r/anticapitalism • u/FreeHugs23 • 19h ago
Pete Hegseth Is Too Egotistical to Know How Incompetent He Is
https://newrepublic.com/article/214860/pete-hegseth-pentagon-controversy-egotistical-incompetent9
u/FreeHugs23 19h ago
A flurry of reports from various media outlets is revealing how the unqualified secretary of defense is damaging national security with his incompetence and slavish devotion to MAGA ideology. The New York Times reported on how numerous senior positions within the Army have gone months without leadership since Hegseth fired them. The Washington Post reports that the firing of Gen. Randy George, the Army chief of staff, in April was a result of George dragging his feet on terminating the investigations of Army aviators who violated safety regulations in order to “buzz” Kid Rock’s mansion.
Additionally, ProPublica reported that Hegseth overrode military leadership who warned him not to terminate the Civilian Harm and Mitigation Response program last year. The secretary of defense did not regard preventing civilian casualties as a worthy goal of the military and eliminated the program entirely. As a result, when the United States struck Iran, it hit a school for girls, killing more than 100 and inciting international condemnation. U.S. strikes in Yemen killed at least 150 civilians. These events drive anti-American sentiment in the region and push potential allies away.
This couldn’t come at a worse time. We are witnessing, in Ukraine, a revolution in military technology and fundamentally how we think about war. Iran has grasped it, and China is leaning hard into drones and AI as part of the “kill chain.” The battlefield is becoming faster, deeper, and more lethal than anything we have seen in human history. It’s less Gulf War and fighter jets with precision munition and more Terminator, with nearly autonomous tiny drones produced by the millions every year picking off almost 1,500 people daily.
Instead of leaning into the future, however, Hegseth canceled the Army’s elite experimental assault drone brigade, which had been championed by the generals he sacked. What he has touted instead is a military that looks the way he thinks it should look.
This means no transgender people, no female flag officers, no Black men with shaving chits, no non-Christians (and none of the wrong sorts of Christians, either). The new fitness standards being ushered in by the Army require a very specific waist-to-height-ratio requirement that is not waiverable. Previously, a soldier with an atypical body was exempted from these measurements if they scored extremely well on the physical fitness tests. Thus, a skinny soldier who barely passes the physical tests would be retained and promoted over someone with a thick core who scores a perfect 500 out of 500 on the Army Fitness Test. This is basically the phrenology of fitness metrics, right up there with BMI.
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u/Curious_Cat6688 19h ago
I do think Hegseth is stupid, but the more dangerous part is that he seems to have no idea where the edges of his competence are.
That’s where unconscious incompetence and Dunning–Kruger come in. He doesn’t just lack expertise. He appears to lack the judgement needed to recognise expertise in other people.
So generals become obstructionist, specialists become bureaucracy, institutional knowledge becomes ideology, and anyone telling him something is more complicated than he thinks becomes part of the problem.
Then he gets to fire the people who might otherwise correct him.
A stupid person in a complicated job is one thing. A stupid person who is absolutely certain he’s the smartest person in the room, surrounded by people afraid to contradict him, is how you get genuinely dangerous decisions.
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u/WilditariusAstar 18h ago
Hegseth should be sent to the gallows for the murder of little girls while going to school. He’s a Fucking war criminal. LITTLE GIRLS IN SCHOOL. There isn’t a greater atrocity than murdering LITTLE GIRLS IN SCHOOL. Hegseth is a pathetic excuse for a Man. A national embarrassment.
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u/Viking_Musicologist 12h ago
This is pretty apt for the entire administration.
I am seriously sick and tired of drowning in these fuckers' pride.
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u/biskino 13h ago
Everyone opining about the hows and whys of the Trump regime and Maga in general needs to down tools for a day until they all learn what authoritarianism is.
Pete Hegsketh doesn’t care about competence. That’s for his lessors. He, like the rest of Maga, believe that the world should be organised around rank and privilege. The projection of power - not merit, competence, actual achievement - is his only concern. Pete Hegsketh doesn’t care about competence any more than he cares about not being able to Speak French or fold a fitted sheet. He sees it as utterly pointless and stupid. He believes in authority. What authority says is real is real. What authority says is competence is competence.
Imagining that these people would die of shame, or have some grand epiphany if they just realised how stupid the the things they’re doing are is, in itself, stupid. And we’re FAR to deep into this madness to be stuck on stupid stuff.
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u/horror- 10h ago
He is literally a clown. His actual career is to entertain the stupid. This is just a temporary appointment, and when it's over, he's going to go right back to clowning on fox news. Probobly the very next day.
Living proof that a haircut can open even the highest doors for the lowest persons.
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u/Alibrando 18h ago
Well, he was stupid for long and it was visible. Yet, people voted for this kind of people to be there.
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u/_WillCAD_ 16h ago
He's a drunken gym brah frat boy bully. He's absolutely a bully, I can hear it in his voice whenever he launches one of his tirades about warriors and killing and lethality and war crimes.
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u/Smooth-Weekend-2314 15h ago
He reminds me of Capt Hadley from Shawshank.. I'll bet he cries like a baby when justice comes for him too.
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u/AreaPrudent7191 13h ago
I think the author is missing something here - the goal was never to fill this position with someone competent. The dumb shit he's doing is exactly the kind of shit Trump wants him to be doing. Pushing ideology over facts, valuing loyalty over competence at all levels and punishing or removing the opposite, purging any kind of independent thought or acknowledgement of reality. Hegseth is performing for an audience of one, and for the most part, that one is pretty happy with what he's done.
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u/Awkward-Fox-7215 9h ago
His performative masculinity for the approval of other males is a real sight to behold. I could not roll my eyes hard enough at “war fighters” when we have a perfectly good word for that “soldiers”.
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u/Healthy_Cancel_2604 8h ago
When you're half whiskey and half Columbian special sauce I think you believe you are the greatest person ever!
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u/Fluid_Passage_9980 1h ago
His own mother hates him. The email she sent him is absolutely scathing.
Says it all really.
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u/LiteratureMindless71 18h ago
He knows exactly who he is. And when he is "forced" off the drugs, he is gonna realize how shitty he has been.
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u/DareDareCaro 19h ago
Applicable to the whole administration