How Secretary Hegseth Got What’s Most Important Wrong

You gotta hand it to Pete. Insofar as appearances go, he has it all. He’s good-looking, trim, and fit. When he talks, he sounds severe and mean, just like a real warrior. He’s even articulate.

Unlike most voters, I didn’t listen to just the “good parts” of his infamous speech before our assembled military brass. Our never-fail-to-miss-the-point media repeated endlessly his tirade against fat, disheveled, sloppy-looking troops.

Sure, that was a bit shallow. But I listened to the whole, hour-long speech. I even took notes.

The speech impressed me for what it was not. It was far from the deranged, randomly focused monologues of our president. It was clear, forceful, articulate and well-delivered. Pete only stumbled once, and then only for a few words. He even managed to bash DEI, mostly in passing, without sounding like a racist, misogynist or homophobe.

If you were looking for a Secretary of Defense from central casting, Pete and his speech seemed to fit the bill. His focus on readiness, morale and esprit d’corps could have inspired troops going into battle at any time in human history.

But the speech—like Pete himself—had one glaring, fatal flaw. This isn’t any time in human history. It’s a very special time. It’s a crucial time in the respective histories of the US and China, as well as of China and the “West.” And it’s a very special time in the history of warfare.

The mightiest democracy in our species’ six thousand years of recorded history is self-evidently undergoing the most precipitous decline since ancient Rome’s. It’s continuing our entire species’ dismal history of democracy, which I calculated on a time- and population-weighted basis as 3.2 percent.

At the same time, the practice of warfare is undergoing rapid, fundamental change. Machines are replacing human troops. Not only can people direct those machines remotely while far from harm’s way. With prior programming, the machines can operate autonomously and collectively by themselves. Airborne or seaborne drones can be programmed to flock like birds or school like dolphins. They can react intelligently and spontaneously to enemy action based on previous general programming, without detailed advance knowledge of the enemy’s condition or strategy. It exaggerates little to say they can “think.”

Unfortunately, our own burdensomely costly military is far behind in this smart-machine arms race.

The reason is fundamental to the nature of our capitalistic, profit-driven society. The gigantic, privately-owned enterprises that supply most of our means of making and defending wars are all part of our “military-industrial complex.” Ike warned us about that in 1956.

Their primary goals, as taught by our 1,700 B-schools, are increasing revenue and profit for their shareholders, not military effectiveness, let alone economy or saving troops from harm. That’s why our huge Predator drones cost an estimated $4 million for a single unit and $20 -$40 million for a complete system. In comparison, estimates of the cost Iran’s small Shahed drones range from $20,000 to $375,000 (with Russia’s copies coming in at an estimated $50,000). The drones that Ukrainian soldiers are now assembling in the field from toys, commercial parts and cheap, standard, military explosives are estimated to cost just $300 to $1,000 per unit.

If all these lower estimates (as reported by Google AI) are accurate, then Iran can produce 200 drones, Russia can produce 80, and Ukraine can produce 13,333 for the cost of every one of our Predators. Do you think these vast differences in numbers (and concomitant strategic flexibility) work in our favor?

Pete’s speech on morale and readiness could have been appropriate at any time in human history. But for this particular time, when we’re behind in the most revolutionary arms race in the history of warfare, his speech was all but irrelevant. (Pete did mention drones, but only in passing, as if they were nothing more than a newer, better bullet, rather than a world-historical change of approach.) He had called an extraordinary meeting of all American top brass, forcing them to fly in from all corners of the Earth, to give a pep talk that any military leader from ancient Sparta or the Qing Dynasty might have given.

To see how totally irrelevant Pete’s speech was for our times, consider Taiwan. It’s the most likely locus of a future war involving us directly. China has set itself the goal of controlling the island some time in 2027. Since Taiwan wants to keep its fragile independence, and since the US has pledged to support it, the application of military force is strongly implied.

But what kind of force? Can we expect a full-scale assault by China? Are we going to see Chinese troops storming the beaches near Taipei as our troops once stormed Iwo Jima?

Not hardly. China’s few wars since Mao’s Communist Revolution have been by proxy, in Korea and Vietnam. In its 76 years of control, the Chinese Communist Party has never attacked another nation directly without provocation, whether for conquest or for more commercial ends. It has only supplied armaments and sometimes troops to “buffer states.”

