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What Pete Hegseth Doesn't Understand About Soldiers

Atlantic

6 days ago

Politics
Atlantic

What Pete Hegseth Doesn't Understand About Soldiers

In the summer of 2014, I was leading a company of Green Berets—from the 5th Special Forces Group—in Afghanistan's Kunduz province. President Barack Obama had recently promised an end of combat operations in the country, and the Taliban understood the tactical implications of his statement, believing that the drawdown of coalition forces meant they could now operate with impunity. They further believed that during the holy month of Ramadan, our Afghan partners, too tired from fasting during the day, would not conduct large-scale operations against them. My company, along with commandos from Afghanistan's 5th Special Operations Kandak, decided to surprise them. Over the course of a week, we would assault Taliban strongholds, striking enemy forces when and where they believed they were most secure. During one of these operations, in Dasht-e-Archi district, a combined American and Afghan team had just stepped off the helicopters when Taliban machine-gun crews opened fire. Our soldiers responded without hesitation, killing several enemy fighters and capturing a Taliban machine gunner. At that moment, the team leader radioed me. He was suddenly confronting a scenario that every Green Beret officer prepares for during the Special Forces Qualification Course: His foreign counterpart was about to commit a war crime. The machine gunner was severely wounded and, in the dark colloquialism of our profession, circling the drain. An Afghan lieutenant argued that the fighter didn't deserve mercy; his commandos should finish him off. The impulse was understandable in the lieutenant's heightened post-combat state; the proposal was also illegal and morally reprehensible. The team leader helped talk the Afghan lieutenant down. The Talib would not be executed. Our medics worked to stabilize the man who had just tried to mow them down with a PKM machine gun. This decision was less about what the fighter deserved and more about the kind of soldiers that my men were, and that we wanted our Afghan partners to be. That night's events tell two stories. The first is that my team needed to destroy the enemy, using quick and lethal violence. This imperative is the core rationale for any army's existence. But my team members also needed to act as professional soldiers: to set aside their emotional impulses, even in moments of fear, and uphold the law and the moral standards of the United States Army. Anger, resentment, and the desire for retribution can never be fully suppressed. Just as saints feel tempted to sin, even the most moral people can find themselves pushed to the limits by the compounding stresses of combat. I spent 23 years as a paratrooper and Green Beret, most of them during the War on Terror, and I faced many frustrating moments. During the first year of the Iraq War, civilians regularly stopped Americans on the street and hectored us: 'You guys are the authority now. When is my electricity coming back? Where can I go to get ice?' After enough confrontations, even the most idealistic among us started to think, Screw these people. But in our disciplined fighting force, somebody would pipe up: 'That Iraqi's upset because he has no power, and he's just trying to feed his family.' The malignant impulse to start hating all Iraqis or Afghans was checked before it was allowed to metastasize. Through shared expectations, we held one another accountable. Sometimes, service members would provide calm, steady counsel to someone at risk of lashing out. In other cases, when American soldiers violated our norms and committed crimes, their colleagues would seek justice, as was the case when three Iraqi detainees were killed in 2006 by soldiers from 3rd Brigade, 101st Airborne Division— a unit that had recently included a young lieutenant named Pete Hegseth. The question of how the U.S. military should conduct itself is under new scrutiny, as Hegseth, now the secretary of defense, has declared that his priorities for the Pentagon will be lethality and returning the military 'to the war fighters.' As he said at the Army War College in April, 'Everything starts and ends with warriors in training and on the battlefield. We are leaving wokeness and weakness behind.' Hegseth, who served in Iraq as an infantry platoon leader and in Afghanistan as a staff officer, was not involved in the Iraqi detainees' deaths, but he knew men whose lives were upended by the investigation. Today, he is tapping into the notion that President Joe Biden and some of his predecessors tied up the American military with overly restrictive rules of engagement, and that the country's long and disappointing post-9/11 wars might have turned out better had service members been given freer rein. Anything that falls outside Hegseth's vision of lethality is painted as a woke distraction, and anyone suggesting restraint is a hindrance or a remnant of the previous regime. Parts of this agenda seem like common sense. Why wouldn't a department charged with fighting America's wars encourage a warrior spirit by empowering the people who risk their life in combat? Clearly it should. Still, Hegseth risks creating a false dichotomy—that one must choose between lethality and professionalism. This view comes at a cost to operational effectiveness as well as moral clarity. Hegseth is positioning himself as the tribune of the common soldier, whom he will protect from ladder-climbing careerists. As a Fox News commentator, Hegseth campaigned on behalf of three American service members accused or convicted of war crimes. Eddie Gallagher had been accused by his fellow SEALs of killing a wounded teenage prisoner; acquitted of murder, he was convicted of posing for photos with the prisoner's body and demoted. (He later seemed to admit on a podcast to a role in killing the detainee.) Mathew Golsteyn, a former Green Beret officer, was charged with murder for allegedly executing a released Afghan detainee. The paratrooper officer Clint Lorance was convicted of ordering his soldiers to kill Afghan civilians. Golsteyn and Lorance both maintained that they had acted legally. These suspects were turned in not by woke Pentagon officials but by other 'war fighters.' Nevertheless, during Donald Trump's first term as president, he pardoned Golsteyn and Lorance and reversed Gallagher's demotion. In effect, Trump and Hegseth have taken an extreme position: that the way to support American troops is to avoid second-guessing anything