The TV Host Who Went to War

The people who told you he couldn’t do the job owe you an explanation.

On January 24 of last year, the Senate voted 50–50 on the nomination for Pete Hegseth to serve as our Secretary of Defense. Vice President JD Vance cast the tiebreaking vote, while Lisa Murkowski, Susan Collins, and Mitch McConnell and every Democrat voted no.

Speaking as a conduit for establishment consensus, McConnell wrote that Hegseth “failed, as yet, to demonstrate that he will pass this test.” The desire to be a “change agent” was “not enough” to run an organization of three million personnel with a trillion-dollar budget. Senator Chris Murphy called Hegseth “dangerously and woefully unqualified” and Senator Tammy Duckworth said he lacked “the qualifications, the breadth of knowledge or the moral fiber to lead the greatest military on the face of the earth.”

Mattis had been confirmed 98–1 and Lloyd Austin was confirmed 93–2.

Hegseth had never managed an organization larger than a hundred people and his largest budget had been $16 million. He was a Fox News weekend host, a culture warrior who railed against the “woke military.” He was, according to many a serious person in Washington, fundamentally unserious.

Thirteen months later, we can evaluate that against his record.

Operation Absolute Resolve

In the early morning darkness on January 3, operators from the U.S. Army’s Delta Force and 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment converged on downtown Caracas. Their target was Nicolás Maduro, longtime enemy of both President Trump and the United States, indicted by the U.S. Department of Justice on charges of narco-terrorism and drug trafficking.

Operation Absolute Resolve had been planned and prepared for several months. A CIA team had been operating inside Venezuela, tracking Maduro’s movements through a source who had infiltrated his inner circle, building a picture of his habits. The extraction force had rehearsed a raid countless times on a full-scale replica of Maduro’s compound. Once ready, a massive air package of F-22s, F-35s, F/A-18s, EA-18G Growlers, B-1 bombers, E-2 Hawkeyes, and drones suppressed Venezuelan air defenses across the country while the assault force targeted the Presidential palace.

With Chinese diplomats just a few rooms over, Maduro was black-bagged before he could reach his safe room. His wife later told interrogators heard aircraft outside just minutes before American forces breached the compound. Thirty two Cuban commandos from Maduro’s personal security detail were discombobulated and killed. Maduro and his wife were transported to the USS Iwo Jima, then to Guantanamo Bay, and finally to New York, where they were arraigned in Manhattan federal court. “I am the president of Venezuela, I consider myself a prisoner of war.” Maduro said before a judge. No Americans were killed.

The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff described the operation: “We think, we develop, we train, we rehearse, we debrief, we rehearse again and again, not to get it right, but to ensure that we cannot get it wrong.” Hegseth, speaking to sailors aboard the USS John F. Kennedy two days later, called it “the most sophisticated, most complicated and most successful joint special operations raid of all time.”

It is hard to argue with that. The Maduro operation required seamless coordination across special operations, air and naval power, intelligence agencies, and federal law enforcement executed against a defended target in a hostile capital, at night, with minimal American casualties. Maduro famously said, “Come and get me. I will be waiting at Miraflores!” Sec. Hegseth got him.

The same man that Mitch McConnell said had not demonstrated the capacity to pass the test.

Arsenal of Freedom

If the Maduro raid was the most visible achievement, the acquisition reform agenda may prove to be the most ambitious.

On November 7, 2025, Hegseth delivered a speech at the National War College titled “The Arsenal of Freedom.” The first several minutes of his address were taken nearly verbatim from a speech Donald Rumsfeld had given the day before the world changed and the acquisition reform agenda was shelved indefinitely, September 10th 2001. Every Secretary of Defense for a generation has promised to fix the Pentagon’s broken procurement system and none have come close to succeeding.

It takes the Department of War, on average, years to move a technology from concept to delivery. The process is dominated by a handful of massive prime contractors operating with limited competition. Urgent wartime needs have historically required going around the official process entirely. As Hegseth said: “We shouldn’t have to go outside the process to make it work.”

He scrapped the Defense Acquisition System and replaced it with a new one, the Warfighting Acquisition System, focused on speed. He eliminated the Joint Capability Integration and Development System requirements process, created Portfolio Acquisition Executives to replace program executive officers, mandated commercial-first procurement, and restructured foreign military sales by moving the Defense Security Cooperation Agency from the policy office to the acquisition office. He launched the BOND initiative which embedded over a hundred executives, including seventy-two former CEOs and COOs from companies like Apple, Microsoft, Ford, and Tesla, directly into government.

