Or perhaps more amazing to me was selected over all these people.

My decades of voting proxies for defense contractors tells me a lot of those flag rank officers are looking at a cush gig on the Board of one of those companies, to pedal his influence.

Hegseth already had a cush gig, running his mouth on Fox Noise.

As noted earlier, I could get behind a lot of what he said in that speech. I suspect, however, that the result will be using those broad principles to establish de facto racist/sexist policies. His PQ standards virtually eliminate women from any combat role, but, I can see a point. If you're wounded, and need a lot of help getting to relative safety, your mate needs to be able to lift your 6'2", 210lb self. No matter how much a 140lb woman may want to help, nearly give herself a stroke trying to help, you may both end up laying in the mud, because, short of loading up on testosterone, like a bodybuilder, the average fit woman, is going to have trouble lifting someone over 200lbs.

The most obvious likely result is a lilly white military. Besides the women and black men Hegseth has relieved of command over the last 8 months, there was one white, male, of note: Vice Chief of Staff of the Air Force Gen. Jim Slife, a white man, who was regarded as favoring DEI policies. The Google net sifter mentions a memo Slife wrote, as relevant to the sudden end of his career: Comments on racism: Slife himself had drawn criticism from Republicans for a 2020 memo in which he addressed institutional racism in the military, stating, "We'd be naive to think issues of institutional racism and unconscious bias don't affect us". Like in the Soviet Union, in Shinyland, bad things don't exist, if you prohibit talking about them.

Hegseth said, in an interview, in November 24:

“First of all, you’ve got to fire the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs,” Hegseth said in November on the Shawn Ryan Show podcast, shortly before Trump picked him to lead the Pentagon. “But any general that was involved—general, admiral, whatever—that was involved in any of the DEI woke s— has got to go. Either you’re in for warfighting, and that’s it. That’s the only litmus test we care about.”

airandspaceforces.com - Brown generals fired trump

With that anti-DEI bias, every other officer, who promotes anyone other than a white, Christian, man, will open himself up to cries of "DEI" by some butt-hurt white guy, who was passed over, and find himself on the absolute bottom of the promotion list, or separated. In effect, Hegseth will be the sort of toxic commander, keeping everyone walking on egg-shells, lest some white guy be offended, that he criticized in his speech.

So, if you eliminate the women, and POCs, and those not PQ, the US is going to have a pretty small military. Anyone up for a return of the draft?

Steve....HBTT