The Daily Signal - From Woke to Warfighting: How Pete Hegseth Can Fix the Pentagon

Episode Date: January 5, 2025

Decades of social engineering have transformed America's armed forces, prompting concerns about the Pentagon's warfighting capabilities and politicized culture. It's the reason President-elect Donald Trump picked Pete Hegseth as his nominee for secretary of defense: to restore lethality as the military's primary focus. Fixing the Pentagon won't be easy, but it's imperative to restore America's fighting force. On this episode of "The Daily Signal Podcast," former Army Ranger Will Thibeau shares firsthand accounts from his service and outlines the startling changes at the Department of Defense since then. Thibeau, who directs the American Military Project at the Claremont Institute's Center for the American Way of Life, diagnoses the problems—and what it will take to restore the military's core mission of combat readiness. For anyone concerned about the future of American military power, Thibeau provides a perspective on what went wrong—and how to make it right. You can follow Thibeau's work on X: https://x.com/WilliamThibeau Read his report, "Identity in the Trenches: The Fatal Impact of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion on U.S. Military Readiness," at https://dc.claremont.org/identity-in-the-trenches-the-fatal-impact-of-diversity-equity-and-inclusion-on-u-s-military-readiness/ Keep Up With The Daily Signal Sign up for our email newsletters: https://www.dailysignal.com/email   Subscribe to our other shows: The Tony Kinnett Cast: https://www.dailysignal.com/the-tony-kinnett-cast  Problematic Women: https://www.dailysignal.com/problematic-women  The Signal Sitdown: https://www.dailysignal.com/the-signal-sitdown    Follow The Daily Signal:  X: https://x.com/DailySignal  Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thedailysignal/  Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TheDailySignalNews/  Truth Social: https://truthsocial.com/@DailySignal  YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/DailySignal  Rumble: https://rumble.com/c/TheDailySignal    Thanks for making The Daily Signal Podcast your trusted source for the day’s top news. Subscribe on your favorite podcast platform and never miss an episode. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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President-elect Donald Trump is busy preparing to take office on January 20th, and the U.S. Congress, specifically the Senate, will be. having confirmation hearings on his nominees. I'm joined today by Will Tebow, who is the director of the American Military Project at the Claremont Institute, a Heritage Foundation alum, and also somebody who has experience working in the defense industry and served as an Army Ranger. Thank you, Will, for being here. And thank you for your service to our country. Rob, thank you. Thanks for having me. Well, I'm so excited to talk to you because it's one of those issues that oftentimes doesn't get the attention in the corporate media or the legacy media, as they now are called,

that it should. And that is some of the reforms that need to take place at the Department of Defense. That is an area that you're specifically focused on in your work on the military. Bring us up to speed on the project that you oversee at Claremont and some of the big goals that you've set, particularly as Trump takes office. We started the American Military Project over 18 months ago out of Claremont, and we sought to become the authoritative diagnostic and prescriptive effort. for the military's institutional health. We wanted to understand why the military seems to have succumbed to the ideology of

diversity, equity, inclusion, wokeness, and I think a more troubling, broader institutional rot that affects a lot of parts of Department of Defense decision making. And so we sought out to do a few things. The first is to understand the history, understanding that this started a lot longer in our past than we care to admit even in the 1960s, but then certainly accelerated under the Biden administration and the Obama administration before it. It's something that requires us to hold uniform military officers accountable, and we need to challenge commonly held assumptions of American culture, such as, you know, the notion that proportional representation by race must be

found in every institution of American life, or, you know, dare we assume injustice. And, you know, You know, these are a few things into which I'm happy to dive, but I think it's something that our work at Claremont has provided a lot of clarity on. It's been very helpful, Will, and I do want to get to current events and some of the things that Trump can do to fix are hopefully correct. But since you mentioned the history, take us back to the 1960s. How did this start to permeate the Department of Defense? And can you pinpoint some specific examples that took place back in that decade?

