Reflections on Secretary Hegseth’s Remarks at Marine Corps Base Quantico

As a junior naval officer in the mid-1980s, I was an arrogant little fart. By the time I was a lieutenant – the equivalent of a captain in the Army – I was fully convinced that I knew more about leadership and the conduct of special operations than anyone in my chain of command.

Watching Secretary Hegseth lecture hundreds of general and flag officers on 30 Sep, I recognized a fellow traveler. A major in the Army National Guard until he resigned his commission in 2024, Secretary Hegseth came across as a cocky, know-it-all, junior officer eager to shake his Promethean fist at the top brass. “Way to stick it to ‘em, Pete!”

But any similarities end there. My career progression from junior officer (JO) to a relatively senior rank was an unremarkable slog up a steep hill. Major Hegseth skipped all that. He rocketed directly from JO to Secretary of Defense (”Secretary of War” if Congress legislates the proposed change).

Good for him! I harbor no envy. However, there’s risk in promoting our savants too quickly. Secretary Hegseth’s curious speech at Marine Corps Base Quantico reveals that his meteoric rise from Major to SECDEF deprived him of some crucial lessons that senior officers typically learn during their less hurried journeys through the ranks.

In the interest of space, I’ll discuss only three of the senior-officer lessons that Secretary Hegseth appears to have missed.

Lesson #1: Rules of engagement (ROE) are vital leadership tools, not inconvenient constraints.

In Secretary Hegseth’s military, our troops will no longer have their hands tied by “stupid…politically correct and overbearing” rules of engagement.

Nothing in his speech sounded more like the JO version of me than his polemic against overly restrictive ROE. My first combat deployment was for Operation JUST CAUSE, the 1989 US invasion of Panama. During the first days of the invasion, our ROE were relatively liberal. However, as the operation proceeded and the success of the campaign was more or less assured, ROE became increasingly restrictive. It seemed to me that our leaders were deliberately shifting risk away from Panamanian civilians and onto my troops.

As I advanced through the ranks, I realized that that’s precisely what they were doing. And rightfully so. Senior military commanders must constantly balance three variables: risk to mission, risk to troops, and risk to noncombatants. Maintaining that balance involves tradeoffs, which commanders (not lawyers) manage primarily through “commander’s intent” and ROE. As Operation JUST CAUSE proceeded, my commanders revised the ROE to privilege the safety of noncombatants because they understood what my JO brain couldn’t comprehend: disproportionately high civilian casualties would have impeded restoration of normal relations with Panama, the strategic objective of the invasion. In war, winning is not enough. Strategically, it matters how states fight and win their wars.

Another reason ROE are vitally important is their relevance to the oath that every servicemember takes to support and defend the US Constitution, the law of the land. We are a nation of laws. That’s what made America unique in the 18th century and makes us great today. If we abandon the Laws of Armed Conflict and the Uniform Code of Military Justice whenever their strictures seem inconvenient, what exactly are we fighting for? Furthermore, senior officers are obliged to establish the legality of their orders because they expect their troops to follow those orders. Leaders who issue illegal orders put their troops at risk of legal prosecution; “I was just following orders” will not help them at trial. In short, when commanders consult with their JAG officers to craft ROE, they are living into their oaths and protecting their troops.

Finally, senior leaders value ROE because they safeguard their troops against bad choices that can ruin a soldier’s life. The risks of physical trauma in war are obvious. War also exposes servicemembers to grave risks of moral trauma, psychological harm that can result from participating in or witnessing acts that transgress deeply held moral values. Good leaders mitigate risks of moral trauma and moral injury by ensuring that their troops thoroughly understand the ROE every time they go “outside the wire.” Senior leaders recognize their obligation not only to fight and win on the battlefield, but also to do their best to bring the men and women entrusted to them home as whole human beings, ready to reintegrate with the society that sent them to war and reunite with the loved ones they left behind. Secretary Hegseth’s emphasis on “maximum lethality and authority for warfighters” discounts these obligations.

Lesson #2: Diversity is either a liability or a force multiplier; it’s our choice.

According to Secretary Hegseth, “An entire generation of generals and admirals were told that they must parrot the insane fallacy that ‘our diversity is our strength.’” While I don’t know any generals or admirals who framed it quite that way, every senior officer recognizes racial, ethnic, cultural, religious, and socioeconomic diversity as a brute fact of military service. Because America’s population is diverse, and because defending our nation is an all-hands-on-deck effort, it could be no other way. The variable is not whether we should or should not be a diverse force, but whether the fact of diversity is an asset or a liability.

