluck us from the roofs of our flooded houses, not black helicopters.

And because almost all Americans see Guardsmen as people who come to help them in time of need, they strengthen the legitimacy of the state where units with heavy weapons may undermine it.

In 2022, I published a short book, Reforging Excalibur, that outlines how we should change our grand strategy and our armed services to face a world of Fourth Generation war.  It discusses the services in their order of importance, and the National Guard comes first, with the Coast Guard second.  To most Secretaries of Defense, the National Guard is an also-ran that gets little of his attention.  That will not be true of Pete Hegseth.  Call or write your Senators and let them know you want him to be confirmed.  Your own safety depends on it.