The Aerospace Industries Association called it “an ambitious, long-needed overhaul.” The U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s Defense and Aerospace Council praised the removal of barriers that “have, for too long, slowed innovation.” Applied Intuition, a defense-tech startup, called it “the most important step” the Pentagon could take to accelerate capability delivery. Axios reported that few Pentagon actions in recent memory had drawn such uniform praise across stakeholders in military industry.

The Arsenal of Freedom tour that followed was the opposite of his Quantico rally weeks earlier. An ambitious technical roadmap for how America builds and buys weapons with no culture war overtones. And virtually no mainstream media coverage relative to the bench press videos, or the tattoos.

Iran

And now, as of this writing, the United States is waging a comprehensive military campaign against Iran’s military infrastructure, with overwhelming operational success though details are still emerging. Under Hegseth’s leadership, the Department of War is simultaneously managing a complex campaign in the Middle East, helping to oversee a transition in Venezuela, and spearheading a generational overhaul of its own bureaucracy.

This is, by any measure, extraordinary for a department that is supposedly being run by an unqualified Fox News personality.

The Credibility Gap

So how did the people who evaluate these things get it so wrong?

The assumption that credentials predict competence. By the resume metrics that Washington uses to evaluate fitness for office, he was manifestly unqualified.

But credentialism tells you what someone has done, not what they can do. And the track record of credentialed defense secretaries is, to put it mildly, mixed. The resumes behind America’s most catastrophic military failures would pass Sen. McConnell’s test.

Hegseth’s predecessor Lloyd Austin was confirmed 93–2 and was the embodiment of bipartisan respectability. He was also responsible for the catastrophic withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021, a crisis of competence that left thirteen American soldiers dead, stranded our citizens in a hostile country, and left an arsenal of billions of dollars in military equipment behind as a gift for the Taliban. It was, by nearly universal assessment, the worst American military humiliation in a generation.

Then, in January 2024, Lloyd Austin was covertly hospitalized for health complications due to prostate cancer surgery. He did not inform the President of the United States. He did not inform the his deputy secretaries or the National Security Council. The man at the head of the chain of command for the most powerful fighting force in human history was in the intensive care unit for days before the White House even knew he was there, and Biden did not learn of the cancer diagnosis for more than a week. This happened while the U.S. was actively weighing military strikes in the Middle East.

In the terms that matter, military success, the two figures are incomparable.

Granted, Hegseth has not played nice with the media. The “warrior ethos” rhetoric, bench press videos, the campaign against transgender troops, and renaming of the department are all irresistible provocations to mainstream media and Democrat lawmakers. The Signalgate scandal, in which he shared sensitive operational details over Signal hours before military strikes were executed, was low hanging fruit.

But the volume of coverage of the cultural and stylistic material created a trap. Having committed early to the narrative that Hegseth was unserious, critics could not pivot when this was emphatically and continuously disproven. The Arsenal of Freedom speech was covered in defense trade publications and largely ignored by prestige media. The operational planning behind the Maduro raid required months of quiet, competent coordination that didn’t fit the picture of Hegseth as a drunk idiot. The Iran campaign is being covered as a foreign policy story, with Hegseth’s role as the head of the orchestrating department barely acknowledged.

Institutional self-interest is also at play. Hegseth’s acquisition reforms are explicitly designed to break the power of incumbent stakeholders. The foreign policy establishment’s objection to Hegseth was never purely about his qualifications, it was clearly also about the fact that he threatens their structural position.

A Real Verdict

On January 24, 2025, Mitch McConnell said the desire to be a change agent was not enough. Thirteen months later, the guy he refused to endorse has a record more impressive than nearly any Secretary of Defense in recent memory by the only metric that should matter—performance.

The questions to ask are all simple: did the operations succeed, is his agenda substantive, and is the department more capable than when he arrived? The establishment has refused to ask these questions. It focuses on credentials and has substituted cultural objections for analytical ones when the credentialing argument proved insufficient.

A Fox News host went to war and the people who told you he couldn’t do it were wrong because they mistook their own discomfort for the national interest. This is a teaching moment and it should concern anyone who relies on establishment judgment to understand what is actually happening with the American government.