The Mythology of Pete Hegseth

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I didn’t begin this week thinking I would be writing about the Iran War, Chuck Norris, and Kid Rock, but one of the “joys” of living through the Trump era is that every week seems like the worst game of Mad Libs you’ve ever played.

Let’s dive in:

Ahead of his book launch next month, I interviewed Jasper Craven last week for Long Lead’s newsletter, Depth Perception. Jasper has made a career out of what he describes, dryly, as “veterans’ issues in the age of forever wars,” but much of his beat turns out to provide insight into what I called “a sprawling crisis in masculinity that’s fueling an interconnected toxic stew of misogyny, internet culture, gambling, and violence.” His beat is where the Venn Diagram of toxic masculinity and the military overlap.

I’ve known and respected Jasper and his reporting for years, and in our conversation put words to something that I think is incredibly important and under-covered in this moment — how and why Pete Hegseth is corrupting the US military and remaking the Pentagon with all the anger of a frustrated mid-level officer from the “GWOT,” the Global War on Terror that dominated the first two decades of this century.

In particular, Hegseth as secretary of defense has moved quickly to remake the military as more white and more male. He cleaned out the upper ranks of the military of women and Blacks — firing the first black man to lead a service branch, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen. C.Q. Brown, and the first woman to serve as the Chief of Naval Operations, Adm. Lisa Franchetti. (As you may remember, at the same time, DHS similarly fired Adm. Linda Fagan, the commandant of the Coast Guard — and then Kristi Noem stole her house.)

Hegseth didn’t hide his reasoning. As he said on a podcast before his confirmation, “Any general that was involved — any general, admiral, whatever — that was involved in any of the [diversity, equity and inclusion] woke shit has got to go.”

The moves left the US military without a single woman at a four-star rank; today, all nine of the Joint Chiefs are white males — overseeing a roughly 1.3 million-strong military that is about twenty percent female and 43 percent people of color.

In doing so, Hegseth rolled back some of the amazing accomplishments that have come in this generation as the leadership ranks of the military, the institution in American life that most looks like America itself, finally begin to reflect the makeup of the force at large. We forget how the integrated military was one of the biggest landmarks of civil rights in US history, and how long and hard women have fought to be accepted in an institution that has done much to discourage them over the years.

Yet rather than viewing the advancement of minorities and women as a success, Pete Hegseth believes they’re the cause of institutional rot.

Jasper explained in our conversation how the idea of “DEI” in the military has become such a bugaboo on the right — and how, in particular, “DEI” has developed into its own mythology about why we “lost” the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

As Jasper sees it, understanding the centrality of DEI today requires rewinding to the years after Vietnam, when the US right developed a mythology about the “left behind” POW/MIAs in Vietnam. “One of the main ‘coping mechanisms’ after America’s loss in Vietnam by a certain class of reactionary politicians and certain Vietnam veterans was to find some way to scapegoat the loss and preserve the country’s prestige. The POW/MIA movement emerged to basically conjure this myth that America didn’t basically go hard enough in Vietnam — that we should have stayed there longer, that all these spineless politicians didn’t properly support the troops, [and that they] didn’t even bother to recover many of who remained imprisoned by America’s enemies,” Jasper told me.

The POW/MIA mythology is largely lost to the haze of American memory now, but it was a major driving force of culture through the 1970s and 1980s, the genesis for famous Chuck Norris movies and, most of all, for Sylvester Stallone’s iconic Rambo: First Blood Part II. The movie — co-written by James Cameron of later Titanic fame — was the second-highest grossing domestic movie of 1985, and told the story of how Rambo is pardoned and released from prison in order to run an off-the-books solo operation to locate missing Vietnam POWs — but told by the shadowy US government not to actually rescue them. When — of course! — he does begin to kill the captors and rescue POWs, the bureaucrats behind the scenes try to undermine him. In one of the most dramatic scenes, the Pentagon bureaucrat overseeing the mission scoffs to Rambo about why the US had abandoned the POWs: Money.

“What the hell would you suggest we do if some burnt-out P.O.W. shows up on the six o'clock news—fight the war all over again? Have an invasion! Bomb Hanoi?” he tells Rambo, then adds the kicker: “Do you think anybody is going to get on the floor of the United States Senate and ask billions of dollars for a couple of forgotten ghosts?!”

Forgotten ghosts.

The whole argument on the right that the US never “lost” Vietnam — but instead was betrayed by weak-kneed and un-American leaders — actually has strong parallels to the post-World War I antisemitic mythology about how the brave German military and stoic and strong people were “stabbed in the back” by the politicians who betrayed them and surrendered — the Army didn’t lose, the myth held, it was betrayed by Jews, Communists, and other “criminals” on the home front.

Today, Jasper argues, “DEI” has taken the place of the “stab in the back” mythology from Vietnam. In fact, one of Hegseth’s key “qualifications” for becoming defense secretary — if one can even call it that — was how during his time as a Fox News host, he’d written a 2024 book called The War on Warriors that laid the blame for Iraq and Afghanistan squarely at the feet of weak-kneed officials like the (Black) general and secretary of defense, Lloyd Austin, and other “feckless generals,” “social justice saboteurs,” and “whores to wokesters” who lowered the military’s standards and forced the best fighters in the world to fight with one hand tied behind their back by cowardly lawyers. Hegseth was different — he was a real fighter: “Feeding a well-oiled killing machine, now that’s my jam,” he wrote.

Now, with no real management experience or strategic background, he has the chance to remake the US military in his image, an image and vision roughly equivalent to what you would expect from a 13-year-old boy who had logged too many hours playing Call of Duty on the couch.

