What does Trump’s pick to run the Pentagon believe?

Analysis by Peter Bergen, CNN

(CNN) — Pete Hegseth, President-elect Donald Trump’s pick to be secretary of defense, has an unconventional resume for the position, which in recent years has been held by retired four-star generals such as Jim Mattis and Lloyd Austin and by major Washington players like Leon Panetta and Robert Gates, both of whom had served as CIA directors.

While Hegseth served honorably in the US military, he retired as a major, and his most recent gig was as a Fox News anchor. Given Hegseth’s relative lack of relevant experience to manage the Pentagon, one of the globe’s biggest organizations and the most powerful military in the world, an important question to try to address is: Does Hesgeth’s understanding of the state of the American military correspond with reality?

A good place to delve into Hegseth’s core beliefs about this is his most recent book, “The War on Warriors: Behind the Betrayal of the Men Who Keep Us Free,” published in June.

Hegseth’s book is an odd mix of slogans and unsupported assertions about the purportedly “Marxist” and “woke” US military. It is 228 pages long and has no footnotes and few facts to back up its claims, some of which are dubious at best.

Hegseth spends a chapter of his book dumping on the “trans” troops in the US military, whom he portrays as a key plank of the Pentagon’s purportedly “woke” agenda.

This is a sizable red herring. A 2016 study by RAND estimated there were between 1,320 and 6,630 transgender people on active duty and between 830 and 4,160 in the reserves. Let’s take the high-end estimates, and that’s 10,790 people. Around 2 million people serve on active duty and in the reserves, so even using the high-end estimate, roughly 0.5% service members are trans. So, for much of the US military, it is unlikely they will serve with someone who is trans.

Yet, Hegseth says that because of the “woke” and “Marxist” agenda underlined by the presence of trans soldiers in the US military, it’s been hard to attract recruits to serve in uniform. In fact, the real recruiting problem is not down to a small number of trans soldiers. It is impacted more by prosaic factors such as the declining number of qualified Americans of military age and the fact that amid low unemployment, the military is just one of many jobs young Americans can take.

A record number of Americans of military age — 77% — don’t qualify for the US military as they are obese, have taken drugs, have a criminal background or have medical problems, according to a 2020 study by the Pentagon. There are also fewer recruits because there are fewer people in the appropriate age cohort to serve in the US military, the result of falling American birth rates, which is why the United States is also seeing declining numbers of students applying to colleges.

All these factors have nothing to do with Hegseth’s claims that the US military is wokeness central and has embraced, in his words, “trans lunacy.”

Additionally, Hegseth says, “Lots of people need to be fired” at the Pentagon. A particular object of Hesgeth’s anger is the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Charles “CQ” Brown, who is Black. Hegseth portrays Brown as a general officer obsessed with diversity, equity and inclusion, or DEI.

Because of the purportedly “woke Marxist” military, Hegseth cites an anonymous US Army officer who told him that “overall readiness is in serious crisis,” referring to the ability of US military units to deploy quickly for combat. In fact, the readiness rates are higher now than in years. “Currently, 60% of our active force is at the highest states of readiness and could deploy to combat in less than 30 days,” the then-chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Gen. Mark Milley, testified before a congressional committee last year.

CNN asked the Trump transition for comment on the claims made in Hegseth’s book.

In his book, Hegseth is very exercised about the role of women in combat because he says women are less effective fighters. It is certainly the case that few women have passed the “Q” course to become US Special Forces soldiers.

Yet, women play many key roles in the US military — just as they do in the Israeli army — something Hegseth seemed to publicly acknowledge Wednesday when he told reporters, “We support all women serving in our military today who do a fantastic job across the globe, in our Pentagon, and deliver critical aspects, all aspects, combat included, and they have … for quite some time.”

Like other Republicans, Hegseth wants answers to who is responsible for the shambolic US withdrawal from Afghanistan in the summer of 2021. Hegseth blames the US military when it was simply following orders issued by the Biden administration to withdraw all troops, and when it was, instead, the State Department that had no plan for an orderly evacuation until it was too late.

Hegseth also claims that “coastal elites” hold military service against those who serve. This is an odd claim when 18% of the 118th Congress are veterans, while the Census Bureau estimates 6% of the overall US population are veterans. It seems that military service is something that voters around the country appreciate.

Hegseth writes eloquently about his time serving in the Iraq War, which was a marked contrast to his previous job at Bear Stearns in New York City, crunching “numbers on an Excel spreadsheet for boring meetings with really rich bankers.” Hesgeth’s account of fighting in Iraq, when the war was at its height and where he earned the first of his two Bronze Stars, is the least polemical and the most interesting part of his book.

But a decade and a half later, his military career was over. Hegseth claims he was deemed to be a possible Christian nationalist extremist because of his tattoo of a Jerusalem cross and was prevented from serving in his National Guard unit in Washington, DC, protecting the January 2021 inauguration of President Joe Biden (which came only two weeks after the riot by Trump’s supporters at the US Capitol). Though, according to the Associated Press, it was a different tattoo, one reading “Deus Vult” (Latin for “God wills it” and an expression associated with the Crusades) that led military leaders to tell him to stay home.

Hegseth seems quite bitter about this experience, which resulted in him putting on his uniform for the last time a couple of months later.

Hegseth’s book is a diatribe against supposed wokeness in the US military and the spinelessness of military leaders like Gen. Brown who are purportedly implementing the woke agenda. Should Hegseth become secretary of defense, this may set up a fight between him and top American generals, particularly over the issue of transgender troops.

There could also be a battle over the question of “Who lost Afghanistan?” — which Hegseth squarely blames the generals for.

In his book, Hegseth is silent on the big issues that a future secretary of defense might have to face, such as the Chinese possibly invading Taiwan. The CIA’s chief assesses that Chinese leader Xi Jinping has told his military to be ready to take the island by 2027. For Hegseth’s views on those kinds of issues, we will likely have to wait for his confirmation hearing, which, for the moment, appears to be on track given Trump’s strong continued backing.

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