When President Donald Trump changed the name of the Department of Defense to the Department of War last year, many saw it as merely a branding exercise, but as the fierceness of Operation Epic Fury in Iran has shown us, it was much, much more than that.
On Easter Sunday, our military pulled off a daring rescue of a downed airman behind enemy lines, and what it made clear, once again, is that Trump’s Department of War is run by soldiers, not by experts, and the results are phenomenal.
As Secretary of War and former frontline veteran Pete Hegseth has put it many times, his Pentagon will focus on “maximum lethality, not tepid legality.”
Put another way, what is the point of having the biggest, deadliest, most powerful military in the world if every bad actor across the globe knows America is too feckless to use it?
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Thus far, when you compare the stunning success of our military operations in Venezuela, as well as the shock and awe leveled across Iran, with Joe Biden’s staggeringly stupid and tragic Afghanistan withdrawal, the difference isn’t just night and day, and it’s not just winning and losing, but life and death.
Since the end of the Cold War, the United States has essentially assumed that it can easily win any knockdown, drag-out military confrontation, so the question has too often been about winning the peace, not winning the wars.
This has almost always meant being less aggressive and using less fighting force in the hopes of not creating more people across the globe who dislike America, but Pete Hegseth understands that is not his job.
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Hegseth’s attitude is that when the bell rings, we pummel our enemies like a young Mike Tyson until the bell rings again; we don’t hold them up for a few rounds to put on a good show for NATO and the United Nations.
Another thing that Hegseth instinctively understands as a soldier’s soldier is that the best way to avoid endless wars is to win them quickly, decisively and, as President Trump has put it, unconditionally.
This willingness to use extreme measures is something that should give Iran’s leadership — those still breathing, anyway — great pause as we approach Tuesday’s 8 p.m. deadline for Iran to give in or face massive destruction.
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On Sunday, Trump posted to Truth Social, “Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the F—–’ Strait, you crazy b——-, or you’ll be living in Hell — JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah. President DONALD J. TRUMP.”
Liberals all over the country shrieked in agony and called for Trump’s removal, claiming that attacking infrastructure is a war crime, even though attacking infrastructure — or, if you want to be fancy, “disrupting the enemy’s interior lines” — is as natural to warfare as chipping is to golf.
Carl von Clausewitz was an early-19th-century Prussian officer whose book “On War” is considered the birth of modern military tactics. In it, he writes this in regard to what defeating your enemy means:
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“What do we mean by the defeat of the enemy? Simply the destruction of his forces, whether by death, injury, or any other means — either completely or enough to make him stop fighting.”
This is the Hegseth, soldier-first, expert-last style of war; it is not a forever slog in which houses of diplomatic cards are carefully constructed. It is not a style that would allow our naval forces to be captured and humiliated by Iran, as happened under Barack Obama.
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No, under Hegseth’s Department of War, our downed serviceman this week was not bartered for; he was rescued by a military that blew up anyone who tried to get in its way.
No wonder recruitment and morale are soaring. Young men and women joining the military under this Department of War know they are neither diplomatic pawns nor guinea pigs in woke social engineering experiments; they are warriors.
Whatever the ultimate outcome in Iran, one thing is already certain: no nation on Earth, no foe, can assume, as they did under the Department of Defense, that the U.S. military will simply block punches without landing any.
After decades of civilian experts and mild-mannered generals giving America a kinder and gentler military, warfighting is back, and whether the United States of America is loved around the world or not, it absolutely will be feared.
