Senate Republicans are getting wobbly on the nomination of Pete Hegseth, a decorated former Army officer who served in combat in Afghanistan and Iraq, a longtime veterans advocate, and a graduate of Harvard University and Princeton University. President-elect Donald Trump has won the most sweeping Electoral College mandate for a Republican in more than 30 years. Yet, some red-state senators think they have better judgment than the most popular and transformative Republican figure of the modern era. They’re wrong.

Hegseth did not spend his life climbing the political ladder of the Department of Defense bureaucracy, and that is why the DOD swamp (or, as President Dwight D. Eisenhower called it, the military-industrial complex) is freaking out over his nomination. Hegseth isn’t a general (all too often a politician with stars) whose livelihood depends upon a revolving door of lucrative military contracts. He is an outsider who is committed to fundamental reform of the Department of Defense by returning the world’s most fearsome fighting force back to its core mission of winning on the battlefield and projecting competence and strength around the world to protect our country’s safety and security interests.