The Quantico confab: Hegseth does well, Trump does not.

Washington D.C. in 2025 is not Baghdad in 2005.

Yesterday’s gathering of top U.S. military leaders at Quantico was the subject of much consternation by the left before it even took place. Afterwards, it is the subject of even more.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is being attacked by the mainstream media for using the event to “tout [his] partisan agenda.” But his remarks were partisan only in the sense that they depart from liberal orthodoxy and the transformative policies of Democratic presidents. In a democracy, a new, non-liberal administration should be free to depart from such orthodoxies and policies.

Should it announce the departures at an event like the one held yesterday? I don’t see why not. Publicly announcing a major turnaround in Defense Department policies serves the interest of transparency. Announcing it to an audience of top military leaders communicates the administration’s seriousness.

Televising the event can be viewed as grandstanding and maybe it was. However, doing so protects the administration from leaked accounts and media reports that are not true.

This interest in going public is confirmed by the way Hegseth’s remarks have been mischaracterized by major media outlets. For example, last night on CNN Abby Phillip and some of her left-liberal panelists claimed that Hegseth wants to get rid of military “rules of engagement.” Phillip and her like-minded guests argued that, under Hegseth’s policy change, members of our military can commit war crimes with impunity, thereby making our soldiers vulnerable to war crimes by the enemy.

But Hegseth never said he would get rid of all rules of engagement. He said he would eliminate “silly’ rules of engagement. Later, he said the rules he would eliminate are the “overbearing” ones.

No one on Phillip’s panel denied that there are some overbearing rules of engagement — rules that impede our fighting for insufficient reason. In fact, Tim Pawlenty, former governor of Minnesota, told Phillip that on his several visits to war zones, soldiers frequently complained about certain rules and their application, such as restrictions on night-time raids.

For all I know, Hegseth, who comes from Minnesota, was one of the warriors who complained to Pawlenty. If so, he wasn’t the only one.

Hegseth has also drawn criticism for what he said about women in the military. But his statements on this subject shouldn’t be controversial.

Hegseth praised the women in the U.S. military, calling them the finest in the world. He cited many areas in which their contributions have helped the armed forces significantly.

However, Hegseth did insist that women seeking combat roles must meet the same physical standards as men.

Why is this controversial? Combat doesn’t differentiate between male and female warriors. Combat doesn’t grade on a curve. A serious military would use women for all roles that don’t carry tough physical requirements. But where tough physical requirements apply, it would deploy only women (and men) who can meet them.

Hegseth also spoke out against woke policies that focus on race, ethnicity, etc. “No more identity days,” he stressed.

What Hegseth wants is to make the U.S. military as colorblind as possible. He believes a military is more unified and effective when extraneous characteristics that can divide members (e.g. race) are not emphasized.

I don’t know whether this is true, but it seems plausible. And colorblindness is always to be desired in an organization that wants to identify and reward the best of the best. Our military should be such an organization.

I think it’s clear from the above that, to some extent, Hegseth wants to shift the military back to what it was in the past, before wokeness became a governing principle under Democratic presidents. This doesn’t mean turning back the clock in all respects, but it does mean returning to old policies and practices in some.

Restoration of the policies and practices Hegseth identified seems well warranted in some cases and reasonable in most others. And because the departures from past policies Hegseth is reversing were made pursuant to a political agenda, I find it laughable that organs like the Washington Post are complaining that Hegseth had a political agenda.

This is another example of how the media portrays radically transformed institutions as the natural order of things and reversals of transformation as radical.

Donald Trump’s comments yesterday are a different story. He told the gathering that he proposed to Hegseth using American cities as training grounds for the armed forces,

Trump gave no indication that he was joking. He seemed quite serious.

Understand: I’m okay with sending U.S. troops to Washington, D.C. to help the city’s undermanned police department fight crime. And if local police forces aren’t able to protect federal facilities and/or federal personnel (e.g. members of ICE), using federal forces to protect them is fine with me.

But the kind of training our forces need before entering Baghdad circa 2005 or Mosul circa 2016 can’t be gained by helping the D.C. police force patrol the streets or by protecting a federal facility in Portland, Oregon. In places like Baghdad and Mosul, we were fighting a terrorist army whose members were out to kill our troops. In D.C., there is no terrorist army. There are mainly kids and young adults looking for cars to hijack and people to rob.

In D.C. there is no cadre of snipers ready to pick off police officers. There are no IEDs that have been planted for the purpose of maiming anyone. Our tanks are not rolling down the streets of D.C. looking for terrorists to clear out and hoping to avoid being firebombed.

Any analogy between the military’s proper mission in American cities and its mission when deployed to fight America’s enemies in the Middle East is inapt and, in my view, borderline obscene. What Trump has done by drawing one is to feed the left’s narrative that he wants to unleash our military on our citizens.

I don’t believe this overwrought claim is supported by anything Trump has yet done. But arguably it is supported by what he said yesterday.

Trump should have left all the administration’s talking to Hegseth. But that was never going to happen, was it?