Every newly minted secretary of defense of the past 75 years or so has entered office with one overarching goal: to prepare US forces to overpower the nation’s foreign enemies if the need arose. But not Pete Hegseth. For our newest secretary, the enemy to be overcome resides not outside the United States but within: the “Marxists” in government, the media, and civil society who, he claims, have instilled “wokism” in the US military—that is, a commitment to racial and gender diversity—and thereby undermined its warmaking capacity. Now in office—following a narrow 51–50 vote in the Senate—his top priorities will be to purge the officer class of anyone tainted by that “woke shit,” as he terms it, and drive women, Blacks, and LGBTQ folks out of positions of authority, or out of the military altogether.

Hegseth, a former Army National Guard captain and Fox News host, has been very clear in his public comments and a recent book, The War on Warriors: Behind the Betrayal of the Men Who Keep Us Free, about his vision for the armed forces. Instead of a diversified force that’s broadly representative of US society, he seeks a force largely composed of white, presumably conservative, men. This requires, first of all, eliminating all measures aimed at promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in the military and the removal of any officer who may have espoused support for DEI efforts or might have been promoted as a result of them. His top priority target: Air Force Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr., the African American chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and an advocate of anti-racism training in the armed forces.

“First of all, you got to fire the chairman [of the] Joint Chiefs,” Hegseth declared in a November 7 interview on The Shawn Ryan Show, a podcast hosted by a former Navy SEAL contractor. “But any general that was involved—general, admiral, whatever—…in any of the DEI woke shit has got to go,” he added.

Another likely Hegseth target: chief of naval operations Adm. Lisa Franchetti, the first woman to serve as the Navy’s top combat officer. In his 2024 book, Hegseth refers to Admiral Franchetti as “another inexperienced first”—that is, someone like General Brown, who he claims was chosen by the Air Force as the first African American to serve as chief of staff just to score DEI points. (Both General Brown and Admiral Franchetti have far more military experience than Hegseth: Brown, a former Air Force fighter pilot, has logged over 3,000 flight hours, including 130 hours in combat; Franchetti has served in the Navy for 40 years and commanded aircraft carrier strike groups. Another highly experienced female officer, Coast Guard commandant Adm. Linda Lee Fagan, was fired by the acting secretary of the Homeland Security Department, Benjamin Huffman, on January 21, allegedly for her “excessive” focus on DEI endeavors.)

Hegseth’s drive to oust Brown, Franchetti, and other prominent Black and female officers who he claims were promoted to advance diversity goals and not because of their qualifications, will serve multiple functions: to deter any officer from calling for greater diversity in the officer corps (which remains predominantly white and male) to deter female and minority personnel from reporting on racist, misogynist, or abusive behavior by their officers or fellow soldiers; and to discourage women and African Americans from applying for officer training or even volunteering for service in the military.

At times, Hegseth has said that women should not serve in combat at all. “I’m straight up just saying we should not have women in combat roles,” he told Shawn Ryan during that November 7 podcast. He thought it was OK for women to perform nursing, logistical, and other noncombat roles in the military, as they have done in the past, but not to serve alongside men in armor, infantry, or Special Forces units. “Everything about men and women serving together makes the situation more complicated, and complication in combat means casualties are worse,” he claimed.

Current Issue

February 2025 Issue

Hegseth altered his stance under questioning by members of the Senate Armed Services Committee during his confirmation hearing on January 14, saying he would not object to women serving in combat so long as they adhered to certain (unspecified) “standards.” But, having won confirmation, he is now free to pursue his more exclusionary views. Moreover, the fact that Hegseth refused to acknowledge or take responsibility for a history of spousal abuse—a record detailed in a sworn statement by his former sister-in-law, Danielle Diettrich Hegseth—will surely send a message to male soldiers that any sexual abuse of their female colleagues will probably go unpunished.

Regarding African Americans, Hegseth has been more circumspect. When boasting of his “warrior ethos,” he is carefully ecumenical when describing his friends in the military: “Officers and enlisted. Black and white. Young and old. Men and women. All Americans. All warriors.” By choosing C.Q. Brown as his first prime target, however, he will send a signal to all African Americans in the officer corps (or aspiring to join it) that Blacks will henceforth find their prospects for promotion progressively reduced, no matter how much they excel.

