About That Hegseth Guy and the Pentagon He’s Walking Into

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Our own dear Duane wrote a great piece this morning on Donald Trump’s out-of-the-box choice for Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth.

I think it was a bold shot across the bow of the entrenched globalists in the building who have been working on eroding our military from the days of Pat Schroeder agitating for women in combat and who have pretty much succeeded in infiltrating every aspect of it by now. Hegseth is super sharp, a war-tested veteran himself, and an old-school believer in national defense, warfighting supremacy, and deterrence through overwhelming strength being the American military’s primary function above all else.

We are so far removed from that at this juncture it is painful.

One thing that has really gotten my goat in this past week has been inferences made by certain “military” newspapers purporting to serve that particular community. The original game in town, Stars and Stripes, is now a subscription-only online for most stories, and I really don’t read it at all.  Another smaller but awfully well-regarded news source is The Marine Corps Times, little bro publication to The Army Times. The specific editions cover items and news pertaining to each service and then general topics military-wide.

The big dog in military reporting is called Military.com – most of you may be familiar with it. It’s owned by the employment website Monster, which is itself a subsidiary of a Dutch company, Randstad Holding.

I have found Military.com to be more left-of-center in general, but there is no gainsaying that some of their reporting has been stellar. And they do a great job of keeping the Pentagon on its toes as far as issues with the troops go.

But their coverage of the Trump win has me narrowing my eyes.

The Nov 6 column is worrying aloud to military members whether Trump will be using them to gun down fellow Americans in the street.

Trump Won. Here’s What That Could Mean for the Military.

…While Trump has been vague on exactly how he would carry out his plans, he spoke repeatedly on the campaign trail about using the military for domestic purposes, including to help carry out mass deportations, target political rivals, and quell any protests while he’s in office.

He, like other Republicans, has also railed against so-called “woke” military policies — such as those aimed at making the military more welcoming to minorities, LGBTQ+ people and women — and vowed to fire generals and others whom he considers “woke.”

Trump’s first four years in office could provide a preview of how he will use the military in his upcoming term.

In summer 2020, during the height of mass racial justice protests across the country, Trump considered deploying active-duty troops against protesters. But he was stymied by opposition from his own officials, including then-Defense Secretary Mark Esper, whom Trump later fired, in part because of Esper’s opposition to invoking a law called the Insurrection Act to deploy troops against protesters.

It’s accompanied by a link to a helpful article titled What Happens If the President Issues a Potentially Illegal Order to the Military? Military.com felt obligated to write such an article about an exercise in an attempt to clarify things because, well, Trump.

…The entire scenario is a work of fiction, but given presidential campaign rhetoric as Americans head to the polls in November, Military.com spent several months trying to unearth what existing safeguards and policies are in place to protect what has long been considered a hallmark of the U.S. — an apolitical military that uses its power to fight the country’s enemies, not its own citizens.

In speaking with more than a dozen Pentagon officials as well as outside experts, what emerged was a landscape where few concrete legal protections exist to prevent an abuse of power by a president, especially if that president chooses to lean on the Insurrection Act, a vaguely worded law originally passed in 1792.

The Insurrection Act was invoked in Los Angeles in 1992 during the Rodney King riots. Army troops, along with Marines from Camp Pendleton, were called into the city to save it from being utterly destroyed.

…By the time Bush invoked the Insurrection Act in May 1992, dozens of Angelenos had been killed. Businesses weren’t just looted; they were burned to the ground. Entire city blocks had been reduced to rubble. Dusk-to-dawn curfews were in effect, and millions of residents were scared to leave their homes.

Southers remembers watching people storm the former headquarters of the Los Angeles Police Department and thinking the city was lost. It later came out that Mayor Tom Bradley hadn’t spoken with Police Chief Daryl Gates for several months leading up to the riots. Their fractured relationship hampered the LAPD in its response to violence and looting.

“No chief wants to say ‘I need the [National Guard here].’ When that decision comes, it’s time to check your ego at the door,” Southers said. “In 1992, Gates was like ‘we got this covered,’ and his troops got overrun.”

…Three days into the 1992 riots, Bush deployed 4,000 soldiers and Marines to Los Angeles to end what The Washington Post called “days of urban anarchy.” Bush also mobilized 1,000 federal troops trained in urban policing.

More than 4,000 National Guard members had already been in place by the time federal assistance arrived in Los Angeles. Seeing the armored vehicles roll in seemed to reassure law-abiding business owners and perhaps force potential looters to think twice.

Bush was not considered a madman at the time for doing so. In the NBC article above, the 1992 riots are contrasted with Trump’s desire to invoke the Act against rioters and the wave of destructive violence in cities during the summer of Fiery but Peaceful, even as governors like Tim Walz hesitated to call their own National Guard troops in to quell the mayhem. 

…”I do not support invoking the Insurrection Act,” he [SecDef Esper] said. “The option to use active-duty forces in a law enforcement role should only be used as a matter of last resort and only in the most urgent and dire of situations. We are not in one of those situations now.”

In the decades between King and Floyd, attitudes had changed so much that no longer did authorities look to impose order – rampaging was permitted to the point where a governor’s wife was actually talking about how she left the windows open to be able to sniff the aftermath of the raging conflagration.

Despite the legitimacy of prior invocations and the fact that Trump did not order any federal troops into Minneapolis or other cities, Military.com does not mention any instances providing cause for invoking the Insurrection Act – only for questioning it (They mention Kent State, though.).

