The Daily Signal - Victor Davis Hanson: Pete Hegseth Delivered the Military Turnaround Washington Said Was Impossible

Episode Date: December 17, 2025

The criticisms against Sec. of War Pete Hegseth are “entirely political,” and anyone could have said the same things about “the Obama and Biden administration—and much more egregiously.”   Hegseth has turned the U.S. military around in ways no one thought was possible, like getting the military back to meeting all of its recruiting quotas, explains Hanson during today’s episode of “Victor Davis Hanson: In a Few Words.”   Recruitment under the Biden administration fell “some 40 to 50,000 recruits,” and former Sec. of Defense Lloyd Austin’s Pentagon used excuses like “people are out of shape, in gangs, using drugs, etc.”   “The real cause was, as Pete Hegseth said when he came in, that people felt that the military was not emphasizing combat, battlefield efficacy… [Now,] There is a record number of Army recruits. The military has met all of its recruiting. That is equivalent to the dramatic revolution on the southern border. Nobody thought we could close the border. We did. Nobody thought we could get recruitment back. Pete Hegseth did,” argues Victor Davis Hanson on today’s edition of “Victor Davis Hanson: In a Few Words:” 👉 The Daily Signal cannot continue to tell stories, like this one, without the support of our viewers: http://dailysignal.com/donate Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

If you look at what Pete Hexeth has actually done, it was long overdue, and he's doing it very well. There is a record number of Army recruits. The military has met all of its recruiting. That is equivalent to the dramatic revolution on the southern border. Nobody thought we could close the border. We did. Nobody thought we could get recruitment back. Pete Hexeth did.

And the criticism against him has two themes. It's entirely political, and it's not symmetric. Everything they said about Pete Hexeth in a negative context could have been applied to both the Obama and Biden administration, and much more egregiously. Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for the Daily Signal. A lot of officials in the Trump cabinet are under a lot of criticism. as we'd expect from the left. But one has, I think, both got more criticism and more unfair criticism than any other cabinet member. And that's Pete Hexeth, the Secretary of War, the newly renamed Department of Defense. Let's just review a little bit his record because it does not

justify the level of invective that the left, and even some people on the right in Congress and the Republican Party have unfairly attacked him. We were told during the Biden administration that the recruitment for the Air Force, the Army, the Navy, and even in one case, I think one year the Marines, was off some 40 to 50,000 recruits. And the Pentagon's reaction under Secretary of Defense, Lloyd Austin, was, as we heard this echoed by a lot of the four-star admirals and generals, Well, people are out of shape. They're in gangs. They take drugs.

They are wanted by private enterprise. We have to compete with all of the excuses other than the real cause. The real cause was, as Pete Hexas said when he came in, that people felt that the military was not emphasizing combat, battlefield, efficacy. It was turning into a social justice, quote-unquote, program. program. The subtext of Pete's excess point was that there was a particular demographic, white males from rural and often southern locales. They had died twice their numbers in the demographic in Iraq and Afghanistan, and they weren't joining. Some of them were not joining because of the 8,500, maybe 8,000, 8,800, that had natural immunity from prior COVID infections,

and yet they did not want this experimental MRNA vaccine, and they were drummed out in mass. The majority of those fit this demographic. The others felt that under the DEI obsessions with race and sexual orientation and gender, that people would be recruited, retained, promoted on criteria other than battlefield efficacy, so they just stayed away from what they felt was a hostile environment. It didn't help when Mark Millie and Lloyd Austin told the nation before Congress that they were going to invest white supremacy and following the death of George Floyd. That's over with. There is a record number of Army recruits.

The military has met all of its recruiting. That is equivalent to the dramatic revolution on the southern border. Nobody thought we could close the border. We did. Nobody thought we could get recruitment back. Pete Hexseth did. The other thing, very importantly, we have procurement that we were focused largely, not entirely, but on a few big conglomerates. These were companies that over the years had consolidated dozens of defense contractors who had famous names in World War II, but now they were Lockheed, General Dynamics, Northrop, Raytheon, etc.

