The man picked as defence secretary wants to purge the Pentagon

FOUR YEARSdc,deinato ago Pete Hegseth, a telegenic Fox News host and major in the Minnesota national guard, was told that he would be deployed to guard Washington, during the inauguration of Joe Biden. The order was revoked, he recalls, when superiors pointed to his prominent tattoos: a Jerusalem cross on his chest and the words “Deus Vult” on his arm, both symbols of the Crusades but now associated with neo-Nazis. “I joined the army to fight extremists in 2001,” he recalled on an episode of Shawn Ryan Show, a podcast, published on November 7th. “Twenty years later that same army labelled me one.”Mr Hegseth now has a chance to turn the tables. On November 12th nominated him to serve as secretary of defence. If confirmed—he will meet with considerable resistance in the Senate—he would be the second youngest person ever to hold that office and the least experienced. He would also be the most radical. “First of all,” he told Mr Ryan, ”you gotta fire the chairman of the joint chiefs” and any general or admiral involved in “ [diversity, equity and inclusion] woke shit”.In the “The War on Warriors”, a book published this summer, Mr Hegseth compared America’s left to a “Jody”, military slang for someone who sleeps with the spouse of a serviceman abroad. “The Left didn’t fight the wars,” he writes. “They stayed home and wrecked our house. America-wreckers, all of them.” The Pentagon, he believes, was then consumed by “woke” ideology after the killing of George Floyd in 2020 and the protests and riots that followed. The prevailing view, he argues, is: “we will not stop until trans-lesbian black females run everything.””Troops are ‘walking on eggshells’,” he complained on the podcast. “They’re afraid of one misstep on…one gender thing or one racial thing or one trans thing”. The removal of vaccine sceptics was “a purge of people of conscience”. The introduction of women into combat roles was a mistake. “There aren’t enough lesbians in San Francisco to man the 82nd airborne,” he argued, “and in trying to cater to that they lost the boys from Tennessee and Kentucky and Oklahoma, the traditional dudes who did it because they loved their country.”All this has also detracted from a focus on combat, argues Mr Hegseth. Nor is he squeamish about how it ought to be waged. He has defended American troops accused of war crimes, arguing that rules of engagement are too constricting. The laws of war were “written by dudes in cloakrooms in Europe after world war one because they thought they could fight polite wars in the future amongst European nations,” he noted. “Then we wonder why the war never ends...we’ve written rules that are…written for us to lose.”Mr Hegseth does not explicitly confirm he would be willing to deploy America’s armed forces to quell domestic unrest, an issue that pitted Mr Trump against the Pentagon in his first term. But he warns that Antifa, Black Lives Matters, Hamas supporters “and other progressive storm troopers” are creating “little Samarras”—referring to a hotbed of Iraqi insurgency—“in the centre of cities” in America.When it comes to using America’s forces abroad, Mr Hegseth describes himself a “recovering neocon” who now recognises that America’s war on terror “burned two decades of money, our best and brightest, goodwill [and] military capabilities”. He warns that the country is now “tempted to do it again in Ukraine”, distracting from the larger task of confronting China.American aid to Ukraine is weakening its armed forces elsewhere, he argues, citing a supposed lack of shells for American forces in South Korea. It also risks dragging America into a larger war: “The last thing I want is my son deploying to the Donbas to defend eastern Ukraine.” In any case, he argues, Vladimir Putin’s ambitions are unlikely to extend beyond Ukraine. “I don’t want American intervention driving deep into Europe.” , like the World Bank, he says, has been “totally corrupted”.For Mr Hegseth, the Pentagon stands at an “existential” juncture that he describes in scatologically vivid terms: “a shit-or-get-off-the-pot moment”. The generals know what is heading their way.