Trump's Pentagon pick wants to "Make America Lethal Again"
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Pete Hegseth, right, at a televised concert in 2019. Photo: John Lamparski/Getty Images
President-elect Trump's pick to lead the Defense Department, Pete Hegseth, this week shared a sizzle reel on X. It concluded with all-caps bombast: "MAKE AMERICA LETHAL AGAIN."
Why it matters: It's an unorthodox declaration, one suggesting the military he may inherit is too feeble to fend off Russia, too toothless to spook China.
State of play: Every defense secretary enters the Pentagon with goals. Some public. Some private. Some personal. Some popular.
- Some achieve them. But good luck finding a perfect scorecard.
- The building is infamously stubborn, with decades-old antibodies on hair-trigger alert for anything too radical.
What we're hearing: Secretaries need a few things to exact change. Among them: executive-branch backing and budget finesse. (A Republican sweep of Washington should simplify the latter.)
- "The main focus right now seems to be on whether Hegseth has the executive experience to reform the Pentagon. After all, it is a huge bureaucracy," said Colin Dueck, a nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
- "But if the secretary has the support of the president in reforming defense, a great deal can be accomplished. If not, far less so."
- "Successful change agents as [defense secretary] need to change what the DOD spends money on and how it spends money," Bryan Clark, director of the Hudson Institute's Center for Defense Concepts and Technology, said separately.
- "Trying to make changes through training, doctrine or operations is hard because those are primarily the purview of the uniformed military."
Previous defense chiefs, effectively CEOs, have notched wins still discussed today.
- Ashton Carter, William Perry and Robert McNamara come to mind.
- Breaking Defense in 2022 eulogized Carter, saying we live in the world he saw coming.
What they're saying: "It really does take the secretary himself, backed by the president, waking up every single day, prioritizing one to three issues in order to bend the Pentagon bureaucracy to his will," Mike Gallagher, the lawmaker turned head of defense at Palantir Technologies, told Axios' Mike Allen.
- As for Hegseth? Expect a "very aggressive reform agenda. I mean, he's written about it in his book."
My thought bubble: Exactly what MALA means is squishy. To what metrics of success will it be held?
- Also, zingers and phonk won't intimidate world leaders.
What's next: Hegseth's planned overhauls will face stiff resistance. That is, assuming Trump keeps him around.
Go deeper: Pete Hegseth paid settlement to accuser but denies sexual assault
