Our chapter on foreign policy and national security discusses the role of the secretary of defense. Last night, with VP Vance breaking a tie, Pete Hegseth won confirmation for that office. He wants a "warrior culture" at the Pentagon.
Warriors are people who exult in killing, who prize individual courage and daring, who obsess about honor (often in self-destructive ways), who frequently take trophies from the bodies of their enemies, and whose behavior on and off the battlefield often veers into atrocity.
Soldiers are different. They are servants of the state. In well-governed countries, they are bound by discipline, the rule of law, and commitment to comrades and organizations—not to self-glorification. Their virtues are obedience, stoicism, perseverance, and competence. They serve a common good, and duty, not glory, is their prime motivation.
The distinction matters. If Europe and the United States overran large parts of the planet, it was because they deployed disciplined soldiers against, in many instances, more numerous warriors. Even well-organized warriors—think of Shaka’s Zulus, or the Iroquois confederacy—could rarely defeat well-drilled infantry. The British General C. E. Callwell’s Small Wars, a manual on imperial warfare, explains the outcomes of those and many other fights far better than Homer’s Iliad.
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The infatuation with warrior culture—the strut and swagger, the desire to battle mano a mano—is not atypical of a certain kind of junior officer, which is what Hegseth was in the National Guard. It is a world apart from how the armed forces operate at scale, and from the extraordinarily complex business of the Department of Defense.
You don’t want Achilles in a nuclear submarine, you don’t need El Cid maintaining your stealth bomber, and you surely do not want Crazy Horse presiding over the urgent problem of renovating the American defense industrial base.
