RUTHFULLY YOURS

President Donald Trump and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth have a clear mandate to restore the United States Armed Forces as the global standard of military excellence, rolling back four years of decline under the DEI-obsessed Pentagon of the Biden-Harris administration.

They will face resistance to these reform efforts not just from the political Left and the Democratic Party, but from an entrenched class of senior officers whose bureaucratic ethos and commitment to woke ideology have undermined mission readiness, eroded cohesion and morale among the troops, and transformed our military from a merit-based institution singularly focused on national defense into a laboratory for costly and destructive social experimentation.

Hegseth’s success in setting the Pentagon straight will depend on his effectiveness in checking the overreach of these woke officers and restoring civilian control over our Armed Forces. That will require more than simply overturning race– and sex–based quotas, ending the indulgence of transgenderism in the uniform, or any of the other worthy and necessary measures to unmake the woke military at the level of policy. To achieve real and lasting change, Hegseth must enact structural reforms that remove not just the woke policies themselves but the climate and the culture from which they emerged.

Below are three ambitious but achievable recommendations that Hegseth could adopt to tame the scourge of wokeness in uniform and restore control of our defense establishment to the American people and their elected representatives.

1. Eliminate woke officers by restoring civilian control of personnel processes.

It would be difficult to overstate the extent to which the upper echelons at the Pentagon have been taken over by left-wing ideology. In one analysis published by the Center for Renewing America, out of almost 600 generals and admirals, over 60 were found to have politicized their service to an objectionable extent — more than one in ten.

A problem of this scale demands a coordinated response from the Pentagon’s civilian leadership. It goes without saying that those who are unfit for service must be identified and removed. Wherever senior officers are found in violation of DoD Directive 1344.10, prohibiting political activity in uniform, enforcement must be swift and it must be strict. But more than that, President Trump and Secretary Hegseth must establish a system that ensures such destructive leaders do not rise to the top again.

For decades, the highest ranks have been left to their own devices, and the Armed Forces have effectively been controlled by an entrenched bureaucracy — not by the elected commander-in-chief or the leadership he appoints.

This is especially true when it comes to the cornerstone issue of promotion through those ranks. As a matter of course, administrations of both parties have often deferred in practice to the recommendations of the service chiefs and in-service review boards, with the president’s appointment effectively a formality.

The president must once again exercise his full authority under the appointments clause of the U.S. Constitution. President Trump and Secretary Hegseth should be personally involved in the selection and vetting of general officers. The Presidential Personnel Office, which exists to ensure presidential appointees are qualified and aligned with the interests of the American people as expressed at the ballot box, can assist in this vital task — returning to civilian hands a process too long improperly delegated to uniformed leadership.

2. Downsize the Joint Staff and move it from the Pentagon to the White House.

If any organization at the Pentagon exists outside the scope of political accountability, it is the Joint Staff. It is a common joke inside the building that you cannot even plan a barbecue without Joint Staff concurrence. But it is no laughing matter when such bureaucratic intransigence stops our Armed Forces from following the lawful orders of the commander-in-chief, whether to build a border wall, withdraw from Afghanistan, or execute any other action deemed appropriate for our national defense.

Given the record of failure current leadership has racked up, it would be tempting for President Trump to simply clear house and appoint more competent generals and admirals to the Joint Chiefs of Staff. But changing the names at the top while leaving the massive structure underneath untouched would be rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. Instead, he should cut the leviathan down to size by ordering the Joint Chiefs of Staff to reassign all staff not personally assigned to the service chiefs to the appropriate position within the Office of the Secretary of Defense.

The JCS was established by law to advise the commander-in-chief, not to act as a law unto itself. The dozens of personal staff assigned to the service chiefs will be more than sufficient to fulfill this statutory mandate. Retaining the thousands of DoD employees currently at the disposal of these admirals and generals would all but guarantee continued mission creep and overreach into areas properly entrusted to civilian authorities.

Right-sizing the Joint Staff should also be accompanied by a physical relocation. The Pentagon’s in-house bureaucracy is not just overgrown; it is unaccountable. Moving the Joint Staff out of the Pentagon and “closer to the flagpole” will ensure responsiveness to the president. This relocation would mark an important return to proper function and protocol, while maintaining clear operational chain of command through the service secretaries and secretary of Defense. If recent news is any indication, there is plenty of open space in the old USAID offices.

3. Reform the pathway for officers’ commissions.

Fixing things today won’t count for much in the long run if we don’t attack military wokeness at the source. Replacing one cohort of woke generals with capable leadership is pointless if an even more woke, even more destructive generation is going to rise up and replace them in just a few short years. If the current state of our service academies is any indication, then that is exactly what would happen without serious corrective action.

While rooting out DEI and firing the Boards of Visitors is a good start, the administration should consider deeper changes to West Point, the Naval Academy, and the Air Force Academy. The proportion of civilian professors has steadily grown since the Clinton administration, and the academies today often seem like standard universities with a bit of military culture added on top.

It is time to restore the proper understanding of these academies’ purpose: to form men ready to lead in war. Selection for the academies must be made solely on the basis of a candidate’s willingness and ability to do so. This means we must end the practice of quota-based admission, which seeks to form an officer corps that represents the demographics of society at large. But it also means we must shift away from sports-driven recruiting and other practices that treat the service academies as just one college among many.

The administration might even consider a return to an earlier model, still used across the Atlantic by the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, in which the academies would serve not as degree-granting institutions but as military finishing schools. This would ensure that service and merit are paramount, rather than any other considerations.

The Department of Defense should also take a long, hard look at which universities are suitable hosts for ROTC programs. Too often, ROTC programs serve to funnel taxpayer dollars — at full tuition rates — to woke universities whose broader activities are directly opposed to American public interests. The officers who emerge from these programs are both politically compromised and militarily subpar. Going forward, the administration should ensure that our tax dollars go only to institutions that operate on merit, and that preserve and pass on our traditions. A generation from now, the impact of officers formed by these policies would be transformative.

If Secretary Hegseth follows this path, his legacy will be far greater than any single policy change. He will have paved the way for a new generation of leaders in uniform — leaders animated not by the politics of the moment but by the best traditions of patriotic service and military excellence. The goal must be not simply the construction of an Armed Forces where wokeness does not rule, but of one where wokeness — the hijacking of our military by unaccountable bureaucrats for utopian political ends — is neither imaginable nor feasible. Only then can we say that America, and her oldest and most venerable institution, have been made great again.