Garrett Graff writes:

Ahead of his book launch next month, I interviewed Jasper Craven last week for Long Lead’s newsletter, Depth Perception. Jasper has made a career out of what he describes, dryly, as “veterans’ issues in the age of forever wars,” but much of his beat turns out to provide insight into what I called “a sprawling crisis in masculinity that’s fueling an interconnected toxic stew of misogyny, internet culture, gambling, and violence.” His beat is where the Venn Diagram of toxic masculinity and the military overlap.

I’ve known and respected Jasper and his reporting for years, and in our conversation put words to something that I think is incredibly important and under-covered in this moment — how and why Pete Hegseth is corrupting the US military and remaking the Pentagon with all the anger of a frustrated mid-level officer from the “GWOT,” the Global War on Terror that dominated the first two decades of this century.

In particular, Hegseth as secretary of defense has moved quickly to remake the military as more white and more male. He cleaned out the upper ranks of the military of women and Blacks — firing the first black man to lead a service branch, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen. C.Q. Brown, and the first woman to serve as the Chief of Naval Operations, Adm. Lisa Franchetti. (As you may remember, at the same time, DHS similarly fired Adm. Linda Fagan, the commandant of the Coast Guard — and then Kristi Noem stole her house.)

Hegseth didn’t hide his reasoning. As he said on a podcast before his confirmation, “Any general that was involved — any general, admiral, whatever — that was involved in any of the [diversity, equity and inclusion] woke shit has got to go.”

The moves left the US military without a single woman at a four-star rank; today, all nine of the Joint Chiefs are white males — overseeing a roughly 1.3 million-strong military that is about twenty percent female and 43 percent people of color.

In doing so, Hegseth rolled back some of the amazing accomplishments that have come in this generation as the leadership ranks of the military, the institution in American life that most looks like America itself, finally begin to reflect the makeup of the force at large. We forget how the integrated military was one of the biggest landmarks of civil rights in US history, and how long and hard women have fought to be accepted in an institution that has done much to discourage them over the years.

Yet rather than viewing the advancement of minorities and women as a success, Pete Hegseth believes they’re the cause of institutional rot.

Jasper explained in our conversation how the idea of “DEI” in the military has become such a bugaboo on the right — and how, in particular, “DEI” has developed into its own mythology about why we “lost” the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

As Jasper sees it, understanding the centrality of DEI today requires rewinding to the years after Vietnam, when the US right developed a mythology about the “left behind” POW/MIAs in Vietnam. “One of the main ‘coping mechanisms’ after America’s loss in Vietnam by a certain class of reactionary politicians and certain Vietnam veterans was to find some way to scapegoat the loss and preserve the country’s prestige. The POW/MIA movement emerged to basically conjure this myth that America didn’t basically go hard enough in Vietnam — that we should have stayed there longer, that all these spineless politicians didn’t properly support the troops, [and that they] didn’t even bother to recover many of who remained imprisoned by America’s enemies,” Jasper told me. [Continue reading…]