The Pentagon sits there across from Washington D.C. on the Potomac River like…well, I’m something of a master of metaphor, and I can’t think of a single thing that it’s like. Its design is said to have been influenced by the location President Roosevelt initially picked for its site. The site was changed, but they kept the shape, in part because it resembled defensive forts constructed to repel sieges during the age of muzzle-loading cannons.
The Pentagon contains some 3.7 million square feet of floor space, including 17.5 miles of corridors, all of it surrounding a 5.1 acre central courtyard, also pentagonal in shape. About 25,000 military and civilian people work in the Pentagon, with about 3,000 people who work in support jobs such as kitchens, cleaning, and maintenance.
Driving past it, or from the air, it doesn’t look that big. But when you walk up to the Pentagon on the ground, the immensity of the place hits you. There are only five above-ground floors, and two basement levels, but it seems bigger than it is. The place fairly buzzes with employees in and out of uniform. Walking into the Pentagon is a singular experience. You immediately feel like an outsider, because you are. Everyone in the building walks and looks like they are on a mission, because they are. The feeling that the whole place is filled with serious business is unavoidable. People walk quickly from place to place. There are ramps between the floors, instead of elevators or stairs, so they can move more efficiently and easily around the building.
The Pentagon was constructed over 16 months just before and during World War II. Because steel was in demand for weapons manufacture, the Pentagon was built with reinforced concrete, using sand dredged from the Potomac. An Indiana limestone façade was put on later. Because of the pressure of preparation for and fighting the war, the five sections of the building were constructed one by one, each of them occupied the moment they were finished.
The Pentagon fairly reeks of very serious missions and money. It’s the place where the nearly one trillion dollar defense budget is planned, put together, and spent. In every year of every administration, Democratic or Republican, pledges are made to bring the defense budget under control, to make the military more efficient and more lethal, and to increase the fighting power of our military.
Serious people have tried to do just that. Robert McNamara was hired away from Ford Motor Company to come to the Pentagon to bring the management and planning and efficiency systems he had developed for Ford during the 1950’s and apply them to the Pentagon as Secretary of Defense. He brought the concept of “systems analysis” to the military. It was a method of breaking down complex problems to their component parts so that the problems could each be understood and undertaken in a more efficient manner. The civilians McNamara brought with him into the Pentagon were known as the “Whiz Kids” because of their propensity to break everything down to numbers that could be added and subtracted and multiplied and divided so that budgets could be managed more efficiently.
McNamara proceeded to oversee our disastrous involvement in the war in Vietnam. The idea of counting the bodies of dead Vietnamese as a measure of success in a war that nearly everyone, beginning with the soldiers on the ground, could see that we were losing, was McNamara’s.
George W. Bush brought Donald Rumsfeld to the Pentagon as his Secretary of Defense. Rumsfeld had already been secretary once, under Gerald Ford, so he was thought to have the kind of expertise at running the hugely unwieldy defense establishment that Bush wanted. The list of Rumsfeld’s previous accomplishments and jobs is so long, it would take pages and pages to list them.
Briefly, he had a political life as a four-term congressman, as a representative to NATO, as White House chief of staff, and a business life as chairman and CEO of two major pharmaceutical companies. He also served at various times as an envoy to the Middle East, and on several high-level commissions such as the National Economic Commission and the National Commission on Public Service and on a commission to analyze the threat of ballistic missiles to the United States.
In short, Donald Rumsfeld was a very busy man with an enormous portfolio. In the Bush administration, Rumsfeld oversaw our disastrous invasion of Iraq for no legitimate reason, and he decided to accomplish the invasion with less than a third of the number of troops the generals in the Pentagon told him they needed. Questioned at the beginning of the war by a soldier who wanted to know why he had been riding around in Humvees with canvas sides and roofs that could easily be destroyed with great loss of life by improvised explosive devices (IEDs), Rumsfeld answered, “You go to war with the army you have, not the army you want.”
Nearly 4,500 soldiers were killed in Iraq, and nearly 33,000 were wounded because the United States military was so unprepared for the insurgency that followed our invasion of that country. Rumsfeld left his Pentagon position in 2006 with the war unfinished and on its way to the kind of ignominious pull-out we ended up with in Vietnam.
