Hegseth’s Reforms Are What the Army Needs By Will Thibeau
https://tomklingenstein.com/hegseths-reforms-are-what-the-army-needs/
On May 1, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth executed what may be remembered as the most significant act of institutional reform in the American military since the Goldwater-Nichols Act of 1986. In a single memo, Hegseth initiated a reorganization of the Army that consolidates command structures, dismantles legacy programs, eliminates bureaucratic dead weight, and restores merit-based advancement. More importantly, it repudiates the reigning progressive orthodoxy that has turned the Pentagon into a symbol of regime decadence rather than national defense.
This reformation, co-led by Army Secretary Dan Driscoll and Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George, reflects not only a strategic shift in military doctrine but a philosophical realignment away from managerial liberalism toward a more classical understanding of executive leadership. It is the kind of executive decisiveness that critics of the administrative state, from James Burnham to Angelo Codevilla, have long argued is necessary to break the inertia of our postmodern bureaucracies. This was not reform by committee. It was an assertion of will.
From Bureaucracy to Battlefield
The Army that Hegseth inherited was shaped by the long war on terror — an era of dispersed, low-intensity conflict that encouraged bureaucratic sprawl and doctrinal stagnation. In 2001, there were 871 generals and admirals serving throughout the Armed Forces. Today, there are roughly 950 — nearly a 10% growth, even though the total force has shrunk by roughly the same percentage over the same period. As War on the Rocks noted in a 2022 piece, this top-heavy structure created a glut of careerists more concerned with promotion boards than combat readiness.
The May 1 directive cuts approximately 40 general officer billets and up to 1,000 civilian staff roles at the Pentagon. In their place, Hegseth has emphasized agile command-and-control, streamlined formations, and the integration of unmanned systems. The retirement of legacy equipment like the Humvee and outdated rotary-wing platforms reflects a sober recognition that great power competition — not counterinsurgency — is now the defining strategic reality.
This modernization is long overdue. A 2021 RAND study found that the U.S. military’s acquisition system “incentivizes risk aversion and conformity,” resulting in a procurement timeline that often stretches over decades. The pivot toward off-the-shelf, commercially adaptable unmanned platforms represents not only a technological update, but a repudiation of the failed industrial-consultant complex that has long dominated defense acquisition.
Regime Change Within the Regime
But the deeper transformation is ideological. For over a decade, the Pentagon has served as a vehicle for progressive social engineering. Under Secretary Lloyd Austin and Deputy Secretary Kathleen Hicks, the Department of Defense institutionalized DEI policies that undermined the military’s core meritocratic and martial functions. Hicks mandated race and gender quotas for promotions. June became a month of Pentagon-sponsored Pride celebrations. Leaders were not promoted for their warfighting acumen, but their compliance with diversity metrics.
As Christopher Rufo has documented, DEI ideology in the military was never merely symbolic. It was a re-education campaign, delivered through mandatory training, internal surveillance, and ideological credentialing. These policies demoralized the rank-and-file and alienated the public. A 2022 Heritage Foundation survey found that nearly 70% of active-duty servicemembers viewed the military’s focus on social issues as a distraction from its warfighting mission.
The Hegseth reforms are a counter-revolution against this ideological colonization. With the stroke of a pen, the Secretary has voided DEI mandates, ending promotion quotas and eliminating civilian offices dedicated to identity-based advocacy. Where the left used the bureaucracy to institutionalize its cultural revolution, Hegseth is now using executive power to de-institutionalize it.
Executive Will in an Age of Managerial Drift
This is a case study in the political principle that you can just do things. Hegseth’s memo exposes the fallacy of consensus governance, particularly within the national security apparatus. For years, defense reformers across the political spectrum have proposed changes like these — streamlining command, integrating AI, and realigning force posture toward China. And yet, little changed. The bottleneck wasn’t a lack of ideas. It was a lack of power.
The managerial class, as Codevilla and Burnham understood, substitutes process for authority. In the Biden-Austin Pentagon, reform efforts were always contingent on endless consensus. Every initiative was filtered through blue-ribbon panels, interagency working groups, and strategic guidance documents that ultimately deferred to the status quo. The result was paralysis. Consider the Defense Department’s flagship AI strategy, authored by the Chief Digital and AI Office: a 70-page document that took two years to write and essentially recommended avoiding the development of a cohesive AI doctrine.
Hegseth’s approach marks a decisive break from this inertia. It is a model of what Michael Anton has called “Caesarism within the law” — the responsible use of executive authority to override bureaucratic resistance in moments of national decline. Critics call it authoritarian. It is merely the restoration of authority itself.
The Stakes: Cold War and Hot War
This is not merely a bureaucratic shakeup. It is a preparation for war. The United States faces an increasingly aggressive China, a revanchist Russia, and a globe where the deterrent power of American military might is no longer assumed. The reforms at the Pentagon are, at their core, about restoring the military as an instrument of national sovereignty, capable of deterring great power adversaries and winning wars.
Readiness, not representation, must guide military policy. Lethality, not diversity, must govern promotions. The next war will not be won by HR administrators or compliance officers. It will be won by warriors equipped with the best tools, unencumbered by ideology, and led by commanders chosen for excellence, not identity.
Even establishment figures seem to recognize the necessity. Retired Gen. Martin Dempsey, Obama’s chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and certainly no Trump loyalist, praised the reforms on LinkedIn as “long overdue” and “a critical inflection point.” That acknowledgment, from one of the architects of the old consensus, underscores just how dramatic this change is.
Secretary Hegseth’s May 1 memo is a rebuke to the last thirty years of Pentagon policy. But more than that, it is a rebuke to the entire ethos of managerial liberalism — the idea that nothing can be done without permission, consensus, and review. Conservatives have too often internalized that ethos, even as they claim to oppose it. Hegseth offers a different path: a model of bold, unitary executive action, driven by clarity of vision and fidelity to the American regime.
The message is simple, and deeply subversive in an age of drift: you can just do things. And if we want to win — at home or abroad — we must.
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