“SO VAST IS the [Department of Defence] and so multifarious are its missions,” wrote Ash Carter, America’s 25th secretary of defence, “that it dwarfs most institutions on Earth.” The Pentagon owns or maintains almost 30m acres of property, he noted, an area larger than Pennsylvania. Its carbon emissions are about 1% of the country’s total. Its annual budget, a little over $800bn, exceeds the GDP of Taiwan, Belgium or Argentina.
On January 14th Pete Hegseth, a Fox News presenter tapped by Mr Trump to be his defence secretary, was grilled by the Senate. Much of the session was about the nominee’s alleged alcohol abuse, sexual assault and opposition to women in combat. But Mr Hegseth also promised to “restore the warrior ethos” to the Pentagon, reform its acquisitions process and deter China. Is he up to those tasks?
The secretary of defence is one of the most powerful individuals in government. The military chain of command runs from the president to the defence secretary and then—skipping the joint chiefs of staff and the heads of the army, navy and air force—on to the commanders who oversee different parts of the world. “It would be very hard for a president to override the advice he was getting from the secretary and the chairman [of the joint chiefs of staff],” noted Dick Cheney, who ran the Pentagon for George H.W. Bush.
Mr Hegseth would not have a role in the nuclear chain of command, which runs directly from the president to nuclear units, though he would expect to be consulted in a crisis. James Mattis, Donald Trump’s first secretary of defence, is said to have slept in gym clothes for fear that the president might order a nuclear strike on North Korea in the middle of the night. “You’re never on vacation, you’re never on leave, you’re always on duty,” noted Caspar Weinberger, Ronald Reagan’s secretary. Mr Cheney recalls riding to work every morning with a CIA briefer in the car and a copy of the president’s daily brief.
The secretary’s next task is to keep America’s vast military enterprise ticking over. Parts of it are out of his hands. The Department of Veterans Affairs spends over $300bn annually. The Department of Energy designs and builds nuclear weapons. But the Pentagon has its own fingers in many pies. The National Security Agency, America’s signals-intelligence service, dwarfs the CIA and reports to the Pentagon. The department employs around 700,000 civilians, around a third of the federal civilian workforce. It contains multitudes: in 2015 it transpired that the Pentagon had spent $84m—more than the defence budget of some small countries—on erectile-dysfunction drugs.
The secretary is not just a commander and manager. He is also a diplomat. “This turned out to be a bigger part of the job than I thought when I went into it,” notes Mr Cheney. “You end up having to spend a fair amount of time dealing with other defence ministers, attending NATO quarterly meetings, doing all of those things.” Lloyd Austin, Joe Biden’s defence secretary, visited Asia a dozen times in four years. In October 2022 it also fell to him to phone Sergei Shoigu, his Russian counterpart, twice in three days, to warn him against using nuclear weapons.
In practice, Mr Hegseth would not have to run all this alone. “I’m gonna hire a lot of smart people to help with this,” he promised the Senate. The Pentagon’s chief operating officer is the deputy secretary of defence. He or she essentially runs the department on a day-to-day basis and organises its budget. Mr Trump has nominated Stephen Feinberg, a billionaire investor, for that role. But even if Mr Hegseth takes no interest in the minutiae of his department, he would need to offer a vision for its shape and direction. “It’s like running a giant aircraft-carrier,” noted Eric Edelman, the Pentagon’s policy chief in 2005-09. “You can’t just make…rapid course changes without having ripple effects throughout the whole organisation.”
Mr Trump’s enthusiasm for using the armed forces for domestic tasks, from border security to suppressing protests, has previously sucked the Pentagon into deeply sensitive matters. Mark Esper, Mr Mattis’s successor, warned the head of America’s national guard that the president might seek to use military forces to help overturn the result of the election in 2020. In Mr Trump’s first term, his several defence secretaries largely acted as a brake on his instincts. At his hearing, Mr Hegseth repeatedly declined to say whether he would obey orders to shoot protesters in the legs, as Mr Trump had suggested.
The lot of the secretary is not always a happy one. Donald Rumsfeld, who served in the job twice, latterly under George W. Bush, compared the department to “one of the last decrepit dictators of the world”, in thrall to central planning. Bob Gates, a former CIA chief who succeeded Rumsfeld, seems to have hated almost every minute of the job, complaining in his memoirs about the Pentagon’s suffocating bureaucracy and the torment of dealing with Congress and the White House.
The magnitude of these responsibilities and the rigours of the job have weighed heavily on office-holders. Robert McNamara, who had excelled at corporate management and reform, demurred when first asked by John F. Kennedy to serve as secretary of defence weeks after becoming president of the Ford Motor Company in 1960. Despite having run one of the most important firms in the world, he thought it would be “a mistake to put a person as inexperienced as I in government in such a position”. Mr Hegseth has no such qualms. ■
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