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pete hegseth
It’s Up to We the People to Save a Flailing America From Spiritual Death
For tyranny to be stopped, for a catastrophic war with China (and who knows what else) to be avoided, America must have profiles in courage, not cowardice.
Aug 05, 2025
As a retired U.S. Air Force officer, I firmly believe in civilian control of our military. This country should be a nation of laws—not of special interests, oligarchs, or kings. Before committing our forces to battle, Congress should always declare war in the name of the people. Our military should indeed be a citizen-soldier force, not an isolated caste driven by a warrior ethos. And above all, the United States should be a republic ruled by law and shaped by sound moral values, not a greed-driven empire fueled by militarism.
Yet when I express such views, I feel like I’m clinging to a belief in the tooth fairy, the Easter Bunny, and Santa Claus. It feels idealistic, naïve, even painful to think that way. Yes, I served this country in uniform for 20 years, and now, in the age of Donald Trump, it has, as far as I can tell, thoroughly lost its way. The unraveling began so long ago—most obviously with the disastrous Vietnam War of the 1960s and 1970s, though in truth this country’s imperial desires predated even the Spanish-American War of 1898, stretching back to the wanton suppression of indigenous peoples as part of its founding and expansion.
A glance at U.S. history reveals major atrocities: the displacement and murder of Native Americans, slavery, and all too many imperial misadventures abroad. I knew of such realities when I joined the military in 1985, near the end of the Cold War. Despite its flaws, I believed then that this country was more committed to freedom than the Soviet Union. We could still claim some moral authority as the leader of what we then referred to as “the free world,” however compromised or imperfect our actions were.
That moral authority, however, is now gone. U.S. leaders fully support and unapologetically serve an ongoing genocide against the Palestinian people in Gaza. They sell weapons to nearly every regime imaginable, irrespective of human rights violations. They wage war without Congressional approval—the recent 12-day assault on Iran being just the latest example. (The second Trump administration has, in fact, launched almost as many air strikes, especially in Yemen and Somalia, in its first five months as the Biden administration did in four years.) Those same leaders have been doing a bang-up job dismantling the America I thought I was serving when I took that oath and put on second lieutenant’s bars four decades ago. That America—assuming it ever existed—may now be gone forever.
FUBAR: A Republic in Ruins
My fellow citizens, America is FUBAR (a term that dates from World War II). We are not faintly who we claim to be. Rather than a functioning republic, we are an ailing, flailing, perhaps even failing empire. We embrace war, glorify warriors, and profit mightily from the global arms trade, no matter the civilian toll, including tens of thousands of dead and wounded children in Gaza, among the latest victims of U.S.-made bombs, bullets, and missiles.
Signs of moral rot are everywhere. Our president, who would like to be known for his budget cuts, nonetheless giddily celebrates a record trillion-dollar war budget. Our secretary of defense gleefully promotes a warrior ethos. Congress almost unanimously supports or acquiesces in the destruction of Gaza. Images from the region resemble bombed-out Stalingrad in 1942 or Berlin in 1945. Meanwhile, for more than two decades now, America’s leaders have claimed to be waging a successful global “war on terror” even as they fuel terror across the globe. What do they think all those U.S. weapons are for—spreading peace?
Trump and Hegseth are not faintly what the founders of this country envisioned when they placed the military under civilian control.
My wife and I cope through dark humor. We see news on cuts to Medicaid, the mentally ill in the streets, and crumbling infrastructure, and quip: “But Bibi [Netanyahu] needs bombs. Or Ukraine does. Or the Pentagon needs more nukes.” That’s why Americans can’t have nice things like healthcare. That’s why all too many of us are unhoused, in debt, out of work, and desperate. In 1967—yes, that’s almost 60 years ago!—Martin Luther King warned of exactly this: America’s approaching spiritual death through militarism (aggravated by extreme materialism and racism). That death is visibly here, now.