In the years immediately following Truman’s 1948 executive order desegregating the armed forces, racial tensions in the ranks subverted good order and discipline. In extreme cases, it decimated unit cohesion, rendering squads, platoons, and entire companies essentially combat-ineffective. In response, the military instituted programs and policies to promote equal opportunity and address racism, gender bias, and (after 2011) homophobia. In other words, these programs are not new. Nor are they artifacts of a “woke” agenda as Secretary Hegseth implies. As an Ensign in 1984 serving under Ronald Reagan, I dutifully completed my annual “equal opportunity” training. As a Department of Defense civilian in 2018 serving under Donald Trump, I dutifully completed my annual “DEI” training. The names have changed, but the objectives have not. These programs were essential then. They’re essential today.

Secretary Hegseth insists that “unity,” not diversity, is our strength. Maybe. What the secretary seems to be missing, a common oversight among junior officers, is that achieving unity in our racially, ethnically, culturally, religiously, and socioeconomically diverse formations requires intentional leadership. Though it went by various names, DEI training has long been an essential tool for military leaders seeking to make America’s diversity a warfighting asset.

Lesson #3: Combat is not war.

I returned from my first combat deployment more obnoxious than ever. Unlike most of my peers and many of my superiors at that time, I now had combat experience. Unlike them, I “knew war.”

No, I didn’t. I had a minor brush with combat that yielded nearly zero insights into the profound complexities of war. Here again, Secretary Hegseth and the JO version of me seem to be brothers. He appears to believe that his brush with combat qualifies him to lecture officers and NCOs who spent much of their careers in war zones on the nature of war. Military officers, he explained, should not concern themselves with issues that don’t involve “kill[ing] people and break[ing] things.” He reminded his audience that “We have entire departments…dedicated to diplomatic, informational, and economic lines of effort. We do the M[ilitary]…And our [general and flag officers] need to master it in every domain, in every scenario, no more distractions, no more political ideologies, no more debris.”

This would be excellent advice for an audience of majors and lieutenant commanders attending command and staff college, where mastering warfighting specialties is a primary focus. The fact that he delivered these remarks to essentially all of America’s flag and general officer corps reveals that our “Secretary of War” (not yet an official title) knows very little about war. He does not seem to understand what every admiral and general has known since they were commanders and lieutenant colonels: war is an extension of politics. Officers who don’t understand the political, informational, and economic sources of national power may understand combat, but they do not know war.

It’s noteworthy that a consensus emerged among flag and general officers returning from World War II, Korea, and Vietnam that the “technocratic conception of officership,” the view that values technical and operational proficiency above all – Secretary Hegseth’s stated view – had been rendered obsolete by the complexity of modern warfare. Admiral Raymond Spruance, for example, concluded from his Second World War experiences that the “technical types,” those who were competent on the bridge of a ship but “deficient in abstract imagination and reasoning,” needed to step aside to make room for the “strategical type” who possessed “inventive intellect.” Admiral James Stockdale credited the wide range of coursework he was allowed to sample while earning his master’s degree at Stanford in 1962 with providing him with the tools to persevere during his seven years of captivity in North Vietnam and lead his fellow prisoners through the ordeal. When he took the helm as President of the Naval War College, Stockdale set out to craft a curriculum that would illuminate “the irrationality and unpredictability of combat, the psychological and subjective, as well as the objective totality of the human experience we call war.” The current emphasis at America’s war colleges on the full spectrum of national power – diplomatic, informational, military, and economic power – is the product of insights inspired by decades of war.

Pete Hegseth was an unconventional choice for Secretary of Defense. His primary qualification was recent service as a junior officer. In some regards, this has been refreshing; he says out loud what many junior officers and mid-grade NCOs quietly stew about. His observations about “risk aversion” and the “zero defect command culture” are 100 percent on the mark; I hope he addresses these problems aggressively.

Secretary Hegseth was also right when he acknowledged that we live in “a moment of mounting urgency. Enemies gather. Threats grow. There is no time for games.” Yet despite this acknowledgement, “games” were the order of the day. He summoned flag and general officers from across the planet to scold and admonish them employing the same exhortations that company and platoon commanders across our military routinely deliver to their enlisted troops: haircuts, physical standards, good order and discipline.

Secretary Hegseth urgently needs to recalibrate his priorities. I trust that the senior officers and NCOs he lectured in Quantico will offer him this feedback and help him redirect his focus to the strategic level of statecraft, the arena where our nation’s most effective Secretaries of War and Defense flourished.

Photo Credit: Jim Watson / AFP