What Pete Hegseth and his warfighters learned about Washington

Back in 2010, there was no more respected warfighter and general beloved by his men than Stanley McChrystal, commander of US forces in Afghanistan. Bob Gates once called him “the finest warrior and leader of men in combat I ever met.” He was also a man of the people, uncomfortable around the fat and happy elites of the foreign policy and national security world. As the late reporter Michael Hastings wrote in his profile for Rolling Stone, McChrystal’s favorite beer is Bud Light Lime, his favorite movie Talladega Nights, and dismissed fancy restaurants with candles on the table as “too Gucci”.

It was that notorious article that proved to be McChrystal’s undoing and led directly to him offering his resignation to President Barack Obama. Much of it wasn’t driven by quotes from the general himself, but Hastings’s reporting on the opinions and attitudes of McChrystal’s staff. It was a collection not of political hacks, but largely made up of incredibly accomplished and experienced operators, who he was so personally loyal to that he invited them along on the night of his 33rd wedding anniversary to an Irish bar in Paris:

The general’s staff is a handpicked collection of killers, spies, geniuses, patriots, political operators and outright maniacs. There’s a former head of British Special Forces, two Navy Seals, an Afghan Special Forces commando, a lawyer, two fighter pilots and at least two dozen combat veterans and counterinsurgency experts. They jokingly refer to themselves as Team America, taking the name from the South Park-esque send-up of military cluelessness, and they pride themselves on their can-do attitude and their disdain for authority…

By midnight at Kitty O’Shea’s, much of Team America is completely shitfaced. Two officers do an Irish jig mixed with steps from a traditional Afghan wedding dance, while McChrystal’s top advisors lock arms and sing a slurred song of their own invention. “Afghanistan!” they bellow. “Afghanistan!” They call it their Afghanistan song. 

McChrystal steps away from the circle, observing his team. “All these men,” he tells me. “I’d die for them. And they’d die for me.”

When Hastings’s piece hit the newsstands, it went off like a M18A1 Claymore. The quotes about then-Vice President Joe Biden and the rest of the Obama Afghanistan team, collected from a mixed group of McChrystal’s closest circle, was an eye-opening glimpse into the general’s mindset about the idiocy of Washington elites. It proved too much even for a warfighter and terrorist hunter of his stature to survive.

There is a similar character to what’s currently going on at the Pentagon, where Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s staff has gone through a round of backstabbing and accusations, leading to the dismissal of some of the SecDef’s closest aides. It’s a lesson about the dangers of personal loyalty winning out over the needed skillset for the job of turning a ship as big as the Pentagon. Such things aren’t changed easily, particularly by people who don’t know how to play the inside game effectively.

This second Trump administration is full of figures who combine personal loyalty with a natural and well-honed capacity for public communication. But for them to succeed, they need to be surrounded and supported by people who have much more to offer than loyalty. It’s the roles underneath these principals where policy will be made and applied – the same space where competing staffers and the existing bureaucracy will seek constantly to leak, undermine and climb up the daily chaos ladder.

Other tranches of the Trump administration would be wise to see this and learn from it. The DoD team may have a surplus of military bros who come across as crass and unprofessional, but that’s little different from a DoGE team of incredibly accomplished people whose brilliant minds also make it difficult to see the human side of their work as something more than just moving around so many cogs. It’s not enough to be on the team, which these dismissed aides insist they still are. You also have to be good at your job – a job which currently requires a completely different set of skills than the ones used on the battlefield or in Silicon Valley. 

Economist Steven Levitt has a line that comes to mind: “Just because you’re great at something doesn’t mean you’re good at everything.” Being excellent at engineering or operations can make you a billionaire or a badass. No matter how impressive the background, it doesn’t automatically grant you the necessary knowledge to navigate the swamps of Washington. That requires people who possess a different set of skills, and finding them soon could be the difference between success and failure for the government reform mission of this administration.