Well, let's start with the political moment of the 1970s. the tension of racial chaos throughout America, political assassinations. The Civil Rights Act, though, was the linchpin for real policy change that started at the Department of Defense. Secretary Robert McNamara, you know, Secretary of Defense under Kennedy and President Johnson, said explicitly, this is almost a direct quote, that he wanted the Pentagon on to be the first federal institution to achieve the desired outcomes of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. And the most specifically, that outcome being racial representation that is proportional to the

country writ large. And what precipitated was an institutional organized effort to make this happen through affirmative action, through diversity, equity, inclusion, as we now know it. And it started in the form of the Defense Race Relations Board, which started everything from what are known as equal opportunity trainings. It started reviews of personnel policy based on the assumption, like I started, that disproportionate representation among racial groups in certain organizations or in certain ranks of the uniformed military was evidence of injustice, even if none existed. And so this is always striking because, again, it's as old as the, you know, 1916. It's as old as the Civil Rights Act. And it's not something that we can just describe to a recent phenomenon of wokeness.

It's much deeper. Right. Well, thank you for giving us that history. And in the years that followed, then, under both Republican presidents and Democratic presidents, this continued to make its way through all levels of the Pentagon, I would imagine. Right. Well, think of what was happening for the military. The Vietnam War was in full swing.

You then started a draft to remedy. military instability, you know, strategic instability in Southeast Asia. In that draft where you conscripted Americans who wouldn't have otherwise joined the military, they were coming from a civil society of unrest. And then you brought that unrest, overlaid with the expectation that if they didn't see, you know, men who looked like them in the ranks above them, they could presume injustice. That was literally the teaching of the Defense Race Relations Board. And so what precipitated, and maybe wasn't a direct cause, but it was proximate to it, was racial tension in the military itself. An aircraft carrier succumbed to a race riot off the coast of Vietnam.

Military prisons that housed American soldiers succumbed to race riots in Vietnam during a war. And I think we all wanted to forget what happened to Vietnam, both in that case and strategically. And we wanted to move on and we thought we can move on without paying much attention to how the military institution had changed. And like you said, it continued. In 1973, West Point allowed women to be admitted. And the change in the entrenched nature of these assumptions became even more cemented for military and political life in America.

And then it sounds like under the Obama administration at first and then in the last four years under Biden, they just poured more fuel on the fire and it became a whole lot worse. Yeah. What do they say these days? It's a mask off moment. I think that's what the second half of the Obama administration was for the notion, really the belief that the military must reflect the politics and ideologies of civilian life, the first being, you know, allowing trans service members. But one that's, I think, really pernicious, and albeit it's controversial amongst some conservatives even, is the belief that. that women should have access to any role, any job in the military,

even special operations and other combat rules. This comes even as, even today, military fitness tests have different metrics for men and women. And I think the realities of biological sex are still true and even more true in ground combat. But regardless, there is this imperative that the military must have the same landscape of equality an opportunity for men and women, regardless of the realities in which these organizations

operate. And that's continued even worse under the Biden administration because I think now it's the acknowledgement that the military leadership class, uniformed and otherwise, is committed to this mission, not just the politicians who would make those decisions. Will, what did you experience as a ranger? Did you see some of these things happening before your own eyes firsthand? It was really starting. As in, you know, the last few years of my service, I had, you know, a modest time, you know, only six years. But, you know, I had a senior officer tell a cohort of my peers and I, after we got back from a deployment to Iraq, that, you know, there's the goal to replace us with black men and women in order to make our special operations unit more diverse. In a professional military course, even during President Trump's ban on transgender service, members, we had an instructor of that course complete a full male to female transition. And when I say

full, I mean full. Surgeries and pronoun changes included, even though the president had a state of policy change on the books that wasn't enforced by the leaders at that military installation. So, you know, these were just a little snippets of what went on and how it manifested for me in my Foxwell, as they say, but I think it's become real that the, again, the institutional policy is much deeper, more deeply entrenched than even my experience. And this extends to the, you mentioned West Point earlier, but it extends to the Naval Academy, the Air Force Academy, those service academies are also facing some of these policy changes and the ramifications?