they do. The suspicion that senior officers care more about appeasing their superiors than easing the average soldier's predicament is hardly new. Anton Myrer's 1968 novel, Once an Eagle, contrasted the Army career of the obsequious Courtney Massengale with that of the muddy-booted warrior Sam Damon. In The Centurions, Jean Lartéguy's classic 1960 novel about the French campaigns in Indochina and Algeria, one character wishes there could be two distinct armies—one for display in polite society and one engaged in the dirty business of winning battles. These books prefigure the view held by some Iraq and Afghanistan veterans that lawyers, politicians, and the cowardly generals who kowtowed to them prevented American victories. Hegseth's perspective reflects what he learned as a platoon leader—when his duty was to maximize his subordinates' effectiveness at inflicting violence when needed. It also bespeaks his lack of experience at higher levels of military or civilian leadership. The complexities of procuring new weapons systems, making trade-offs among competing priorities, and maintaining relationships with foreign governments were all someone else's job, as was, of course, providing strategic military advice to the president. Just as a Fortune 500 company does not hire its CEO directly out of college, the Pentagon does not assign a new lieutenant to command a division. In most cases, the military gives emerging leaders just enough responsibility to help them grow, while senior commanders temper their rougher instincts. On the morning of June 6, the 81st anniversary of D-Day, Hegseth boasted on X that he was doing physical training on Omaha Beach with soldiers from the 75th Ranger Regiment. It was only the latest in a series of updates about his workouts with elite units. The posts might be good for morale, but he appears far more eager to present himself as a jacked-up model warrior than to do the less glamorous work of running the Pentagon. Every branch of the military faces multidimensional problems. Accelerating the construction of Navy vessels—to choose just one of many pressing examples—means dealing with budget and personnel constraints, nuclear-safety laws, and the limited capacity of the American shipbuilding industry. Solving these big, difficult, and often boring strategic challenges is what the troops most need a defense secretary to do. When I was a junior officer, I bristled at commanders who I felt didn't understand the realities I was dealing with. Sometimes, my frustration was the product of youthful arrogance divorced from larger realities— a problem remedied by time and experience. In some cases, though, the frustration was legitimate. I watched as decisions at the highest levels wasted initiative, resources, and, in many cases, lives. I also understand why many soldiers feel hemmed in by Pentagon bureaucracy in more prosaic ways. Anyone who has spent time at Fort Bragg, as I did at the start of my career, knows the elaborate lengths the Army has taken to avoid disturbing the red-cockaded woodpecker. Military personnel are subject to annual training requirements—on avoiding phishing scams, handling classified information—that feel oppressive in the aggregate. When Don't Ask, Don't Tell ended in 2011, the exhaustive training sessions in preparation for the policy change were far more disruptive to our work than the change itself was. But for all the complaints about weakness and wokeness, America's military remains at its most effective when inspired to maintain both its professionalism and its warrior culture. In 2005, General Erik Kurilla, currently the head of U.S. Central Command, found himself in a close-up fight in the alleys of Mosul—a fight that ended with Kurilla shot multiple times and his sergeant major beating an insurgent in hand-to-hand combat. Kurilla embodied a warrior ethos. But he was also the officer who, after a British aid worker was killed in a failed attempt to rescue her from the Taliban in 2010, insisted on holding SEAL Team 6 members accountable for deceiving higher-ups about the circumstances of her death. Meanwhile, America's disciplined armed forces outperform those that have supposedly embraced an unbound warrior mentality. In 2021, Senator Ted Cruz and others bemoaned that U.S. Army recruiting commercials were not sufficiently masculine compared with those for the Russian Airborne Forces, only to see the same Russian forces largely wiped out at Hostomel, in Ukraine, nine months later. Perhaps Cruz could have learned from the 2018 rout of hardened Russian veterans who tried to challenge the U.S. military in Khasham, Syria. Military historians can point to many examples of cultures—Sparta, the Confederacy, early-20th-century Germany—that counted on their martial spirit to bring them victory, but instead lost to armies that had both a warrior ethos and important strategic advantages. Many soldiers in a losing fight will blame external factors: After World War I, disgruntled Germans refused to acknowledge that their country's war aims had been dishonorable and unrealistic and that their armaments makers had been too slow to innovate. Instead, they insisted that their army had been stabbed in the back. This mindset leads in dangerous directions, as Germany showed two decades later. Although most wars have been fought for conquest or plunder, Americans tend to be more comfortable with the use of force when it is seen as virtuous, an extension of the values that we feel make us exceptional. This moral dimension is also a concrete strategic asset. When American forces are perceived as acting immorally, they directly undermine national objectives. Domestic and international support erode, fueling enemy propaganda and complicating cooperation with allies and local populations. Sometimes, broader strategic goals force high-level commanders to limit what soldiers do. In Afghanistan in 2011, many disliked the constraints our superiors imposed on nighttime raids at the demand of Hamid Karzai, the country's American-backed president. Yet those constraints reflected the basic premises of the war: Americans were liberators, not occupiers. We had troops in the country at the request of the local government, which meant that, at times, we had to modify our tactics and procedures in deference to the local government. Leadership at the Defense Department should not overcorrect for past mistakes. Failure to recognize the brutal truths of combat and to embrace a warrior ethos risks losing future wars. But a cultlike devotion to achieving that ethos without connection to larger values risks losing our way.

