In an oddly mismatched pair of speeches, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and President Donald Trump lectured 800 of the US military’s most senior officers and enlisted leaders at the sprawling Marine Corps base at Quantico, Virginia, a few miles south of the Pentagon. Not everything they said was unhelpful or untrue, but the whole event showed a lack of understanding of just how good — how “lethal,” to use Hegseth’s favorite term — the US military remains today.
Hegseth, who has rebranded the DoD as the “Department of War” gave a crisp, professional presentation in full command of the stage — as you would expect from a camera-comfortable former Fox News personality. His principal themes were launched with precision and passion. The gist was that the military had drifted far, far away from its high standards. He attributed this to a “woke” culture and said the idea that “our diversity is our strength” is “an insane fallacy.”