Disruptive force at the Pentagon

Hello, this is Darrell Castle with today’s Castle Report. This is Friday the 15^th day of November in the year of our Lord 2024. I will be talking about some of the nominees President-elect Donald Trump has made for his cabinet. (That is, should he be allowed to assume the office to which the American people have elected him.) Since I have a strong interest in the U.S. military and the best interests of its service members, I will therefore emphasize the nomination of Pete Hegseth to be Secretary of Defense.

Who is this Pete Hegseth, whom Trump tapped to lead the Pentagon?

I was hoping for Tulsi Gabbard to come out of the turmoil as Defense Secretary. Bbut as Trump so often says, hope is not a strategy. She just seemed like she would be the perfect way to give the middle finger to the deep state. But it seems that Trump has come up with a different way that even I had not thought of. I say even I had not thought of, because I spend a lot of time thinking of ways the deep state could get the middle finger.

The way Trump chose, was to nominate Pete Hegseth, who for the last 8 years has worked for Fox news. I will confess to being a little embarrassed because until his nomination was announced, I had not even heard of Pete Hegseth. I had to do a deep dive into who this man is and very quickly so the first thing I did was read his book “The War on Warriors” to learn something about him. Thank goodness for Amazon and especially for Kindle. I probably shouldn’t be too embarrassed though because since I don’t watch TV news or anything else on TV for that matter it’s not surprising that I had not heard of him.

TV personality precedent (on the other side)

It turns out though, that the administrations of Obama and Biden were littered with appointments from the left side of TV news. I couldn’t, however, find any appointment as significant as Defense Secretary. That job goes to a person who will lead the Pentagon and command its gigantic presence all over the world including some 700 military bases on foreign soil. This choice is certainly an example of Donald Trump thinking outside the box which in and of itself is a good thing considering the attitude of go along to get along and political correctness that seems to guide the Pentagon today.

Pete Hegseth, I predict, will have trouble in the nomination process. (Although with Republicans firmly in control of the Senate his eventual confirmation should be successful.) It will be those with the least experience with the military who will oppose him because they will see him as the most vulnerable and because he represents change at the Pentagon. They say he is unqualified because he doesn’t come from the same cabal of liars and propagandists who have ruled the Pentagon and its armament complex since World War ll. I learned enough about him from reading his book to know that he represents the military that I knew, or the old military which believed in the ancient concept of the way of the warrior. He stands opposed to the new military where drag queens are sent into high schools in an effort to recruit new sailors for the navy.

Qualifications of Pete Hegseth beyond his Fox News career

Surely he has more qualifications than Fox News to recommend him for the job or otherwise, I guess Senator Elizabeth Warren is right and he is too young and not qualified. He would, at age 44, not be the youngest ever Secretary of Defense because the despicable Don Rumsfeld was 43 when he assumed office. I will take a few moments now to summarize what you probably know, but we need to hear his background in defense. The main objection seems to be that he is a media guy but, as I said, there has been a parade of people going from regime media to government service and back again in recent years. I would guess that the real objection is not the media but Fox News.

The Pentagon needs a man like him – who has served as a combat officer

It turns out that Pete Hegseth is a really bright guy, something the Pentagon needs right now. He has an undergraduate degree from Princeton and a master’s in government from the John F. Kennedy School of government at Harvard. While at Princeton he went through ROTC training and entered the Army National Guard. When he finished at Harvard he went into to the army and was sent to Guantanamo for a year to preside over that prison where supposed terrorists are held. When his tour in Cuba ended, he volunteered for a combat tour in Iraq as an infantry officer. He then did a long stint in Afghanistan obtaining the Army rank of Major, where he commanded the counterterrorism center in Kabul. He now has been in the guard for 18 years.

He earned the combat infantryman’s badge and two bronze stars for valor in combat. So, he’s young which usually means energetic, he’s smart, and he’s experienced the trauma that military people are constantly exposed to. It is no cliché to say that he feels their pain and he emphasizes with their plight. The reason Trump picked him instead of someone with more executive experience can be determined by paying close attention to the things Trump often says in his speeches. He understands the problems that currently infect the Pentagon and he is being sent there to do something about them.

He gets it

Trump believes, and I agree from reading his book, that Hegseth understands the problems in the Pentagon. The paralysis by analysis, the crumbling industrial base that is supposed to feed the millions of people the Pentagon controls, the apparent lack of readiness, and most importantly the infection of wokeism that bleeds resources and accomplishes nothing. The department of defense, after all, has or should have, as its primary mission to fight and win wars in defense of the American people.

Hegseth is apparently a world class communicator as viewers of Fox News would attest from the longevity of his stay there. Those skills as a communicator, his relative youth, and his energy for the job should serve him well in his efforts to revamp recruiting for the military service. This is how Donald Trump described his book.