Jimmy Kimmel Roasts Trump After Show Hiatus

Buzz Feed

11-06-2025

Entertainment
Buzz Feed

Jimmy Kimmel Roasts Trump After Show Hiatus

returned to his show after a long weekend and devoted much of his opening monologue to attacking President Donald Trump for sending troops into Los Angeles to deal with protests in the city. Kimmel showed off footage of an ordinary scene outside his studio, saying it might surprise viewers 'who have been watching cable news and believe this city is some kind of totalitarian hellscape right now.' Disney is even holding a film premiere on the same block for the new movie Elio, which Kimmel noted is about aliens. 'Don't tell Trump,' Kimmel said. 'He'll send the Green Berets in.' He tore into Trump for using masked agents to 'abduct' migrants, most of whom 'have never done anything wrong.' Protesting that, he said, 'is not only our right as Americans, it's our responsibility.' 'Los Angelenos have been gathering to demonstrate ― and, with very few exceptions, peacefully demonstrate ― to voice their opposition to this disgusting and unnecessary abuse of power instigated by our mentally ill president,' he said. Kimmel noted how Trump earlier this year tried to take credit for stopping the wildfires that hit the Los Angeles area. Trump again tried to take credit for that this week and said he saved the city from 'burning' a second time by sending in the National Guard to stop the protests. 'He so desperately wants to be the hero putting out fires,' Kimmel said. 'He's starting fires. Putting out a fire you purposely start doesn't make you a firefighter. It makes you an arsonist with a hose.'

‘There are no mobs, there's no violent insurrection': Kimmel calls out Trump over LA protests

Boston Globe

11-06-2025

Entertainment
Boston Globe

‘There are no mobs, there's no violent insurrection': Kimmel calls out Trump over LA protests

