Pete Hegseth Aces His Nomination Hearing; Dems Stage Banshee Show

Hegseth’s opening statement characterized his posture throughout the hearings:  the Pentagon exists to fight wars if they become necessary, with the President, not the Pentagon, determining that necessity and the nation’s defense posture. That requires a focus at the Pentagon on “warfighting, lethality, meritocracy, standards and readiness.” 

He emphasized that President Trump told him,

“We’ve repeatedly placed people atop the Pentagon with supposedly ‘the right credentials’ –whether they are retired generals, academics, or defense contractor executives–and where has that gotten us?’ He believes, and I humbly agree, that it’s time to give someone with dust on his boots at the helm.  A change agent.  Someone with no vested interest in certain companies or specific programs or approved narratives.”

Instead, in recent years, the Pentagon has created a top heavy corp of 43 four star generals and others who have been promoted for losing wars and who then rotate to lucrative positions in defense contracting businesses which produce million dollar weapons which do not work, while sucking up billions in taxpayer dollars, creating lucrative returns for the investing class, and political donations for a compliant Congress.

The result is a culture of outright delusion.

General Milley, for example, actually believes that America is “winning” the Ukraine war.  Hegseth repeatedly vowed to change this culture.

When Sen. Elizabeth Warren demanded that he vow not to join a defense company after serving as Defense Secretary, he cracked up the room full of actual warrior veterans like himself by simply noting that, “I am not a General.”

Under the Biden Administration, the ability of the Pentagon to execute its mission has been further poisoned by DEI, COVID based firings, and direct political firings of soldiers supporting Donald Trump.

The first Trump Administration saw open lying to the president and rampant insubordination regarding his orders to pull out of Syria or to deploy troops to protect the Congress on January 6, 2021, as but two examples.

Hegseth vowed to remedy this, including reinstating those fired for their political or vaccine beliefs, while imposing accountability for failures of command.  He repeatedly underlined his loyalty to Donald Trump, as commander in chief, noting his job is to competently execute the President’s orders. 

The Mission Critical Defense Industrial Base 

No war can be fought or won unless the mission is clear and the logistical industrial base is available to fight it.  Hegseth vowed repeatedly to pursue breaking the grip of major defense contractors on the Pentagon through competition while pursuing technological innovation in advanced weaponry and reviving the defense industrial base to support it.

He also noted that the priority defense is of the homeland, of our borders and citizens not foreign adventures. He said he would use the Defense Production Act and every other method he can find to gin up the defense industrial and research base. He emphasized that in any undertaking, the mission would be defined with exactitude and executed without mission creep.  

Right now, the military is dependent on foreign supply chains and an aging technological platform which fails to innovate, let alone prove useful under actual battle conditions.

Our demonstrated inability to develop hypersonic missiles when the Russians are manufacturing them wholesale at far less cost, to develop the missile defense President Trump has called for which will change all military strategic equations to favor the defense, or to develop defenses to drones, are but recent manifestations of this corruption. 

Recruitment and the Citizen Soldier

Senator Tommy Tuberville underlined the other mission critical problem in his questioning of Hegseth: recruitment.

Traditionally, and particularly for minorities, the military has served as a valued training base for a skilled citizenry.  In the destructive policies under the Biden Administration and other Democratic administrations, recruitment is way down. 

The reasons are several: 

• lack of physical fitness for duty,
• drug use,
• indoctrination in hatred of the nation,
• and an unwillingness to serve in losing, purposeless wars. 

Already, with Trump’s election, recruitment has begun to turn around. Hegseth noted that this is an obvious priority.

The Democrats Freak Show 

As noted above, Democratic senators of every sexual persuasion attacked Hegseth as a misogynist toward women, transsexuals, a criminal sexual assaulter, a philanderer in his marriages, a failed financial manager, a drunk, someone willing to shoot protesters in the legs and invade Panama and Greenland –all at a level of upper register hysteria which makes the three witches act in Shakespeare’s Macbeth seem tame.

I’m sure that at points in Senator Hirono’s, Gillibrand’s, Warren’s and similar tirades from the rest of the “her” identifying Senators, the term “cat lady” popped into the minds of the warrior veterans of all sexes in the audience.

Senator Tim Kaine is credited with the most vicious blows on social media, although to this author, Kaine seemed tipsy himself and weirdly off key himself. 

They were all very significantly upstaged by Senator Mark Wayne Mullen, who called out the Democratic Senators on the Committee for voting while drunk in evening sessions, and multiple infidelities to their partners.

While Mullin’s takedown will grab appropriate headlines, I was more impressed by Hegseth’s answer to all of this.  He “knows what he does not know,” he wrote in his opening statement.  He noted that the accusations against him have all been debunked and were part of a smear job aimed at Trump.  He also said that as a very imperfect human being he had been saved by Jesus Christ and his wife, Jenny, and lives for the future of his seven children.