Pete Hegseth's Hard Choices: Today's Decisions and Tomorrow's Military

"I've been here for four years as the commandant of the Army War College. This is the first opportunity we've had to host the secretary of defense," Hill said with a broad smile, adding, "It is pretty cool."

Hill said that having Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth come to rural Pennsylvania is important because of the history of the Carlisle Barracks, where the campus is located. "This is a really special place," he said. "It's a 268-year-old military encampment that predates our nation, and it's been an integral part of our Army and our nation's history since 1757. And since 1951, the United States Army War College has been housed here."

Its mission is to preserve peace through intelligent preparation to repel aggression. At peak load, the student body is about 2,000. Its signature is a 10-month resident graduate degree program that certifies students in the highest level of joint professional military education.

This year's officer class drew not just U.S. military leaders from all branches and intelligence services — Hill said there are also military leaders attending from 77 different countries.

"There are 31 European nations represented here, as well as most of the Indo-Pacific nations represented, such as India, Japan, Australia, the Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia. There's a half-dozen from the African continent and a similar number from South America and Central America. Ukraine is here, and we have an officer from Israel and Lebanon here," Hill explained.

When Hegseth was minutes away, Hill left to greet the defense secretary and his team. As Hill walked away, he said, "Today is going to be a big day."

The handshake between Hill and Hegseth was warm. They motorcaded through the Claremont Gate and toward the Wheelock Bandstand, where 800 seats were set up outside for the defense secretary's speech. The overflow crowd exceeded 1,000, leaving several hundred standing in the grass as Hegseth took to the podium just in front of the old bandstand.

Whoever was running the sound turned up the volume for AC/DC entrance music. The senior military officers in attendance approved.

"Who dialed up 'Thunderstruck'? I didn't choose it, but I like it. Please take your seats. It might have to become SOP," Hegseth said as everyone in attendance, a sea of camouflage and uniforms, laughed. Hegseth was in his element: confident, assured and far from Washington, D.C.

Hegseth was there to mark the first 100 days of the Trump administration and share what he has accomplished at the Department of Defense. He bluntly acknowledged it had been bumpy in the wake of a series of leaks that have resulted in resignations and firings, not to mention unsubstantiated rumors that President Donald Trump is about to fire him.

"When President Trump called me to take this job, he told me first — he told me two things. The first was, 'Pete, you're going to have to be tough as s*** — tough.' Boy, he was not kidding on that one. This job requires a steel spine, and that's fine," he said. For the next 28 minutes, he discussed a policy blueprint and vision that this White House sees for the military.

Afterward, in the same room where Army War College graduate and former five-star Gen. and President Dwight D. Eisenhower once gave a talk, Hegseth sat down with the Washington Examiner. He spoke about his recent controversies, his mission to reshape the military, the robust growth each service branch has seen since Trump took office, and how faith has kept him grounded.

Dressed in a navy blue suit, with a crisp red, white and blue pocket square and dark socks with green Army warriors, Hegseth said coming here and being able to articulate the department's focus at a hundred days while looking out at a group of men and women who are the future leaders of our formations meant a lot to him.

Hegseth said he spoke to those in attendance about restoring the warrior ethos, rebuilding the military, and reestablishing deterrence. He said that these men and women were on board despite having come up in a military filled with a woke quota mindset.

"They don't know how to react to it or whether to fully embrace it, and whether their commanders will support them in fully embracing it. So our job is to change the entirety of the culture so that they can truly lead with a warfighter ethos," he said, adding he could see their heads nodding in agreement as he spoke.

Since being announced as Trump's pick for defense secretary, Hegseth has faced resistance from the legacy press, Democrats and some Republicans, and his worst enemy of all: the very building he is set to reform.

The Pentagon's culture is legendary for its rigid hierarchy. Its home base in Crystal City, Virginia, has the population of a small city, 27,000, and directly employs 3.4 million people worldwide. And that doesn't even begin to count the contractors who work for the Defense Department, which some estimate to be just under 980,000 men and women across the globe.

It is a culture that does not like to be tinkered with.

"If you're here for the right reasons and you're not compromised and you're willing to be courageous and bold and speak clearly, and then you'll back POTUS, 100% you're a threat," he said.

"They knew that from the minute he chose me through my entire confirmation process, from the minute I walked into the building to the first initiatives we took, like DEI is dead at DOD," he said of the elimination of so-called diversity, equity and inclusion policies at the agency.

Hegseth said during the 2024 campaign that Trump told him a couple of times he wanted him to work in the administration. His answer was always the same. "You're trying to save the republic," Hegseth said he told Trump. "If I can help you, count me in. That was sort of my stance."

When he got the call asking him to come down to Mar-a-Lago and interview or talk to the president for this position, he did two things: He told the team he would be there and spoke to his wife and said, "I don't know if this is the beginning of a weeklong process. I don't know if there are eight people in it. I don't know if it's just me. I don't know what the situation is, but if he asked me to take this job, I'm not going to hesitate." Hegseth said this was followed by a lot of prayer, something he emphasizes is profoundly important to him.

"I couldn't be here without the perspective of my relationship to Jesus. It's not otherwise sustainable. And also understanding that his will will be done and it's my job to put on the armor of God because that charts the course. I'm not claiming I'm a perfect person. I'm not claiming everything I've done in my life has been perfect, but man, my life has been changed by Jesus Christ," he said.

Hegseth isn't the first outsider to stir the wrath of the institutional DOD. On Monday, Sept. 10, 2001, then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld gave a Pentagon speech that declared war not on an adversary in hot spots around the globe but one in the very building he was standing in.

