Hegseth Brings the Culture War to Combat

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s appointment today of his personal lawyer, Timothy Parlatore, as a Navy commander in the Judge Advocate General’s Corps reflects not just the norm-breaking approach that Hegseth is bringing to the job, but an odious philosophy of warfare. Like his new boss at the Pentagon, Parlatore has a pattern of providing support to soldiers accused of grave misconduct, even war crimes. He notably represented Eddie Gallagher, a Navy SEAL court-martialed on charges including the murder of a captured fighter (though he was found guilty only of one, lesser charge), along with a second SEAL accused of serious sexual offenses. Elevating a lawyer with this record does not bode well for the armed services Hegseth hopes to build.

The fundamental challenge of military leadership lies in creating cohesive teams that can work together in an environment of mortal risk and, when called upon to do so, use lethal force themselves. The task is challenging, to say the least, and presents the dangerous temptation of taking a shortcut to such team building by denigrating those not on the team. The most obvious means of such othering involves using exclusionary criteria—race and gender, but also less visible traits such as sexual orientation—to promote unit cohesion. Although this makes team cohesion and battlefield effectiveness easier to achieve in the short term, professional soldiers resist this approach because its negative focus on identity ahead of standards ultimately results in undisciplined and unreliable forces.

Hegseth has long made clear his opposition to women serving in combat roles, but no argument for excluding them for an inability to meet military standards is sustainable. Women have proved, over 20-plus years of conflicts, that not only can they make the grade, but they are essential to the U.S. military’s combat capability. The undeniability of this fact is presumably why Hegseth has largely backtracked on his opposition.

Instead, he’s chosen to demean the much smaller population of transgender service members. Although they have amply demonstrated honorable service and the ability to meet military standards, he has repeatedly denigrated them and is now enforcing President Donald Trump’s executive order that denies transgender service members’ capacity to be “honorable, truthful, and disciplined.” A more limited version of the order, simply restricting accommodations for transgender service members, was an option, but this blew straight past that. Instead, their unjustified, wholesale exclusion from the military is now another example of othering by the Hegseth-led Department of Defense.

The language of the order—that transgender identity is a “falsehood” that contradicts “biological truth”—sets the tone for seeing these service members as less than human. It mimics the worst way Americans have sometimes talked about our enemies in war. This type of dehumanization may help soldiers in the act of killing, but it also opens the door for unrestrained violence and war crimes.

Hegseth’s penchant for othering is not limited to women or the transgender population. In remarks and books, he has also made clear his disdain for Muslims. He went so far as to say that “Islam itself is not compatible with Western forms of government.” How offensive such a record of statements might be to the thousands of American Muslims serving in the U.S. military seems not to have occurred to the new defense secretary.

[Tom Nichols: Who’s running the defense department?]

Hegseth’s willingness to find enemies within is of a piece with his firing of senior military lawyers and his overall approach to war. During his time as a TV host, Hegseth relentlessly lobbied for those accused or convicted of war crimes to be pardoned. One case involved Lieutenant Clint Lorance, who, in his first three days of leading a platoon in Afghanistan, repeatedly filed false reports to his leaders, threatened innocent Afghan civilians with violence, and gave an order to kill two unarmed Afghan men. The soldiers under his command had been operating in the area for months, and many had deployed several times. They were, to use a term of Hegseth’s, “dusty boots” soldiers in every sense. They themselves were disgusted by Lorance’s conduct and reported it up their chain of command; 14 of them later testified against Lorance at his court martial. In Hegseth’s portrayal, however, this outcome was somehow an example of military lawyers exerting undue influence on the battlefield and constraining service members in a way that put them at risk.

Lorance was convicted of murder charges in 2012, and served six years in prison before Trump pardoned him in 2019—something that Hegseth and his Fox News colleagues had clamored for. Lorance’s war crimes were precisely the result of the dehumanization of enemies—without and within—that the U.S. military has long sought to discourage. It is the opposite of the disciplined toughness that our uniformed leadership has historically cultivated; it is also wildly ineffective. The soldiers who had to operate in the aftermath of Lorance’s actions described an environment in which they had completely lost the trust of local Afghans. As a consequence, they faced an embittered population more willing to support the Taliban.

For Hegseth and Parlatore, the nuances of assessing who is friend or foe on the basis of how they act appear to be an unwelcome distraction. Crude binaries based on identity are so much simpler—whether they determine who is permitted to serve in our armed forces or who is a potential target for killing. Hegseth likes to emphasize military standards, yet shows a reckless disregard for the very benchmarks of discipline and combat effectiveness that have guided the American military for generations. This culture warrior’s identity politics will ultimately make the U.S. military weaker.