00:00It'd be easy to brush off Pete Hegseth as a culture warrior.
00:03The only people who actually deserve peace are those who are willing to wage war to defend it.
00:09We should not have women in combat roles.
00:10It hasn't made us more effective, hasn't made us more lethal,
00:13has made fighting more complicated.
00:15No more beardos.
00:16But his ambition runs much deeper.
00:18He wants to completely reform America's military.
00:21I'm skeptical. That can take decades.
00:23But he is planting the seed for a radical change
00:25in an aspect of military behavior that doesn't get enough attention.
00:29Psychology.
00:30Armed forces tend to take on the mentality of their leaders,
00:33and the wrong one can lead to disaster.
00:36This is where Norman F. Dixon comes in.
00:38Dixon was a British psychologist who studied the military mind,
00:42and he wrote an influential, and surprisingly funny book about it in 1976.
00:46Dixon didn't find that incompetence occurred more frequently in the military,
00:49only that for no other profession can incompetence cause so much human tragedy so quickly.
00:54He also thought the problem was largely preventable,
00:56and that's why those in the military have a duty to learn from past mistakes.
01:00There are few better examples than Douglas Haig, who commanded the Brits during World War I.
01:04Dixon described him as obstinate, mean, and lacking in compassion.
01:08He sent hundreds of thousands of young soldiers to their death for no real reason.
01:11The modern equivalent? Vladimir Putin.
01:14We're now in the fourth year of a war he expected his troops to end in just three days.
01:18And then there was Arthur Percival, another British general who Dixon describes as highly intelligent.
01:22But that didn't stop him from allowing Japan's easy conquest of Singapore in 1942.
01:27Like other architects of disaster, he was rigid and dogmatic.
01:31And that brings us back to Hegseth.
01:33For example, his disdain for intellectualism just ended the Pentagon's long-time practice
01:37of sending junior officers to elite universities.
01:40Too many of our officers came back looking too much like Harvard.
01:45Heads full of globalist and radical ideologies that do not improve our fighting ranks.
01:50Given his intention to forge a military in his own image, I think it's fair to consider a few
01:55more personality traits Dixon considered causes of incompetence.
01:59Hegseth checks all those boxes.
02:01His book is literally called In the Arena.
02:04He's pushing women out of combat roles.
02:06He disparages defenders as not being warriors.
02:09We're training warriors, not defenders.
02:11He's censoring and banning reporters.
02:13He even has this tattoo.
02:15All this is captured in his and Trump's favorite tagline.
02:18Peace through strength.
02:20It's clear that the military Hegseth wants to create will have no problem with the strength
02:24part.
02:24But the question is, where's the peace?
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