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I confess to being taken aback by President-Elect Trump’s nomination of Pete Hegseth as Secretary of Defense. Pete is a friend, a patriot, and a great guy. But to run a near-trillion dollar bureaucracy? What in his experience qualifies him to do that?

Byron York makes the point:

The fact is that despite his impressive qualifications — Princeton, Harvard, two Bronze Stars, and professional success — Hegseth does not have the resume one would expect from a secretary of defense, most notably the management experience to run one of the largest bureaucracies in the world, with an $841 billion budget this year. But Trump clearly wanted a change in direction.

On reflection, maybe being the World’s Greatest Bureaucrat isn’t the real qualification for the job of Defense Secretary. They can bring on a couple of bean counters as deputy secretaries to manage the department. And in any event, maybe no one can do it. I got together with Donald Rumsfeld in Washington, not long after he finished his second tour of duty as Secretary of Defense. He described the Pentagon as an almost insuperable obstacle to getting anything done. When he had a high priority project, the temptation was to bypass the bureaucracy entirely, and hire a team of independent contractors to get the job done. That isn’t a good practice, in principle, and the taxpayers wind up paying twice. But it was, in his view, the only way around the Pentagon blockade.

Trump probably has a different mission in mind for Hegseth. He wants him to be the public face and the emblem of a basic change in direction. The armed forces are no longer to be used as a vehicle for social experiment. (It was Pete Hegseth, after all, who wrote the book on how wokism has degraded our military.) Instead, they will be returned to their traditional function as a deadly war-fighting machine. Pete Hegseth, young and a war hero, is an excellent person to convey that message. And his communication skills are unsurpassed.

Maybe what Trump is trying to bring about is not incremental change, but a fundamental reminder of what our armed forces are all about. That, plus getting recruitment numbers back up to sustainable levels. The kinds of young women and women who enlist to fight for their country are not, for the most part, interested in careers in DEI. Maybe Pete is the right guy to convince young Americans that in this new era, it is once again time to sign up.