OPINION: Is the U.S. military too ‘woke’ to win wars? Hardly.

Why does President-elect Donald Trump intend to nominate as his defense secretary Pete Hegseth, a 44-year-old Fox News host and former major in the Army National Guard who has no experience running a vast organization like the Defense Department and who is now embroiled in a sexual assault scandal? (He denies wrongdoing in the 2017 incident, and no police charges were filed.)

At least part of the explanation for the decision can be found in Trump’s desire to purge what he has described as “a woke military that can’t fight or win, as proven in Afghanistan.” In a book published earlier this year, Hegseth wrote: “Our generals are not ready for this moment in history. Not even close. The next president of the United States needs to radically overhaul Pentagon senior leadership to make us ready to defend our nation and defeat our enemies. Lots of people need to be fired.”

These criticisms might resonate with at least a portion of the public fed up with the costly futility of America’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan — and conditioned by relentless right-wing criticism into thinking that the armed forces have been hijacked by social justice activists. Although the military remains one of the most respected institutions in U.S. society, only 60% of those surveyed by Gallup in 2023 expressed confidence in the armed services — the lowest level in more than two decades.

Yet the blame for what went wrong with the post-9/11 wars rests more with politicians than generals. It was America’s political leaders who gave the armed forces the thankless task of transforming Afghanistan and Iraq into Western-style democracies. That was probably a mission impossible, especially given the limited commitment Washington was willing to make in both countries. For example, when President Barack Obama announced in 2009 that he was sending 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan, he also said they would begin coming home within 18 months — a timeline that encouraged the Taliban to wait them out.

The U.S. military, having all but forgotten about counterinsurgency strategy before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, had its share of blunders in the early days of the wars in both Afghanistan and Iraq, but on the whole, military leaders proved resilient and adaptable. This can be seen in the successes of the 2007-2008 U.S. “surge” in Iraq, which brought the country back from the brink of civil war, and of the post-2014 period when U.S. forces supported Kurdish and Iraqi allies to defeat the Islamic State.

Some of the biggest U.S. policy disasters in recent history — such as the rise of the Islamic State after the U.S. pullout from Iraq in 2011 or the collapse of the Kabul government after the U.S. pullout from Afghanistan in 2021 — occurred when presidents disregarded military advice to keep a residual force in each country. It is particularly rich that the Trump transition team is reportedly discussing court-martialing officers involved in the bungled exit from Afghanistan during President Joe Biden’s administration when Trump was the one who negotiated the withdrawal in the first place — and he tried to pull out U.S. troops even earlier, before the end of his first term.

In the course of chronicling the U.S. wars of the past quarter-century, I’ve grown to know and admire many of America’s most distinguished generals and admirals. Based on personal observation, I would say that Gen. David H. Petraeus, Gen. Jim Mattis, the late Gen. Ray Odierno, Gen. Lloyd Austin, Adm. James G. Stavridis, Adm. William H. McRaven, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster and other outstanding military leaders of recent decades are every bit the equal of any group of generals and admirals in U.S. history — and that includes Gens. George S. Patton and Douglas MacArthur, two deeply flawed historical figures whom Trump appears to venerate.

Many of today’s generals had considerable success fighting (as junior officers) in the 1991 Gulf War and (as more senior commanders) in the 2003 invasion of Iraq, and they undoubtedly would have won more victories if they had fought more conventional conflicts. It was their bad luck — and the nation’s — that they were tasked with carrying out messy and unsatisfying counterinsurgencies and nation-building exercises.

But they certainly cannot be accused of putting “wokeness” above combat capability. Mattis, for one, is known for sayings such as “Be polite, be professional, but have a plan to kill everybody you meet.” Trump reviles Mattis as “the world’s most overrated general” not because Mattis is too politically correct but because Mattis resigned as Trump’s defense secretary and publicly criticized his policies.

I have no doubt that some “diversity” training involves trendy academic jargon that can be annoying to participants, and that it can backfire by dividing troops along ethnic or gender lines. But some diversity training is important in a very diverse force full of women and ethnic minorities. It’s important to make the military a welcoming destination for recruits of all backgrounds — not just White men.

Hegseth’s criticisms of affirmative action programs and women in combat assignments will probably make military recruiters’ jobs harder. There is little evidence to suggest, as so many on the right do, that “wokeness” hurts recruitment; internal military surveys show that young people don’t sign up primarily because they view military service as too dangerous and not a good career path.

The extent to which the U.S. armed forces actually engage in diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) training has been vastly exaggerated. Most of the examples of “wokeness” that MAGA activists have dug up occur at the service academies, where students might receive instruction on issues of gender and race, just as their civilian counterparts do. But the military remains a conservative institution focused on deterring and defeating the nation’s enemies — not on promoting critical race theory.

In 2023, Army Sgt. Maj. Michael A. Grinston told the House Armed Services Committee that in basic training, 92 hours were dedicated to rifle marksmanship and only one hour to equal opportunity training, which includes dealing with sexual harassment and sexual assault. Air Force Chief Master Sgt. JoAnne S. Bass testified that her service “does not have pronoun training” and is focused on “warfighting.”

What would really degrade combat readiness is not DEI training but purging the senior officer ranks on political grounds and, as Trump has vowed to do, employing the military for domestic law enforcement tasks such as rounding up undocumented immigrants. Either undertaking would be a major distraction from preparing to fight China, Russia, Iran, North Korea and other potential foes. MAGA politicization is a far bigger threat to the armed forces than “wokeness.”

Max Boot is a Washington Post columnist and a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. A Pulitzer Prize finalist in biography, he is the author, most recently, of the New York Times bestseller “Reagan: His Life and Legend.”

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