Washington is not even faintly committed to “peace through strength,” a vapid slogan touted by the Trump administration, and an unintentional echo of George Orwell’s dystopian “war is peace.” It is committed instead to what passes for dominance through colossal military spending and persistent war. And let’s face it, that warpath may well end in the death of the American experiment.
The Mediocrity of Our Generals
In this era of creeping authoritarianism and mass surveillance, perhaps the U.S. is lucky that its generals are, by and large, so utterly uninspired. Today’s American military isn’t open to the mercurial and meteoric talents of a Napoleon or a Caesar. Not in its upper ranks, at least.
One struggles to name a truly great American general or admiral since World War II. That war produced household names like George C. Marshall, Dwight D. Eisenhower, George S. Patton, and Chester W. Nimitz. In contrast, America’s recent generals—Norman Schwarzkopf and Colin Powell of Desert Storm fame, Tommy Franks in Iraq in 2003, David Petraeus and Stanley McChrystal of the “fragile” and “reversible” Iraq and Afghan “surges”—have left anything but a legacy of excellence or moral leadership, not to speak of decisive victory. At best, they were narrowly competent; at worst, morally compromised and dangerously deluded.
Mind you, this isn’t a criticism of this country’s rank-and-file troops. The young Americans I served with showed no lack of courage. It wasn’t their fault that the wars they found themselves in were misbegotten and mismanaged. Twenty years have passed since I served alongside those young troops, glowing with pride and purpose in their dedication, their idealism, their commitment to their oath of service. Many paid a high price in limbs, minds, or lives. Too often, they were lions led by donkeys, to borrow a phrase once used to describe the inept and callous British leadership during World War I at bloody battles like the Somme (1916) and Passchendaele (1917).
Today, I fear that America’s lions may, sooner or later, be led into even deeper catastrophe—this time possibly a war with China. Any conflict with China would likely rival, if not surpass, the disasters produced by World War I. The world’s best military, which U.S. presidents have been telling us we have since the 9/11 attacks of September 2001, stands all too close to being committed to just such a war in Asia by donkeys like Donald Trump and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth.
And for what? The island of Taiwan is often mentioned, but the actual reason would undoubtedly be to preserve imperial hegemony in the service of corporate interests. War, as General Smedley Butler wrote in 1935 after he retired from the military, is indeed a racket, one from which the rich exempt themselves (except when it comes to taking profits from the same).
A disastrous conflict with China, likely ending in a U.S. defeat (or a planetary one), could very well lead to a repeat of some even more extreme version of Trump’s Make America Great Again campaign, amplified and intensified by humiliation and resentment. From the ashes of that possible defeat, an American Napoleon or Caesar (or at least a wannabe imitator) could very well emerge to administer the coup de grace to what’s left of our democracy and freedom.
Avoiding a Colossal Act of Folly
War with China isn’t, of course, inevitable, but America’s current posture makes it more likely. Trump’s tariffs, his bombastic rhetoric, and this country’s extensive military exercises in the Pacific contribute to rising tensions, not deescalation and rapprochement.
While this country invests in war and more war, China invests in infrastructure and trade, in the process becoming what the U.S. used to be: the world’s indispensable workhorse. As the 10 BRICS countries, including China, expand and global power becomes more multipolar, this country’s addiction to military dominance may drive it to lash out. With ever more invested in a massive military war hammer, impetuous leaders like Trump and Hegseth may see China as just another nail to be driven down. It would, of course, be a colossal act of folly, though anything but a first in history.
And speaking of folly, the U.S. military as it’s configured today is remarkably similar to the force I joined in 1985. The focus remains on ultra-expensive weapons systems, including the dodgy F-35 jet fighter, the unnecessary B-21 Raider bomber, the escalatory Sentinel Intercontinental Ballistic Missile, and Trump’s truly fantastical “Golden Dome” missile defense system (a ghostly rehash of President Ronald Reagan’s “Star Wars” proposal, vintage 1983). Other militaries, meanwhile, are improvising, notably in low-cost drone technology (also known as UAS, or uncrewed autonomous systems) as seen in the Russia-Ukraine War, a crucial new arena of war-making where the U.S. has fallen significantly behind China.