“Hegseth is elevating this very virile masculinity as the prime factor for military success, and stem[ming] from [that is] the fact that he has conveniently scapegoated women and minorities as the reasons why America lost the forever wars,” he says. “Post-9/11, women and people of color really were elevated in significant ways for the first time in the military and they, by all accounts, excelled. Hegseth, whose own masculinity and identity is tied to his military service, found it easy to point to them as the reasons for failure, rather than to interrogate his own behavior, his own training, and the military’s broader tactical missteps.”

We “lost” the war in Iraq and Afghanistan because of DEI, Hegseth believes. The sheer misogyny on the right for women in the military today is astounding — as you may remember from how quickly online influencers began to blame last year’s Black Hawk helicopter collision at Washington National Airport on the fact the craft was being piloted by a woman.

Hegseth’s tenure as defense secretary has been one long cosplay of toxic white masculinity — from his performative kettlebell workouts to his closure of an advisory committee that helped draw women into military service. His speeches and public appearances all emphasize the “Warrior Ethos” and the “War-Fighter,” and seems to believe that things like “logistics” are for wimps and sissies. Remember in the fall, when he summoned all the military’s generals and admirals back from across the entire world to an unprecedented gathering in Virginia, only to harangue about “woke” and “DEI” and berate them over physical fitness standards. This would be a man’s military going forward, he said over and over again.

In particular, he denigrates rules-of-engagement regularly — in fact, it’s a key part of his “stab in the back” mythology. The lawyers ruined war, he argues. We lost Iraq and Afghanistan because we obeyed silly rules of engagement. Now, in Iran, we won’t do any of that wussy stuff like following the law.

That mythology run so deep in MAGA blood that Donald Trump “renamed” the Defense Department the “Department of War,” ahistorically proclaiming Hegseth the “Secretary of War,” as if somehow the entire idea of “defense” was too woke and weak.

As he said in a March press briefing, “America, regardless of what so-called international institutions say, is unleashing the most lethal and precise air power campaign in history. B-2s, fighters, drones, missiles, and of course classified effects. All on our terms with maximum authorities. No stupid rules of engagement, no nation-building quagmire, no democracy building exercise, no politically correct wars. We fight to win, and we don’t waste time or lives.”

Later in the month, he said that there would be “no quarter, no mercy” for the Iranian military, which would actually be considered a war crime — although it appeared that it was more likely to be just Hegseth trying to sound tough and not understanding what he was saying.

But there are signs that the US is crossing lines that would been unthinkable not that long ago: We even appear to be using mines in Iran.

Hegseth seems to view the entire world through the lens of “stab in the back” and “POW/MIA” mythology, all updated for the 2020s and the viral social media age.

Then last week came a stunning — but, given his track record, perhaps expected — story from the New York Times: Hegseth struck from the promotion list four Army officers set to be promoted to one-star generals — two of them Black, two of them female. It also included this eye-popping story about a showdown over a different promotion:

It’s hardly the first time that Hegseth has reached down into the ranks and engaged in “internal purges” to bend the military to his vision.

But beyond his reshaping of careers and the military’s upper ranks, I think we haven’t as a nation reckoned how corrupting his ideology of Christian nationalism is to the Pentagon. He’s been injecting Christian rhetoric and prayers into public appearances, is reshaping and threatening the chaplain corps (which, again, he says has been “watered down”!), increasingly talks of the war in Iran as some messianic Crusade, and last week even held a prayer service at the Pentagon.

Of course it was always a bad idea to put a Fox News host with no meaningful job experience in charge of the world’s complex organization. (And that’s even before you get into all the troubling personal allegations about him!)

Now, though, Hegseth is the chief cheerleader for the war in Iran, which is quickly spiraling in ways that will global ramifications for years or decades. “He’s very trigger happy,” one source told CNN, adding that Hegseth believes “blowing shit up” is the best way for him to keep his job.

Which brings us, finally, to Kid Rock. Last weekend in Tennessee, two Apache attack helicopters buzzed MAGA-friendly rock star Kid Rock’s mansion and then, apparently, flew over the No Kings rally in Nashville. Kid Rock loved it, posting video and writing “God Bless America and all those who have made the ultimate sacrifice to defend her,” but it was a clear violation of numerous military policies and immediately led to an Army investigation and the suspension of the pilots.

Then, on Tuesday afternoon, Hegseth retweeted Kid Rock’s original tweet and wrote, “Thank you @KidRock. @USArmy pilots suspension LIFTED. No punishment. No investigation. Carry on, Patriots.”

While on the one hand it was exactly what would expect from Hegseth, it was also another stunning window into his “war on woke” and how he’s corrupting normal military order and discipline — insisting on intense physical fitness standards on the one hand, but also telling soldiers that as long as they too are “anti-woke” they can get away with anything. It’s hard to imagine a more dangerous message one could send to the men (and women!) given the world’s most powerful weapons.

The fact that Hegseth so fundamentally misunderstands the path to building a successful military — why we have merit-based promotions, why “DEI” matters in a force where likely the majority of the force isn’t a white Christian male like him, and why we have rules-of-engagement — is incredibly dangerous and will ricochet through the force for a generation.

The irony, in fact, is that Hegseth’s “war on woke” is actually likely to metastasize over the years and undermine the long-term effectiveness and fighting ability of the US military.

Right now, the next “stab in the back” is actually coming from inside the E-Ring of the Pentagon.

GMG

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PPS: Pick up Jasper’s new book! Out next month, wherever you get your books.