[Salon] Pete Hegseth has seen the enemy and it is American liberals

(Lower right: 10th anniversary of the Beer Hall Putsch in Munich. (The original J6!)
Commemorative postcard issued to mark the 10th anniversary of the Beer Hall Putsch, also known as the Munich Putsch, a failed attempt by the Nazi Party leader Adolf Hitler with Erich Ludendorff and other leaders to seize power in Munich, Bavaria, during 8-9 November 1923.)

https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2025/01/22/pete-hegseth-war-warriors/

Pete Hegseth has seen the enemy and it is American liberals
Greg Jaffe
Pete Hegseth appears during a Senate Armed Services Committee confirmation hearing on Capitol Hill on Jan. 14. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
The moment that Pete Hegseth’s life changed forever came in Iraq at a base named for two U.S. soldiers killed in a mortar attack. It was March 2006, and the war was going badly for the Americans. Hegseth was sitting at his computer in the dusty outpost, sifting through intelligence from an Iraqi informant.
“My body was bone-weary and my mind melting down,” he writes in his book “The War on Warriors,” published in 2024. In this moment of “euphoric stress” and “glorious exhaustion,” Hegseth had a realization that he would carry home with him from Iraq and into the Senate Armed Services Committee hearing room, where this month lawmakers questioned him about his fitness to be the next secretary of defense.
“If I could have my family over here,” Hegseth writes of his thoughts on that day at Forward Operating Base Brassfield-Mora, “I wouldn’t leave. Ever.”
In many ways, Hegseth never did leave Iraq. Over the past 18 years, he has led two nonprofit groups focused on veterans and the military. He has written five books, married for a second and then a third time, and worked as a weekend host for “Fox & Friends,” President Donald Trump’s favorite television news show.
But the most fruitful way to understand him is as a product of two lost wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
There’s little in “The War on Warriors” that suggests that Hegseth was expecting to someday become the secretary of defense. The book includes no advice for how the military should retool to confront a rising China or a revanchist Russia — matters of major concern inside the Pentagon. Hegseth doesn’t share any thoughts about how to fix the Defense Department’s bloated and frequently over-budget weapons programs.
His overriding focus, like that of the president he is likely to serve, is on fighting internal enemies — the cultural “Marxists,” “social justice saboteurs” and “feckless generals” whom he repeatedly accuses of lowering the military’s standards, tying its hands in battle and dulling its warrior edge. These are the people Hegseth blames for America’s defeats in Iraq and Afghanistan.
“Busy killing Islamists in shithole countries — and then betrayed by our leaders — our warriors have every reason to let America’s dynasty fade away,” Hegseth writes. “Leftists stole a lot from us, but we won’t let them take this. Time for round two — we won’t miss this war.”
Pete Hegseth at a news conference in 2012 at which he announced his candidacy for a U.S. Senate seat in Minnesota. (Jim Mone/AP)
In the first years after he returned from Iraq in 2006 and then from a deployment to Afghanistan in 2012, Hegseth was quick to praise the generals in charge of those wars and exhort weary Americans to stay the course.
When the decades-long conflicts ended badly or inconclusively, Hegseth, like many veterans, went looking for someone to blame. Such “stab in the back” narratives often follow military defeats. Some are especially noxious. After its loss in World War I, the German army insisted that it had been robbed of battlefield victory by a cabal of communists, socialists and Jews. The widely believed myth fueled the rise of the Nazis.
Other “stab in the back” narratives are designed to absolve militaries of guilt for their mistakes. After the Vietnam War, U.S. military leaders accused former president Lyndon B. Johnson of micromanaging the war and preventing them from launching a large-scale conventional attack on North Vietnam. They also blamed the press for writing negative stories that undermined support at home.
Hegseth’s book taps into a version of the military’s post-Vietnam narrative. He slams military lawyers, known as judge advocate generals, for imposing what he deems overly restrictive rules of engagement on front-line troops, allowing the enemy to escape harm. Hegseth derisively refers to them as “jagoffs.” And he bashes senior leaders — “armchair generals in air-conditioned offices” — for acceding to them.
