S1E10: The War on Warriors by Pete Hegseth
In 2024’s “The War on Warriors,” Pete Hegseth takes a tried-and-true template treatise - the woke mob has taken over x institution - and applies it to the US military. The premise is simple: while real (white) men were fighting overseas, the gay/leftist/liberal/trans/ANTIFA/fat/university-educated/elite/marginalized/soft/non-Christian/female/minority wokesters infiltrated America’s toughest institution. Hegseth is dialed in and he's sticking it to the man. Unfortunately, the resulting work bores more than it achieves the intended outrage.
Most chapters follow an identical structure and land at an identical conclusion. Hegseth takes a specific theme such as women in the military, presents an edge-case scenario - some personnel wearing sympathy bellies in pregnancy seminars, and extrapolates this to mean the end of a lethal fighting force. Military personnel watch occasional HR powerpoints on diversity, so now they’ve forgotten how to bomb anything. June became Pride month, which somehow interferes with a tradition of cutting a sheet cake on the anniversary of D-Day. How are these things related? And what’s so good about sheet cake?
Hegseth builds rants on these things accentuated with punchlines like “yeah, Al-Qaeda will be real scared when the special forces drop in with fake pregnant bellies,” and then repeats his core conclusion that the military is too “woke.” The majority of the book cycles like this on various target groups such as transgender people, minorities, gay people, leftists, university-educated people, and so on. The first half or so follows this repetitive, firehose format, delivered with the cadence of a drunk Fox News weekend co-host.
Aside from his fixation on “diverse recruits pumped full of vaccines and even more poisonous ideologies,” Hegseth fixates entirely on soldiers in frontline combat. It may be owing to his love of crusader roleplay, but this narrow analytical lens results in an astonishing lack of consideration for the complexity of modern military organizations and the evolving nature of warfare. His concern for female bone density is not relevant to the majority of actual roles most US personnel occupy, nor is it relevant to drone-dominated field combat. From this narrow focus he presents a pearl-clutching prophecy about the end of US “lethality” while ignoring, I don’t know, fucking Tomahawk missiles?
Speaking of Tomahawk missiles, the most notable sections are Hegseth’s attacks on the Geneva Conventions, rules of engagement, and international humanitarian law. He argues instead that the US should commit war crimes wholesale, that the message to Al-Qaeda should be “we will rip your arms off and feed them to hogs,” and that attempts to limit war crimes are the real reason the USA has “lost every war since 1950.” This is strange. Aside from a pretty obvious moral argument against committing war crimes, there are very practical, strategic reasons not to do them as well: war crimes cause the occupied population to rally against you, they create generational propaganda pieces against your country, they erode ally confidence, they erode unit discipline, and they worsen PTSD for your own soldiers returning home.
So why does Hegseth embrace war crimes? There appears to be a combination of things. It may be driven purely by hate. It may be tied to his crusader fantasies. It may be from his early days at Guantanamo Bay. It may be that he isn’t a strategic thinker.
But it may also have something to do with self-mythologizing. His military resume is not particularly exceptional, and he has few extra credentials. What’s more, Pete served primarily in an Iraq war that is not remembered with fondness. So how do you make a unique hero story out of that? Hegseth takes a page out of vanilla Hollywood scripts. He paints himself as a tough son of a bitch held back by pencil pushers with more expertise, experience and rank. But this is the real world, not fantasy, and so what emerges is a dark willingness to do anything, including barbaric war crimes, to advance his career - sorry - his country’s interests.
As this book serves as a CV for his later role in the Trump administration, it further burnishes Hegseth's culture war and war crime credentials with perhaps the most important piece of all - showing that he’s one of the boys. Yes, Pete loves men. He spends many tangents professing his love of men - strong, beautiful, brave men. He recounts his time in the military and how good it was to be surrounded by men. Men are simply incredible, especially men that look like him. God-fearing, beer-drinking, fist-pumping, man-loving, shallow-end-of-the-pool-diving men. Just to be perfectly clear, it is extremely important to Pete that you know he is a man.
That’s about it. The book is a dud. For all his scorn of the other, Hegseth has no respect for his own audience either. This book is a piece of shit perhaps less so for the content that is meant to trigger, but more so for the superficiality. It is a vapid discussion of the military and masculinity served up with all the faux pomp and the blandness of a sheet cake. 2/10.
We had a pretty good time ripping it on the podcast nonetheless.
