DAVID MARCUS: GOP trio missed the whole point of Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth
Pete Hegseth squeaked through his Senate confirmation on Friday and became America’s new secretary of defense, but he needn't thank Republican senators Mitch McConnell, Lisa Murkowski, and Susan Collins.
For all three long-time establishment and anti-Trump senators, the main objection to Hegseth stepping into the top Pentagon job was that they believe he lacks the prerequisite experience to run the mammoth organization. Here is how Murkowski put it in an X post: "Managing the Department of Defense requires vast experience and expertise as the department is one of the most complex and powerful organizations in the world, and Mr. Hegseth’s prior roles in his career do not demonstrate to me that he is prepared for such immense responsibility."
Never mind that Hegseth was educated at Princeton and Harvard and served more than a decade in the U.S. Army infantry. Forget that he rose to the rank of major while serving tours in Afghanistan. And disregard that he is a published author who has led veteran advocacy organizations. The problem for these senators was that Hegseth lacks the traditional credential of having worked for a defense contractor, the very type that have been captured over the past two decades by the woke agenda Hegseth has vowed to eliminate.
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Let’s take Trump’s last Defense Secretary, the eminently qualified Mark Esper. Like Hegseth, Esper served in the military, but upon leaving active service, he held a menagerie of high-profile jobs with legislators, the Chamber of Commerce, and eventually as a vice president for defense company Raytheon.
This is exactly the kind of resume that McConnell, Murkowski and Collins were looking for. Esper is the kind of guy who gets 90 votes in favor of confirmation, as he did in 2019, but in building that corporate CV he looked the other way as the institutions he served embraced wokeness and DEI.
Here is what Shanda Hinton, Raytheon Technologies' chief diversity officer, had to say in 2023: "Advancing diversity, equity and inclusion is more than a goal – it's our duty and a critical element of our ESG strategy. This recognition only encourages us to keep pushing to create generational change."
I’m not trying to argue that Esper is some kind of Ibram X Kendi when it comes to things like critical race theory. But he clearly looked the other way as these perverse progressive mindsets took hold.
This was the gentle cowardice of the old Republican Party, always scared of being called names by the left if they didn’t pretend men can become women and America is a deeply racist country. But now is time for courage. This is why Hegseth is the right man for this moment. While the Mark Espers of the world stood by as DEI programs and wokeness infected the military and defense industry, Hegseth was writing books about the leftist institutional capture of our armed forces and schools.
The former "Fox & Friends" weekend anchor may never have been a C-suiter at a massive corporation, but all of those companies have been complicit in the anti-merit based policies that Hegseth promised to pull the plug on during his Senate confirmation hearings.
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In a very real sense, Hegseth is qualified because he isn’t "qualified." Almost anybody who checked the boxes that McConnell, Murkowski and Collins demand would be coming from the same groupthink swamp that has made our military weaker in the name of diversity.
The American people voted for Trump in large part because they know that Democrats have lost their minds in the culture war. We don’t want men in women’s sports and we do want a military focused on being lethal, not politically correct.
If Hegseth winds up in over his head we will know it pretty fast, and I will gladly apologize to his twin detractors on the Republican side of the senate aisle, but that is very unlikely to happen, and how high is the bar really when Biden’s DefSec Lloyd Austin just went missing for a few days and nobody cared?
Hegseth has a chance to fix the military the way Trump wants him to because the American people elected Trump to get that exact thing done.
Elections, they say, have consequences and a Hegseth-led Department of Defense is a great consequence for those who want merit, fairness, and competence in the military. It is a shame, but maybe not surprising that Collins, McConnell, and Murkowski could not see this. Fortunately, Vance made sure their misguided opinions didn't get in the way of real change at the Pentagon.