Far too often, America’s leaders, whatever they’ve said in their election campaigns, have valued weapons and wars over almost anything else.
The Pentagon’s “solution” here is to continue the massive funding of Cold War-era weapons systems while posing as open to innovation, as an embarrassing video of Hegseth walking with drones suggests. America’s military is, in short, well-prepared to fight a major conventional war against an obliging enemy like Iraq in 1991, but such a scenario is unlikely to lie in our future.
With respect to drones or UAS, I can hear the wheels of the military-industrial complex grinding away. A decentralized, low-cost, flexible cottage industry will likely be transformed into a centralized, high-cost, inflexible cash cow for the merchants of death. When the Pentagon faces a perceived crisis or shortfall, the answer is always to throw more money at it. Ka-ching!
Indeed, the recent profit margins of major military contractors like Lockheed Martin, Boeing, and RTX (formerly Raytheon) have been astounding. Since 9/11, Boeing’s stock has risen more than 400%. RTX shares are up more than 600%. Lockheed Martin, maker of the faltering F-35, has seen its shares soar by nearly 1,000%. And Northrop Grumman, maker of the B-21 Raider bomber and Sentinel ICBM, two legs of America’s “modernized” nuclear triad, has seen its shares increase by more than 1,400%. Who says that war (even the threat of a global nuclear war) doesn’t pay?
Meanwhile, the Pentagon’s war budget, soaring to unprecedented levels, has been virtually immune to DOGE cuts. While Elon Musk and his whiz kids searched for a few billion in savings by gutting education or squelching funding for public media like PBS and NPR, the Pentagon emerged with about $160 billion in new spending authority. As former President Joe Biden once reminded us: Show me your budget and I’ll tell you what you value. Far too often, America’s leaders, whatever they’ve said in their election campaigns, have valued weapons and wars over almost anything else.
What Is To Be Done
I’ve written against warriors, warfighters, and U.S. militarism since 2007. And yes, it often feels futile, but silence means surrender to warmongering fools like Hegseth, Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), and the farrago of grifters, clowns, toadies, con men, and zealots who inhabit the Trump administration and much of Congress as well. The fight against them must go on.
All leaders, military and civilian, must remember their oath: loyalty to the Constitution, not to any man. Illegal orders must be resisted. Congress must impeach and remove a president who acts unlawfully. It must also reassert its distinctly lost authority to declare war. And it must stop taking “legal” bribes from the lobbyists and foot soldiers who flood the halls of Congress, peddling influence with campaign “contributions.”
For tyranny to be stopped, for a catastrophic war with China (and who knows what else) to be avoided, America must have profiles in courage, not cowardice. Yet even despair is being weaponized. As a retired colonel and friend of mine wrote to me recently: “I don’t even know where to start anymore, Bill. I have no hope for anything ever improving.”
And don’t think of that despair as incidental or accidental. It’s a distinct feature of the present system of government.
Trump and Hegseth are not faintly what the founders of this country envisioned when they placed the military under civilian control. Yet power ultimately resides in the people (if we remember our duties as citizens). Isn’t it high time that we Americans recover our ideals, as well as our guts?
After all, the few can do little without the consent of the many. It’s up to the many (that’s us!) to reclaim and restore America.
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'Here It Comes': Leaked Hegseth Memo Suggests More US Troops on US Streets
"The worst we've been waiting for," wrote one legal scholar in response to an internal DHS-DoD document reportedly authored by Philip Hegseth.
Aug 02, 2025
New reporting based on a leaked briefing memo from a recent meeting between high-level officials at the Department of Homeland Security and Defense Department sparked fresh warnings on Saturday about the Trump administration's internal plans to increase its domestic use of the U.S. military.
According to Greg Sargent of The New Republic, which obtained the memo, the document "suggests that Trump's use of the military for domestic law enforcement on immigration could soon get worse."
