Part Two: The Armed Forces Need to be Put Back in the Hands of Soldiers—Pete Hegseth is the Person to Do It
The Spreadsheeting of the Armed Forces—and its Consequences
This report originally appeared in Restoration of America News and is reprinted with permission.
Recently, Restoration News reported on a B-1 bomber crash at Ellsworth Air Force base that occurred last January 4. The underlying cause of the crash—as revealed by a scathing military report and hard data as well as critiques by knowledgeable players analyzed by Restoration News—exposes deeper problems that have become endemic to the Armed Forces. This is the “spreadsheeting,” or bureaucratic taming, of the military from the top down in the name of “risk management” and “planning.”
A deeper investigation shows that this spreadsheeting extends throughout the services, at the hands of bureaucrats, lobbyists, politicians, and ideologues. It affects training, equipment, talent, recruitment, culture, and morale. It’s turned warriors into playthings of soft-handed administrators in Washington, D.C., and more recently into subjects of indoctrination by DEI inquisitors appointed by these administrators. And it has led directly to an increase in disasters like the January 4, 2024 crash—and to other problems as well.
Bureaucrats and Lobbyists Meet Politicians—and the Armed Forces Suffers
The previously discussed rise of bureaucrats in the 1990s reinforced a Washington stranglehold of a small number of defense contracting conglomerates. These players, encouraged by a rotating cast of corporate-government operators, have essentially locked in contracts with the Pentagon to the detriment of effective military operations. In fact, according to Responsible Statecraft, “defense industry consolidation” means that “major prime aerospace defense contractors [have gone] from 51 in 1993 to just five today.”
In one astonishing recent example, reported by military analyst Erik Prince, the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) refused an offer of Texas precision drilling technology to flood tunnels where Hamas hid in Gaza. This would have removed both the need to use bombs and the ensuing carnage and pro-Hamas propagandizing that ensued. But the IDF could not take advantage of the offer because it was “under pressure from Pentagon diktats” by bureaucrats locked into the big corporate players who manufacture bombs.
The potential effects of this kind of move on soldiers are hard to overstate. If planes like the B-1 bomber can’t get common sense upgrades—the kind, say, that lets their software better process changes in altitude and windspeed—then events like what happened at Ellsworth become more likely to occur. Meantime, according to reports, in lieu of these basic upgrades, white collar Pentagon operators pour heavy funding into new and often unworkable hi-tech planes offered by Lockheed and Boeing. So, in the name of new technology that checks a box, the needs of pilots have gone unmet for the better part of two decades. This misspending leads to frightening vulnerabilities. One example was flyers reusing expendable $5 filters on aircraft because they couldn’t afford new filters.
But it was political operators who turned drift and bloat in an organization increasingly run by bureaucrats into the systemic attrition of trained soldiers.
The Bleed-Out of Talent
The attrition began with another bureaucratic failure: the interest-group controlled omnibus bills that have become a feature of life in Congress since around 2000; bills so stuffed with controversial material that the compromise needed to pass them becomes impossible. Thanks to Congress’s ensuing decade-and-a-half failure to pass a budget, vital funding for military programs has gone through via continuing resolutions which don’t adjust to account for higher personnel costs.
Worse, this failure of compromise eventually led to sequestration, thanks to President Obama using a 2011 budget standoff to allocate “half the sequestration cuts to defense, at a time when it accounted for only about 20% of spending.” For the Army, this meant “cut[ting] 40,000 active-duty soldiers, shrinking [the Armed Forces] to 450,000 by 2017.” For the Air Force, this meant a reduction of active-duty airmen from 333,370 to 310,000.
An Air Force report to Congress in 2018 said that, thanks to sequestration, the Air Force was “the smallest…it has ever been.” Active-duty aircrew flying hours had been slashed from 17.7 to 13.2 hours per month. 31 squadrons, including 13 coded for combat, had stood down because of funding pressures. Plans had been announced to eliminate 500 planes, and, according to a Military.com report cited by The American Legion, the Air Force was “making do with ‘half-size squadrons.’” The common refrain today is that hours in the air are even shorter—4.1 hours a month, by one estimate—and that efforts to replace real flying with “on-the-ground simulators” are dismal failures.
