As anyone who has watched any of his high-octane performances in the Pentagon briefing room could attest, there are three main things War Secretary Pete Hegseth wants Americans to know about the war in Iran: We are winning decisively, this is not a quagmire, and most of the media are lying to you.
“A dishonest and anti-Trump press will stop at nothing to downplay progress, amplify every cost, and call into question every step,” Hegseth fumed at reporters sitting in front of him at a March 19 morning briefing, many of whom were hand-picked for their perceived loyalty to the MAGA agenda.
“Sadly, TDS [Trump Derangement Syndrome] is in their DNA. They want President Trump to fail,” he lamented.
In Hegseth’s rosy view of the war one month in, nothing serious has gone wrong, and victory has been glorious and complete, as should be obvious to any “hardworking, taxpaying, God-fearing American patriot.”
“The media here, not all of it, but much of it, wants you to think … that we’re somehow spinning toward an endless abyss, or a forever war, or a quagmire,” he said. “Nothing could be further from the truth.”
To watch Hegseth share the podium with Gen. Dan Caine, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, is to witness a tableau of fire and ice.
Hegseth is the fiery preacher evangelizing to a room full of sinners who he thinks should worship President Donald Trump as much as he does.
“The world, the Middle East, our ungrateful allies in Europe, even segments of our own press, should be saying one thing to President Trump: Thank you. Thank you for the courage to stop this terror state.”
Caine, by contrast, is the very model of a modern American general: cool, steady, measured, honest, and assiduously apolitical.
For all his media savvy, Hegseth is quick to take offense when questioned about things he’s unwilling or unable to answer.
Early on, when an NBC reporter asked whether Trump’s four-week timeline for the war was accurate, Hegseth dismissed it as a “typical NBC sort of got-you type question.”
When the news media gave prominent coverage to the deaths of six soldiers in a forward headquarters in Kuwait that was unprotected from overhead drones, Hegseth blasted the news for playing it up.
“It’s front-page news. I get it,” Hegseth groused. “The press only wants to make the president look bad.”
When asked why the U.S. military failed to plan adequately to keep the Strait of Hormuz open to commercial shipping, Hegseth bristled at the question. “We planned for it,” he said.
When CNN ran a story headlined, “Reports that the Trump administration underestimated the Iran war’s impact on the Strait of Hormuz,” Hegseth called it “fake news” and “patently ridiculous.”
“This is always what [the Iranians] do, hold the strait hostage. CNN doesn’t think we thought of that,” Hegseth complained while adding as an aside, “The sooner David Ellison takes over that network, the better.”
Ellison, being the CEO of Paramount, which is acquiring CNN’s parent company, Warner Bros. Discovery, has close ties to Trump.
One thing Hegseth has not attempted to hide is contempt for the media’s traditional role as watchdog.
Despite his time as a Fox News host, Hegseth prefers a lapdog press corps, which takes his pronouncements at face value.
Hegseth has been picking fights with reporters since he first arrived at the Pentagon last year, and just lost a lawsuit by the New York Times, which challenged his restrictions against reporters “soliciting” information that has not been specifically authorized for release.
“To state the obvious, obtaining and attempting to obtain information is what journalists do,” U.S. District Judge Paul Friedman wrote in his ruling striking down Hegseth’s policy as an unconstitutional infringement of the First Amendment.
And the judge found that “undisputed evidence reflects the policy’s true purpose and practical effect: to weed out disfavored journalists — those who were not, in the Department’s view, ‘on board and willing to serve — and replace them with news entities that are.”
In retaliation for the ruling, the Pentagon revoked all unescorted access to the Pentagon by all reporters, friend or foe.
Trump admires and encourages Hegseth’s pugnacious persona and routinely praises his combativeness.
But even Trump has admitted the U.S. greatly underestimated Iran’s willingness to widen the war by attacking its Gulf neighbors. “Unexpectedly, they started sending missiles to the UAE, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, and elsewhere,” Trump said at a White House event before turning to Hegseth.
“Were you equally surprised by that, Pete?”
“Way more than we thought, Mr. President,” Hegseth had to agree.
Hegseth spends a lot of his public time selling the war as “one for the history books.”
“Never has a modern military been so rapidly and historically obliterated, defeated from Day One with overwhelming firepower.”
Despite Hegseth railing about “Democrats rooting against the country,” virtually no Democrat or military analyst or expert has disputed the spectacular tactical success of the joint U.S. — Israeli military campaign, which has destroyed a record 15,000 targets in less than a month.
What defense reporters and military strategists question is whether those impressive battlefield gains will translate into achieving Trump’s political goals, which, in addition to ending Iran’s nuclear program, now also include breaking Iran’s control of the Strait of Hormuz, and getting Iran to stop firing missiles and drones at U.S allies in the region.
“What we’re seeing is a situation where targetry never makes up for a lack of strategy,” former Defense Secretary retired Gen. Jim Mattis said in a recent interview with MS Now. “There have been significant military successes, but they are not matched by strategic outcomes.”
Compared to Mattis, a legendary Marine Corps commander, Hegseth is largely seen in military circles as a featherweight — all hair gel, skinny suits, and bumper sticker bromides.
Hegseth relishes talking about “killing bad guys,” giving “no quarter, no mercy for our enemies.”
“It is not a fair fight. We are punching them while they’re down, which is exactly how it should be,” he said at one briefing.
“We have a president of the United States that when he sends his war fighters out to fight, he unties their hands to actually go out and close with and destroy the enemy as viciously as possible from moment one,” Hegseth boasted. “We negotiate with bombs.”
That kind of theatrical bravado can land with the troops, who may feel they can relate to someone more like them, but it doesn’t sit well with some retired commanders.
“I’m disappointed by the current atmosphere that is communicated from the top,” retired Gen. Stanley McChrystal said in a recent New York Times podcast. “I had the honor and opportunity to serve with some of the most elite forces, people who really did some extraordinary things, but they didn’t beat their chest about it.”
“They weren’t braggadocious. That’s just not the way they behaved,” said McChrystal, a former Joint Special Operations Commander. “The danger of some of that verbiage now is that much of the force is 18 years old, and it’s influenceable. They see that, and they go, ‘Wow, that’s the way we ought to think. That’s the way we ought to be. We are superior.’”
The other problem with Hegseth’s and Trump’s constant refrain of “we are winning,” or in Trump’s case, “we have won,” is that it ignores all the lessons on the limits of airpower from past wars.
“We again fell for the seduction that if we bomb key targets, we will produce the outcome we want,” McChrystal said, “but we may be at a point where we’ve run into a country that has an extraordinary capacity to be bombed.”
And even though Iran’s stocks of missiles and drones have been severely degraded, McChrystal notes it only takes a handful to spook shippers in the Persian Gulf.
“So, they can have an effect with a fairly low level of effectiveness.”
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Hegseth’s answer to critics of how the war is going is simple: This time is different.
“To the media outlets and political Left screaming ‘endless wars,’ stop. This is not Iraq. This is not endless. I was there for both. Our generation knows better, and so does this president.”
Jamie McIntyre (@jamiejmcintyre) is the Washington Examiner‘s senior writer on national security.