Hegseth’s view of the fight contrasts sharply with those of senior battlefield commanders, such as Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, whom Hegseth had once celebrated as a “war hero.”
McChrystal, in his battlefield memoir, “My Share of the Task” (2012), described a night raid in Iraq in which he looked into the eyes of a terrified kindergarten-age boy whose father was being detained by Army Rangers. “As I watched, I felt sick,” the general wrote. “I could feel in my own limbs and chest the shame and fury that must have been coursing through the father. … I thought, not for the first time: It would be easy for us to lose.”
In Hegseth’s version of the war, there were no botched raids, no festering Iraqi resentments, no U.S. war crimes or civilian casualties. There were only brave American soldiers, craven bureaucrats and “bad guys” who deserved to die.
“I realized that perhaps my planetary purpose was to … destroy Islamist radicals,” Hegseth writes. “Feeding a well-oiled killing machine, now that’s my jam.”
He describes his experience in Iraq as a spiritual rebirth. “There was nothing left of the old Pete Hegseth,” he writes. “[It was] as if I was reincarnated from a past life.” By the end of his tour, he was no longer just a patriotic citizen or a soldier who had courageously volunteered to go to war. He was, in his own words, a member of the “warrior class.”
President Donald Trump with "Fox & Friends" co-host Pete Hegseth at a Wounded Warrior Project event at the White House in 2017. (Andrew Harnik/AP)
At a different time in American history, Hegseth’s frustrations may have faded gradually after his return to civilian life.
Instead, Trump’s stoking of grievances and his lies about losing the 2020 presidential election caused Hegseth’s anger to fester and deepen. His final break came a couple of weeks after the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol, when his Army National Guard unit was tapped to provide security at President Joe Biden’s inauguration and Hegseth was told he wasn’t wanted.
Hegseth writes that he was flagged as a possible Christian nationalist and extremist because of a Jerusalem cross tattoo on his chest. Other accounts, including in The Washington Post, cited a second tattoo bearing the Latin words “Deus Vult” — or “God wills it” — as the problem. Though ordinary Christians use the phrase, it has become popular in recent years with some of the extremist groups that participated in the siege at the Capitol.
To Hegseth, it was as if the war he had fought overseas — the war that had given his life meaning and purpose — had washed up on American shores. “We should be in panic mode. Almost desperate. Willing to do anything necessary to defeat the ‘fundamental transformation’ of the American military,” he writes.
In this fight, Hegseth sees enemies everywhere. He recasts the stories of two female soldiers who earned Silver Stars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the nation’s third-highest award for valor, as pawns in a larger campaign by leftists to break down barriers that, until 2013, had prevented women from serving in combat arms jobs, such as the infantry. Their goal, he maintains, is to lower standards and to make the military “fatter,” “slower” and more effeminate.
He heaps similar scorn on those in the Biden administration and the Pentagon who championed diversity, equity and inclusion programs, or pushed to repeal the ban on transgender people serving openly in the military. Their real goal, he repeatedly insists, is to discourage “normal,” “straight, white men,” like him, from fighting for their country. “Make no mistake about it: the left wants to destroy the one institution standing between them and total control — the United States military.”
The true villains of his book, though, are the generals and admirals who followed their civilian leadership’s orders and betrayed the country’s “warrior class.” In Hegseth’s view, these “sellouts,” “cowards” and “whores to wokesters” aren’t just guilty of bad judgment. Their actions, he writes, are potentially “treasonous.”
Hegseth, though, never answers a big question at the heart of the U.S. military’s relationship with its constitutional democracy: What should these men and women at the top of America’s armed forces have done? Does he believe that senior military leaders have a moral obligation to ignore legal orders from elected civilian leaders if they think they might weaken the military or its warrior class?
These were hypothetical questions when Hegseth was a Fox News talk-show host. As secretary of defense, he would have to confront them for real.
Earlier this month, Hegseth appeared before the Senate Armed Services Committee for his confirmation hearing. His hair was slicked back in the manner of a television host. An American flag pocket square peeked out from his bright blue suit.
