By Rob Bluey, The Daily Signal | January 08, 2025
Decades of social engineering have transformed America’s armed forces, prompting concerns about the Pentagon‘s warfighting capabilities and politicized culture. It’s the reason President-elect Donald Trump picked Pete Hegseth as his nominee for secretary of defense: to restore lethality as the military‘s primary focus.
Fixing the Pentagon won’t be easy, but it’s imperative to restore America’s fighting force.
“I had a senior officer tell a cohort of my peers and I, after we got back from a deployment to Iraq, that there’s the goal to replace us with black men and women in order to make our special operations unit more diverse,” Thibeau told The Daily Signal.
Thibeau, who now directs the American Military Project at the Claremont Institute’s Center for the American Way of Life, diagnoses the problems—and what it will take to restore the military’s core mission of combat readiness.
“The military exists to be lethal and to kill our enemies,” Thibeau explained. “It’s a purpose that puts the military at odds with the values of our liberal society. … And what’s happened, certainly in the last decade or so, is that the military has become just another institution that reflects the values of our civil society. Those are values that are incompatible with an organization committed to lethality.”
For anyone concerned about the future of American military power, Thibeau provides a perspective on what went wrong—and how to make it right.
Rob Bluey is president and executive editor of The Daily Signal.
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