This question – frankly pertinent and simultaneously impertinent – would stymie our American generals and those who lead them into harm's way, and more commonly, down dead end streets, over the cliffs of insanity, and into fire swamps.  Like former President Joe Biden, they Simply. Don't. Know.

Obviously, this one question needs to be answered, and constitutionally explained by the Secretary of "War."  It's the least we can ask of the young man.

Then, I would imagine that, given Secretary Hedgseth is the MAGA man in the Pentagon, he will give the following short speech.

Thank you all for coming. I hope you packed your sh!%.

Putting America First means means change for the Pentagon. Some of you may have noticed that you haven't won a war in 80 years. And yet, except for the ever-expanding trillions that pad your budgets and enrich you in retirement, not much has gotten better in the warfighting arena in those 80 years.  Instead of an industrial capacity that allowed ramped-up production and innovation like the last time Congress declared war, we now have a far less industrial economy, and a changed demography.  Fewer people are engaged in the kind of work that makes the kind of war you think you are conducting possible.  The US economy today produces 43% of the globe's weapons – and yet the nation does not profit!  US-made weapons today are, as a rule, temperamental, expensive, inelegant, designed by committees and dreamed up by politicians in and out of uniform.  What you call war is just another business, and you are pretty rotten businessmen.

You're adapting as fast as you can, but your pace is somewhere between glacial and geologic. What's worse, the main thing you're adapting to is the loss of actual Americans willing to fight and pay for your undeclared yet heavily justified wars. Most of you have never read Catch-22, and yet is it amazing how so many of you were actually in the novel!  The undeclared, unpopular, idiotic, expensive, horrendously led and managed, objective-free and poorly fought wars you all have spent your careers extending and nurturing must end.  Today is that day.

The brighter among you have noticed that the President changes his mind and his focus a dozen times a day. But have you noticed that we are no longer the MacDaddy of the planet, war pimps for dollars, respected for our military and diplomatic prowess? Your real daddies are David Petraeus and Keith Kellogg, and the last thing on their mind is putting America's security first.  Your handmaidens for future war, at home and abroad, are Alex Karp and contractor operated propaganda management.   That's not innovation, that's a defense department that has forgotten what defending actually is.