Hegseth’s Dangerous Obsession With Lethality

The “warrior ethos” is no way to run an army.

War Secretary Pete Hegseth. (Photo by Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images.)

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If we wanted to take the goal of pure theory as the actual goal we set, and derive from that the means which we should apply, we would arrive by interactions to the extreme—but this conclusion would be a pure figment of the imagination, produced by a barely visible thread of logical sophistry.

– Carl von Clausewitz

We unleash overwhelming and punishing violence on the enemy. We also don’t fight with stupid rules of engagement. We untie the hands of our warfighters to intimidate, demoralize, hunt, and kill the enemies of our country. No more politically correct and overbearing rules of engagement.

– Pete Hegseth

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In On War, Clausewitz wrote, perhaps too optimistically, that the tendency of war to turn extreme would find its counterweight in the principles of statecraft that abhor such a waste of effort. In Wilhelmine Germany, the army had largely escaped the oversight of any statesman, and its assertions of the necessity of extreme measures and total victory were not seriously questioned. The German army became involved in the systematic killing of civilians in colonial wars not through true military necessity nor because of a discrete political goal, but due to a culture that emphasized ever-increasing violence as a uniform tactic.

Isabel Hull’s book on the military culture of the German Army is titled Absolute Destruction, and traces the consequences of the fixation on this concept through both the Wilhelmine era and the Third Reich. In particular, she traces how the pursuit of absolute destruction as a definition of victory turned into wanton killing of civilians during the Boxer Rebellion and to outright genocide when suppressing colonial rebellions. This drive to the extreme was ineffective and often counterproductive, being not just criminal, but a waste of effort.

Unfortunately, the preoccupation with destruction as a proxy for victory has not remained a matter of history. “Lethality” has long been a buzzword at the Pentagon, but the second Trump administration has elevated it to an obsession. A recent speech by Pete Hegseth in which he presented his vision for how America’s military must change illustrates this.

A Policy of Wanton Destruction

Ideals of “lethality” or “absolute destruction of the enemy” appeal to the same impulse: the desire to destroy the one you hate. But the purpose of war is not destruction; rather, the purpose is to induce your enemy to fulfill your will, to gain something of political value. Clausewitz argues that the only reason the wars of “civilized” nations involve less wanton destruction than those of “uncivilized” ones is because the civilized have developed more effective uses of violence. But Clausewitz was by no means unaware of the ways in which the elemental forces of emotion could affect the conduct of war in all cases. As he wrote, “tensions can exist that make the eruption of war a veritable explosion.” Yet, in civilized nations, this does not give rise to a shapeless mass of primal violence, but rather violence that is molded by the state and civil society towards a political purpose with defined boundaries—based on the intensity of hostile feeling, but also rational interest.

But we are talking here about something rather different from a war over something relatively minor which becomes a vast conflagration. We are talking about the choice of an armed forces or government to insist that extreme conduct in war is itself a means to victory. Clausewitz wrote much on the concept of the extreme in war, but he was concerned with the extremity of effort, of the extent to which a state or people might exert themselves in pursuit of victory. This is entirely distinct from the matter of how “extreme” or indiscriminate the conduct of a war might be. Wanton murder of civilians is not indicative of a higher degree of exertion towards victory. Murder of non-combatants may be more likely in a more passionate, all-encompassing struggle, but it may also be present in a minor skirmish with no serious aims. The decision to engage in violence towards civilians is either a raw, barbarous outburst by individuals, or it is a policy of the state. In either case, it cannot be considered as something belonging to war itself. It is either a personal act or an act of state distinct from the business of war.

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The Wanton Destruction of American Power

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How can this be so? Does Clausewitz not define war as the “continuation of policy by other means”? Clausewitz also describes war as a duel on a larger scale. This image is useful because it demonstrates how it is the interaction between two wills that makes war a phenomenon distinct from the mere application of state power. Violence against the nonresisting is therefore no more war than a man shooting his wife is a duel. To kill civilians is a policy choice. It is also a crime. The mistake of considering it a part of war comes from the fact that it frequently accompanies war. But violence against civilians also includes the act of troops firing into a crowd of protestors, which certainly does not belong to war.

But what is the significance of mistaking an act of policy for part of war, if war is the continuation of policy? Aside from what we have already said about the peculiar nature of war, it must be remembered that war is a means by which policy can be pursued, and so this error confuses means and ends. It disguises a political decision as military necessity to prevent it from being scrutinized on its own terms.

The Golden Calf of Lethality

The “lethality” fetish is one form of this confusion between means and ends. The term lacks any specific or direct meaning in the context of war. At first glance, this may seem surprising, but when we consider that battles are not typically won by exterminating the other side, the relative unimportance of killing per se is more easily explained. The cult of lethality represents the central conviction of the school of thought (if it can be called as much) advanced by Hegseth: that the key to victory is killing people. Reciprocally, defeat (including the defeat in Afghanistan) can be explained by failure to kill enough people. This poor understanding of war on all levels invites immediate comparisons to Stalin’s pithy (but apocryphal) statement that “Death solves all problems—no man, no problem,” and to Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara’s attempt to quantify success in the Vietnam War in terms of body count.

