Pete Hegseth Is Ready to Bring the Culture War to the Pentagon

Evan Vucci/AP Photo

Some of the nation’s legendary “great men”—leaders like George Marshall and Clark Clifford—have served the country as defense secretary. President-elect Donald Trump has tapped a Fox News host for the job. Pete Hegseth is a veteran of wars in both Iraq and Afghanistan, but he stands out as being uniquely unqualified among his predecessors to oversee an agency with nearly 3 million employees. If you understand what Trump wants him to do, however, he’s probably the perfect man for the job.

Several former Trump administration officials, in conjunction with the conservative Heritage Foundation, created a blueprint for a second Trump term known as Project 2025. Much of the new defense secretary’s likely agenda is spelled out in it. And while it makes a few nods to transparency, calls for better contracting procedures, and, of course, big budget increases, much of the document is simply a roadmap for a culture war.

Christopher Miller, who served 72 days as acting defense secretary during the first Trump administration, is the author of the Project 2025 section on the Defense Department. He starts by suggesting that the Pentagon has emphasized “leftist politics” over military readiness. To combat this problem, Miller lays out a host of priorities for a new Trump administration. Among those are ridding the active military of transgender people and their health care, along with ending abortion access.

As Miller explains:

Exceptions for individuals who are already predisposed to require medical treatment (for example, HIV positive or suffering from gender dysphoria) should be removed, and those with gender dysphoria should be expelled from military service. Gender dysphoria is incompatible with the demands of military service, and the use of public monies for transgender surgeries or to facilitate abortion for servicemembers should be ended.

Miller seems to believe that the military is full of “Marxists” looking to carry out social justice experiments while indoctrinating the ranks. He urges the next defense secretary to make sure senior military officers “understand their primary duty to be ensuring the readiness of the armed forces, not pursuing a social engineering agenda.” To that end, he calls for axing diversity and equality programs and rooting out Marxist professors in the military academies—where tenure should be abolished. In addition, the new administration should audit the curriculum and health policies of schools on military bases so they can be cleansed of “inappropriate” content.

Everything on this conservative wish list dovetails nicely with Hegseth’s rhetoric on Fox News. He has railed against “woke” policies that he claims have hurt military recruitment and has decried the Pentagon’s “social justice” messages. “The Pentagon likes to say ‘our diversity is our strength.’ What a bunch of garbage,” he said on Fox. “In the military, our diversity is not our strength, our unity is our strength.” On a podcast hosted by conservative commentator Hugh Hewitt, Hegseth once said, “There are not enough lesbians in San Francisco, Hugh, to man the 82nd Airborne. You’re going to need to go to guys in Kentucky and Colorado and Ohio, who love the country.”

Hegseth’s televised attacks on “wokeism” in the military helped kill a Pentagon initiative to crack down on extensive white supremacy and extremism within the armed forces. In 2021, Hegseth devoted a segment on Fox News’ Primetime to attacking a Black combat veteran named Bishop Garrison, whom Biden had tapped to oversee a new Countering Extremism Working Group. The working group was tasked with figuring out how to identify people like Jack Teixeira, the Massachusetts Air National Guard member with a history of violent, racist behavior who leaked a trove of classified documents on Discord in 2021. This week, Teixeira was sentenced to 15 years in prison.

But Hegseth reframed the anti-extremism effort as just another liberal attempt to impose woke policies on the federal government. He described Garrison’s assignment as “a purge, a purge of the Defense Department led by a new, and now powerful, radical leftist, a 1619 Project activist, a hardcore social justice Democrat, a man who believes all Trump supporters are racist and extremists.” Biden’s appointment of Garrison, he told viewers, was “the equivalent of Ibram X. Kendi, the author of How to Be an Antiracist, in charge of vetting the entire US military, past, present, and future.” His attack ultimately generated enough political pressure from Republicans that the working group disappeared in less than a year without having had much of an impact.

During the last Trump administration, there were no fewer than six defense secretaries—seven if you count Mark Esper’s two separate stints in the job. (By comparison, there has been just one during the Biden administration, Lloyd Austin.) Only two of Trump’s defense secretaries were ever confirmed by the Senate. Given that track record, the odds are high that Hegseth will be back at Fox News soon enough. But even a short tenure could give him enough time to check off some items on Project 2025’s to-do list.