“During the hiring freeze directed by the Secretary, the Department of Defense will continue to hire the civilians that support the lethality [emphasis mine throughout] of the Total Force,” Hurst said. Well gosh, I guess we’re hiring Seal Team 15 or whatever, right? Well, no.
“DoD will continue to recruit the great Americans who manufacture artillery shells, repair and refit our warships, maintain our fleets of military vehicles and equipment, teach the sons and daughters of Service members, and provide medical care to our warriors and their families.” Hiring teachers and doctors and nurses to support lethality — got it.
This is only one of many examples. There is a style, cadence, and word choice to DoD press releases in this somehow-still-young administration that provide a fascinating, if largely uncomplicated glimpse at the type of limited, childish ghouls currently in charge of the world’s largest military. There are warriors and warfighters everywhere; there is lethality, and force, and strength; there is a sneering dismissiveness of anything else the sprawling military apparatus engages in besides pointing guns at people and shooting them. The releases are the way a Fox News Pentagon talks, what they assume Secretary of Defense John Wayne would sound like.
“The result will be a more agile, responsive, and mission-focused Department — one that delivers for the warfighter and supports our national security priorities with greater clarity and speed,” said Eric Pahon, a spokesman for the deputy secretary of defense, in regard to, uh, a memo about a “Workforce Acceleration & Recapitalization Initiative.”
“Through our budgets, the Department of Defense will once again resource warfighting and cease unnecessary spending that set our military back under the previous administration, including through so-called ‘climate change’ and other woke programs, as well as excessive bureaucracy,” said Robert G. Salesses, then performing the duties of the deputy secretary. A few weeks later, another release announced the cancelation of $30 million-worth of such programs, including such wastes as studying potential conflicts over fisheries and climate hazards that could destabilize the African Sahel.
Instead of those: “This initiative directly supports that commitment by prioritizing investments in areas like hypersonic weapons development, AI-powered systems for enhanced battlefield awareness, and strengthening the domestic military industrial base.” Incidentally, Hegseth and Trump now want a trillion-dollar Pentagon budget.
The Defense Secretary’s own childlike fascinations shine through in the releases as well. “To ensure the U.S. military remains the strongest and most lethal fighting force on the planet, the Secretary of Defense directed the Military Departments to ensure their physical fitness standards support this enduring goal.” That’s Hegseth up at the top of this post, doing some pushups for the camera with troops stationed in Panama.
This isn’t, of course, purely an exercise in misdirected machismo in language. Mixed in with the president’s clear imperial and expansionist goals, the fact that the DoD brass talk like someone likely to pull a gun on anyone who knocks on the door is a huge “warfighting” alarm bell. They don’t want the US military to be some big peacekeeping force that builds dams and shakes hands with locals; they want to invade — somewhere, anywhere — and blow shit up.
That desire, that attitude — what good is this bazooka if I don’t fire it at something — yields a Pentagon that can’t talk about hiring a teacher without bringing up lethality. It’s also what makes them ignore clear security problems like rising sea levels or, say, using a messaging app to talk about when fighter pilots will take off on bombing runs. And while the press releases might offer a simple if enduring case study for sociologists and psychiatrists to peruse, it isn’t exactly comforting to know such broken children are in charge.
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