The book reveals the leftwing betrayal of our warriors, and how we must return our military to meritocracy, lethality, accountability, and excellence. Pete has also led two Veterans Advocacy organizations, leading the fight for our warriors, and our great veterans. Nobody fights harder for the troops, and Pete will be a courageous and patriotic champion of our “Peace through Strength” policy. Donald Trump

Fox News had this to say about him:

Pete Hegseth has been an exceptional host on Fox & Friends and Fox Nation and a best-selling author for Fox News Books for nearly a decade. His insights and analysis, especially about the military resonated deeply with our viewers and made the program the major success that it is today. We are extremely proud of his work at Fox News and wish him the best of luck in Washington.

Taking Washington (and the Pentagon) by surprise

Others who know Hegseth speak very highly of him and seem thrilled that he has been nominated. I have read comments from others who know him from the media and also the military and they usually go something like this. He’s a great American patriot and whip smart. He believes our military is a national defense force, not a sociological experiment. I came across a comment in his book that confirms his belief in the military as a defense force not an experiment. I won’t give the quote here since it’s a little off color but in essence he said there are simply not enough of the people the department has been recruiting to man the ranks of the 82nd airborne division.

Well, in any event this nomination has taken Washington by surprise and I suspect that is the primary reason for it. The Secretary of Defense role in the Pentagon is to provide civilian leadership and oversight between those in uniform and those civilians with command authority. Right now, the military has about 750,000 civilian employees to oversee plus roughly 2 million in uniform many of whom are scattered all over the world. The good news is that Pete Hegseth has no faith in DEI and he wants the military to be a meritocracy again. He wants DEI and CRT out of the military academies so that young officers can be taught warfighting and that’s it.

Does Pete Hegseth believe the Pentagon when it says we have a lot of enemies?

The downside, and there always seems to be one, is that he apparently believes in the official narratives constructed by the neocons in conjunction with the military, industrial, security, and intelligence complex. Those narratives teach us and constantly remind us that Russia, China, and Iran are enemies. I don’t, therefore, see the 2 trillion in cuts Elon Musk promised coming from the military or from the closure of any foreign bases. If you team him with Trump’s choice for UN Ambassador, his National Security Advisor, his Secretary of State, and his Ambassador to Israel, one might view that list as an Israeli war cabinet.

I personally have no problem with Israel. I just have a problem with being constantly involved in fighting their wars because they and their lobby demand it. I wonder if it can be changed but I hope for the best regarding the American attitude toward other people’s wars. It is difficult to see how the roughly 500,000 dead in Ukraine could have been killed without US money, weapons, technology and manpower. I heard it said the other day that Zelensky intends to let Trump know that he will not accept a compromise ending of fighting because he considers that to be surrender and he prefers war. That would be one of the quickest and easiest conversations of my administration should I be in Trump’s position.

Example: who started the Ukraine War – and how?

There are a lot of people out there whose souls long for war. They beat their chest and constantly blow the trumpets for more and more war. They send the orders to the defense contractors to build more and more weapons. To the research facilities they order more research into new and better methods of death and destruction. Just think about this for a moment. If I am right, and many more knowledgeable than me are right, and the US instituted a coup in Ukraine in 2014 which led to the Russian invasion as they knew it would. If this was all part of a concerted plan to ignore and subvert the plans for peace agreed to by Reagan and Gorbachev, then the US is complicit in starting this war to begin with.

Those things all served to push NATO, a threatening enemy alliance, as far as the Russians were concerned, to the Russian border. Then what decision was left for those charged with protecting Russia and its people? So, the result has been some half a million deaths and the complete destruction of the infrastructure of a country along with its potential for economic survival. If Ukraine could find better leadership, and if it could exploit its own natural resources perhaps it could survive and be a functioning independent nation again, but as they say, when ifs and buts are candy and nuts, then everyday will be Christmas.

Fighting a long-standing trend

In conclusion, the hope for Donald Trump, apparently, is that he will be so far outside the DC box because of what he has been through since 2016, that he will be able to accomplish something in defiance of the primary political trend. That trend is more power concentrated in Washington, bigger deficits, more regulations, more debt, which all lead inevitably to less private economy where real wealth for real working people is created. The trend continues to lower GDP rates, a widening gap between rich and poor, with 90% of the population having no real wage gains in 50 years.

This pattern is indicative of most governments. The elites get more and more power, and more and more wealth until the whole system is corrupted by it all. Eventually, and I argue that eventually has come to America, the elites become parasitic shifting more wealth to themselves and those they favor. This phenomenon was studied at Stanford leading the professor, Walter Scheidel to conclude that the trend continues until the people getting ever poorer cause some event to happen. He listed war, revolution, total government collapse, some disease pandemic. In other words, “a four-horseman type of leveling.”

Can Trump stop this?

Finally, folks, while most do not see the primary trend, people know something is wrong. I can see that we are in the late stages of the process and a leveling is coming unless Trump can do something to reverse the process. That is what the hope and the mandate mean, so outside the box, yes its time for that type of thinking.

At least that’s the way I see it.

Until next time folks,

This is Darrell Castle.

From CastleReport.us; appears by arrangement – Ed.