Democrats questioned him about his return home from war: reports of heavy drinking, repeated infidelity and an allegation of sexual assault.
Hegseth declared himself an “open book.” But he wasn’t referring to the darker moments from his past, which he either declined to discuss or dismissed as “anonymous smears.” He seemed to mean “The War on Warriors.” There was little talk at the four-hour hearing of the countries that pose the greatest threat to American security: North Korea, China, Russia and Iran. (TP-He's "good" on that too: Exterminate All the Brutes!)
Instead, much of the discussion focused on the ideas in Hegseth’s book and whether he was qualified to lead the world’s most powerful military. “We’ve repeatedly placed people atop the Pentagon with supposedly the right credentials … and where has it gotten us?” Hegseth asked, paraphrasing Trump. (TP-Ludendorff: "let's put a Corporal in charge!)
Democrats slammed the nominee for passages in his book asserting that the introduction of women into combat units had led to less-effective troops and a weaker military. “We have hundreds, hundreds of women who are currently in the infantry, lethal members of our military,” Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-New York) said to Hegseth. “... But you degrade them.”
Hegseth refused to give ground, insisting that standards have been lowered.
“Give me one example!” Gillibrand angrily replied. “Please give me an example!”
Republicans accused Biden officials of spinning a false narrative about racism in the ranks, and blasted the Army officers who had branded Hegseth as a potential extremist threat and drove him from the service. “They’re the racists,” Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-North Dakota) said. “They’re the bigots.”
Even as he defended the nominee, Cramer seemed to worry that Hegseth and Trump might take things too far. He urged Hegseth to hold off purging generals who had implemented Biden-era policies.
“Give those men and women a chance under new leadership,” he suggested.
Hegseth was noncommittal. “Accountability is coming,” he vowed.
Everyone — Hegseth, the Republicans, the Democrats — seemed to agree that bitter partisan infighting had no place in the Pentagon. But what does that mean in an era in which everything becomes political?
In his book, Hegseth promises to save the military from “woke” Pentagon bureaucrats and political ideologues. “The Left captured the military quickly, and we must reclaim it at a faster pace,” he writes. “We must wage a frontal assault. A swift counterattack, in broad daylight.”
He never pauses to consider that purging the military of political ideas he doesn’t like may have the opposite effect of what he intends. Instead of unifying the force, his actions could threaten to make the military ever more like the country it serves: polarized, angry and coming apart.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2025/01/22/pete-hegseth-war-warriors/

Pete Hegseth has seen the enemy and it is American liberals
Greg Jaffe
Pete Hegseth appears during a Senate Armed Services Committee confirmation hearing on Capitol Hill on Jan. 14. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
The moment that Pete Hegseth’s life changed forever came in Iraq at a base named for two U.S. soldiers killed in a mortar attack. It was March 2006, and the war was going badly for the Americans. Hegseth was sitting at his computer in the dusty outpost, sifting through intelligence from an Iraqi informant.
“My body was bone-weary and my mind melting down,” he writes in his book “The War on Warriors,” published in 2024. In this moment of “euphoric stress” and “glorious exhaustion,” Hegseth had a realization that he would carry home with him from Iraq and into the Senate Armed Services Committee hearing room, where this month lawmakers questioned him about his fitness to be the next secretary of defense.
“If I could have my family over here,” Hegseth writes of his thoughts on that day at Forward Operating Base Brassfield-Mora, “I wouldn’t leave. Ever.”
In many ways, Hegseth never did leave Iraq. Over the past 18 years, he has led two nonprofit groups focused on veterans and the military. He has written five books, married for a second and then a third time, and worked as a weekend host for “Fox & Friends,” President Donald Trump’s favorite television news show.
But the most fruitful way to understand him is as a product of two lost wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
There’s little in “The War on Warriors” that suggests that Hegseth was expecting to someday become the secretary of defense. The book includes no advice for how the military should retool to confront a rising China or a revanchist Russia — matters of major concern inside the Pentagon. Hegseth doesn’t share any thoughts about how to fix the Defense Department’s bloated and frequently over-budget weapons programs.