The "terrifying" memo—which the outlet recreated and published online with certain redactions that concealed operational and personnel details—"provides a glimpse into the thinking of top officials as they seek to involve the Defense Department more deeply in these domestic operations, and it has unnerved experts who believe it portends a frightening escalation."
Circulated internally among top Trump officials, TNR reports the memo was authored by Philip Hegseth, the younger brother of U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth. The younger sibling, though lesser known by the public than his controversial brother, currently serves as a senior adviser to Homeland Security secretary Kristi Noem and acts as DHS liaison officer to the Pentagon.
Text of the terrifying memo, written by Pete Hegseth’s little brother, with some redactions due to the agreement Sargent had with those he obtained it from. newrepublic.com/article/1986...
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— Rebecca Rauber (@defeatthefascists.bsky.social) August 2, 2025 at 9:17 AM
The meeting between DoD and DHS officials and the memo centers on Philip Hegseth's push for closer collaboration between the two departments, especially with regard to operations on the ground, like those that happened earlier this year in Los Angeles when National Guard units and later U.S. Marines were deployed in the city to help Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents and local law enforcement put down local protests sparked by raids targeting immigrants and workers.
As Sargent noted in a social media post:
Strikingly, the memo says straightforwardly that what happened in Los Angeles is the sort of operation that may be necessary "for years to come." As one expert told me: "They see Los Angeles as a model to be replicated."
"To Make America Safe Again, DHS and DoD will need to be in lockstep with each other, and I hope today sets the scene for where our partnership is headed," states the memo, which also compares transnational criminal gangs and drug cartels to Al Qaeda.
Lindsay Cohn, an associate professor at the U.S. Naval War College, was among the experts TNR spoke with who called that comparison particularly worrying. "The conflation of a low-level threat like transnational criminal organizations with Al Qaeda, which was actually attempting to topple the United States government, is a clear attempt to use excessive force for a purpose normally handled by civil authorities," said Cohn.
Sociology professor Kim Lane Scheppele, a scholar who studies the rise of autocracy at Princeton University, was among those who raised alarm in response to the published reporting and the contents of the memo.
"Here it comes," wrote Kim Lane Scheppele. "The worst we've been waiting for."
According to TNR:
The memo outlines the itinerary for a July 21 meeting between senior DHS and Pentagon officials, with the goal of better coordinating the agencies' activities in "defense of the homeland." It details goals that Philip Hegseth hopes to accomplish in the meeting and outlines points he wants DHS officials to impress on Pentagon attendees.
Participants listed comprise the very top levels of both agencies, including Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and several of his top advisers, Joint Chiefs chairman Dan Caine, and NORTHCOM Commander Gregory Guillot. Staff include Phil Hegseth and acting ICE commissioner Todd Lyons.
"Due to the sensitive nature of the meeting, minimal written policy or background information can be provided in this briefing memo," the memo says.
Joseph Nunn, counsel for the Liberty and National Security Program at the Brennan Center for Justice, told TNR it was "disturbing to see DHS officials pressuring the U.S. military to turn its focus inward even further." Nunn added that the memo suggests that "military involvement in domestic civilian law enforcement" is set to become "more common" if the policy recommendations put forth by Phillip Hegseth take hold.
Following publication of his reporting, Sargent said he wanted to flag something specific for readers.
"It looks plausible that the Hegseth brothers are trying to push military leaders further on involving military in domestic law enforcement," he noted. "Two experts I spoke with read the memo that way. There may be a bigger story here to get."
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The Tragedy of Thom Tillis
Tillis squandered a unique opportunity to protect the nation from Pete Hegseth. The country is now paying the price for his cowardice.
Jul 15, 2025
The incompetence of U.S. President Donald Trump’s Secretary of Defense is painfully obvious. Former Fox & Friends weekend host Pete Hegseth was never qualified for the job.
Belatedly, Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.)—who became the key vote to confirm the nominee—now admits it.
Tillis squandered a unique opportunity to protect the nation from Hegseth. The country is now paying the price for his cowardice.
