
Hegseth Can Make The Pentagon Great Again By Ending The Defense Contractor Gravy Train
Making the Department of Defense great again starts with making the habit of trading senior military honors for dollars shameful
Amid the Democrat senatorial clown show of Tuesday’s secretary of defense confirmation hearings, one confrontation between Pete Hegseth and Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., resonated particularly strongly with me as a retired Army officer.
It was when Warren challenged Hegseth with his past writings that “generals should be banned from working for the defense industry for 10 years.” Warren tried to put Hegseth in a twist by asserting that he would not follow his own rule, but Hegseth defused the situation masterfully by replying, “I’m not a general, senator.”
Laughter ensued, but this exchange had me thinking deeply about one of the primary issues I believe plagues the Department of Defense in 2025, that being the revolving door between our military’s senior ranks and the military-industrial complex.
It is generally understood that one of Hegseth’s biggest challenges will be to unwind the most pernicious effects of the military-industrial complex, from cost overruns, to decades-long delays in weapons development, to reliance on in-theater contractor support, to mismatches between requirements and capabilities, to every other vice of the world of defense acquisition. Hegseth faces the Herculean task of cleaning out the Augean Stables at the Pentagon, but there is also a little-known and related cultural paradigm Hegseth must shatter if he is to succeed in this arena.
My personal experiences inform this analysis. I retired from the Army as a full colonel. My career was a mix of peacetime and wartime assignments, often in tactical units that deployed to Afghanistan and Iraq, but also serving repeatedly in the fearsome budget wars of the Pentagon and Congress. After an incredibly fulfilling military career, I decided I wanted to move in an entirely different direction, and I went to law school after retirement, becoming a corporate lawyer (I know, what was I thinking?!). I left the military and the defense industry completely behind me and never looked back. Nevertheless, I had many friends who stayed in service and made flag rank, and I kept in touch with most of them.