Even more important, Xi Jinping and his cohorts are not stupid. They are not about to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs. They would not risk injuring, let alone destroying, the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), probably the world’s most advanced and productive chip maker and the source of much of China’s future prowess in drones. Nor would China risk the lives of Taiwan’s semiconductor workers, or other workers who make Taiwan industrially and commercially valuable. There is never going to be a full-scale sea and ground invasion of Taiwan.

So how will China drag Taiwan reluctantly into its fold? Undoubtedly it will try to blockade the island. It will declare an air and sea cordon, probably a good distance away. It will enforce the blockade with a massive armada of air and sea drones. The drones will launch from fast-moving ships and/or stealth aircraft (if China can copy or steal our stealth technology). Or they will launch from the Chinese Mainland, in a bold dare for us to start a war directly with China.

By means of that air and sea cordon, China will control all traffic of people and goods in and out of Taiwan. In this entirely seagoing and airborne struggle, both sides will try hard not to damage Taiwan, its people, or its precious industries. Yet when we send our gigantic, lumbering aircraft carriers and airborne bombers out to break the blockade, China will respond with massive strikes of modern, autonomous and remotely controlled drones.

Our carriers and similar WW2-era ships will be sitting ducks. And unlike the forces for which they are sitting, they will contain real people, lots of them.

How long do you think American public support for war will survive our first aircraft carrier going down, with thousands of American sailors’ lives lost? our second?

Will China use its blockade to starve the Taiwanese into submission? I doubt it. I think China will simply make life hard for the Taiwanese for a while, using its blockade to round up and imprison Taiwan’s chief advocates of independence and democracy. Perhaps fighting a few one-sided battles with us and our allies will drive the point home. Perhaps the Taiwanese will see the writing on the wall and decide that discretion is the better part of valor, that prosperity and membership in the world’s next great empire is worth the price of foregoing independence and democracy.

After all, hasn’t our own current president shown the world that democracy is not all it’s cracked up to be?

Anyway, haven’t most of China’s ethnically Chinese people collectively supported a new empire since Mao? The Chinese are a quintessentially practical people.

If all this happens as described here, Chinese history will have come full circle, in what the Chinese might call a delicious irony. During the two Opium Wars (First, 1839-42; Second, 1856-60), the British commandeered exclusive trading rights to Hong Kong and later the Kowloon Peninsula by military force. The British won these battles with the aid of superior hand-held firearms, which were faster-reloading and more accurate than their Chinese counterparts. The Brits thus won their battles although the Chinese had invented the gunpowder that powered their firearms nearly a millennium before.

Just so, the US will have invented most of the semiconductors, chips and programming technology used in all sides’ drones. But we will have failed to improve them to provide low-cost, effective and efficient means of fighting wars without putting human lives at risk. And our failure will have been a direct result of our private military suppliers’ focus on profit, rather than military necessity and efficacy.

So in dwelling on fighting spirit and “lethality,” Pete not only missed the entire point of modern warfare. He missed the historic and visionary technological developments that, in theory, permit wars to be fought and won by sacrificing mostly machines, rather than human lives. If continued, his “leadership” of his so-called “Department of War” will thus mark a decisive shift in military competency from West to East, and a major turnabout in human history.

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Why our Country is Going to Hell, and How to Fix It

NOTE TO READERS: The substance of this post is indirectly derived from the contents of a new book, Rural versus Urban, by political scientists Suzanne Mettler and Trevor Brown, as discussed on the “Ezra Klein Show” with Mettler herself. That show’s transcribed text in the NYT is the only thing that I have yet read that adequately explains a multiply-indicted New York City con-man and real-estate mogul becoming the champion and cult leader of struggling rural America.

Fact 1. Until the mid-nineties, there was no great difference between rural and urban voters in party affiliations. Then the gap began growing—in Republicans’ favor. It’s now exploding.

Fact 2. The rural political county chairs that the authors spoke to said, “the issues that were most important to people are the economy, health care, education, etc. They did not mention “gun rights and abortion and immigration as top issues.”

Fact 3. On a “feeling” scale from one to 100, white rural Americans rate Black Americans at 70, Hispanic Americans at 67, gay men at 57, illegal immigrants at 39, and Democrats at 14 points.

