"Win Our Wars"

Francis P. Sempa

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A front-page story in the Washington Times by Ben Wolfgang is headlined “Top Officers Lose Trust in Hegseth.” The story quotes “numerous high-ranking officers,” anonymous retired and current generals and flag officers, and top civilians at the Pentagon who contend that War Secretary Hegseth is an “unserious” and “grandstanding” leader with a “junior officer’s” mentality who is doing “deep damage to the military.” Hegseth, they say, is seen as “unprofessional,” and his personnel moves are leading to “an unprecedented and dangerous exodus of talent from the Pentagon.”

Hegseth is weakening the military by fighting the “culture war” within the ranks, according to liberal defense commentator Michael O’Hanlon of the Brookings Institution. O’Hanlon, it appears, speaks for the pro-DEI and pro-woke high-level officers who implemented the Obama-Biden transformation of the armed forces from the warrior ethos of the past into a kinder, gentler force where promotions were based not on merit but on diversity.

It is a military that has not won a war since 1991 in the Persian Gulf, and that was spread thin fighting endless wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and waging the Global War on Terror. It is a military where physical standards were sometimes lowered in the name of diversity, and where rules of engagement sometimes gave advantages to our enemies and unnecessarily exposed our forces to greater danger. None of this was the fighting force’s fault—it was, instead, the fault of civilian and military leaders who forgot or simply ignored that the primary mission of our armed forces is, in Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s words, “to win our wars.”