His overriding focus, like that of the president he is likely to serve, is on fighting internal enemies — the cultural “Marxists,” “social justice saboteurs” and “feckless generals” whom he repeatedly accuses of lowering the military’s standards, tying its hands in battle and dulling its warrior edge. These are the people Hegseth blames for America’s defeats in Iraq and Afghanistan.
“Busy killing Islamists in shithole countries — and then betrayed by our leaders — our warriors have every reason to let America’s dynasty fade away,” Hegseth writes. “Leftists stole a lot from us, but we won’t let them take this. Time for round two — we won’t miss this war.”
In the first years after he returned from Iraq in 2006 and then from a deployment to Afghanistan in 2012, Hegseth was quick to praise the generals in charge of those wars and exhort weary Americans to stay the course.
When the decades-long conflicts ended badly or inconclusively, Hegseth, like many veterans, went looking for someone to blame. Such “stab in the back” narratives often follow military defeats. Some are especially noxious. After its loss in World War I, the German army insisted that it had been robbed of battlefield victory by a cabal of communists, socialists and Jews. The widely believed myth fueled the rise of the Nazis.
Other “stab in the back” narratives are designed to absolve militaries of guilt for their mistakes. After the Vietnam War, U.S. military leaders accused former president Lyndon B. Johnson of micromanaging the war and preventing them from launching a large-scale conventional attack on North Vietnam. They also blamed the press for writing negative stories that undermined support at home.
Hegseth’s book taps into a version of the military’s post-Vietnam narrative. He slams military lawyers, known as judge advocate generals, for imposing what he deems overly restrictive rules of engagement on front-line troops, allowing the enemy to escape harm. Hegseth derisively refers to them as “jagoffs.” And he bashes senior leaders — “armchair generals in air-conditioned offices” — for acceding to them.
Hegseth’s view of the fight contrasts sharply with those of senior battlefield commanders, such as Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, whom Hegseth had once celebrated as a “war hero.”
McChrystal, in his battlefield memoir, “My Share of the Task” (2012), described a night raid in Iraq in which he looked into the eyes of a terrified kindergarten-age boy whose father was being detained by Army Rangers. “As I watched, I felt sick,” the general wrote. “I could feel in my own limbs and chest the shame and fury that must have been coursing through the father. … I thought, not for the first time: It would be easy for us to lose.”
In Hegseth’s version of the war, there were no botched raids, no festering Iraqi resentments, no U.S. war crimes or civilian casualties. There were only brave American soldiers, craven bureaucrats and “bad guys” who deserved to die.
“I realized that perhaps my planetary purpose was to … destroy Islamist radicals,” Hegseth writes. “Feeding a well-oiled killing machine, now that’s my jam.”
He describes his experience in Iraq as a spiritual rebirth. “There was nothing left of the old Pete Hegseth,” he writes. “[It was] as if I was reincarnated from a past life.” By the end of his tour, he was no longer just a patriotic citizen or a soldier who had courageously volunteered to go to war. He was, in his own words, a member of the “warrior class.”
At a different time in American history, Hegseth’s frustrations may have faded gradually after his return to civilian life.
Instead, Trump’s stoking of grievances and his lies about losing the 2020 presidential election caused Hegseth’s anger to fester and deepen. His final break came a couple of weeks after the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol, when his Army National Guard unit was tapped to provide security at President Joe Biden’s inauguration and Hegseth was told he wasn’t wanted.
Hegseth writes that he was flagged as a possible Christian nationalist and extremist because of a Jerusalem cross tattoo on his chest. Other accounts, including in The Washington Post, cited a second tattoo bearing the Latin words “Deus Vult” — or “God wills it” — as the problem. Though ordinary Christians use the phrase, it has become popular in recent years with some of the extremist groups that participated in the siege at the Capitol.
To Hegseth, it was as if the war he had fought overseas — the war that had given his life meaning and purpose — had washed up on American shores. “We should be in panic mode. Almost desperate. Willing to do anything necessary to defeat the ‘fundamental transformation’ of the American military,” he writes.
