In Defence of Pete Hegseth: All He is Saying is Give War a Chance!
(Allusion to the John Lennon song of course: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C3_0GqPvr4U ) Pete Hegseth is the first US Secretary of Defense/War in a generation who treats the job as warfighting rather than stakeholder management. That is the whole of it. Every complaint against him reduces to the fact that he refuses to perform the bureaucratic liturgy the Pentagon press corps mistakes for competence.
He enjoys the language of lethality. Good. That is the job. The Secretary of War, and the restoration of the title itself tells you the intent, is not a grief counsellor. For two decades the department was run by people whose primary skill was testifying without saying anything. Hegseth says things. The line about the bottom half of the ocean is not a gaffe; it is deterrence with a punchline.
He livestreams strike footage. The alternative is the New York Times telling you a strike happened in paragraph fourteen under a headline about climate. Posting the footage is information sovereignty. If the military does not own the visual record, the enemy and the legacy media will write it for you. Hegseth understands that war is now fought in the attention economy as much as the physical one.
The tattoo is Deus Vult, Latin for "God wills it," a Crusader phrase with a millennium of history. The people who insist it is a white-supremacist slogan are the same people who think everything is a white-supremacist slogan. This is guilt by association aimed at a man who has spent his life in uniform. It is noise.
On the execution of Hasan, the critics think they have him, and they are wrong about why. The objection is not that it is cruel. The objection is that it is too honest. America has executed people for centuries; we just made sure you did not have to think about it. Hegseth's position is that if the state is going to kill a mass murderer who gunned down thirteen soldiers on American soil, the public has a right to see it done. That is not sadism. That is transparency applied to the one government function we have been trained to look away from.
The liberal critique of Hegseth is not a critique of policy. It is a critique of feelings. Nothing in his actual record is being argued on the merits. It is all "he enjoys it," "he relishes it," "he's fond of the meme." That is the language you use when you cannot argue the substance, so you pathologise the temperament. And that is the tell: the establishment does not fear Hegseth because he is reckless. It fears him because he is legible to normal people. He talks like a guy who has been in a firefight, not like a guy who has been in a seminar. In a country that just spent twenty years losing wars run by seminar guys, that is not a bug.
Intellectual honesty requires one concession: the martyrdom problem is real. Executing Hasan publicly hands ISIS a recruiting video. That is a tactical cost, and Hegseth should own it rather than wave it off. But note that this is an argument about method, not about character. It is the kind of argument you can actually have, which is precisely the conversation the Spectator piece (link below), and its liberal targets are avoiding.
Defending Hegseth is not hard once you stop apologising for the fact that a war secretary likes war. He is competent, he is honest about what the job is, and the people attacking him are attacking his personality because they have nothing on his results. Everything else is theatre criticism dressed up as national security analysis.
https://spectator.com/article/the-execution-will-be-televised/