And we were buying few platforms, $14 billion carriers, $120 million F-22s, a billion-dollar frigates, etc. But our enemies were building lots of things. They were taking our approach to World War II when the United States just flooded the zone with Thunderbolt, P-47, fighters, P-51, fighters, Essex carriers, escort carriers, light carriers. carrier, Sherman tanks, good enough, but just swarm the enemy. We weren't doing that. So one of the things that HECSeth has tried to do is look toward a wider variety of startup off-the-shelf companies that make cheaper products and greater quantity. A million drones they have announced. That's new. The third thing is, yes, it was good to worry about American safety overseas, and that's why ostensibly after 9-11, we went into Afghanistan and Iraq, or we take out

the nuclear. But if you look since 1990, when we first had figures, there's some 900,000 people who have OD'd or killed themselves from foreign imported opiates and particularly fentanyl, often disguised as designer drugs intended to kill Americans through Chinese agency and cartel fabrication. I guess we would call them pill factories in Mexico and parts of Latin America. So these drug interdictions are saving American lives. And he's saying to the nation, it doesn't do any good to spend billions of dollars and defend the borders and intervene all over the world. If in your backyard you're losing more people from all the battles combined since World War II,

more than Vietnam, more than Korea, more than Iraq, more than the First Gulf War, more than Afghanistan, 900,000 dead, 75,000 to 80,000 a year. For now, we're getting close to the 35th year of this, and he's trying to stop that. He ended, as I said, DEI, which was amazing because what had happened, the left had always despised the Pentagon. They had always tried to rake the generals over the coals. we knew that stereotype of the radical democratic party. But the last 10 years, especially under the Obama administration, they said,

wait, wait, wait, wait, they have the chain of command. They don't have to argue in Congress. They don't have to get a bill passed. All we have to do is bring these generals and admirals in here, especially under a Democratic Obama or Biden administration, and say, you're going to do this and you're going to do this. Abortion, you're going to make that base have abortion. to everybody.

DEI, you're going to make that artillery unit so they could get an instant fit right through the chain of command, and all of a sudden, Pete HECSeth came in and said, you're abusing the military for your political agenda. We're not going to do it anymore. A couple of other things. Pete HECSeth compared to what? I didn't hear anybody say that Lloyd Austin might have had a conflict of interest coming out of Raytheon right into the Secretary of Defense.

Was that a good paradigm that we're doing? Generals go out of the Pentagon. They go to defense contractors. Then they rely on their former subordinates for maybe advice about which weapon systems to buy. And then they often go back into government in retirement. And then they'll go back again to these defense. what Eisenhower warned us about the military industrial complex. So Lloyd Austin was AWOL for seven days.

We never knew where he was. Did anybody suggest he should step down? No. So this is political, and the calls for Pete Hex had to step down, and it's ridiculous. And finally, about the drug interdiction, we've had about 30 of these. Are we all suffering from collective amnesia? Barack Obama on the Pakistani Afghan border, Somalia, somewhat in Libya, in Afghanistan, in Syria, Iraq, was a master of predator drone assassinations. He didn't kill, I don't know, 60 or 70 narco-terrorist on 30 boats or more.

He killed over 500 people, including a 16-year-old U.S. citizen. And when he was asked about this, according to Mark Houtburn's co-authored book, he said, you know, I never really knew that I was pretty good at killing, pretty good at killing. It suited me. That's what Obama said. He also said in the White House correspondent's dinner, he joked about using predators and killing people. He said, if people wanted to date his daughter, they better be careful because of predators. In other words, that his hallmark, his brand had been predator, assassination. That's kind of a very light way of approaching human assassination, if you ask me. What am I getting at? If you look at what Pete Hegseth has actually done, it was long overdue, and he's doing it very well, and the criticism against him has two themes. It's entirely political, and it's not symmetric. Everything they said about Pete Hegseth in a negative context could have been applied to both the Obama and Biden administration. and much more egregiously.

Thank you very much, Victor Davis-Hansson, for the Daily Signal. Thank you for tuning in to the Daily Signal. Please like, share, and subscribe to be notified for more content like this. You can also check out my own website at victorhansen.com and subscribe for exclusive features in addition.