The entire tone seems to be one of fearful trepidation and encouraging military members to be wary of the very legitimacy of any orders that might come from the Trump White House. Ivy League legal professionals opining on honoring your military oath isn’t exactly conducive to good order and discipline, particularly when the article seems to suggest just “ignoring orders” you disagree with is somehow okey-dokey.

…Yale legal scholar Eugene Fidell told Military.com that he doesn’t think that “the armed forces’ officer corps [are] Praetorian guardians of American democracy.”

“They’re the defenders of our country, but that’s not an institution that was built to defend democracy as such,” he added.

Both Fidell and the former judge advocate said that, if an order is deemed lawful, a military commander who still has objections has little recourse but either to appeal to some higher echelon, carry out the order, or resign.

However, Fidell said it’s unlikely that the latter option will become popular.

“We don’t have a tradition of resignation in protest in the armed forces,” he said. “It’s happened so rarely that you could probably count the number of instances on one or maybe two hands.”

Instead, military officers often choose to express their displeasure or disagreement with an administration’s actions through anonymous leaks to media or, in the case of the Trump administration, leaders at the Pentagon simply ignored orders they disagreed with in the hopes the mercurial president would forget, or treated them as musings rather than official proclamations.

Excuse me? Are we now in the business of fomenting and nurturing a flock of Vindmans who will act contrary to their sworn oaths because of their personal biases vice doing their duty?

That’s not how any of this works.

This was the publication two days ago, as the speculation about a new SecDef was heating up.

President-elect Donald Trump’s choice for defense secretary is still up in the air, but it is a sure bet he will look to reshape the Pentagon and pick a loyalist following his tumultuous first term. Five men held the job as Pentagon chief only to resign, be fired or serve briefly as a stopgap.

…The key test, however, will be loyalty and a willingness to do whatever Trump wants, as he seeks to avoid the pushback he got from the Pentagon the first time around.

Trump’s relationship with his civilian and military leaders during those years was fraught with tension, confusion and frustration, as they struggled to temper or even simply interpret presidential tweets and pronouncements that blindsided them with abrupt policy decisions they weren’t prepared to explain or defend.

Time after time, senior Pentagon officials — both in and out of uniform — worked to dissuade, delay or derail Trump, on issues ranging from his early demand to prohibit transgender troops from serving in the military and his announcements that he was pulling troops out of Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan to his push to use troops to police the border and stem civil unrest on the streets of Washington.

In his first administration, Trump hewed toward what he considered strong military men and defense industry executives. Initially enamored with generals, Trump over time found them to be not loyal enough.

“He soured on them,” Cancian said. “They were not as pliable as he had thought. … I’ve heard people speculate that maybe the chairman would be fired. So that’s something to watch.”

Notice the verbiage and the emphasis over and over on “loyal to TRUMP” as if loyalty was an unexpected, totally out-of-the-norm quality for a potential presidential cabinet member. Something no president prior to this madman has ever expected or required from a cabinet member.

What are they implying here, and, by that inference, telling troops about their next SecDef?

See my problem with all this?

Don’t think for two seconds stories like these aren’t getting wide play among a troop base already fractured by years of DEI indoctrination and being beaten about the neck and shoulder during ‘white rage,’ anti-warrior caste, and wrong-think witch hunts. The troops are also not the overwhelmingly conservative block they used to be, either.

There’s a determined and entrenched cabal already trying to morph into an effective tool to undercut the incoming Commander in Chief with the able assistance of the media telling military members that President Trump’s orders are not legitimate.

Pentagon officials discussing how to respond if Trump issues controversial orders

Pentagon officials are holding informal discussions about how the Department of Defense would respond if Donald Trump issues orders to deploy active-duty troops domestically and fire large swaths of apolitical staffers, defense officials told CNN.

Trump has suggested he would be open to using active-duty forces for domestic law enforcement and mass deportations and has indicated he wants to stack the federal government with loyalists and “clean out corrupt actors” in the US national security establishment.

Trump in his last term had a fraught relationship with much of his senior military leadership, including now-retired Gen. Mark Milley who took steps to limit Trump’s ability to use nuclear weapons while he was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The president-elect, meanwhile, has repeatedly called US military generals “woke,” “weak” and “ineffective leaders.”

Officials are now gaming out various scenarios as they prepare for an overhaul of the Pentagon.

Lloyd Austin is using his careful language – of course, the Pentagon will be delighted to carry out the ‘lawful’ orders of the incoming president.

That’s what we do – no politics here.

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin directed the military on Thursday to carry out a smooth transition to President-elect Donald Trump, with a reminder to the force of its obligation to follow the lawful orders of the next commander in chief.

While such memos are rare, it was not the first time the military’s top civilian leader has pressed the force on its duty to the Constitution in regard to a changeover of control under Trump.

However, in the context of the incoming president’s suggestion that he may use federal forces at the southern border, and Project 2025 plans to force out career civilians and fill positions with Trump loyalists, the Biden administration has taken unusual steps both to try to insulate those civil servants and to remind the military of its own sworn oaths.

“As it always has, the U.S. military will stand ready to carry out the policy choices of its next Commander in Chief, and to obey all lawful orders from its civilian chain of command,” Austin wrote in his letter to Defense Department personnel.

THE DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE WILL JUST SAY ‘NO’ TO DULY ELECTED CIVILIANS FROM THE WRONG PARTY 

This is a massive issue, and Hegseth is walking straight into it.

Before he even has a chance to get to procurement issues, training, etc., ad nauseum.

He has to nail down this from the start – pin the slimy hide of this burgeoning resistance movement right to the wall from the get-go.

There is so much to do.