Tillis’ Reversal
In a phone call with Trump just before Christmas, Tillis promised to support all of Trump’s cabinet picks. But he developed strong reservations about Pete Hegseth—strong enough to participate in a secret effort to kill the nomination. Serious issues about character, statements about barring women in combat, and allegations of sexual misconduct dogged Hegseth. He had none of the qualifications necessary to run the defense department of more than 2 million military and civilian personnel.
Other Republicans—including Sens. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa), Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), Susan Collins (R-Maine), and Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.)—had similar concerns. And to confirm Hegseth, Trump could afford to lose only three Republican senators. Ernst, a former combat veteran who had survived a sexual assault, capitulated to pressure from Trump’s supporters who threatened a primary challenge in her upcoming reelection. The other three—Murkowski, Collins, and McConnell—held firm.
That left Tillis. After weeks of coordinating with fellow senators to oppose the nomination, he caved. As with Ernst, the threat of a Trump-endorsed primary challenger lurked. But Tillis attributed his earlier resistance to “vetting” and said that he decided to support Hegseth after conducting “due diligence.”
Even so, his abrupt, 11th-hour reversal from “no” to “yes” surprised Murkowski and Collins. And it positioned Vice President JD Vance to cast a tie-breaking vote that put Hegseth in charge at the Pentagon by one of the narrowest margins of any defense secretary in modern history: 51 to 50.
Hegseth’s Scandals
Before long, Hegseth’s incompetence revealed itself.
In his first major overseas appearance on February 12, he “made a rookie mistake,” according to Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.), chairman of the Armed Services Committee. Hegseth told NATO and Ukrainian ministers that a return to Ukraine’s pre-2014 borders was “an unrealistic objective” and ruled out NATO membership for Kyiv. Hegseth’s comments gave away Ukraine’s negotiating leverage before cease-fire negotiations with Russia had even begun.
“I don’t know who wrote the speech,” Wicker continued. “[I]t is the kind of thing Tucker Carlson could have written, and Carlson is a fool.”
Then came the “Signalgate” scandal. Hegseth was on a group chat from March 13-15 that inadvertently included the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic. The chat detailed sensitive information describing the United States’ imminent attack on Houthi rebels in Yemen.
Shortly after that scandal became public came Signalgate II. The New York Times reported that Hegseth himself had shared detailed information about the forthcoming strikes in Yemen on March 15 in a private Signal group chat that included his wife, brother, and personal lawyer.
According to the Times, “Mr. Hegseth’s wife, Jennifer, a former Fox News producer, is not a Defense Department employee, but she has traveled with him overseas and drawn criticism for accompanying her husband to sensitive meetings with foreign leaders.”
“Mr. Hegseth’s brother Phil and Tim Parlatore, who continues to serve as his personal lawyer, both have jobs in the Pentagon, but it is not clear why either would need to know about upcoming military strikes aimed at the Houthis in Yemen.”
There’s more. Recently, the public learned that Hegseth paused U.S. weapons shipments to Ukraine without informing Trump. A week later, Trump resumed the shipments.
Tillis’s Lamentations
At long last, Tillis finally found his spine—but only after announcing that he would not seek reelection in 2026. In a July 9 interview on CNN, he admitted the truth about Hegseth: “With the passing of time, I think it’s clear he’s out of his depth as a manager of a large, complex organization.”
As for Hegseth’s unilateral pause on weapons to Ukraine without informing Trump, Tillis said, “That’s just amateurish. That’s from somebody who doesn’t understand large organization dynamics.”
Would Tillis vote to confirm Hegseth today? “Now, I have the information of him being a manager, and I don’t think his probationary period has been very positive.”
In the same interview, Tillis also commented on his affirmative vote for another Trump cabinet member whose incompetence is likewise becoming clear and deadly: Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
“Quite honestly, the main reason I supported Kennedy was because [Sen.] Bill Cassidy [R-La.] thought that we should see how it plays out,” Tillis said.
That cabinet pick is not playing out very well either. Just ask Sen. Cassidy.
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