Trump Appointee Pete Hegseth Vs. The Great Replacement of Normal White Males In The Military

By Morris van de Camp

Trump Secretary of Defense pick Pete Hegseth with U.S. Marine Corps Brig. Gen. David Walsh Nov. 10, 2023. U.S. Marine Corps image by Staff Sgt. Theodore Bergan

The War on Warriors: Behind the Betrayal of the Men Who Keep Us Free

New York: Broadside Books, 2024

The Left didn’t fight the wars. They stayed home and wrecked our house. America-wreckers, all of them. These domestic extremists are the real American “Jody”—ask a veteran; they’ll tell you.

Pete Hegseth

When I was in the army, I watched the best squad leader in the battalion walk with a steely resolve out of the motor pool and into civilian world. That soldier was a sergeant (E-5) in a staff sergeant (E-6) billet and his professionalism and leadership abilities were extraordinary. He refused to re-enlist, however. He was white and had a black soldier in his squad who made a series of spurious claims of racism against him. The sergeant’s commanding officer, first sergeant, platoon sergeant, and platoon leader all knew that the accusations were false, but it didn’t matter. The sergeant correctly recognized the entire structure of the Department of Defense was against men such as himself.

He walked out of that motor pool just a few months before 9-11. His failure to reenlist, and the large-scale refusal of many other men like him to give it a second go, is no small part as to why the war in Iraq was so frustratingly negative and the war in Afghanistan ended in a calamitous retreat.

Pete Hegseth, Donald Trump’s nominee for the position of the Secretary of Defense, was one of the soldiers who, like the man described above, recognized that the Defense Department’s structure targeted men such as himself. He was removed from the Washington D.C. security detachment for Biden’s inauguration after the so-called January 6 insurrection due to his “extremism.”

Officially, his Jerusalem Cross tattoo was the proof of his non-permissible views, but it is more likely he was removed from duty because he was a known Trump supporter. Hegseth backed Trump from his perch as a Fox News contributor, he’d joined the network in 2014.

Hegseth’s personal life is rocky, there’ve been two divorces and several affairs. It is alleged he’s showed up to work at Fox intoxicated. It is certain that sexually reckless behavior makes every endeavor a water-cooler talk away from catastrophe, and men who are known to be adulterers can increase the emotional temperature in a place to the point of violence very quickly. Hegseth claims he is reformed.

In 2024, he published a book about the problems in the military.

The book is centered on the army, which has done the bulk of the difficult deployments since the end of the Cold War and 9-11. To sum up the message of the book, Hegseth argues that the Department of Defense’s problems originate with the so-called social justice reforms applied to the military which took place during the Obama years.

The Obama Era Reforms

President Obama ended the military’s “Don’t ask; don’t tell” (DADT) policy regarding homosexuals in the military in 2011. The policy had been enacted in 1994 by President Clinton as a compromise between the increasingly powerful homosexual lobby and conservatives who pointed out that gays in positions of power in a hierarchical organization could be tempted to abuse subordinates. Additionally, DADT was enacted at a time when gays were often infected with AIDS, which was then 100% fatal and had no known treatment or cure. DADT was enacted in February 1994, and Pedro—a gay participant on an MTV show called The Real World—died of AIDS that November. The concern over homosexuals was not misplaced.

By 2011, the AIDS crisis was under control and attitudes had shifted so that Obama had a free hand to change direction. Of the overturning of DADT, Hegseth wrote,

It just wasn’t a big issue for me. I didn’t really have a problem with DADT, and I didn’t have a big problem with overturning DADT. In fact, I was mobilizing for deployment to Afghanistan at Fort Dix, New Jersey, when the new policy was being unveiled across “big Army.” [i.e. The Department of the Army plus every field unit.] Our commander briefed the unit, peppered with a few jokes. You know, infantry stuff. We mostly laughed it off and moved on. America was at war. Gays and lesbians were already serving in the military. I had seen the enemy with my own eyes. We needed everybody. I now regret that passive perspective. (p. 112)

Hegseth came to realize that the end of DADT was not about “fairness” at all. Instead, it was the beginning of a leftist-inspired desire to impose their resentment-fueled fantasies upon a population group which is unable to resist. Shortly after the repeal of DADT, Obama’s Department of Defense issued directives ordering men to wear fake pregnancy vests or parade around in red high-heel shoes.

Soldiers in high heels draw online outburst, Army Times, April 23, 2015

The putative purpose of these exercises was for men to gain empathy towards women. It is more likely however, was that these directives were meant to humiliate.

After DADT was repealed, Department of Defense internal policies continued to spiral downwards. President Obama ordered combat positions open to women and then enacted pro-transsexual policies which were written by trans ideologues. He also pushed for policies that over-promoted blacks. Hegseth writes,

A man who has a feeling toward a female and acts differently in combat—gets people killed. A woman who can’t do the same job as a man in combat—gets people killed. A “trans” soldier who doesn’t have his/her meds is combat ineffective—and gets people killed. A competent, experienced white soldier who leaves the Army because he’s been told he’s the problem—gets people killed. Likewise, a black or female soldier who gets promoted, primarily because of the color of their skin or the genitalia between their legs—gets people killed. (p. 32)

During the Iraq War, females in the service were really a problem. The story of Jessica Lynch, for example, was complete hype. Lynch, a female soldier, was taken prisoner after being injured in an accident when her lost unit was ambushed. The military diverted enormous resources to rescue her at a time when Saddam Hussein and other politically significant enemies remained at large.

