The Peter Zeihan Podcast Series - The Fire Hose of Chaos: What Is Hegseth Doing?

Episode Date: April 29, 2025

Pete Hegseth, the current Secretary of Defense, has been doing his best to completely dismantle the United States' ability to fight a war now or in the future. Let's look at why this is happening...Join the Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/PeterZeihanFull Newsletter: https://mailchi.mp/zeihan/what-is-hegseth-doing

Peter Zion here. It's Easter Monday. You'll see this on Easter Tuesday. And today we have to talk about the Department of Defense and in particular the Secretary of Defense, a guy by the name of Pete Hegeseth. Pete Hegeseth is the least qualified, most incompetent Secretary of Defense the United States has had. And over the couple of months that he has been in the office, he has done more to destroy the United States' capacity to to fight a current war, much less a future war than really anyone in American history. And it's exploring why. The big news that came out over Easter weekend that is prompting me to talk about this topic is that if you remember back a few weeks ago, we had this signal gate issue where the Secretary of Defense, Hegsef, set up a chat room with a bunch of other top national

security folks as well as the Treasury Secretary and somehow a reporter got invited onto it. and on an unsecured platform that the Russians had cracked the security on, started discussing active war plans and operational intelligence, something that under normal circumstances would have gotten everyone involved fired. But this is the Trump administration and decisions are made differently these days. Anyway, it turns out that around the same time that he did that, Hegsa had another signal chat, again, unsecured. But this time with personal friends, his personal lawyer, his wife, no one who had a security clearance. And to be clear, this is a felony that would get anyone in the armed forces put away forever and disarrably discharged in a matter of seconds. The Trump administration has already said they see nothing wrong with this, and Hegeseth will continue in his position. I think it's worth understanding why the United States military is the most powerful military force in human history and how Hegeseth is looking to rip that up root and

branch. The first issue is education. When you have a force that spans the globe, you will need dozens of different skill sets, especially in your officer corps. So the United States maintains the most advanced staff college system in human history to train up their mid-career officers for any possible outcome, as well as to teach them things like history, economics, trade, technology, electricity, energy, and all the rest. One of the things that Hegeseth has said is that anything that does not directly encourage activities for an active warfighter should be cut.

That includes all of the staff colleges, which is where we get all of our officers. Basically, it's returning or an attempt to return the training system to something that was much more reminiscent of what we had in the Civil War where you just threw bodies at everything. Gone would be. the efforts of leveraging technology or anything else.

The second issue is these educational institutions that we have, keep in mind globe-spanning military force. So we do two things. Number one, we fly the troops to the educators. We fly the educators to the troops based on the circumstances. In addition, there's the little issue of allies. Because the United States has the best training system in the world, we kind of lend it out, if you will.

We invite other war fighters from other countries that are allied to come to our training institutions to basically get indoctored in the American way of warfighting, as well as seal up alliances and potential alliances with countries that are not yet treaty allies. Well, that requires people moving about. And one of the things that Hegeseth has done is a blanket travel ban on all the educators so that they can't travel. So if you want a warfighter to get trained, he now absolutely has to come to where the university happens to be, whether that's in Annapolis or in Monterey, and everyone else is just shit out of luck.

So we've seen what is arguably, in my opinion, the single biggest advantage we have long-term whittled down to just a weak spot. Then there's technology. You may have noticed, but since the age of computers, the type of hardware that we are using in the world has been evolving, especially in the last few years with the Ukraine war. So, for example, the military gets a lot of crap. And I think fairly, or rather unfairly, for not being, let's what a phrase this, for being kind of stodgy, because the technologies that they have used really haven't evolved or mutated a lot in the last hundred years.

I mean, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. We got jets after World War II or at the end of World War II. We got tanks at the end of World War I. We developed missiles during the Cold War. But guns, artillery, missiles, jets, helicopters, ships, you know, The general playbook hasn't evolved all that much. The basic platforms haven't evolved. We just upgrade specific technologies and put them together in different packages

and throw them at different problems in different ways. But the pieces really haven't changed all that much. Well, starting about five, ten years ago, that really started to shift because we got breakthroughs in things like information technology and energy transfer and digitization. And they're all happening at the same time. And they're combining the new weapons. systems that were only now starting to game out and design. And the Ukraine war is famous,

of course, for drones. And drones are absolutely the leading edge of this revolution. But we don't know what this is going to look like in five years or 10 years or 15 years or 30 years. And keep in mind that we have a lot of weapon platforms that we designed back in the 50s that we're still using. And so you have to have an institution within the military that games out the future. And this takes two forms. First, you get the best in the brightest from the Intel systems within the military. You put them together into room and get them to imagine the sort of thing that the president is going to be demanding of the military forces in 10, 20, 40, 80 years. And then you need a technical team that can design a weapon system

that will not just be useful 10 and 20 years from now, but can be upgraded and still be used a generation or two from now. Well, Hankseth is firing all of those people. The Office of Net Assessment, whose job it is to do the first part of that. Imagine in the future has, been disbanded and we're seeing massive cutbacks in excess of 70% for all the offices that do the technical work. So basically the United States is taking a giant technological step backward in its war fighting under Hegsseth. And then the third issue is recruitment. Remember, we don't know what the weapons of the future are going to be. So why in the world would you put any restrictions on how someone might choose to serve their country? We need. We need.