Hegseth has also hinted at his preference for an increasingly white-majority force. (Today’s enlisted active-duty force is approximately 68 percent white and 18 percent African American, Pentagon data shows.) The way to attract more recruits, he wrote, is to portray fewer Blacks and women in recruitment advertising and devote more effort to recruiting in predominantly white areas of the country. “Across America, from small town to small town, there are still hundreds of thousands of patriotic, strong, manly men ripe for recruitment,” he suggested. But he indicated that “all the ‘diversity’ recruiting messages made certain kids—white kids—feel like they’re not wanted,” and so should be overhauled.

With regard to LGBTQ people in the armed forces, Hegseth has been far more outspoken about his discriminatory intentions. Transgender people, he says, should not be allowed in the military at all: “Transgender people should never be allowed to serve. It’s that simple.” He hasn’t said the same about gay men and lesbians, but he seems to prefer that they remain in the closet, where they were forced to hide under the so-called “don’t ask, don’t tell” (DADT) policy, introduced in 1994 and repealed in 2017 by President Obama. Repeal of DADT, he wrote, “was the breach in the wire—the foothold—the Left needed to push much more extreme ideology through the gap,” by which he seems to mean acceptance of transgender people.

All of these intents and inclinations will affect the armed forces first, by creating fears and upheavals within the officer corps and increased racial and gender friction within the enlisted population. Many women and African Americans who sought to make a career in the military may find their path to promotion blocked or may choose to depart when their contracts expire, leading to more internal disorder. How this all plays out remains to be seen, but it can hardly be good for morale and unit cohesiveness.

Increased turmoil and friction in the ranks also endangers national security. By provoking greater internal disorder, Hegseth’s moves could undermine troop readiness for a future conflict, such as a war with China over Taiwan—supposedly the Pentagon’s principal focus. Many US strategists also believe—correctly, I think—that the United States is more successful in gaining and retaining allies abroad when its armed forces represent the nation’s diverse population. By firing prominent Black and female officers and discouraging African Americans from joining the force, Hegseth would project an aura of intolerance and misogyny that could complicate US efforts to secure vital overseas alliances.

But it will be on the home front that Hegseth’s pending actions are likely to produce the greatest impact. By discouraging Black and female enlistment, these moves risk turning the military into an increasingly white male force, increasingly differentiated from the nation’s diverse population and less representative of its concerns and values. Removing officers for their espousal of racial and gender equality “will convey to the American public that their military leadership is political, and that will diminish trust in the military,” observed Kori Schake, director of foreign and defense policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank. “It will hurt recruiting and retention, and it will fundamentally change the way the American public looks at its military leadership. I think it’s a terrible idea.

All this bears on the most vital question of all, at least from the perspective of democracy’s survival: whether Hegseth will comply with potential White House orders to employ armed, active-duty troops in suppressing public protests. One of his predecessors, Mark T. Esper, stood with Army Gen. Mark A. Milley, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, in defying Trump’s orders to use active-duty soldiers to crush peaceful Black Lives Matter protests in June 2020, with both pointing out that this would violate the Constitution. (Esper was fired by Trump several months later, while Milley, a presumed target of future Trumpian retribution, was pardoned of any conceivable crimes by President Biden on January 20.) Hegseth, however, seems to have no qualms about using armed soldiers in this manner. When questioned by Democratic senators during his confirmation hearing on the matter, he refused to rule out the use of lethal force to quell domestic protests.

So far, there have been few large-scale demonstrations against Trump’s norm-bending moves on immigration, the environment, or numerous other issues, so it is impossible to know what might transpire if such protests break out. But history suggests that when authoritarian rulers are able to use the nation’s armed forces to suppress dissent without consequences, democracy disappears. For Hegseth, a war against domestic dissidents may be just what the country needs to bolster its defenses against foreign adversaries—an outcome he advocates in The War on Warriors—but every one of his predecessors has stressed that domestic unity combined with a diverse, representative military establishment represents the best ingredients for national progress and protection from foreign adversaries.