David Brooks
We Deserve Pete Hegseth
Jan. 15, 2025
By David
Brooks
Opinion Columnist
First
let me hit you with some realities:
- The secretary general of NATO,
Mark Rutte, has said that the West is not prepared for the challenges that
will come over the next five years and that it’s time to “shift to a
wartime mind-set.” Kori Schake, who directs foreign and defense policy
studies at the American Enterprise Institute, writes that while World War
III has not begun, “a world war is approaching.”
- Recent American defense strategy
has been based on the optimistic assumption that we will have to fight
only one war at a time. But the closer cooperation between China, Russia,
Iran and North Korea make a coordinated attack more likely, meaning we may
have to fight three or four regional wars simultaneously.
- The weak U.S. industrial base has
hollowed out American resilience. China’s shipbuilding industry has a
capacity more than 230 times that of the United States. When experts
recently conducted war games with China, the United States ran out of
long-range anti-ship missiles within three to seven days.
- The Chinese are building gigantic
amphibious landing craft of the sort they would use for an invasion of
Taiwan. They have developed a powerful microwave weapon that has the
intensity of a nuclear explosion and can disrupt or destroy electronic
components of our weapons systems. H.R. McMaster, the former national
security adviser, recently said, “I think China is laying the groundwork
for a first-strike nuclear capability against the United States.”
- In 2023, the RAND Corporation
issued a report on U.S. military “power and influence.” Here’s how it
opened: “The U.S. defense strategy and posture have become insolvent. The
tasks that the nation expects its military forces and other elements of
national power to do internationally exceed the means that are available
to accomplish those tasks.”
Now,
if you are holding a hearing for a prospective secretary of defense, you would
think you might want to ask him about these urgent issues. Or you might come up
with other serious questions: How do drones change war-fighting? How will
artificial intelligence alter the nature of combat? How do we shift from a
defense policy built around counterterrorism to a policy built around
nation-state warfare? If you’re a Democrat trying to sink a nomination, you
would think you’d want to ask substantive questions on life-or-death issues
like these in order to expose the nominee’s ignorance and unpreparedness.
But
did this happen at the Pete Hegseth hearing in front of the Senate Armed
Services Committee this week? If you thought those kinds of questions would
dominate the hearing, you must be living under the illusion that we live in a
serious country.
We
do not. We live in a soap opera country. We live in a social media/cable TV
country. In our culture you don’t want to focus on boring policy questions; you
want to engage in the kind of endless culture war that gets voters riled up.
You don’t want to focus on topics that would require study; you focus on images
and easy-to-understand issues that generate instant visceral reactions. You
don’t win this game by engaging in serious thought; you win by mere
attitudinizing — by striking a pose. Your job is not to advance an argument
that might help the country; your job is to go viral.
Pete Hegseth is of course the living, breathing embodiment
of this culture. The world is on fire and what’s his obsession? Wokeness in the
military. I went through high school trying to bluff my way through class after
doing none of the reading, and in Hegseth, I recognize a master of the craft.
During the hearing Hegseth repeatedly said he was going to defend the
meritocracy. In what kind of meritocracy is being a Fox TV host preparation for
being secretary of defense? Maybe in the one Caligula fancied when he
contemplated making his horse a consul.
Several
Republican senators were happy to play along with the woke-military game. In
addition, Senator Kevin Cramer used his precious question time to praise
Hegseth for having the courage to use the words “Jesus Christ.” (If we had used
this logic during World War II, Father Fulton Sheen would have commanded the
D-Day invasion.) I’ve also learned that mentioning climate change in a
Republican gathering is like throwing a side of bacon into an Orthodox minyan —
they react with great offense.
Hegseth
is in no danger of rising to the level of mediocrity, but next to some of his
Democratic questioners, he looked like Carl von Clausewitz. Democrats played
their own culture war games. Especially early in the hearing their main
obsession was women in combat. (Like everybody in my social class, I support
women in combat, but I don’t think it’s as important an issue as failure to
deter World War III.)
Senator
Elizabeth Warren submitted over
30 pages of written questions to Hegseth before the hearing. They had to do
with things like drinking, accusations of sexual assault, threats to L.G.B.T.Q.
rights and veterans benefits. I have enormous respect for Warren, but she
didn’t show much interest in topics like how to deter and fight a war — which
are kind of central to the purview of this committee.
Senator
Tim Kaine tried to play the moral disqualification game, dwelling on Hegseth’s
various adulteries. With Democrats’ having failed to defeat Donald Trump with
this strategy, I admire their capacity for persistent losing.
The hearing got better as it went along and more junior
senators got to speak. Senator Mazie Hirono was excellent, asking substantive
questions: If the president ordered you, would you order troops to shoot
protesters in the legs? Would you follow an order to use the military for mass
deportations? Senator Tammy Duckworth was outstanding, too, asking about the
big responsibilities of the job: Does Hegseth know anything about the ongoing
international negotiations? Does he know which countries are in the ASEAN bloc?
(The answers are no and no.)
The
lesson for Democrats over the next four years is clear: Don’t fly into moral
outrage every day. Focus on Trumpian incompetence.
Overall,
Republicans were the more serious party at the hearing. The committee chairman,
Senator Roger Wicker, did note that we live in the most dangerous security
environment since World War II. Senator Tim Sheehy did mention shipbuilding.
Senator Ted Budd did ask about warplanes. Senator Eric Schmitt did ask about
drones.
But,
as you can kind of tell, I finished watching the hearing sick to my stomach. I
also came away thinking that we need to come up with a better way to think
about expertise. Hegseth’s core populist conviction — repeated ad nauseam — is
that the grunts on the ground know what they are doing and the pencil-necked
geeks in air-conditioned offices just write nonsense regulations that get in
the way. The man wasted years at Princeton and Harvard when he could have
learned everything he knows by watching that Colonel Jessup speech at the end
of “A Few Good Men.”
We
don’t want to live in a populist paradise in which expertise is suspect and
ignorance a sign of virtue. Nor do we want to live in an elitist world in which
technocrats try to rule the world. As the political scientist James C. Scott
showed, technocrats are too abstracted from reality to even see what is going
on.
We need to settle upon a place where experts are respected
and inform decision-making, but civilians make the ultimate calls. In a healthy
democracy people revere great learning on substantive issues; they understand
the world is too complex to be captured in bite-size slogans; but they also
appreciate the wisdom that comes from concrete experience and know that most
hard calls have to be made in light of the deeply held values that have made
America what it is.
All
of this has been corrupted by the war for short attention spans. In the 19th
century we had the Lincoln-Douglas debates. Today it would be the
Lincoln-Douglas TikTok wars followed by “Three Takeaways From the
Lincoln-Douglas Debates” followed by a panel of pundits (like me) analyzing
whether Stephen Douglas helped himself with swing voters in DuPage County.
Can this kind of country prevail in a global conflict of
systems? Maybe, but maybe not.
