Hegseth's Two Pentagon Projects: Culture and Autonomy
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth says he is fundamentally reshaping the culture of the U.S. military. By PBS NewsHour's account, that means removing senior officers, dismantling diversity initiatives, and putting new emphasis on religious faith and what he calls a warrior ethos. Alongside the personnel and culture fight, PBS reports he is accelerating autonomous weapons and other emerging technologies — a second track of change that has less to do with who serves than with what does the fighting.
AI-generated discussion · Different perspectives
The two projects pull in different directions. A warrior ethos puts the human fighter at the centre of the story; autonomous weapons quietly take humans out of the fight.
They can still coexist. A military can celebrate the human warfighter in its rhetoric while buying more machines to spare that warfighter from risk. The culture message and the procurement message don't have to agree.