everyone of every background. And if you look back at the history of the U.S. military going all the way back to before the Civil War, it's not just that the military has always been a social ladder for underprivileged groups to sustain status within a society. It's a way they can attain leadership. They can get the skills that they need to remake their own futures. And for the American point of view, from the military point of view, from the tactical point of view, from the warfighter point of view, we need everyone we can get. You know, newsflash, folks, straight white dudes are less than one-third of the population. And if you put restrictions on how the other two-thirds of the population can choose to serve the country,

you will never meet your recruitment goals. So in the last two months, we've seen a series of things go down. Most notably, Higgsath recently changed the physical requirements for what you have to match in order to serve in the military. a gold phraseology, a policy that almost seems like it was custom designed to kick all women out of the U.S. military. And then, of course, recruitment for any place that is not totally stocked with white dudes has basically been cut to zero. Even black engineering universities are no longer being visited. And I know, I know, some of people are going to say, well, if you've got a standard and everyone can't meet, it doesn't work. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.

The Israelis broke the seal on women in the military over 50 years ago. And today, every First World military has a substantial proportion of women in the field. So if you can't adjust for that, you're going back to the 1840s. Moreover, there are some jobs like, say, fighter pilots, where women are better because they can handle the G-forces better. So is Heg-Seth going to change the policy that only chicks are fighting in the jets? I don't think so. What we're seeing is it's all adding up to the greatest degradation of American warfighting potential that we have ever seen.

And this is only two months in. I also don't think this is the end of it. Yes, Hegset has now committed multiple felonies. Yes, Hegset is an unmitigated disaster in his leadership. And yes, his entire inner office has now been fired. Oh, this is rich. So he fired everybody in his office saying that they were all leaking information. I have no idea if that is true, but Hegeseth has a history, especially in the Signalgate stuff,

of saying something that's just a bald-faced lie, knowing that the information is out there to prove them wrong, and it's usually released the next couple of days. So by the time we see this video, we will probably have multiple lawsuits against Hegeset personally for people firing, quitting for wrong words. So by the time you see this video, it's entirely possible that the office that was fired, they will have all issued wrongful termination lawsuits, and providing the information that will prove that this guy is just an absolute moron. Okay, do I think he's going to go?

No. Remember, the Trump administration did not build his cabinet because he thought these people were capable or change agents. He chose them because they were incompetent. The first time around, when Donald Trump became president, he really didn't expect it. He thought he was going to lose to Hillary Clinton. And so he didn't have a cadre of people around him

because he had never been in government. well he reached into the republican party pulled their policy experts and especially on security affairs relied very heavily on generals and admirals to kind of fill out the billets well what he discovered in that sort of environment is when you have generals and admirals who have been through the staff training program and they know how the world works intimately they have opinions about how things should be done and they can point out consequences if you do things the wrong way well whenever that happened Trump fired them. And so he went through more cabinet members than any American president in history and just a huge number of generals rotated through the world, a huge number of generals rotated

through the White House in positions like, say, Secretary of Defense or CIA director. Anywho, you fast forward that to this most recent race, Trump had decided while he was out of power that rather than build a team of competent people who could push an agenda through, he wanted to make sure that there was never anyone in the room who would tell him no. So he reached out and hired people like Pete Hegseth, who I would argue three months before he became Secretary of Defense, had no idea that that was in his future. Well, because Trump values incompetence near him, there is no reason to expect Hegseth to be dismissed. I mean, of course he should be dismissed, but of course, in a normal administration, he would have never been nominated, much less

confirmed. And that brings us to the next problem. Hegseth and people who are at his level of general incompetence, that includes the director of national intelligence who is Tulsi Gabbard or Health and Human Services Secretary, who is Robert Kennedy Jr. All of these people should not be in their spots, but they're going to stay because Trump values their lack of expertise. He values their yes mentality. He values the fact that they're not keeping him informed because it allows him to live in his hermetically sealed Obama-esque bubble. The only way that these people can go away is if they are impeached. And since the Trump team has basically gutted the Senate of anyone who is willing to stand out,

that's a really tall order. As Senator Mikowski of Alaska pointed out, retaliation against Trump is real. And so she's considering leaving the party and being an independent in her home state of Alaska. That would still leave us with 52 Republican senators. who are either unwilling or unable to stand against the president on issues of national security. And if you're going to impeach someone, you have to get two-thirds of both houses of Congress. So now you're talking about roughly 20 Republican senators have to flip in this political environment, and I just don't see that as feasible.

So we are looking to the long, painful, drawn-out crash of the United States to be able to manage its national security concerns. under a leadership that is thin, that is broken, that is incompetent, and unfortunately that we are stuck with for the foreseeable future.