Why Pete and why now?
It's a question many Senators are currently asking themselves as they decide whether they will vote to confirm my colleague and friend, Pete Hegseth, to the role President-elect Donald Trump has nominated him for: our next Secretary of Defense.
My answer to that question spans two decades of violence, from September 11, 2001 through the fall of Afghanistan on August 15, 2021. My answer includes the death of no less than 7,054 U.S. service members and countless more severely injured like me. It includes billions of dollars of tax payer money wasted on unnecessary gear and troop movements. My answer is anything but short, but if I had to say it in one sentence, it would be this one: Pete Hegseth has seen and felt the price of a war fought for too long, with barely a defined mission, and with too few held accountable for its failure.
Pete fought my wars and I his. And he knows better than any general the follies that cost us precious life and treasure.
The coming-of-age story for my and Pete's American generation—late Gen X, early millennials—starts on a small TV screen that my football coach turned on while we were lifting weights, half asleep, one early morning. On it, we watched a plane commanding the attention of all the world as it flew straight and steady into a tall building, erupting into flames and causing the audible gasp of the TV hosts. Of course, this was the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, and it defined a generation of young men.
Four years later, I remember looking down at my feet perfectly aligned with yellow footprints painted on the pavement at Marine Corps Recruit Depot Paris Island. I remember seeing my combat boots tromping though "moon dust" in the scorching heat of Iraq in 2007. And finally, I remember lying on my back looking down my body where my feet used to be, shortly after they were explosively removed from my body by an IED on a battlefield in Afghanistan in 2010.
The support we felt coming home revealed a country that had healed from the fractures of the Vietnam War era, when soldiers were spit on for fighting a war they were forced into. Our generation of fighters reset the patriotism this country had lost. When we look back at our 20-year war against radical Islamic terrorists, it may be that restoring our nation's affection for our service men and women is the only true ground we gained, though it's ground that's being challenged every day by radicals who hate this country.
That's the answer to why Pete: Because as we wrap up four years of wandering in the wilderness with failed DEI policies and declining standards under the leadership of a Biden administration, our generals are social justice warriors more focused on how they're received by the liberal press than how lethal our warriors can be. They're more focused on telling "their story" in books than improving the strategy and tactics we use to crush our enemies.
In this moment more than ever, we need someone leading the Pentagon who has fresh memories of our long, exhaustive, unfruitful, and misguided wars. We need someone with steady hands and a thoughtful mind. Someone in tune with the challenges we face in military readiness—which include recruiting, morale, and a systemic void of leadership. We need someone who has stood in the arena and withstood the battles of slander and politics and has come out as stalwart in his mission as ever before.
Why Pete? Because we need a leader who has more of the warriors' perspective than the war college's endorsement.
I have spent the last five years working alongside Pete at Fox News Media. I've joked that I am earning a living filling in for Pete Hegseth. But the truth is, most of that time, I was learning from him. In an industry rife with guarded, self-interested "talent," Pete could have seen me, a fellow veteran who came into media through a similar path, as competition, or even a hinderance to his own goals. Instead, as any leader would, he welcomed me, opened doors for me, and mentored me as not just a "news anchor" but as someone with the solemn responsibility to represent our generation of warfighters and their legitimate concerns.
In my years of experience working alongside him and eventually calling him a friend, I observed a person who lived by a powerful creed: Treat people with respect, let your work ethic speak for you, and never forget who you are and what got you here.
I've seen Pete fight to highlight the "Modern Warriors" perspective on TV and in books. He broke open the scandalous treatment of veterans in the VA. He traveled to the middle east and Israel to help us all understand the conflicts that drew us into war after 9/11 and the threats that may remain.
In seeing the dramatic downward spiral of military recruitment, Pete went out of his way to cover things like the Best Ranger Competition at Fort Benning, the Navy SEAL Swim in NYC, and many other events and stories that would hopefully inspire the next generation to pick up the mantle and defend our country. That's why Pete: Because I have a 15 year old son who may want to defend this country, and he deserves better than what we have left for him.
Many of the attacks on Pete are unfounded, thinly-veiled partisan mudslinging, unserious and without merit. But some have questioned his experience and qualification. To these, I simply ask, how can we justify continuing to promote generals who can't claim any victories to even higher positions of power? How does a General who cut his teeth in Vietnam lead our military into the next wave of armed conflicts? How does that reflect the price we, the OIF/OEF generation, paid in blood?
In my eight years of active duty service, I saw firsthand the fraud, waste, and abuse that plagues our government at large and especially our "unauditable" Department of Defense. I watched wave upon wave of new radio systems, detection devices, uniforms, and reinvented vehicles. I witnessed the Osprey debacle and the F-35 money pit. I heard time and time again the adage "use it or lose it" referring to carelessly expending ammo and explosives to justify the same allotment the next fiscal year.
How do we entrust meaningful reform to the men and women who built this culture of ineffective and wasteful warfighting?
That's why Pete.
After the loss of so much life, and the mutilation of so many young American warriors in Iraq and Afghanistan, we need now more than ever a military leader who has a boots on the ground perspective, who knows by face and name the cost of war and has a personal motive to ensure we are as lethal and deliberate as possible before we commit ourselves to another conflict.
War is raging in Europe and across the Middle East today. American troops are stationed in and adjacent to those countries engaged in battle. We have big choices to make on how we prepare and potentially enter the next fight.
As a Marine who's given two legs and a decade of my life to defend this country that I love with all my heart and soul, and, as a dad of a teenage boy who may very well raise his right hand to defend us, I encourage every sitting United States Senator to confirm President Trump's pick for Secretary of Defense, my friend, former colleague, and fellow combat veteran Pete Hegseth.
Joey Jones is a Fox News contributor and a United States veteran.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
English (US) ·