But this must be accounted a serious insult to McNamara, for Hegseth has much more in common with the former; he too cares little for whether the dead are civilians. In fact, the evidence before us suggests that he would prefer some number of civilians were amongst the dead as proof of the lethality with which the “operators” are “operating.” How else might we explain his veneration of those who have deliberately killed civilians? His recent attempt to get the final word and “settle history” by glorifying the criminals of Wounded Knee comes to mind as a particularly pathetic example of this behavior. More notably, Hegseth is secretary of defense for precisely one reason: he spent his time on Fox News during the first Trump administration defending convicted war criminal and alleged (by his comrades) murderer Eddie Gallagher. It was this that gained him the favor of President Trump. Hegseth’s lack of qualifications, lack of competence, and many personal failings were overlooked because he aligned with Trump in believing that implementing a caricature of the warrior aesthetic and targeting civilians is a sure means to victory.

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It’s worth discussing two reasons for why we should consider “lethality” deficient as a goal around which to orient a military. On the tactical level, killing the enemy is a means, not an end in itself. The end is to render him incapable of further resistance, for which purpose non-lethal injuries and surrender are no less suitable. Capturing prisoners in particular is generally superior to having to actually kill the enemy—convincing the enemy to give themselves up rather than sell their lives dearly will invariably be less costly. There is no rationale for giving special prominence to killing, and doing so will inherently obscure the larger goal.

The second count of the weakness of lethality is its unsuitability as a metric on the strategic level. Battles may perhaps be won or lost on the basis of lethality (though I have argued to the contrary) but reducing the question of victory or defeat in war to whether there was enough lethality is plainly absurd. Strategy cannot be reduced to counting corpses. War is a political act, and so success can only be measured by progress towards achieving a political end. To take killing as the purpose of a military is to reduce the enterprise to a cargo cult, imitating behaviors without understanding their purpose.

Idolatry of the “Warfighter”

Another aspect of the Trump-Hegseth vision for reshaping America’s military is that of “returning” to the ideal of the hyper-masculine “warfighter.” The idea that “warrior spirit” is the deciding factor in war is common in history; we see it in machismo, élan, bushido, and general romantic ideals of heroism. We can even see it in Clausewitz’s citation of Napoleon’s claim that “the moral is to the physical as three is to one.”

But from history we also see the impotence of raw courage and aggression in the face of superior organization, strategy, and materiél. The Romans did not lack courage at Cannae, nor the Gauls at Alesia, nor the Japanese on Iwo Jima, nor the Army of Virginia at Gettysburg, but that was far from enough to avoid defeat. We should not find this surprising. As war is the realm of danger, courage is the first military virtue, which allows the others to operate; it is necessary but not sufficient. There is no amount of courage that will protect against starvation or make good a lack of ammunition, so long as the enemy is not himself deficient in courage.

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This gets to the fallacy at the heart of the fetishization of courage: the very fact that courage is essential means that modern militaries are highly adept at instilling it. In a business as deadly as war, the apex of human daring is soon achieved—that is, physical courage, the willingness to risk bodily harm, rather than the more elusive moral courage (for example of a commander to take a dangerous course and assume responsibility for it) which does not necessarily correlate with the first kind of courage.

The development of physical courage therefore runs into sharply diminishing returns. “Warrior spirit” can therefore be no talisman against defeat. In a clash between the brave and the brave, marginally higher courage cannot compensate for deficiencies that come from neglecting all other fundamental parts of war, such as feeding, equipping, and maneuvering masses of people. It is this—not instilling courage—that is the true challenge of the practice of war.

The Crusader for Incompetence

Preoccupation with the aesthetics of the warrior and metrics like lethality are more than mere intellectual errors. With the zeal of an iconoclast, Hegseth has pursued the delusion that these hold the key to victory. The targets of his arson have been the real institutions that are useful for waging war, the unglamorous sinews that appear superfluous to someone who cannot be troubled to think deeply about the business. And this is not to mention the pretextual uses of these concepts to purge certain demographics from America’s military. The preoccupation with “lethality” and “warfighters” is already widespread, even if not in as perverse a magnitude as with Hegseth. The vacuousness of these terms is precisely their appeal. One may gesture at anything approvingly and bluster about its lethality or, just as easily, gesture disapprovingly and criticize its lack of lethality. What is key is not speaking in specifics, so you cannot be subject to any kind of criticism or risk being flatly wrong.

The appeal to the mystical image of the “warfighter” is that it avoids having to discuss war in concrete terms. It sells the attractive myth that, by doing more of the parts of war that look cool and really make you feel like a man, you can actually win wars. Lame, pencil-pusher duties like logistics and map exercises are only around because of political correctness; real warriors spend all their time doing CQB drills and pushups. And let us not forget the importance of killing civilians. Once the warrior ethos is restored and every soldier is as happy to stab POWs as Eddie Gallagher allegedly was, the United States will never lose another war. It is the seductive promise that no serious introspection is needed for victory, only the satisfaction of base tendencies.

It seems almost unfair to contrast these ideas of play-acting at soldiery with the genius of Clausewitz. But we must not forget that war is a serious business. It is easy and good to mock the fact that America has a buffoon for secretary of defense. But the impact of Hegseth and his school of thought will be measured in lives. Sooner or later, someone else will hold his office, but that is no guarantee that we will be free of the influence of these delusions. The only remedy is furthering the understanding of war as a serious affair requiring serious consideration, not the performance of a caricature.

Kiran Pfitzner is a historian of civil-military relations and Clausewitz’s theory of war. He writes on those topics on Substack as @deadcarl.

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