Yeah, well, West Point often enough is, I think, the vanguard of this kind of social change. West Point adopted racial quotas in 1965 that mandated admissions classes have percentage-based goals of admittance by race. And even as recently as July of 2023, the superintendent of West Point openly admitted to having race-based admission criteria for each class. It's been on the books for a long time. and, you know, we, I think, give these institutions a pass sometimes because they somewhat rightly deserve so much respect and we treat them well. But they're often the place for this overreach and this kind of ideological takeover to happen. And that's a problem.

But, you know, you need to look no further than the stated outcomes of the organization at large. Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks published the Strategic Management Plan for 26. she outlined proportion-based promotion goals based on race for all Department of Defense personnel, civilian and military. This is evidence of a quota system that would make the Ivy League blush that's right under our nose. And, I mean, frankly, until our work at Claremont, no one else was willing to talk about it. And I think it might be just because no one else was taking the time to look for it.

You've outlined the problem broadly. Obviously, we could continue to talk about all of the instances. is, but I do want to move the conversation forward and talk about what opportunities there are to start taking corrective action and fix this. We know from past experiences, I think, of the fight that Senator Tommy Tuberville led and the floor of the Senate over Lloyd Austin's current Secretary of Defense, his abortion memo, holding up the promotions of so many individuals in the military, and the pressure that he faced from the establishment in Washington to cave.

on that effort. And so this won't be an easy task for Pete Hankseth if he's confirmed or Donald Trump, but what do they need to do? Well, let's start with the holds of Senator Tommy Tuberville in 23. Obviously, I think you and I are the opinion that abortion was a righteous enough cause for those holds. But what I think the real value of Senator Tommy Tuberville's year-long fight was that the chance it allowed organizations like ours and the American public writ large to understand the kind of leaders we are promoting to serve at the senior most positions in our military, the generals and admirals. And, you know, if I could have offered one kind of suggestion or criticism to Tommy Tuberville, it was to broaden the scope of the impetus for your holds, to make it about the institutional integrity of the military, to scrutinize the quality of the people that we were asking to be. at generals and admirals because I think that's something all Americans want. They want good people to be in charge of the

military and our most capable units. And he had a chance. He did allow us to do that. And so change starts there. Accountability is more than just firing Biden political appointees. It's about understanding the extent to which certain generals and admirals have had a hand in making DEI defense policy. There's no shortage of speeches and pride events on aircraft carriers that have been attended and explicitly supported by senior officers in uniform. That shouldn't be the case, and the people who've done that should be accountable.

But we can also go back in history for some of these policy changes. You know, President Truman integrated the Army in 1948, allowing blacks and whites to serve alongside each other in the same units for the first time. The policy change he made alongside that executive order was to remove. race as a category from personnel files completely. Meaning when I enter the army, there's no box to check for my race. And I think we should return to that. Why do we need to understand a soldier's race? Well, let's make a genuine effort to be colorblind and to promote equal opportunity. And let's also remove any ability of military organizations to track race by quotas or metrics, because that's really how

you undermine the military profession is when you evaluate characteristics that people can't control about themselves. Well, one of the, if I could go back just since you were talking about the Tuberville incident, and in a case where race played a big role in the case of one particular individual who was up for a promotion. Now, we did a lot of coverage on Colonel Ben Johnson from the Air Force, and he was somebody who spoke out in 2020 after the... the death of George Floyd and had some very pointed commentary, shall we say, about how he thought

the military and those who he was serving was should operate. And as a result of that, Tupperville initially held him. And then I think Eric Schmidt ultimately ended up holding his promotion. But obviously, you know, there are so many people who have come up through the ranks with this mentality. What is – can you remove them from positions? of authority? Is that even possible in a military structure? In many cases, I think you can. The case you mentioned of Colonel Johnson is one where he, you know, in the official capacity as an Air Force

colonel and lieutenant colonel, would make recommendations based on political ideology, saying that his subordinates needed to read certain books like white fragility. They needed to examine their internal racism. And that, that I think is. politicizing your service, regardless of what you think about those books or those those viewpoints. But then I think as you uncovered, there were internal command climate survey results that showcased he explicitly made personnel decisions based on race and diversity. That's a violation of the military profession. There's no way that's legal.

