Retired Army Lt. Col. William Swenson told Newsmax that War Secretary Pete Hegseth’s speech to top military brass on Tuesday shows that the department is embracing a “new paradigm” of holding senior leaders accountable.
“It’s interesting hearing our Department of War discussing an actual return to what we’re supposed to be doing as a country and as a department — war,” Swenson said Tuesday on “Carl Higbie FRONTLINE.”
“We are war fighters and for too long, over the last 20 plus years, we heard too often that we had a right to self-defense. At what time did we ever receive training that said we self-defense our way to victory? We never did.
“We have returned now to a new paradigm where we’re going to hold leaders accountable, we’re going to ensure that our fighting forces are led appropriately, and that those who we fight alongside are ready for the battle.”
Addressing a gathering of 800 admirals and generals at Marine Corps Base Quantico in Virginia, Hegseth said the United States must refocus its military on preparing for war and said that the “era of the Department of Defense is over.”
To that end, Hegseth announced that combat arms standards would be returned to “the highest male standard only.”
Fitness tests will be modeled on the Marine Corps program, and all troops would be required to pass physical and weight checks twice yearly.
Swenson said that in the past two decades, the U.S. flag officer corps “crept away from the meritocracy” and “became more of a survivorship.”
“The lack of ability to risk, the lack of ability to be on the battlefield and try something new that would actually achieve victory, we started to creep away from that after World War II,” he said.
“We’ve seen that continually, time and time again, where in the last 20 years, how many of our battlefield commanders in the flag officer corps were relieved for cause? How many of them were relieved for cause because they were not winning the war?”
At the end of the day, the Pentagon needs to be “curating warriors,” Swenson said, “not bureaucrats” or “functionaries.”
“This is a war fighting industry,” he said.
“Warriors have off-color humor. Warriors don’t necessarily transition seamlessly back into the civilian space. They may never because they are warriors.
“They are a tool that was used by our government to achieve outcomes that very few people can achieve.
We create that class, that warrior class, and when we transition back into civil society, obviously we do need to understand how to operate in a new paradigm, but we’re warriors. We came from that background.”
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