A retired army general took Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to task for what he says is an unhelpful focus on “biceps” over “brains” in the military.
In a Sunday interview on Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan, Stanley Allen McChrystal—a former four-star general who served under former President George W. Bush and President Barack Obama—called Hegseth and other White House officials of his ilk a “symptom” of a larger loss of character in America.
“We’ve always had a problem with certain evil in society and corruption, but I think the fact that we see everything so much now that we normalize it,” McChrystal told Brennan. “We start to accept things in celebrities or leaders that frankly things we wouldn’t have accepted even a generation ago. And that’s our problem.”
He added, “Our national leaders are not the cause of the problem. They are the symptom of the problem. The cause is us.”
On the show to promote his new book, On Character: Choices That Define a Life, McChrystal said he is calling on the American people to “take a hard look at character” and demand integrity.
“As a nation, our character is our fate. So what I am trying to do is convince people to start a national conversation on character, with the idea that it starts at the bottom,” said McChrystal. “Not at the top.”
McChrystal said he is “completely aligned with Secretary Hegseth on the idea that we need to defend the nation” He added, “The defense department needs to be as effective as it can be, and that a certain warrior ethos matters.” However, “We just define it differently,” he said.
Asked about Hegseth’s suggesting that diversity, equity and inclusion was at odds with military strength, McChrystal called it a “distraction.”
“In my experience we tend to understand that everybody can contribute—particularly in today’s modern wars,” McChrystal said. “The idea that everybody’s got to look a certain way, got to have biceps of a certain size, there’s got to be a male, straight, all these things, is not my experience.”
At the helm of counter-insurgency strategy in Afghanistan, McChrystal said his team became a “true meritocracy” where “you didn’t care what someone looked like, how old they were, their gender or their sexual orientation.” He added, “Because it was too important to get the job done.”
McChrystal tendered his resignation under Obama in 2010 after a Rolling Stone profile quoted him making critical remarks about his administration.
Although McChrystal said he does not consider himself a Republican or a Democrat, he told Brennan that he voted for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. According to him, drastic changes in the political climate pushed him to get more involved.
McChrystal said, “I just felt that we hit a period that was so adrift as a nation in terms of character, we were accepting something that is not as good as we are capable of.”