Into the building of the Pentagon, into the job of Secretary of Defense, soon to oversee nearly three million men and women in uniform and hundreds of thousands more in civilian defense jobs comes Pete Hegseth, a graduate of Princeton and the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard who served in the National Guard in Iraq and Afghanistan and attained the rank of Major. Since then, he ran briefly for Senate in Minnesota, chaired a conservative veterans group, got involved in politics as a supporter of Donald Trump, and became a Fox News commentator who has appeared on the weekend version of Fox and Friends, among other hosting jobs. He has also written several books for a conservative publisher.
That’s it.
Hegseth has been widely criticized as massively unprepared for the job of Secretary of Defense because he has never run anything bigger than a conservative non-profit and a conservative political action committee that spent less than half the money it raised on candidates it supported.
I remember when my father worked in the Pentagon during the McNamara years. He and his compatriots were not only dismissive of McNamara and his “whiz kids,” they hated them. I have friends who worked as civilians in the Pentagon during the Rumsfeld years. They hated Rumsfeld. Soldiers I got to know in Iraq and Afghanistan hated Rumsfeld for the slap-dash way he got the military into those wars and his dismissive attitude about the fact that they were un-prepared and not adequately equipped for either war. With all the hundreds of billions of dollars in the defense budget, soldiers fighting in Iraq in December of 2003 were still wearing summer uniforms because Rumsfeld and his whiz kid, Paul Wolfowitz, didn’t think the war, which began in March of that year, would last that long.
I can tell you one thing about soldiers and other service members who serve in uniform. In general, they don’t like the civilians who are in charge of what they do and how they do it. There are many reasons for this – uniforms issued for hot weather still being worn in freezing weather is just one. But it goes deeper than that. Soldiers in uniform don’t like decisions that affect them being made for political reasons. That includes wars that were started wrongfully for political reasons, fought wrongfully for political reasons (see also: the body count), and personnel decisions affecting uniformed soldiers for political reasons.
McNamara and Rumsfeld were said to be hugely qualified to be Secretary of Defense. Look what they did, and what happened to them. Hegseth is just barely qualified to sit at one end of the Fox and Friends couch – he would have been sitting on that couch on weekday mornings if Fox thought he was good enough, but they consigned him to the media desert of weekend mornings.
But let’s not hold this against Pete Hegseth. Who knows? Maybe he’ll sweep into the Pentagon and make brilliant decisions about the F-35 fighter program that has consumed billions while providing us with a fighter jet that does not perform the way it was designed and advertised to perform. Maybe Pete Hegseth, who is said to be a fundamentalist Christian nationalist and would like it if the Bible was used as a textbook for the way we run our government, will wake up one morning and go to the Pentagon and look at all those stony faces that pass him in its corridors and decide that he is in way over his head, and unlike McNamara and Rumsfeld, who stayed in their jobs until failure forced them out, he will resign and go back to the couch at Fox and Friends.
And maybe kittens will bark, and pigs will fly.
Right now, in a rather large building on the Potomac River, tens of thousands of men and women are steeling themselves for what is coming their way. They have steeled themselves before when incompetence and political hackdom came through their doors. The building, and the people who work in it, have been around for decades. They survived one Trump administration. I’m sure plans are being made, without the use of systems analysis, to survive another.
We will soon see how things work out at the Pentagon for a man who has a history of appointing cronies and hacks and people he likes from seeing them on teevee to positions of power. “Competence” and “expertise” and “brilliance” didn’t accomplish much before. Now we will see how toadying does.
Lucian K. Truscott IV, a graduate of West Point, has had a 50-year career as a journalist, novelist, and screenwriter. He has covered Watergate, the Stonewall riots, and wars in Lebanon, Iraq, and Afghanistan. He is also the author of five bestselling novels. You can subscribe to his daily columns at luciantruscott.substack.com and follow him on Twitter @LucianKTruscott and on Facebook at Lucian K. Truscott IV.
Reprinted with permission from Lucian Truscott.