Advertisement 'Not is only is it not an apocalypse, they're having a Disney-Pixar movie premiere right now for 'Elio,' a movie about aliens,' Kimmel said. 'Don't tell Trump, he'll send the Green Berets in, too.' The late-night host, 'People who have lived here their whole lives, people who've been in this city longer than I have, the vast majority of whom have never done anything wrong, are being abducted, which is the correct word to use, by agents in masks,' Kimmel said, adding that protesting these actions 'is not only our right as Americans, it's our responsibility.' Advertisement The comedian pushed back against the Trump administration and some in the media for their portrayal of the protests, noting that, 'with very few exceptions,' the demonstrations have been peaceful. Kimmel put the onus on Trump for 'intentionally inflaming and lying to make it seem like there's a war going on here.' 'We have more so-called unrest here when one of our teams wins a championship, but that's not what you're seeing on TV,' Kimmel said. 'Someone sets a fire in a garbage can, 12 camera crews come running toward it.' Kimmel acknowledged that there were 'some protestors who broke the law,' but called the 'doomsday' depictions of the city in open revolt 'not remotely true.' 'There are no mobs, there's no violent insurrection,' Kimmel said. 'There are Americans who are upset marching to protect their neighbors.' Later in his monologue, the late-night host cautioned demonstrators to 'do everything in our power to protest peacefully and to respect the police men and women and the military.' 'We have to be smart,' Kimmel said. 'He wants us to burn this city down. He wants that.' After noting that the situation has served to take eyeballs away from Trump's recent feud with Elon Musk, Kimmel wrapped up his monologue by telling Trump to 'try to act like a president for once' before showing a montage of more hopeful messages about immigration from past presidents including John F. Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama. Advertisement 'I don't know what happened to the state's rights he thinks so much of when it suits him, but I know I speak for a lot of us here when I say leave us alone here,' Kimmel said. 'We don't need you. We don't need you're help. We didn't ask for your help. We don't want your help.' Matt Juul can be reached at

Donald Trump makes huge World War I blunder in fiery speech as LA riots rage

Daily Mirror

10-06-2025

Politics
Daily Mirror

Donald Trump makes huge World War I blunder in fiery speech as LA riots rage

Donald Trump made a huge blunder about World War I in a fiery speech at Fort Bragg, as the U.S. continues to be rocked by riots over the President's mass deportation order US President Donald Trump delivered a speech at Fort Bragg on Tuesday, as unrest continued in Los Angeles between protesters and ICE officials over his far-reaching deportation order. Fort Bragg, situated near Fayetteville, North Carolina, is home to the military's Special Operations Command, which includes elite units such as the Green Berets and Rangers. ‌ During his address, Trump made a significant historical blunder, claiming that many countries had recently commemorated the end of World War I, while the US did not participate in the celebrations, despite asserting "we're the ones who won the war." ‌ "Without us," Trump said, "You'd all be speaking German right now." "Maybe a little Japanese thrown in. But we won the war," he added. "We're gonna celebrate on Saturday." However, Trump's claim that citizens would have been speaking Japanese is inaccurate, as Japan was an ally of the US, France, Great Britain, Russia, and Italy against the Axis powers of Germany, Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria, and the Ottoman Empire, reports the Mirror US. It appears the President was actually referencing WW2, which was commemorated recently during VE celebrations. The end of WW1 is traditionally commemorated on "Armistice Day" on November 11 each year. The event at Fort Bragg was also attended by Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and Army Secretary Dan Driscoll, and included both active service members and their families. The speech comes ahead of the 250th anniversary of the army and coincidentally, Trump's 79th birthday, which will be marked with a parade in Washington, D.C. ‌ The city is bracing for a massive turnout at the parade this Saturday, with officials already setting up 18 miles of "anti-scale fencing" and deploying drones, despite the usual no-fly zone rules. City representatives have told The Associated Press they're expecting an "preparing for an enormous turnout." ‌ Secret Service's Matt McCool from the Washington Field Office is preparing for "hundreds of thousands" to line the streets, while military sources estimate around 200,000 will join the celebrations. "We have a ton of magnetometers," McCool said. "If a million people show up, then we're going to have some lines." To manage the expected crowds, 175 magnetometers will be in place at security checkpoints throughout the day and for the evening parade. ‌ Metropolitan Police Department Chief Pamela Smith has warned of "major impacts to traffic" and advises attendees to consider using the Metro instead of driving. "This is a significant event with a large footprint," she stressed. "We're relying on the public to be an extra set of ears and eyes for us." ‌ The event has hit the headlines as a National Special Security Event, with security measures on par with presidential inaugurations or state funerals. This elite status is reserved for high-profile functions drawing sizeable gatherings and the likelihood of significant protests, triggering an increased security collaboration between local officials, the FBI, Capitol Police, and the National Guard, all led by the watchful Secret Service. Officials are also on high alert for possible immigration-related protests, mirroring those in Los Angeles, potentially hitting D. C. 's streets. "We're paying attention, obviously, to what is happening there. We'll be ready," affirmed McCool, underlining the extensive preparations in place to manage any civil unrest.

Trump heads to Fort Bragg while facing criticism for deploying military at Los Angeles protests

Washington Post