Diane Biegel

Full credit to @WestIdp (a self-identified former officer whom I do not know) for these points about Pete Hegseth and the military. He made them in multiple posts in response to my comment that Hegseth should already have resigned. They're long in total, so I am cutting them and pasting into a single post to highlight them. As you will see, @WestIdp is no liberal and more than happy with Hegseth's takedown of the Biden/Obama DEI nonsense - but he feels Hegseth failed in his most basic roles: offering decent military advice and ensuring the military is acting Constitutionally and legally. [Post begins below. Any comments from me are in brackets. All else is original, edited only for length.] -- Let's be clear; purging DEI from DOD [Department of Defense, now called the Department of War] was 90% a two-week task. DOD broadly wanted to be rid of it. Hegseth was a field grade National Guardsman who had no idea how the world's largest purchaser and employer really worked... Gym workouts to curry favor with the E4 [junior enlisted soldiers] mafia in the morning and stacking the key appointee offices with inept or corrupt Trump patronages and the Joint Chiefs with GOFOs [generals and admirals] cowed from saying "This is an extraordinarily bad idea, Sir" in the afternoon. He imposed a CCP-like state of paranoia where we can least afford it... "So much winning you'll beg for it to stop" right? Hegseth was no victim; he was a co-arsonist. --- As a prior enlisted from the operational world who later became a recalcitrant junior officer, reading the Pentagon Wars [a 1993 book that describes the military's successful post-Vietnam transformation] and other writings, I completely get where Pete Hegseth came from. My sense is that he was a pretty good field leader who cared about his men, but became more radicalized in the partisan media world... Many of his reforms DO have the right ingredients; a return to merit, removing identity politics, better personnel and family support, simplifying acquisition and cutting massive waste, moving faster than adversaries to deploy decisive technologies and doctrine, pushing the MIC [military-industrial complex] to scale production and deliver on time, and reinstalling a cultural sense of winning after decades of politically sabotaged stumbling and defeat. All of that REALLY matters, and the massive reversal of recruiting shortfalls was a vote of confidence. But understanding the soup-to-nuts process of going to war, its civil and economic complexities, and NOT feeding reckless ambitions of politicians violating their legal and political obligations is Job One for the Secretary. If treaties and statutes no-longer workably address the changing nature of conflict, and need to be amended in order to confront the pseudo-state cartels (whom are killing hundreds of thousands of Americans) kinetically in a lawful fashion, the obligation is to advise POTUS and get legislation pushed through FIRST. If a conflict with a sovereign state is brewing to a point of a globally consequential war, there is a planning and political (and fiscal) process by which we follow precisely to keep the US from plunging into a geostrategic catastrophe. Being an enabler for POTUS to cut corners is the definition of malpractice, where personal fealty betrays the Oath to the Constitution, and moreover the Republic. If you have to resign to make a point, that's what you have to do - and speak up afterwards! -- ...there's a huge difference in picking a dozen top-tier senior officers who are a good fit for your policy plans and taking a wrecking ball to the entire senior leadership establishment. Obama did some dumb things, having little coherent foreign policy and some contempt for Bush's generals. But the half-billion in cash Obama flew over to Tehran was dwarfed by the tens of billions of sanction-free dollars Trump handed the IRGC [Iran Revolutionary Guard Corps, which now essentially runs Iran] in oil revenues while we were in a war (before the blockade). And its not like Trump exercised a lot of interest in how Hegseth was running the ghost town, selecting a litter of Yes Men who couldn't deliver enough "lethality" to win. Much as I disliked Obama, he never would have gotten us in this intractable mess. -- Again, thanks for @WestIdp for this.