There was also a female-soldier issue at the center of the Abu Ghraib torture scandal. The commander of the prisoner of war camps was a woman named Janis Karpinski.

The most vicious of the torturers of the prisoners at the Abu Ghraib complex were women. There was probably some sort of cruel “girl boss” thing going on that brought about the evil, plus the decade of anti-Iraqi propaganda before the war and the lingering anger over 9-11.

Hegseth simplifies the problem of women in combat in this book. The problem isn’t just girls in the infantry or women dealing with prisoners of war, it is women in the military itself in any military occupation specialty. A full description of the problems can be found in Stephanie Gutmann’s 2000 book The Kinder, Gentler Military.

This book is prophetic in that it predicted a disaster in Iraq in “ten years” in the first chapter.

As this article goes to print, Hegseth is only nominated for Secretary of Defense, nonetheless he is now the third man at or near the top of the American War Machine who has pointed out the problems of women in the service. The other two who made a stand were James H. Webb, and Trump’s last first-term SecDef, Christopher C. Miller.

Other Problems

There are other problems which Hegseth ably describes. One is Europe’s deliberate inability to provide for her own defense. He writes,

[T]he Europeans are the worst. Outdated, outgunned, invaded, and impotent. Why should America, the European “emergency contact number” for the past century, listen to self-righteous and impotent nations asking us to honor outdated and one-sided defense arrangements they no longer live up to? Maybe if NATO countries actually ponied up for their own defense—but they don’t. They just yell about the rules while gutting their militaries and yelling at America for help. (pp. 106/7)

Additionally, Hegseth is concerned about international outrage and lawfare against American soldiers who may get involved in a battle in which there is ugly, and possibly unnecessary, killing. He believes that the fighting men need a free hand. Additionally, he recognizes that the Army’s “woke” advertising campaigns, such as an ad which featured a transsexual man pretending to be a girl, was a disaster and is no small part why the army is short of new recruits. The military now has fat, and slovenly men with unkempt beards in every formation.

It is also too difficult to fire anyone in the military. It is a lengthy process to re-assign a dysfunctional private from one unit to another. The paperwork required to separate an AWOL or criminal soldier from the military is enormous. Meanwhile, general officers are not replaced no matter how bad the situation is going. Since the entire system is focused on promoting blacks over whites, the military is saddled with black generals who have (deliberately establishment encouraged) historical grievances against whites and often abuse their positions.

The Disaster at the Dawn of the Department of Defense

From my own experience, the rot described by Hegseth was noticeable in the mid-1990s. An example of this decay is when I attended an ethics course in my basic training company in which black officers talked about the ethics of the Confederate Battle Flag. Later I came to realize that that class was an attack on the symbols of one people by another in the form of a leftist struggle session masquerading as instruction in ethics. A better example for an ethics class would have been a lesson on how to deal with an (often) black soldier who was squared away on field exercises, but a criminal terror when off-duty. I endorsed a second chance for such a man, and he ended up getting someone killed while off-duty.

Another veteran told me the Army was “woke” in 1969. As an MP, he watched his division chain of command figure out how to paper over a series of race riots sparked by young black men at an overseas base.

The problems described above go back to the beginning, when United States Department of War was dissolved and replaced by the Department of Defense in 1947. This was not a meaningless bureaucratic change. The War Department had removed Indians and successfully waged wars with segregated regiments. The new Defense Department was poisoned by the New Deal Leftism of the 1940s from the get-go. This was a mix of beliefs favoring integration/civil rights, support for international organizations, Zionism, and decolonization.

The most significant figure in the early days of the Department of Defense was Anna M. Rosenberg. She was a New Deal Leftist who served as the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Manpower and Personnel. In this capacity she crafted desegregation policies and applied them across the force. Desegregation is a policy which can only seem feasible by an underpinning presumption that people of different races are the same. Different races are not the same however. So integration failed. The American military has not won a war with a desegregated military.

Hegseth might recognize the truth instinctively. Unfortunately, Hegseth goes the other direction, he makes, in effect, a declaration of faith which ratifies the ideas which Anna Rosenberg would have supported. He writes,

The American Founders did not ascribe to a tribal fidelity, nor a fidelity based on a monarch or a holy family, nor on a particular religious denomination. Instead, our unique system of government was modeled after the covenantal approach of the Old Testament nation of Israel, which was fulfilled in the New Testament covenant of Christ. A government based not on blood, but on a structured, written law, freely ascribed to and affirmed by each person as a condition of citizenry and fidelity. The Constitution of United States of America was conceived as our secular covenant, our Law. The Founders placed an enormous amount of weight on the fact that it was not possible to take a public leadership role, or take on a function of government, without publicly swearing an oath to the document that binds us together in law and covenant. (p. 116)

America is not a proposition nation as described above. The Constitution only works in a limited sense because it is the deep tribal law of the Anglo-American people. Having all types of people swear an oath to a set of laws which they cannot truly fathom will end in failure. It has ended in failure. The unfortunate truth is that America is an accidental empire built upon an Anglo-Saxon ethnic core. Hegseth also spouts to the “Democrats are the real racists” partisan fallacy in his book. This statement ignores the fact that the parties re-aligned in the 1960s, and today’s Democrats wouldn’t support Woodrow Wilson who won his war with a segregated army.

