March 07, 2025

Hegseth Brings the Culture War to Combat

By: Dr. Jason Dempsey

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s appointment today of his personal lawyer, Timothy Parlatore, as a Navy commander in the Judge Advocate General’s Corps reflects not just the norm-breaking approach that Hegseth is bringing to the job, but an odious philosophy of warfare. Like his new boss at the Pentagon, Parlatore has a pattern of providing support to soldiers accused of grave misconduct, even war crimes. He notably represented Eddie Gallagher, a Navy SEAL court-martialed on charges including the murder of a captured fighter (though he was found guilty only of one, lesser charge), along with a second SEAL accused of serious sexual offenses. Elevating a lawyer with this record does not bode well for the armed services Hegseth hopes to build.

The fundamental challenge of military leadership lies in creating cohesive teams that can work together in an environment of mortal risk and, when called upon to do so, use lethal force themselves. The task is challenging, to say the least, and presents the dangerous temptation of taking a shortcut to such team building by denigrating those not on the team. The most obvious means of such othering involves using exclusionary criteria—race and gender, but also less visible traits such as sexual orientation—to promote unit cohesion. Although this makes team cohesion and battlefield effectiveness easier to achieve in the short term, professional soldiers resist this approach because its negative focus on identity ahead of standards ultimately results in undisciplined and unreliable forces.

The fundamental challenge of military leadership lies in creating cohesive teams that can work together in an environment of mortal risk and, when called upon to do so, use lethal force themselves.

Hegseth has long made clear his opposition to women serving in combat roles, but no argument for excluding them for an inability to meet military standards is sustainable. Women have proved, over 20-plus years of conflicts, that not only can they make the grade, but they are essential to the U.S. military’s combat capability. The undeniability of this fact is presumably why Hegseth has largely backtracked on his opposition.

Instead, he’s chosen to demean the much smaller population of transgender service members. Although they have amply demonstrated honorable service and the ability to meet military standards, he has repeatedly denigrated them and is now enforcing President Donald Trump’s executive order that denies transgender service members’ capacity to be “honorable, truthful, and disciplined.” A more limited version of the order, simply restricting accommodations for transgender service members, was an option, but this blew straight past that. Instead, their unjustified, wholesale exclusion from the military is now another example of othering by the Hegseth-led Department of Defense.

Read the full article on The Atlantic.

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