One Secretary of War, One Army:  Pete Hegseth’s Vision for the Military, His Country and the World

This is not a book one would expect to read — not from a progressive standpoint, nor even simply from that of an attentive observer. Everything in The War on Warriors by Pete Hegseth signals its intent from the outset: on the back jacket, the current Secretary of Defense — who has himself insisted on being called “Secretary of War” — poses with arms tattooed with M16s and crosses, belt stamped “Fox Nation,” hair slicked back, like a biker at the helm of the most powerful military in the world. Published under the “Fox News Books” imprint — the name of the far-right, pro-Trump network — a bestseller in 2024, the book was written for the already converted. In other circumstances, it would have gone largely unnoticed. But two years on, with the United States having joined Israel in a preemptive war against Iran, and that conflict having become an international crisis that continues to expand, the book reads differently — not to lend it more importance than it deserves, but to reveal what it contains in embryo, in terms of ideology and doctrine.

To put it plainly: if Hegseth is probably not the actual author of this book, he would be neither the first nor the last to have his story written by a ghost writer — it is worth recalling that President John Kennedy himself had his own story, Profiles in Courage, written by his speechwriter Ted Sorenson. No one is shocked by this anymore, and everyone pretends it does not matter. Hegseth is direct about his purpose: after Battle for the American Mind, there is no more time to wait. War on Warriors sets its agenda from the opening pages: it is written for the “sons of the nation,” the future soldiers who will have to “save the Republic,” in his introductory words. It is time to stop the military from going “woke” by launching a “frontal assault” against the deep forces threatening it, and to restore the military’s pride by allowing it to use force abroad without inhibition, without limits or constraints, following the supposedly immutable laws of nature that govern the human condition.

If the world cannot agree on principles of honor or morality, how can we ever prescribe global terms of fair war ? Land warfare, historically understood, is defined by how many people you can slaughter in one space, at one time – limiting the will and capacity of your enemy to fight. (Same goes for bombing, missiles, and drone strikes ; just a different delivery mechanism.) War will never be anything but hell as long as human nature stays deceptive, vengeful, and angry. Much to the chagrin of the utopians and progressives, human nature has not changed. And will not change. We are flawed. We are sinful. Men will always fight other men. [1]

This book serves a very precise function: it legitimizes and makes legible the journey of an “American fighter,” one of its common soldiers, who fought for the nation and experienced firsthand Democratic presidents who made the country less safe, who refused to make the hard choices that the exercise of power demands.

Beyond building a long narrative of brothers-in-arms united in the struggle against Al Qaeda, Hegseth invokes this camaraderie to justify the book’s subtitle — “Behind the betrayal of the men who keep us free” — and defends the American nation by redefining it from the ground up: the Marines, the soldiers who make up the various branches of the military, all those the Administration will need for its present and future wars. In the account of war that Hegseth offers, the difficult and controversial aspects are absent. There is no room for war crimes committed by the United States, nor for civilian casualties. The narrative rests on a simple opposition between courageous American soldiers, timid bureaucrats, and “bad guys” who deserve to die.[2]

In this sense, everything in this book — like all propaganda — is a call to action. America must act, or its greatness will be erased. The book plays on deep fears of replacement, decline, and disappearance. It summons writers and examples from every era and every battle, from the Church Fathers — Saint Augustine foremost among them — to contemporary theorists of war.

For that reason, there is no need to read the book in full: skimming it is enough. It is at the end that one finds, as in any well-constructed lesson, the moral and the injunction to follow the leader, the order to obey. It is worth quoting the passages that crystallize the vision held not only by Hegseth, but by this entire current of the new right — its contempt and disdain for civilian institutions, the rule of law, Europe, and any form of restraint on its appetite for domineering, masculinist power.

 Faced with “savages” — those he describes as pitiless enemies who follow no conventions — the United States has no choice but to cast off constraints imposed from outside (international law, the UN, the European alliance, NATO) and embrace its role.

 If our warriors are forced to follow rules arbitrarily and asked to sacrifice more lives so that international tribunals feel better about themselves, aren’t we just better off winning our wars according to our own rules ?!  Who cares what other countries think. The question we have to ask ourselves is, if we are forced to fight, are we going to fight to win ? Or will we fight to make leftists feel good – which means not winning and fighting forever. [3]

This rhetoric barely conceals its genealogy: it echoes the slogans of the futurist and then fascist ideologues of the post-First World War period, and their glorification of war, of combat as a vehicle for masculine regeneration. Europe, in this worldview, is its very antithesis — at best a relic of the past:

In this context, the Europeans are the worst. Outdated, outgunned, invaded, and impotent. [4]

Casting himself as a judge of History, Hegseth reaches his conclusions after a reductive — at times absurd — rereading of the experience of the two World Wars:

History regards the Greatest Generation not for their poetry, artistic endeavors, or their culinary brilliance. (…) They were great because they understood they were at war and that the consequence for losing the war was annihilation. They killed the enemy. Sometimes in ways that would offend modern sensibilities. Two nuclear bombs ended the war that could have dragged on for years, costing millions more American lives. They won. Who cares.[5]

His words echo, in every respect, the grievances voiced by an earlier generation of American generals opposed to diplomacy and negotiation with the communist bloc. Starting with General Curtis LeMay who, after the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962, made no secret of his bitterness that the United States had not, in his view, deployed its full power against the communist enemy, regardless of medium- or long-term consequences.[6] A grievance repeated after the defeat in Vietnam: do not let civilians manage military affairs. One recalls how Curtis LeMay dismissed as unfounded the fear that the American Republic might slide into tyranny: « I know that a military cabal might seize control of the United States is utter nonsense », adding shortly after: « It would be an unthinking step toward tyranny to prevent military leaders from expressing their honest views before Congress. »[7]

Hegseth makes no reference to this history, from which he nonetheless seems to draw the same lessons: that civilians should not interfere with what the military does or how it does it. There is something of LeMay in Hegseth. Both distort their relationship to reality: claiming to save America from an imaginary threat, seeking to legitimize — on the sole basis of combat experience — wars whose justifications can only be established through a deliberate distortion of the facts; and treating a century of conflict history like a fable that strips away all the detail and human complexity inherent in such situations.

It is worth recalling that as early as 1954, President Dwight D. Eisenhower had to contend with open opposition from certain generals, such as General Mark Clark who, after the armistice of the Korean War, argued that the war could and should have been won had civilian authorities — and the UN in particular — allowed General MacArthur to act freely. It should be noted that MacArthur had suggested to President Truman that nuclear weapons be used in that conflict.[8]Clark’s words at the time were as follows:

We should fight to win, and we should not go in for a limited war where we put our limited man power against the unlimited hordes of Communist man power which they are willing to expend lavishly and do. They have no value for human life or respect for it all. If fight we must, let’s go in there and shoot the works for victory with everything at our disposal.[9]

A week later, at a press conference on August 11, 1954, President Eisenhower firmly rejected this vision. Faced with political pressure from the radical right calling for a break in diplomatic relations with Moscow and for sending the American military into preventive wars, his reported position was unequivocal: « he didn’t believe there was such a thing as preventive war, and he wouldn’t even listen seriously to anyone who came in and talked about such thing. »[10]

Hegseth today seems gripped by the same fever. In 2024 he warns against what he calls the “woke mind virus,” calling for a decisive and immediate takeover of military academies and soldier education, which he claims have fallen into the hands of “Marxists.” He closes his book with an encomium to the new commander in chief:

The fight for freedom can only be won when there is meritocracy in our military – starting with a new courageous commander in chief. Maybe then our military academies will get back to creating color-blind warriors, not ethnic and gender studies cultists.[11]

The central question left open at the end of this book concerns the scope of the means available to the new head of “War-Defense” and his willingness to use them — beginning with nuclear weapons and the automation of destruction through AI. Including through preemptive wars against presumed threats. We have seen how, since his second term, Trump, backed by his Secretary of Defense, has committed the United States to this path, authorizing the use of every available means, without restriction of any kind.

The gulf between the early Cold War and the writing of Hegseth’s book is staggering. It is in that gap that one also becomes aware of the decades-long pressure exerted by a faction within the military establishment to transform American military doctrine and give it free rein. If Eisenhower could fear, even then, a drift toward full-scale nuclear conflict, what explains the fact that the current Secretary of War’s language no longer generates that same alarm? War is itself fed by the shortcuts and simplifications that fill this book — and that ultimately run counter to history, trampling the ideals at the heart of the international system built since 1945 and the hope of resolving conflicts through negotiation.

The entire book amounts to a chilling — if not alarming — refutation of the idea of interdependence, and a pointed but always oblique rejection of the vision expressed by President Wilson in his “Address delivered at the First Annual Assemblage of the League to Enforce Peace,” on May 27, 1916, in Washington. That speech laid the groundwork for what would become, after the Great War, the League of Nations, and later the United Nations — principles that the United States then championed in theory while not yet having entered the war, a situation that would change in April 1917. The First World War would profoundly reshape America’s posture toward the world and toward military affairs, preparing the United States to build its first standing army and lay the foundations of the military-industrial complex.

