Pete Hegseth and his “High-T Department of War” are having a rough go of it lately. Despite being hyper-focused on making sure U.S. troops “look like killers” and that none of them are “soft”, “fat,” or “mushy,” Hegseth’s Pentagon is burning through precision munitions stockpiles in its conflict with Iran, which despite his best efforts effectively controls traffic through the Strait of Hormuz. On top of that failure, DOD has lost Army Secretary Dan Driscoll over Hegseth’s disruption of the personnel pipeline and general mismanagement. And the cherry atop Hegseth’s failure sundae has come in the form of an impeachment effort from a Republican member of Congress over the conduct of the Iran war itself.
And yet Hegseth’s latest announcements suggest that he has learned remarkably little from his experiences. At a recent address at Quantico, he declared that the “warrior ethos has been revived” and “American deterrence is back,” even as he announced plans to eliminate 20 percent of general and admiral positions. He also briefly championed a plan to livestream the firing squad execution of Nidal Hasan, turning military violence into a public spectacle supposedly meant to demonstrate U.S. resolve, before a public backlash—strong enough to push Trump away from the planned display of public cruelty—put the kibosh on those plans. Still, the dissonance is jarring: The defense secretary is so thoroughly preoccupied with projecting toughness and glorifying lethality, all while presiding over a war that has exposed the limits of U.S. power potentially even more than its debacles in Vietnam and Iraq.
There is an older American story about what could happen when a nation selects military leaders based on their bravado and popularity among white supremacists. The Mexican-American War was one of the clearest early examples of the difference between U.S. military belligerence and effectiveness. The professional Regular Army, though small, was a highly military force whose officers understood logistics, discipline, command, and the unglamorous mechanics that allow a military to keep functioning when a war inevitably proves more difficult than the politicians who started it imagined.
However, alongside the regulars marched tens of thousands of volunteers, largely from the Southern states that would make up the Confederacy only fifteen years later. Unlike the Regular Army, whose officers held federal commissions and whose junior ranks were increasingly dominated by West Point graduates selected for their demonstrated military effectiveness, volunteer officers were often elected by the men they commanded or appointed through state-level political patronage. These mechanisms rewarded political prominence, personal popularity, and the performance of masculine authority rather than professional military experience.
Compounding their lack of experience, the white supremacist attitudes of many of the volunteer officers convinced them without evidence that white Americans were naturally superior soldiers and that “yellow bellied Mexicans” were naturally inferior and would be easily defeated. Some Southern volunteers were so confident of an easy victory that they worried the war would be over before they even arrived on the battlefield. As one commander put the pervasive attitude of many volunteers, each U.S. victory demonstrated “the order of providence that the Anglo-Saxon race was not only to take possession of the whole North American continent, but to influence and modify the character of the world.”
Perhaps unsurprisingly, these soldiers’ confidence in their own whiteness alone did not equate to effectiveness on the battlefield, and selecting commanders based on their popularity and manly image proved disastrous in many cases. For example, Colonel Archibald Yell of the Arkansas Mounted Rifles, a magnetic Jacksonian politician who had built his reputation through personal combativeness and political connections, easily obtained a command based on his experience as a former governor and congressman. He had served in earlier wars as a sergeant and later a lieutenant, but he had no significant command experience. This would prove to be his undoing.
When the Mexican-American War began, Yell enlisted as a private in a volunteer company and was elected colonel when the regiment organized. He was still trying to preserve his congressional seat and position himself for further political advancement even as he took command. Once the regiment reached Texas, the problems started almost immediately. Most of its companies rarely drilled, its camp was so disorderly that regular Army commander John Wool struggled to impose basic discipline and sanitation, and Wool eventually dubbed the regiment the “Arkansas Mounted Devils.” He complained that the troops were “wholly without instruction and Colonel Yell is determined to leave them in that condition.” Rather than address the poor training of the troops under his command, Yell instead cultivated rapport with them by positioning himself as their champion against their regular Army commander and providing lavish food and drink.
At the Battle of Buena Vista in February 1847, Yell’s regiment came under Mexican attack and fled in confusion despite Yell’s order to charge, exposing the rear of the rest of the U.S. column. Many of his men were captured or killed, and the regiment fell apart in the fighting and was distributed among different units. Yell charged alone and was killed. Yell embodied a recurring problem of volunteer command, where leaders’ ability to perform the role of a warrior and maintain esteem among their troops sometimes came at the expense of the less glamorous work of making them effective soldiers.
It is from this tattered cloth that Pete Hegseth is cut. While he spends plenty of time in front of the cameras, glad-handing troops and showing how many pull-ups he can do, he is fixated on projecting strength, whether real or imagined. This image that treats aggression, physical appearance, and ideological conformity as evidence of effectiveness, even going so far as to adopt absurd manosphere concepts as guides to military doctrine (see #lethalitymaxxing, language borrowed from incel subcultures obsessed with masculine appearance and status). Hegseth’s bizarre testosterone screening proposal, later rescinded after questions about its medical basis, took the idea further by treating a biological marker of masculinity as a potential proxy for military readiness.
Donald Trump selected Hegseth for much the same reason that Arkansas volunteers elevated Yell. Hegseth had spent years on Fox News performing the role of the warrior who would liberate the military from timid professionals and ideological enemies. Trump wanted someone who looked and sounded like the defense secretary he imagined—a living cartoon warrior, as opposed to a military professional with a demonstrated record of managing a vast institution. Trump has said that Hegseth as straight from “central casting” and “obsessed with war.” Now Hegseth is using his authority to remake the military around the qualities that made him attractive to the president, pushing out senior commanders and disrupting promotion pathways while elevating a narrow vision of masculinity, race, religion, and ideological loyalty.
There is one crucial difference between Hegseth and the volunteer commanders of the Mexican-American War. Yell operated within a military structure led by professional officers who could challenge him, impose discipline, and help compensate for his shortcomings. Hegseth sits atop the entire military hierarchy, with the authority to remove the professionals who question his judgment and reshape the institution in his own image. The regulars once helped turn swaggering volunteers into an effective fighting force, but now the man with the volunteer’s mindset—the sort of person who armed forces lifers refer to derisively as a “rear echelon motherfucker”—is deciding which of the professionals get to stay and who has to go.
This would all be dangerous enough if Trump were pursuing a cautious foreign policy, or the non-interventionist approach that he was somehow credited with by an ignorant pundit class, who were all too willing to be snowed by his dovish rhetoric. Instead, he is reviving the expansionist logic of the Monroe Doctrine, threatening other countries with military force and territorial demands while assuming American superiority will compel submission, even while the war with Iran has exposed the obvious weakness in that assumption. The United States can inflict enormous damage, but Trump and Hegseth’s belligerence has exposed a military far more confident in its capability to impose success than it is able to execute. Military effectiveness depends on professional judgment, institutional knowledge, technological adaptation, logistics, and an understanding of what force can and cannot accomplish, and these are all components of the job in which Hegseth has shown zero interest or competence.
The Mexican-American War showed that U.S. power was real, but its success depended on a professional military capable of exploiting that power. Hegseth seems to be trying to turn the entire military into a volunteer regiment for his warrior cosplay, purging the professionals who might remind him that wars are won through judgment, discipline, and logistics rather than pull-ups and testosterone. He has mistaken looking like a killer for knowing how to win, and the entire world is paying for his insecurity.