Professional 46 year old man who’s going to sell you an encyclopedia if it’s the last thing he does, Pete Hegseth, posted a video last week, November 5th, expressing defiance in the face of articles of impeachment (“It won’t work”) that have now been filed against him by Representative Thomas Massie.
It’s hard to imagine why Massie and others would be pushing for impeachment, particularly given all the Secretary has done for the nation. Have we all forgotten Hegseth announcing in a State of the Force Address, “No fatties?” Have we all forgotten how serious a person you have to be in order to tell people that? Have we forgotten how he has ordered strike after strike on small boats full of what he swears were narco-terrorists — men he has never named, carrying cargo he has never shown — these heretofore unaddressed harbingers of doom? Do you know how brave you have to be to take on a skiff of possible fishermen, particularly when all you have on your side are a couple of measly Reaper drones, AC-130J gunships, and F-35 stealth fighters? How brave you have to be to want a firing squad livestreamed, wheelchair and all, and to run a war that put a Tomahawk through a girls’ school? How right of him to call rules of engagement ‘stupid’; people like Representative Massive might object.
Professional 46 year old and man who’s angry Don Draper slept with his wife, Pete Hegseth, might object to this tone. Stripped of the noise of his constant culture war posture, he and his defenders might point to the fact that recruitment numbers to the armed forces are up. They will point to the capture of Nicolas Maduro, and the fact that said capture wasn’t an outright disaster.
Yes, recruitment numbers are up, but where is the leadership to train, guide, and develop them? As John Oliver reminded us on Sunday’s episode of Last Week Tonight — Hegseth has aggressively sought to change the leadership of the military, with a fifth of the upper echelon now gone.
This is one of the byproducts of what Adam Serwer has rightly called Hegseth’s effort to resegregate the military. The man who wrote in his 2024 book that institutional bias doesn’t exist and so it’s something of an unfair, unjust mystery as to why why groups prioritized “black over white [,] female over male, [,] gay over straight” has blocked at least 40 officers from becoming generals and admirals. Some of the reasons given were recently disclosed to MS NOW: sitting on an International Women’s Day panel, speaking at a Hispanic Heritage Month celebration, and posing for a photo after a second Covid shot.
And we haven’t even touched Iran.
In April, Hegseth declared a “historic and overwhelming victory” against the country. Seven months later, the Strait of Hormuz is still largely closed, tankers are still being hit, and at least 16 Americans are dead. The war has cost billions of dollars and we are now facing ‘strategic inventory shortfalls.’
All this forces us to try and become experts in the way social media has constantly forced us to become experts over each news story that’s crossed our feed over the years. It pushes us to imagine a serious Secretary of Defense (Editor’s note: I view the renaming of the Department of Defense in much the same way I view Elon Musk renaming Twitter ‘X’; as such, I will be referring to them by their ‘actual’ names), and so we try and imagine the questions they would ask, like —
1. What’s our burn rate, and against what?
2. What are our means, and what are we trading away for them? Every missile and dollar spent in the Gulf comes from somewhere.
3. What’s the sequencing? Wars are won by doing things in the right order.
4. What does our conduct elsewhere cost us?
5. What is our theory of victory?
And we look at these questions. And we look at them again. And we imagine how a serious, competent Secretary might answer them.
The House votes by Wednesday.