And, you know, frankly, regardless, the commander in chief has the right to choose which officers serve in the military that he leads. But you, you know, okay, let's say you don't have to fire every single person, but you can certainly remove them out of position. You can give them new opportunities elsewhere that, you know, in positions that are less impactful. And you can create incentives for early retirement in ways that, you know, don't require a lot of legal and political capital, the expenditure of a lot of political and legal capital. And it takes, though, decisive action and an awareness of who these people are. How does a secretary of defense or President Trump as the commander in chief go about doing that? Finding out who they are and then

taking the steps to change the direction that the military has headed? Well, I think, you know, frankly, probably because our work at Claremont, there is now a culture and a consensus on how to examine some of these people. And it's not hard. We look up their LinkedIn activity. We've looked up their Twitter and other social media activity. They're public about it. Right. I mean, you know, one, one admiral, she said in a speech given in uniform that military officers should be skeptical of laws passed by Congress because so many representatives are white men. You know, these are public statements. There's no need for many FOIA requests or, you know, public revelation of bank statements or, you know, other, you know, private activity, we should just do a basic

kind of search of the public persona of these military officers have portrayed in order to understand if they're the right fit. And if there's not the staff in the Department of Defense who can do it, then it's the responsibility of organizations like the Heritage Foundation and Claremont to provide some bandwidth and resources in order to make that happen. But the overarching point is that President Trump and the political appointees whom he puts in the organization to run the Department of Defense need to run the Department of Defense. So long, the military generals kind of build their lists of who they want to promote and they pass it along without much input from the politically accountable officials in the Department

of Defense. That has to end. The senior political Pentagon staff in the White House itself needs to see every name that comes across the river to the Senate for promotion, and they need to understand that it's their choice, not the chairman of the Joint Chief's choice of who leads our military. This incoming administration has put a much greater focus on personnel, at least compared to the first term. It seems that they are looking for individuals who firmly believe in the agenda that President Trump was elected to carry out. Do you think that we will see a change,

as you've just articulated, in terms of the vetting of individuals? who may be up for promotion? It certainly seems that way. And, you know, I think you can look no further than the nomination of Pete Hegseth. You can say whatever you want about his experience and his background or, you know, supposed qualifications, you know, which I think the notion of who is traditionally qualified or what traditional qualifications are is up for debate. But what he is is committed.

He's aligned. And his incentive, his personal incentive structure in life exists. It's completely divorced from the typical confines of the military rank structure and the military industrial complex. He's not coming from Raytheon or Lockheed. He's not coming from being a four-star general. And he's not accountable to those behaviors that make you appealing to the people who have lived that life.

And that's exactly what you need from someone, not just as the secretary of defense, but as the service secretaries and as as their special assistants and frankly as the military uniformed military officer is that they promote and that they choose to lead these organizations. So that's, that's why I'm bullish on these chances as it seems as if the leadership at the, you know, the next Trump administration Pentagon is a leadership class that's willing to change things because they're not counting on their next paycheck from these same people. What are the policy changes, those Lloyd Austin memos that Pete Higgseth needs to carefully take a look at upon winning confirmation if he is the next Secretary of Defense?

Well, let's start with putting Deputy Secretary of Defense Hicks' strategic management plan in the dustbin of history. That is a comprehensive totalizing, uh, estuary. establishment of DEI as military policy. Again, like I said, it is an across-the-board racial quota for the entire Department of Defense, civilian military officials alike. And let's, as part of that, let's return to the Truman era policy of not even tracking race. Let's make an effort to be genuinely colorblind and committed to equality. You know, the, and of course there are associated policies ending the abortion travel tourism in which the Pentagon participates, I think, reversing the transgender service, you know, member mandate is, is also worth considering.