Fact 4. Together, the 26 least-populated states have less than 11% of the total US population but command a majority of votes in the United States Senate. The Electoral College and House are less extremely tilted toward rural power, but you get the idea. Relatively speaking, rural folk rule.

Fact 5. “[T]he basic pattern from 1994 to the present [was] that rural places have elected Republicans, but in the middle of that time, things went in a different way. That was when Howard Dean became the head of the Democratic National Committee, 2005 through 2008.”

“His strategy was to work hard in all 50 states and particularly to organize in rural counties. Some of the county party chairs whom I interviewed still remember how well organized they were at that time. And then Barack Obama comes along and uses similar kinds of organizing strategies, and it really makes a difference.”

* * *

Put these facts together, and you arrive at a simple conclusion. Democrats have lost the rural parts of the country not for any failure of policy, but for failure to show up.

As Mettler put it, “this is where Democratic Party organizing is so needed and crucial. I remember a county chair in southern Ohio saying: Look, there’s no one here shouting from the rooftops back against Fox News: ‘They’re lying to you.’” The Dems have effectively ceded our nation’s rural areas to Republican propaganda, forgetting that our Constitution always has given rural folk inordinate political power.

One other crucial finding of Mettler’s and Brown’s research is hard to encapsulate in a single quotation. For a variety of reasons, rural folk have come to distrust and even fear big cities’ voters, their elite and their moguls. This antipathy has grown as rural factories have closed (often having been shipped to China), rural towns have dried up, decimated by factory closings and opioid addiction, and city incomes have surged or maintained while farms and rural areas have struggled.

As a result, there is a general feeling in rural America that the big, blue cities don’t give a damn about farms, small towns and country folk. They don’t seem to listen and don’t seem to care.

This, in my mind, explains the seeming contradiction that rural folk, by and large, endorse the same policies that city folk do but vote quite differently and idolize Donald Trump. Have you ever tried to reason with your spouse at a time when he or she believes you don’t listen and don’t care? That’s what city pols are up against when they make their grand pronouncements on city media but don’t get their feet dirty and go door to door, let alone organize, in the country.

About fourteen months ago, I wrote a post arguing that campaign contributions to candidates and party organizations are mostly worthless. Why? Virtually all candidates and (to my knowledge) the Democratic Party and its various offshoots spend most of their money talking to themselves or city Dems. For the price of multiple times what it would cost to sustain a field volunteer for a week, they compose, produce and air (repeatedly) print ads and video clips that argue policy positions and try to make the Republican side look bad.

I characterize this activity in the same words that Einstein used to describe insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Ever since Howard Dean gave the infamous scream that drove him from the presidential race and, apparently, from credibility in Democratic campaign circles, we’ve systematically replaced his fifty-state, neglect-no-precinct organizing strategy with an horrendously expensive media war that has been a uniform, consistent and catastrophic failure for Democrats. Will we ever learn?

During the last election cycle, I spent all but a few of my campaign dollars on GOTV organizations, as described (and named) in this post fourteen months ago. All together, I spent enough to buy a new small car.

Since the catastrophe last November, I’ve been taking a contribution holiday. But now, with a year before the midterms approaching, I’m ready to begin contributing again. And I’m going to support the same GOTV and local organizing bodies that I did last time, plus any others that I may discover that do the same sort of work.

In all this, Stacey Abrams is my model. She’s a brilliant on-the-ground organizer who, for some strange reason, was unable to get herself elected governor of Georgia. But she gave us two solid Democratic Senators in Jon Osoff and Raphael Warnock. In my mind, she’s the modern incarnation of Howard Dean and the successor to his briefly successful organizing legacy.

But Abrams is not alone. There are many others who understand that politics in our nation today depends more on trench warfare than drones and informatics operating in the ether or cyberspace.

Our nation’s future depends on people-to-people organizing, just as it did in the beginning. Trying insanely to win the information war in the cesspool of today’s ether and Internet could lead to a real, bloody civil war. What we need is person-to-person diligent and friendly contact.

So Abrams and others like her will get my campaign dollars, as many of them as I can spare. Let would-be writers and producers of expensive clips and sound bites seek their fortunes in Hollywood, what’s left of it.