"This adversary is closer to home," Rumsfeld said. "It is the Pentagon bureaucracy — not the people, but the processes; not the civilians, but the systems; not the men and women in uniform, but the uniformity of thought and action we impose upon them."

He lambasted waste, duplicative duties, bloated bureaucracy and gridlock. He proposed streamlining finance and procurement systems and the consolidation or elimination of duplicate defense jobs.

Less than 24 hours later, the 9/11 attacks began at the Twin Towers in New York and went on to include a farm field in Somerset County and the Pentagon itself. Rumsfeld would tell me years later in an interview that he went into the job to be a reformer, something the two wars during his tenure would never let him fulfill.

Hegseth said the speech Rumsfeld gave, rattling DOD bureaucrats to their core, was very good. "In fact, it models a lot of things that we're going to do, and I commend him for that," Hegseth said. "I would argue that what we're doing is back to basics."

"It's actually not that complicated. If you set high standards, you maintain discipline, you empower commanders, you make sure they're focused on training and readiness. You focus on lethality, and you get the troops what they need. Military education becomes a fairly straightforward exercise," he said.

Hegseth argued that under former Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden, the military got confused and was running think tanks: "We're running basic training and we're running military academies, which are training privates, lieutenants, cadets, future leaders to the war college here. Your job is not to think about the grand social justice dynamics on another continent."

Hegseth said the job of the military is to ask questions such as, "How do I maneuver an infantry battalion or an infantry brigade in the modern context where now drones are vehicle killers?"

"That's what we study at the war colleges," Hegseth said. "That's what we study at West Point. That's what we should be studying: military history, engineering science."

The 44-year-old said people can claim that DEI is just a buzzword. "It is the exact opposite," Hegseth said. "It's actually become an ethos of a place, and it infects the entire inter-dynamics of the relationships."

His plan, from education to training, is to get back to basics: "It's what you are supposed to be able to do, navigate your ship, hit your target with artillery, and are you training for those things? And are you taking care of your people? And that's a big part of the tension also."

As for how the military has changed due to the electronic warfare and drone operations used during the war in Ukraine, he said there is a lot to learn.

"We have to absolutely learn from Ukraine. Warfare has made, in many ways, a leap in just a few years, which is emblematic of how technology changes so fast these days," he said. "So from the internet and computing to quantum computing to AI, everything's multiplying rapidly. Exponentially. So are battlefield capabilities. So are hypersonics, long-range drones, cheap drones, sophisticated drones, electronic warfare, directed energy, space, cyber, you name it. All of those components are coming to bear under how we fight."

The war in Ukraine also informs us of the viability of different platforms. "So, you pay for a lot," Hegseth said. "What if you're paying for lots of Humvees or lots of helicopters that in the next war are easily defeated by cheap drones? Then you're creating a situation where in previous wars, when dynamics change, it's when tactics didn't catch up with technology."

He pointed to when the machine gun was first introduced in World War I, noting, "We were still sending waves of men across fields, and the machine gun changed everything."

The 29th defense secretary said he believes we're at a point at which long-range drones, hypersonics and counter-air operations are all changing and contesting battle spaces differently from assumptions we had made in the past. "So places like the War College and elsewhere have to be learning from what's happening in Ukraine. And we are, we're learning a lot, and it's going to make our troops more lethal and survivable in the next conflict," he said.

Hegseth said there are many hot spots that keep him up at night, but the budget process consumes more of his time and thoughts than he anticipated. He said that how and what we spend are crucial: "If we don't get that right and we don't actually rebuild the military, then I don't want to look back 10 years from now and say, 'You know what? I didn't fight hard enough to make sure we had everything we needed to rebuild the military so that my kids and grandkids had the strongest military in the world.'"

"China's not messing around, and we either match and exceed them or we fall behind. My job is to match and exceed them, to deter them. And there are plenty of people with different priorities in this town. My job is to fight for the Defense Department for the president," he said.

The questions preoccupying Hegseth are, "Have we delivered enough on this? Are we spending enough on this? Have we reprioritized this? Because that legacy lasts a long time too. So yes, I'm looking at the intel and realizing what we have up against us. But the long term is, am I doing right by the warfighters with what we're funding?"

Hegseth said what the military looks like 10 years from now will be a direct result of what they do today.

"So we need to make some hard choices right now. What is our forced posture in Europe? How do we ensure we don't get bogged down in Middle Eastern wars that keep wanting to pull us back so we have clear, limited objectives?" he continued. "How do we prioritize the defense of our own homeland? And you see that on the southern border and Iron Dome. How do we protect our own backyard in the Southern Hemisphere? And all of that is in service to saying, 'Communist China, we want to be friends with you.' We don't want war, but we're going to be the strongest nation on Earth to ensure that that never happens."

Hegseth said that all takes real leadership, real choices and a real vision to keep going because the institution of the Defense Department or any bureaucracy wants to keep doing what it's been doing.

"We're going to have a national defense strategy coming out soon. We have an interim national defense strategy document, and I think that'll be a big legacy of what we leave behind, which is the world has changed. We can't take all the assumptions we've made during the Cold War or during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan because if we do, we will falter and we will have a 21st century dominated by the Communist Chinese."

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Salena Zito is a CNN political analyst, and a staff reporter and columnist for the Washington Examiner. She reaches the Everyman and Everywoman through shoe-leather journalism, traveling from Main Street to the beltway and all places in between.