You know, you should just assume that there are a lot of policies to rescind. But then we need to hold military officers accountable. We need to make standards, standards for personnel and programs about determining who's the best instead of setting a minimum floor of pass or fail. You know, right now, that's what in the name of ensuring men and women have equal opportunities, at every job. Standards are just that. Who can pass the minimum baseline for a fitness test, let's say, as opposed to understanding who's the best and then filtering out the rest, which is what standards should be. And then finally, I think we should take a hard look at some of these

institutions in the military, like West Point. Why is it that you can get a degree in diversity inclusion studies at West Point? You know, why should you get a political science class on critical race theory at the Naval Academy. You know, the Joint Chiefs of Staff is an almost 4,000 person organization, completely devoid of political accountability that participates in almost every military decision, whether it's about software or fighter jets. Let's drastically reduce the size of the joint staff and let's return the military to being accountable to civilian leadership as it was intended, you know, by our founding fathers.

Can you say more about the Joint Chiefs of Staff? I know you were outspoken about CQ Brown and some of the leadership in the past. So what are the changes that President Trump can make to the Joint Chiefs? Well, you know, I was touching on a few of those. The Joint Staff is intended to be a body of advice and consent to the Commander-in-Chief. And so let's retain that core function. But the joke is that you can't plan a barbecue in the Pentagon without getting joint staff concurrence. you know, meaning that they have input in the policymaking process.

There's no reason that needs to happen. Let's take a lot of the people, a lot of the officers who are assigned to the joint staff as kind of a bureaucratic entity. Let's move them under the Office of the Secretary of Defense and in the service secretaries, those people who are accountable to President Trump and appointed by him. And, you know, one idea I have is to, you know, make the joint staff those generals and their personal staffs, you know, so from an organization about a few thousand to maybe 200. And let's move them across the river to the executive office building next to the White House.

The joke we had when I was in the Army is that you never wanted to be close to the flagpole because it meant you could, you would be under much closer supervision. So let's move the joint staff closer to the flagpole. Let's, you know, allow them to write the policy memos and give advice to the president as they're statutorily obligated to do. But let's get them out of the military decision making process. because it's gotten, you know, out of hand. And how is it just the bureaucracy in general that, you know, over time,

they just accumulated more power? Or how did it get to the point where they are making so many decisions that should be in the hands of the civilian leadership? Yeah. Well, I mean, there are some pieces of legislation that I think were interpreted in ways that gave them, you know, carte blanche authority to expand their role and their size, you know, to be a part of military operations, which they're not. You know, General CQ Brown, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs' staff, makes no operational

decisions. He controls no troops in the world. He provides advice and consent to the president, and he should do that. Or the chairman of the Joint Chiefs' staff should do that. But what happens is because there aren't a lot of political appointees, if any, in the joint staff, they just kind of exist as if you might say a deep state or a permanent bureaucracy of the Pentagon that persists throughout political administrations. And I think that's what's allowed them.

They've kind of taken the mantle of authority and continuity to allow themselves to maintain power and relevance. And too many administrations have let that go unchecked. What are some of the key positions underneath the Secretary of Defense that Pete Hegseth would have to fill to make sure that he has the right team in place to enact the reforms? Well, I mean, he's already named a few of them as Deputy Secretary of Defense, his Undersecretary Defense for acquisition and sustainment. I mean, another kind of spot of institutional rot is how we procure technology and weapon systems. And that's a critical need to fill.

He's already named, I think, good people to fill those roles. But, you know, the Undersecretary Defense for Personnel and Readiness will be an important position. The, you know, the assistant secretaries of each service. So the Assistant Secretary of the Army for Manpower and Reserve Affairs, for example, is an important role because that's the person who is responsible for the recruiting, the retention and the personnel of the Army, our biggest service in that case. We're amidst a recruiting crisis that is generational and status. So, you know, these people who are, I think, bold and willing to make the changes that are necessary are some of the key folks. By all accounts, it looks like is that they're well on pace to appoint good people. But we're going to have to carry the ball across the finish line because what happens is whether it's Republicans in the Senate or, you know, defense lobbyists is there becomes the, you know, the imperative to maintain the status quo or to water down effective policy change.

