Hegseth is memeing us into a quagmire

Any historian will tell you that propaganda is part of warfare. One can see plenty of cartoons from World War II that made the Japanese look subhuman including Superman shorts. As a kid, I remember t-shirt makers using “The Simpsons” to make light of Desert Storm and Saddam Hussein. As a young man after 9/11 I was convinced that the perpetrators were simpletons who lived in caves. Whether we have won the war, lost it, or finagled our way out of losing it, the same themes emerged. Our enemy is subhuman and brutal might is the way to beat them.

Except they aren’t and it isn’t. And Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth is playing into the same trap with potentially even worse consequences. The war in Iran has been won, but evidently, we still need to fight it. Iran has been vanquished, but we still need to spend a billion dollars a day to fight them. Iran’s navy has been decimated, even though no one expected them to be a threat. Their air force has been defeated although they have been flying antiquated jets from Top Gun.

Even more concerning is the fact Hegseth is selling us on metrics to convince us that Iran can’t fight back. Relying on quantitative observations either alone or as a primary metric is known as the McNamara fallacy. Robert McNamara, Defense secretary in the 1960s, relied on body counts and ordinance to sell that the war in Vietnam was going well. Donald Rumsfeld, Defense secretary during the Iraq War, fell into the same trap when trying to convince Americans that Iraq was not a quagmire. You would think that at some point we would learn our lessons.

I mean, George Lucas was panned for having teddy bears fight the Empire and writing a story line about blockading trade routes. And yet, the enemy we minimize and write off are continuing to launch drones and missiles across an entire region and have severely crippled the world economy with a blockade. Hegseth’s response to this was laughable. “The only thing prohibiting transit in the straits right now is Iran shooting at shipping,” he said.

Now can the U.S. end this blockade? One can assume so. Will it be easy? Only a fool would assume that. But Hegseth seems to want to sell the American public that this war has been nothing but easy while underselling his lack of preparation, foresight, experience, and education. Like many Marines, the Six Ps were drilled into my skull.

Proper Planning Prevents Piss Poor Performance. It is obvious that our military has trained well for the bombing raids, missile strikes and drone interceptions. It is more obvious that Hegseth didn’t do any planning on a higher level. Maybe war college would have taught him a thing or too that would have come in handy with this war. Maybe he should have accounted for the Strait of Hormuz being blocked off, or even simpler the regime not capitulating after one day.

Hegseth should have realized after serving in the “War on Terror” that there is no easy victory. But that was always the problem and a reason he never advanced higher. Some veterans failed to understand the psychology, the resolve, the discipline, the history, or the humanity of the enemy. Maybe Hegseth should have read more “woke” books at Harvard and Princeton. Instead, veterans like him latch on to the notion that we need to bomb more, kill more, and push those body count metrics higher.

Hegseth has already engaged in talk that shows this might be a possibility. Iranians, especially the diaspora in the U.S., should be worried. Hegseth mocked ordinary Iranians “that think they are going to live.” This is common among a few veterans. There are veterans who think we didn’t kill enough Iraqi, Afghans, or civilians which is why those conflicts didn’t go well. We had too many rules of engagement and too many restrictions on fighting those wars.

Of course, they ignore the common knowledge that when you bomb and kill people, they will be less likely to think of you as the good guys. We saw it in Vietnam, we saw it with President Obama’s drone strikes, we saw it in the bombing of a girls school in Iran.

Hegseth has fallen victim to his own inexperience and it is showing. His default response to a continuing conflict is to repeat the same lies as his boss that the war is over, won, or done and to meme his emotions to the world. We live in a world where we have gone from political cartoons as propaganda to social media memes.

Anyone who views those memes will get the same message. That we are bombing our way to victory, our enemies are helpless and subhuman, that we are winning with “lethality.” Anyone who buys into this notion (and there are many that have) might be in for a rude awakening. Iran’s regime has been planning this war for almost five decades. Hegseth planned it for a week. Maybe we need less memes and more planning.

Jos Joseph is a recipient of the Military Reporters and Editors award for Best Commentary / Opinion. A graduate of Harvard and Ohio State, he is a Marine veteran who served in Iraq. He currently lives in Anaheim, Calif.

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