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The Idealistic Volunteer
Long before President Trump chose him to lead the U.S. military, Pete Hegseth described the moral calling that had compelled him to volunteer to serve in Iraq .
He was working on Wall Street in the summer of 2005 when he read an article about an insurgent who blew himself up, killing 18 Iraqi children. “To me, that was the face of evil,” Hegseth told The Princeton Alumni Weekly. “That sent to me a signal that I need to do my part not to let that ideology win in Iraq” .
He deployed to the war-torn city of Samarra a short time later, driven by a sense of moral purpose and a belief in America’s mission to bring stability to a troubled region .
The Transformation
Today, Hegseth describes the mission animating the war in Iran—now in its second week—in starkly different terms. Instead of justice, U.S. forces are pursuing vengeance against an implacable foe. “Their war on Americans has become our retribution,” he vowed .
At a Pentagon briefing, he promised to unleash “death and destruction from the sky all day long,” adding: “This was never meant to be a fair fight, and it is not a fair fight. We are punching them while they’re down, which is exactly how it should be” .
His rhetoric reflects a deeper ideological shift. For decades, presidents and their defense secretaries have framed American military interventions in altruistic terms—U.S. troops as liberators bringing democracy and freedom. Hegseth has largely dispensed with that talk .
In his view, the U.S. military’s strength is not rooted in its high ideals, humanity or moral purpose, but rather its ability to punish adversaries. Anything that distracts from that singular mission, he has said, is weakness .
🇮🇶 What Changed in Iraq
Soldiers who served with Hegseth say the transformation was driven by a string of military deployments—to Guantánamo Bay, Iraq, and Afghanistan—that each taught him a new lesson in military dysfunction .
In Iraq, Hegseth’s company faced impossible decisions. Soldiers described conflicting orders: military lawyers warned they could not shoot at Iraqis unless actively targeted, while brigade leadership told them at times to fire on nearly any military-age male .
“It was a nightmare for the soldier on the ground,” said Eric Geressy, the first sergeant in Hegseth’s company. “You have conflicting orders, rules that changed constantly and no clear guidance from headquarters” .
Soldiers in his own infantry company in 2006 had shot civilians, executed prisoners and tried to cover up the crimes. After his deployment, Hegseth called those acts “atrocities” and said plainly: “Of course that’s wrong. No one is here to defend that” .
But by the end of his Army career, he was repeatedly doing exactly the opposite—portraying troops charged with war crimes as “heroes” and claiming the military was “throwing warriors under the bus” .
Rejecting ‘Nation-Building Quagmires’
At a March 1 press briefing as the Iran war began, Hegseth vowed there would be “no democracy-building quagmire” and “no politically correct wars” .
“This is not Iraq!” he insisted. “We fight to win and we don’t waste time or lives” .
He has repeatedly called for a relaxation of laws and codes of conduct that he argues unduly restrain soldiers, saying he wants to prioritize “maximum lethality, not tepid legality” . In his 2024 book, he wrote that he told soldiers under his command in Iraq to ignore legal advice about when they were permitted to kill enemy combatants .
The Debate Over His Approach
Critics argue Hegseth’s bellicose rhetoric serves only to undermine the solemnity expected of a defense secretary during wartime. The Washington Examiner noted that his “childish bluster” does a disservice to his credibility and to the Department of War .
Janessa Goldbeck, a Marine Corps veteran and CEO of Vet Voice Foundation, called Hegseth “a very dangerous person” and a “white Christian nationalist” with “the arsenal of the United States government at his disposal” .
But Hegseth’s defenders note he is a decorated veteran with two Bronze Stars, the Combat Infantryman Badge, and multiple deployments . His views, they argue, reflect a disillusionment shared by many post-9/11 service members about how the military was used in endless wars with unclear objectives .
What the Transformation Means
Mathew Golsteyn, a former Green Beret whose murder charges were dropped after Hegseth championed his case, explained the shift: “He’s a product of these broken wars, and pretty much our whole generation feels the same way. The military leadership sent us repeatedly into a hornets’ nest with no plan. They gave us an impossible job, then blamed us when things went wrong” .
For Hegseth, the lesson was clear: lofty moral goals and restrictive rules of engagement led to American defeat in Iraq and Afghanistan. In the Iran war, he is determined to avoid the same mistakes—even if it means dispensing with the altruistic language that once inspired him to volunteer in the first place.
