Hegseth wants leaders like Gen. Patton – warts and al

Davis Winkie

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Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth wants military officers to take risks again – and history may be on his side.

A case in point: the day a 31-year-old U.S. Army lieutenant assigned to hunt Mexican rebel general Pancho Villa was ordered to take 10 men and two cars to buy corn.

After dutifully securing the corn in the spring of 1916, 2nd Lt. George Patton went rogue.More: Hundreds of military leaders went to Quantico for Trump, Hegseth. See inside the Sept. summit

Three horsemen burst forth from the ranch, setting off a flurry of gunfire. The outcome? Patton fatally shot Villa's deputy. The future general triumphantly returned to headquarters with the rebel leader's body strapped to the hood of his car.

This was neither the first nor the last time that Patton disobeyed an order. But in that era, Gen. John Pershing promoted the young officer instead of punishing him. When Pershing crossed the Atlantic Ocean in 1917 to lead the American Expeditionary Force in the grinding trench warfare of World War I, he appointed Captain Patton to lead the force’s experimental tank school. Patton wrote the Army's tank-fighting rules and ultimately became a decisive battlefield commander during World War II.

Hegseth invoked the steel-jawed general in both image and name in his Sept. 30 speech to the military’s generals and admirals at Marine Corps Base Quantico, Virginia.

Standing before an American flag backdrop reminiscent of the opening speech in Francis Ford Coppola’s 1970 "Patton" biopic, Hegseth denounced “fat” and “woke” generals and said he was looking for the “Stockdales, the Schwarzkopfs, and the Pattons,” referencing a stoic Vietnam-era Navy leader and a Gulf War Army general both known for their no-nonsense approach. Hegseth went on to announce an understated but crucially important set of changes aimed at empowering hard-nosed leaders – and giving them chances to learn from their failures. In military terms, Hegseth was flagging that he intended to eliminate a problem he called a “zero-defect command culture.”