Hegseth Blames Woke Policies for Military Decline at Pentagon

Defense Sec­re­tary Pete Hegseth has long main­tained that the U.S. mil­i­tary bad­ly need­ed a leader with dust on his boots to shake up a force that has gone soft and “woke.” On Tues­day, he faced a room of hun­dreds of gen­er­als and admi­rals, whom he had sum­moned from across the globe, and made the case that he was that leader. Mr. Hegseth’s vision of the mil­i­tary and what it should be was almost entire­ly defined by his 12 months of ser­vice in Iraq and his expe­ri­ence as a major in the Army Nation­al Guard. Much of his address focused on the kinds of issues he would have dealt with as a young pla­toon leader in the 101st Air­borne Divi­sion in Iraq or as a com­pa­ny com­man­der in the Guard. He talked about groom­ing stan­dards. “No more beards, long hair, super­fi­cial, indi­vid­ual expres­sion,” he told the brass.

Read more: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/30/us/politics/hegseth-military-officers.html

Key Points

• Sec­re­tary Hegseth told assem­bled gen­er­als and admi­rals that much of their expe­ri­ence had been cor­rupt­ed by decades of decay inflict­ed on the mil­i­tary by woke polit­i­cal and mil­i­tary leaders.
• The defense sec­re­tary main­tained, with­out pre­sent­ing evi­dence, that stan­dards had been low­ered across the force over the past decade to meet arbi­trary racial and gen­der quotas.
• Hegseth stat­ed that one of his pri­ma­ry tasks has been to sep­a­rate offi­cers who were gen­uine­ly invest­ed in changes that weak­ened the force from those who were grudg­ing­ly fol­low­ing law­ful orders.
• The sec­re­tary seemed to divide senior lead­ers into two cat­e­gories, telling the offi­cers that they were either the “woke” or the “war fight­ers,” with most in the room falling into the lat­ter category.

“Woke” as Scapegoat: How the Global National Conservative Alliance Weaponizes Culture Wars

The con­cept of “wok­ism” has become a ral­ly­ing point for the emer­gent Glob­al Nation­al Con­ser­v­a­tive Alliance, link­ing Amer­i­can MAGA fig­ures, Euro­pean far-right lead­ers, and Russ­ian strate­gists through shared oppo­si­tion to pro­gres­sive iden­ti­ty pol­i­tics. Stripped of its orig­i­nal mean­ing as alert­ness to racial injus­tices, the term has been weaponized to attack mar­gin­al­ized com­mu­ni­ties and under­mine basic human rights. At CPAC Hun­gary 2023, Vik­tor Orbán likened lib­er­al­ism to a “virus” threat­en­ing tra­di­tion­al soci­ety while Don­ald Trump dis­missed the “woke and weaponized gov­ern­ment,” with atten­dees unit­ing around shared hos­til­i­ty to lib­er­al­ism, mul­ti­cul­tur­al­ism, and LGBTQ+ rights.

Russ­ian influ­ence oper­a­tions have active­ly ampli­fied anti-woke pop­ulists through­out Europe. In Roma­ni­a’s elec­tion, ultra­na­tion­al­ist can­di­date George Simion employed anti-woke mes­sag­ing while ben­e­fit­ing from Russ­ian-linked dis­in­for­ma­tion, with for­mer US Ambas­sador Adri­an Zuck­er­man call­ing this “a thin veil to hide Putin’s author­i­tar­i­an play­book.” Russ­ian bil­lion­aire Kon­stan­tin Mal­ofeyev cel­e­brat­ed Simion’s vic­to­ry, prais­ing “Ortho­dox Roma­nia” for reject­ing “glob­al­ists.” Ger­man far-right politi­cians pre­dict “woke pol­i­tics” will deep­en crises, while for­mer intel­li­gence chief Hans-Georg Maaßen called Hun­gary a “bul­wark” against Europe “over­run by woke ideology.”

The anti-woke cru­sade serves as uni­fy­ing ide­ol­o­gy and strate­gic deflec­tion, sup­port­ed by insti­tu­tion­al infra­struc­ture. Turn­ing Point USA has built a net­work across Amer­i­can cam­pus­es pro­mot­ing anti-woke ide­ol­o­gy through tools like the “Pro­fes­sor Watch­list.” Tul­si Gab­bard left Democ­rats over “cow­ard­ly wok­e­ness,” while Orbán called cur­rent chal­lenges mere “dis­trac­tions” from “demog­ra­phy, migra­tion and gen­der,” divert­ing atten­tion from Hun­gary’s record infla­tion. Ger­many’s AfD out­lined plans to polar­ize debate between itself and the “woke left,” cre­at­ing divi­sions “com­pa­ra­ble to the sit­u­a­tion in the U.S.” to break down polit­i­cal fire­walls, with CPAC Budapest serv­ing as a key plat­form unit­ing this transat­lantic alliance.

Exter­nal References:
• Fron­tiers: Bat­tle­ground Europe: the rise of anti-woke move­ments and their threat to democracy
• CNN: Analy­sis: The ‘anti-woke’ cru­sade has come to Europe. Its effects could be chilling
• Carnegie Endow­ment for Inter­na­tion­al Peace: The Euro­pean Rad­i­cal Right in the Age of Trump 2.0

Dis­claimer:
The Glob­al Influ­ence Oper­a­tions Report (GIOR) uti­lizes AI through­out the post­ing process, includ­ing the gen­er­a­tion of sum­maries for news items, intro­duc­tions, key points, and, often, the “con­text” sec­tion. We rec­om­mend ver­i­fy­ing all infor­ma­tion before use. Addi­tion­al­ly, all images are gen­er­at­ed using AI and are intend­ed sole­ly for illus­tra­tive pur­pos­es. While they rep­re­sent the events or indi­vid­u­als dis­cussed, they should not be inter­pret­ed as real-world photography.