In this fight, Hegseth sees enemies everywhere. He recasts the stories of two female soldiers who earned Silver Stars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the nation’s third-highest award for valor, as pawns in a larger campaign by leftists to break down barriers that, until 2013, had prevented women from serving in combat arms jobs, such as the infantry. Their goal, he maintains, is to lower standards and to make the military “fatter,” “slower” and more effeminate.
He heaps similar scorn on those in the Biden administration and the Pentagon who championed diversity, equity and inclusion programs, or pushed to repeal the ban on transgender people serving openly in the military. Their real goal, he repeatedly insists, is to discourage “normal,” “straight, white men,” like him, from fighting for their country. “Make no mistake about it: the left wants to destroy the one institution standing between them and total control — the United States military.”
The true villains of his book, though, are the generals and admirals who followed their civilian leadership’s orders and betrayed the country’s “warrior class.” In Hegseth’s view, these “sellouts,” “cowards” and “whores to wokesters” aren’t just guilty of bad judgment. Their actions, he writes, are potentially “treasonous.”
Hegseth, though, never answers a big question at the heart of the U.S. military’s relationship with its constitutional democracy: What should these men and women at the top of America’s armed forces have done? Does he believe that senior military leaders have a moral obligation to ignore legal orders from elected civilian leaders if they think they might weaken the military or its warrior class?
These were hypothetical questions when Hegseth was a Fox News talk-show host. As secretary of defense, he would have to confront them for real.
Earlier this month, Hegseth appeared before the Senate Armed Services Committee for his confirmation hearing. His hair was slicked back in the manner of a television host. An American flag pocket square peeked out from his bright blue suit.
Democrats questioned him about his return home from war: reports of heavy drinking, repeated infidelity and an allegation of sexual assault.
Hegseth declared himself an “open book.” But he wasn’t referring to the darker moments from his past, which he either declined to discuss or dismissed as “anonymous smears.” He seemed to mean “The War on Warriors.” There was little talk at the four-hour hearing of the countries that pose the greatest threat to American security: North Korea, China, Russia and Iran.
Instead, much of the discussion focused on the ideas in Hegseth’s book and whether he was qualified to lead the world’s most powerful military. “We’ve repeatedly placed people atop the Pentagon with supposedly the right credentials … and where has it gotten us?” Hegseth asked, paraphrasing Trump.
Democrats slammed the nominee for passages in his book asserting that the introduction of women into combat units had led to less-effective troops and a weaker military. “We have hundreds, hundreds of women who are currently in the infantry, lethal members of our military,” Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-New York) said to Hegseth. “... But you degrade them.”
Hegseth refused to give ground, insisting that standards have been lowered.
“Give me one example!” Gillibrand angrily replied. “Please give me an example!”
Republicans accused Biden officials of spinning a false narrative about racism in the ranks, and blasted the Army officers who had branded Hegseth as a potential extremist threat and drove him from the service. “They’re the racists,” Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-North Dakota) said. “They’re the bigots.”
Even as he defended the nominee, Cramer seemed to worry that Hegseth and Trump might take things too far. He urged Hegseth to hold off purging generals who had implemented Biden-era policies.
“Give those men and women a chance under new leadership,” he suggested.
Hegseth was noncommittal. “Accountability is coming,” he vowed.
Everyone — Hegseth, the Republicans, the Democrats — seemed to agree that bitter partisan infighting had no place in the Pentagon. But what does that mean in an era in which everything becomes political?
In his book, Hegseth promises to save the military from “woke” Pentagon bureaucrats and political ideologues. “The Left captured the military quickly, and we must reclaim it at a faster pace,” he writes. “We must wage a frontal assault. A swift counterattack, in broad daylight.”
He never pauses to consider that purging the military of political ideas he doesn’t like may have the opposite effect of what he intends. Instead of unifying the force, his actions could threaten to make the military ever more like the country it serves: polarized, angry and coming apart.

[Salon] Pete Hegseth has seen the enemy and it is American liberals - The Washington Post

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Pete Hegseth has seen the enemy and it is American liberals

Pete Hegseth has seen the enemy and it is American liberals