The “League to Enforce Peace” was a purely American organization created to promote an “international association” to prevent war, as Wilson underlined with these words:

Today the foreign policy of the United States is a declaration of inter-dependence of men and nations (…) We are participants, whether we would or not, in the life of the world. The interests of all nations are our own also. We are partners with the rest. What affects mankind is inevitably our affair as well as the affair of Europe and Asia. [12]

In his work on the American war machine and the conduct of its secret and illegal wars,  American War Machine(2010), Peter Dale Scott, former Canadian diplomat and professor emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley, wrote in his epilogue in tribute to a certain restraint shown by past American presidents — not to deny that most of them had engaged in bloody wars, but to recall that at certain moments, placed in circumstances that could have led to far more devastating escalation — notably through the use of nuclear weapons — they had resisted the calls of generals prepared to sacrifice anything in order to “win.”[13]

Here is Peter Dale Scott’s list from his “Final Words”:

+ Truman, who after authorizing Operation Paper, recalled Mac Arthur from Korea in 1952 and resisted the demands to use nuclear weapons in that war ;

+ Eisenhower, who in 1954, having earlier threatened to use nuclear weapons in Korea, refused to intervene militarily in defense of the French at Dien Bien Phu ;

+ Kennedy, who, while escalating in Vietnam, turned down serious proposals to nuke Russia, invade Cuba, and put 60’000 U.S. troops into Laos ; also resisted dangerous proposals to escalate and enlarge it ;

+ Nixon, who, while expanding and intensifying the Vietnam War, engaged in the painful process of normalizing relations with both China and the Soviet Union ;

+ Carter, who continued the same process; and

+ Reagan, who reached an understanding with the Soviet Union that he had once denounced as the evil empire.

Even in the past two decades (about which we are not well informed), we should credit the following :

+ George H.W.Bush, who both initiated the Gulf War and resisted the pressures to convert it into an invasion and occupation of Iraq ;

+ And yes, George W. Bush, who both gratuitously invaded Iraq and in 2006-2007 turned back the very real neoconservative pressures to bomb (and possibly even nuke) the nuclear installations of Iran. »[14]

He added, further on, a tribute to the American people and to the forces opposed to war for their strength and their spirit of resistance to these forces of destruction.

The forces of the war machine have repeatedly driven this country to engage in preemptive wars, but at times the same forces have also been contained. In short, the public state and the war machine, while intertwined, are not identical. [15]

As noted, Eisenhower had personally and repeatedly issued warnings, after standing firm against his generals, that one day perhaps an American president would not be as he was — someone with direct knowledge of the conduct of military operations, and a deep sensitivity to the destruction and suffering they entail. That day, he warned, the United States and the world would have cause to fear for their survival.

In the wake of the preemptive strikes launched by American and Israeli forces against Iran, followed by Lebanon — first in June 2025 and then again from February 28 onward — in a war that is engulfing the region and the world, Pete Hegseth’s book and the elements of his “victory at any cost” ideology take on an altogether different meaning. What appeared, at the time of its publication, as the platform of a Fox News commentator elevated to an unlikely post now reads as a foreign policy document — and, more precisely, as the intellectual manifesto of those who led the United States to strike Iran on the basis of intelligence that their own analysts could not validate, without congressional authorization, and behind the back of diplomatic negotiations barely begun in Geneva.

It is important to revisit that history so as not to succumb to the simplistic and nihilistic vision of its author. For it is precisely the logic described in these pages — contempt for international law, rejection of negotiation, the conviction that force alone can resolve conflicts — that has now been put into practice.

A week after the strikes began, the conflict has spread across the entire region. Its consequences will be borne first and foremost by the Europeans — not by those who decided to start this war. Mr. Trump did not see fit to consult them before acting — nor did his inner circle, whose contempt for Europe is a constant — and nothing suggests he intends to in the future. European leaders are discovering, if there was any remaining doubt, that their role in this kind of calculation amounts to one thing: compliance. That, in the end, is the final lesson of Hegseth’s book: the hierarchy of power admits neither exception nor discussion.

Notes

[1] Pete Hegseth, The War on Warriors, behind the betrayal of the men who keep us free, New York, Fox News Network, Harper Collins, 2024, p.181

[2] See Greg Jaffe’s critical review, “Pete Hegseth has seen the enemy and it is American liberals,” in The Washington Post, 22.01.2025.

[3] Ibid. p.182

[4] Ibid.

[5] Ibid.

[6] General Curtis LeMay, America is in Danger, New York, Funk&Wagnalls, 1968

[7] General Curtis LeMay, op. cit. p.8-9.

[8] Gen Clark testimony before the Senate Subcommittee to investigate the Administration of the Internal Security Act and Other Internal Security Laws, partial Transcript of the August 10, 1954 session published in U.S. News and World Report, August 20, 1954, p.75-81.

[9] Ibid. p.80

[10] Reported in ibid., p. 81

[11] Hegseth op. cit. p.222

[12] Woodrow Wilson, « Address delivered at the First Annual Assemblage of the League to enforce Peace : « American principles », May 27, 1916, on The American Presidency Project, UC Santa Barbara, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/address-delivered-the-first-annual-assemblage-the-league-enforce-peace-american-principles

[13] Peter Dale Scott, American War Machine, Deep politics, the CIA Global Drug Commection, and the Road to Afghanistan, New York, Rowman&Littlefield, 2010, p.256

[14] Ibid.

[15] Ibid. p.257

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