This is a key moment. And our military may not have long to recover because the threats from around the world are only growing. and, you know, the fear is we will only learn the hard lessons of what needs to change after it's too late. What do you think of Pete Hanks, that's very clear vision for what the military should do? Is that articulation an opportunity to reverse some of the challenges when it comes to recruitment, when it is to inspire fear with our enemies, things of that nature? Yeah, it's almost sad that it has to be said, right? The military exists to be lethal and to kill our enemies.

And what makes the military unique then is that no other institution in the military, federal, state, or otherwise, has that unique purpose. And it's a very unique purpose, rightfully so, but it's a purpose that puts the military at odds with the values of our liberal society, smaller liberal society, you know, that is rights-based, individualistic, whether we like it or not. And, you know, the military must exist based on rigid hierarchy, on the notion that you must sacrifice yourself for the good of a whole. And what's happened, certainly in the last decade or so, is that the military has become

just another institution that reflects the values of our civil society. And that's, those are values that are incompatible with an organization committed to lethality. And so we have to reverse that, right? The Army can't have the motto that you should be all you can be in the Army. You know, you got to give all you can give if you want to join the Army because that may be what's required of the Army in the future, you know, combat and operations on the scale we haven't seen since World War II.

Yeah. Well, I mean, I think, you know, ending the military as a social playground for the left and using the military to advance climate change initiatives and all the things like that. Hopefully, we'll, you know, come to an end under Heggsett's leadership. What are some of the tough questions that you expect Heg Seth to face at his confirmation hearing? You know, I think he'll face a lot of, you know, I guess he'll face questions on his personal life. Sure, but I mean, you know, the bipartisan scrutiny he'll receive is based on just this exact question.

If the military is going to be exclusively focused on lethality, what does that actually mean? And I think he'll get, and perhaps he already has received bipartisan scrutiny about the notion that is more or less uncontested that women should serve in infantry and special operations roles alongside men without question. You know, he's raised some modest questions about that and it's driving people crazy. And he should be ready to defend that because, you know, it's a notion that requires defending because we shouldn't be afraid to restore the military to what it means. in what it exists to be. Yeah, no, absolutely. I mean, I suspect that, as you indicated earlier, those lobbyists from the big defense industry players

will be whispering in the ears of senators to, you know, have certain things that they would like to see raised. He does not come from that world. So he should expect some hostile, you know. But I think therein lies an opportunity. Another, you know, problem I have with the, you know, the blow to the Department of Defense is a policy one.

The Department of Defense should not be a foreign policy institution. Right? The president, the White House, the National Security Council, the State Department, set foreign policy. And the military, the Department of Defense as an organization, prescribes military solutions based on policy decisions made by civilians. And, you know, Pete Hexs doesn't need to answer for President Trump's Ukraine policy or his policy on, you know, the Taiwan straight. He needs to be responsible. And I think you should hold this line acutely. He needs to be responsible for how. having a military that is ready to provide the solutions for whatever decisions the president makes. I think too often we've let the military influence the foreign policy decision-making process, and they should do what they do best. And that's be ready, be ready to fight and win our nation's wars, and let those who are accountable to the American people make the decisions if we must fight those wars in the first place. Will Tebow, thank you for your leadership and articulating so many of these important points.

How can our audience find out more about you and your work at Claremont? Yeah, I'm on X at William Tebow. We've published widely in the American Mind and on Tom Klingenstein.com. And I, in September, published a booklet, let's say, called Identity in the Trenches that I think lays out hopefully somewhat comprehensively the history, the current state, and the prescription for the manifestation of diversity. equity, inclusion, and leftist ideology as military policy. So I'd encourage folks to check those out.

Well, we'll be sure to leave links to those in the description and show notes. Thank you so much for spending time with The Daily Signal. It's great to chat with you. Thank you, Rob. Thanks for having me. We are going to leave it there for today. Don't forget to hit that subscribe button so you never miss out on new shows from the Daily Signal. Every weekday, catch top news in 10 right here in this podcast feed.

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