The casualties of the so-called civil rights era have damaged America’s military capabilities in ways beyond dysfunctional desegregated regiments and race riots in foreign bases. There are also the institutions which vanished after the illicit second constitution, the 1964 Civil Rights Act was enacted. The First is Jefferson College of Washington, Mississippi. This school was a military academy which would have stayed open had it been able to accept an endowment by a wealthy white advocate named George Washington Armstrong. However, the school was not able to accept his money with the conditions that it only accept Americans of European origin as well as Latin Americans while excluding Jews, blacks, and Asians. Without the endowment the school was forced to close in 1964. The Jefferson College’s Class of 1968 didn’t serve in Vietnam because there was no such class.

Additionally, Mobile, Alabama’s Brookley Air Force Base was closed by Lyndon Baines Johnson after the state voted against Johnson in the 1964 election because of Johnson’s support for civil rights measures. Brookley AFB was a logistics hub perfectly located to supply any force in the Caribbean or Gulf of Mexico. One must wonder if the shuttered base made it easier for communist infiltration in Central America in the 1980s.

The Military—Deindustrialized Complex & the Many, Many Allies

Hegseth’s color blind, anti-trans, civic nationalist conservativism that points out that women shouldn’t be in combat may be as far as the politics of possible can go for now. It is therefore merely a start toward a new cohesive American military.

The next Secretary of Defense will have several other problems. The first is the misnamed military-industrial complex. This is the interlocking systems of civilian industries which provide weapons and other items to the military. The civilian industries commonly hire away soldiers and there is a suspicion that these companies lobby elected officials to push for policies that lead to war.

The story that lobbyists for this or that arms manufacturer can bribe a president to get a war going is probably not true, but that doesn’t matter. Should there be a war, the industry part of the complex is gone. It is now common knowledge that artillery shells cannot be produced fast enough for the needs of the Ukrainians, and that’s just shells. What about the more complicated fuses? How many long-range rockets can be produced in a week? What are the manufacturing bottlenecks? The factories are gone, how can they return?

America also has a great many allies. Many are simply more mouths to feed. Europe, Japan, and South Korea are all nations that need security and do not build up their respective militaries to the level needed to deter Chinese or Russian aggression. Additionally, many of the allies are utterly hostile towards each other. The Greeks hate the Turks, and the Koreans hate the Japanese. The Saudis export radicalized young men as well as a dangerous Jihadist ideology. How long can this bumbling patchwork of hatreds continue as an effective alliance system? What happens in the event of a real crisis?

Hegseth also misses out an unrecognized racial dynamic that makes things harder. The at-odds groups in the service comprise several racial blocks. The first is the white/Hispanic block (Hispanics were counted as white prior to the 1970s). Members of this group generally get along—Puerto Ricans and Anglo-Saxons aren’t mortal enemies, for example. Then there are blacks whose issues have already been mentioned. Occasionally, black veterans commit spectacular acts of violence, such as the D.C. sniper John Allen Muhammad, 2016 Dallas shooter Micah Xavier Johnson, and New Orleans attacker Shamsud-Din Jabbar.

These acts of violence have the common root of alienation from western society which cannot be reasoned with.

Then there is a group that does not view themselves as white or black but something else. That group, although small, punches well above its weight in trouble. I personally found Native Hawaiians filled with vicious resentment as well as Koreans with American citizenship. The most extreme example of this set is Major Hasan, a Mid-Eastern Moslem who went on a shooting spree at Fort Hood in 2009.

The Secretary of Defense must look after more than soldiers, however. There are also scientists, technical experts, engineers, and contractors who are building future weapons with classified technology. For all their faults, American blacks don’t engage in espionage, but the neither white nor black group described above excels and selling secrets. One example of this is Noshir Gowadia, a naturalized citizen originally from India who sold stealth technology to the Chinese and Israelis, among others. The Secretary of Defense may need to go against H1-b Visas to keep more high-end military tech from finding its way to Beijing or Tel Aviv.

The Department of Defense is an organization that might be too big and unwieldy to succeed. The first Secretary of Defense was broken by the job and died by suicide. There is no single person who has really mastered the job. Secretaries of Defense who are household names, such as Robert McNamara and Donald Rumsfeld, are more remembered for their failures rather than their successes. While there are books and how-to guides on how to be an outstanding platoon leader or president, there is nothing about the cabinet job overseeing the complex structure that is centered at the Pentagon. The next person in the job will have a tough go of it indeed.