Breaking: Trump Team Rethinking Hegseth
This morning in a comment I linked to a TGP story about alleged sexual misconduct by Pete Hegseth in 2017. Hegseth is 44 years old and has already been married three times, so this hardly comes as a surprise—I expected this. Apparently the story will be featured in Vanity Fair which, from time to time, does investigative reporting. That was this morning. This evening the report is that the Trump team is reconsidering. That’s fine, but this is an appointment that never should have been considered.
Anyway, this afternoon Judge Nap had a lively conversation with Colonel Larry Wilkerson—a guy who knows a thing or two about the military, about the State Department, and about how the federal government runs, er, operates. Here are a few brief excerpts:
LW: I've said this repeatedly over the last few days as these names have come out. I do not think that a single one of the principal cabinet officers or reasonable facsimiles thereof--such as the DNI--will be in place 12 months from the time he appoints them.
Judge: Can I tell you who agrees with you? I hope he doesn't mind me saying it on air--he told me this privately. Colonel Macgregor agrees with you 100% on that. He said six to nine to twelve months these characters--if they're even confirmed--will be done.
...
Judge: Senator John Thune was just elected the majority leader in the Senate--he's the leader of the Republicans in the Senate. Colonel Wilkerson, can you take a guess to whom he made his first phone call after he was elected majority leader? It was not Donald Trump. It was not JD Vance. It was not Joe Biden. It was not Chuck Schumer. Bibi Netanyahu. Interesting. Tells you where we are.
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LW: The Pentagon is probably right now sweating bullets with the idea that this 44 year old Princeton, Harvard, Special Forces guy with the tats on his arm [Hegseth] is coming over there to--as he has said, as I understand it--"clean house." There are so many things that need to be done at the Pentagon. Cleaning house is not one of them. I would get rid of some of the flags--no question about it. Some of the admirals and generals, and I would shake things up a bit ... but this is absurd. What I'm hearing from him, and the biggest problem at the Pentagon, Judge, is they can't pass an audit. They lose $20 to $30 billion dollars of the tax payers' money every year, by their own admission! And they can't pass an audit. That's a huge problem that's just draining money away. And along with these wars and support of Israel, for example, it's draining money away at an alarming rate. Trump's going to find that out when he gets into the office again, and finds out just how deeply we are in debt.
Judge: Can a person with no administrative or managerial experience manage a budget of $860 billion and a team of human beings numbering close to three million, talking about military and civilian, the largest not for-profit organization on the face of the Earth, and this guy's going to manage it?
LW: No. No way he's going to do that. He can cause chaos, he can cause a drop in morale that's so significant that people do begin to abandon him, but I don't think he can manage it. And I would say, of the people Trump is appointing, he'll be one of the first to depart.
This last bit is interesting. Wilkerson shares Macgregor’s view of Trump, and in this respect it’s quite positive.
Judge: Are we going to be in World War III?
LW: It very well could be, and it could be a step that Trump doesn't want to take at all. I feel like, that much I intuit it about him: He doesn't like war. He doesn't want war. He speaks that way sometimes, but he really doesn't like it.
LOL. I happened to glance at the comments on Sundance’s post about the Hegseth nomination, which, not incidentally, he claimed was “understandable.” Anyway, some of the commenters were crowing about Pete being a “family man.” Insert clip of slaps to the forehead.
These behemoths run on enertia and are management proofed by the "deep state". Their complexity comes from the size. Defund them, break them, live with them and let Putin solve the problem with a major financial or military reset and then work from scratch. Any idiot can run DoD. Budget, Operational, all requirements are built starting at unit level and approved by the Commander. It used to be on Lotus spread sheets, now input into a computer database. It ain't rocket science. All Pentagon and lower levels begin with the previous years position. They don't zero base and it certainly requires no advance degrees.The next level rolls all the subordinate unit data together, then adds, modifies or deletes a line(s) item and approves then passes to the next level. These requirements end up in what used to be called, "The Army Green Book" or Navy/AF equivalent, that ties budget data to operation description (thus being classified) , or the "CINC's Integrated Priority List" (also classified because of technical description and operational requirement analysis) and passed through secretarial level to Congress. The only difference being that the Pentagon Analysts get paid GS15 salaries for consolidating the work of GS 7s at unit level. They must also be prepared to answer phone calls from congressional staffers, who know "next to nothing about the items listed" but more than the legislators. Also, consolidation from millions of 'line items' to a few thousand, blinding the congress from seeing where the real waste is. "management proofed". I seriously doubt that any Commander below Division spends any time with these management concerns; TDA organizations are work load and budget driven so they would have more working knowledge; all Senior leaders (think Generals) have one or more civilian deputies to to watch the details and keep the "big kahuna" in the picture, meaning that the deputies are the real knowledge and power in this matrix. The current crop of Generals don't have any combat experience (why else are they in charge) and they never managed the underlying support management structure. Politics has broken the system. Bring the troops home. close the border; noone in the world will touch us. We don't need the navy (we even call it "force projection", ie. intimidation, and the current air forces and army forces are more than enough to defend this country.