These shortages of manpower and training had immediate effects that took time to tally. They are unmistakably the context in which the crash at Ellsworth occurred. 2018, the year after the sequester was complete, saw a spate of plane crashes. In late 2020, Congress found that, in just six years since the sequester began, “‘mishaps’ in training flights or routine missions killed 198 service members and civilians, destroyed 157 aircraft, and cost taxpayers $9.41 billion.” Two weeks alone in 2022 saw three crashes on routine training missions in Alabama and California, costing at least five lives and two injuries. The last few months of 2023 saw four crashes. On December 22, 2024, a navy jet was shot down by friendly fire, and another narrowly avoided being shot down by the same barrage, in the Mediterranean.
Put in this context, the failures at Ellsworth become not just predictable but, tragically, a matter of time. And the people getting hurt or killed, the servicemembers, have no one to advocate for them—only union-protected bureaucrats whose priority is to keep money flowing for their favored projects.
The DEI Assault
In the 2010s, on top of sequestration came changes to culture. These were natural extensions of the “risk management” mentality: avoid liability by getting in front of anything that could conceivably cause offense. Most prominent on this list, thanks to American political developments during the 2010s, the question of race.
The extent to which this focus became ideological was only revealed in 2021. That year, Matthew Lohmeier, a Lieutenant Colonel in the Space Force, published the book Irresistible Revolution: Marxism’s Goal of Conquest & the Unmaking of the American Military criticizing the mainstreaming of DEI on Air Force bases. Soon after sitting for a public interview in which he testified to what he said were DEI’s harmful effects on morale and recruitment, he was dismissed from the Armed Forces—a warning to any who would make a similar stand.
This makes sense, because Lohmeier’s book was damning in the extreme. He showed the specific process by which bureaucratic appointments, like one of a woke chaplain who tried to embed with Lohmeier’s unit, morphed into a divisive mentality among soldiers. For example:
[A] forty-page policy proposal—a manifesto—dated June 25, 2020, [saw] recent graduates of West Point—commissioned officers at the time—decry their alma mater’s many “failures,” specifically with regards to systemic racism, and issue a “call to action” to “West Point leadership, the Long Gray Line, and the citizens” of the United States. The overt attack on West Point, in which the words fail, failed, and failure appear nearly forty times in reference to the institution and its leaders, demands that the school “normalize anti-racism” and “radical inclusion,” and make it “the lens through which” West Point “executes all of its aims. . . . . ”
That same year, 2021, as Lohmeier was dismissed, Ellsworth Air Force Base inaugurated its first DEI program, making the 28th Bomb Wing, in its own telling, “the leading unit in Air Force Global Strike Command to begin the Air Force Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion efforts.” Two years later, in March 2023, Ellsworth publicly celebrated one of its senior airmen for teaching DEI during the first term Airman’s Course. How much did this instruction take away from Ellsworth airmen learning the proper sequence of commands to perform a crosscheck—information that would’ve avoided the $456 million calamity that occurred ten months later?
The January 4 Reckoning and the Hegseth Nomination
What all of this amounts to is an assault on the Armed Forces—but it’s a hard assault to quantify, because the Armed Forces remains a black box. Personnel aren’t listed, and decision-making over assignments and funding are not open to the public. Leaks are admirably rare in a culture where people still rely on each other in life-and-death missions. Still, since the 1960s, smart soldiers have seen the potential for this kind of assault, beginning with Dwight Eisenhower, the commanding officer at D-Day. In 1961, in his farewell address as president, Eisenhower warned that the creation of a permanent standing army was a new phenomenon in the United States, one that empowered bureaucrats, lobbyists, and other actors in a military industrial complex—people who could end up harming the military he’d served.
The truth of that warning has been borne out in broad strokes since the early 2000s, when the growth of a subclass of lawyers, administrators, and managers inside the Armed Forces began to change its culture into an operation in risk management, corporate cronyism, and deference to political-ideological agendas. Backlit by these developments, an event like January 4, 2024 is a wake-up call: helping to crystallize the diffuse complaints and analyses that have circulated over the past ten years.
Why the Defense Department Needs Pete Hegseth
In the context of organization-wide decline, Pete Hegseth, a combat veteran with experience in the trenches, is the break-the-mold nominee who’s needed to restore the Armed Services. He knows the ins and outs of a culture that’s hard for outsiders to penetrate, and he knows who to listen to—and who not to—in the name of breaking the hold of bureaucrats. Tellingly, soldiers speaking out, like Lohmeier, fully support Hegseth’s nomination. In their view, remaking the army for its soldiers—getting rid of spreadsheets and returning to people—is the job of someone who’s served hard tours of duty and knows what battle takes: not a manager, a warrior. If U.S. senators are truly seeking to avoid another incident like Ellsworth, they should take note.