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Little Boys and Grown Men

When little boys fight, they seldom do much damage. The victor goes home and brags or keeps silent. The loser goes home to his mama, who patches up his little harms and consoles him. His dad teaches him how to box, or maybe how to sucker-punch first. Life goes on.

If the truth be told, evolution has poorly endowed our species for defense or attack. Although smaller than we are, our household pets can run faster and are better endowed with sharp teeth and claws. Our greatest weapon—the most powerful in the entire animal kingdom—lies inside our crania. As grown men and women, we’ve used it to devise weapons capable of extinguishing ourselves and most life on Earth, except maybe microbes and cockroaches.

Do we use our much-vaunted brains to better our lives? Sometimes. But when it comes to getting along with each other, not so much. The most horrible war in history, which killed some fifty million of us before their times, followed the war “to make the world safe for democracy” by less than two decades. The later one involved the first use of nuclear weapons and produced the general conclusion—duh!—that their widespread use would not be a good thing.

Yet here we are, in the twenty-first century, just having maybe settled a brutal, immensely deadly conflict between two groups lusting for the same land. Each claims to have been motivated by an enduring and noble religion: Islam in one case and Judaism in the other. Yet the one slaughtered nearly 1,200 of the other (including some foreigners) on October 7, 2023. Then the other, in turn, has slaughtered over 70 thousand of the first, including tens of thousands of children, up to the current cease fire.

As any idiot knows, the motivation for the killing had little to do with religion. It was and is all about land.

The Jews are my own tribe. They wrote the First Draft of the Bible. No only does it mention almost every possible sexual deviation, including incest. It’s also replete with smiting and vengeance, lots of them.

Neither Jews nor Muslims, as such, wrote the Second Draft. Incipient Christians did. In it, a guy named Jesus promoted two radically new ideas. First, we should love our enemies. Second, we should love our neighbors as ourselves. (We Americans actually applied these brave ideas after history’s most horrible war. They helped us turn our erstwhile principal enemies into democracies and the world’s third and fourth largest economies.)

During that horrible war itself, alleged proponents of the religion of Jesus went on to exterminate sxi million or so Jews as if they were cockroaches. But never mind. Jesus’ ideas were, and still are, two of humankind’s greatest ideas. Maybe if we followed them, our species could avoid the natural consequences of little boys with tempers and designs having nuclear weapons.

One of those little boys is named Bibi. In two short years, he has managed to make the long-lived global sympathy for Jews resulting from the Holocaust virtually disappear. Yes, the Holocaust involved the untimely, deliberate and methodical murder of some six million Jews. Yes, the massacre of Gazans involved only about 70,000 untimely deaths, and most of them were not entirely deliberate. Most resulted from reckless or grossly negligent attempts to kill Hamas fighters and terrorists without killing innocent people.

But still. No one can view the photos and films of Gaza razed to the ground—or of thousands of families fleeing on foot and donkey-back from one precarious, temporary, bombarded and dusty tent-city to another—without thinking that little Bibi has done something very, very bad.

Those old photos of blasted Berlin at the end of World War II have nothing on videos of today’s Gaza. And the latter will remain a stain on the legacy of Israel and its alleged democracy as long as they last. Have 5,786 years of devout Torah study brought us to this?

Ironies abound. The sudden peace is still precarious. Its path to remanence, if any, will emerge only with time. But already we hear resounding and delirious praises for two of the least worthy leaders in human history, Bibi and our Big, Beautiful Demagogue. Each of them, in his own twisted way, is straight out of the mold of vain, selfish, self-centered, lying, duplicitous, treacherous and law-breaking monarchs of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Each would be personally comfortable in one of Niccolò Machiavelli’s fifteenth-to-sixteenth-century Italian city-states.

If this peace is to last and grow, let alone shift northward and eastward to the breadbasket of Europe, grown men and women will have to get involved. They must be recruited by others, for they will likely accept their mantles reluctantly, as all great leaders do. They will come from the Middle East, Europe, Africa and Asia—maybe even China—because the USA is now mostly spent. But if they succeed, they will earn the respect of a grateful humanity and their rightful place of honor in human history. They might even help save our species from self-extinction by nuclear fire or planetary heating.


For brief descriptions of and links to recent posts, click here. For an inverse-chronological list with links to all posts after January 23, 2017, click here. For a subject-matter index to posts before that date, click here.

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