A laudable hallmark of Donald Trump’s first presidency was “Promises made, promises kept.” With his selection of my friend, Pete Hegseth, to be the next Secretary of Defense, he seems set to deliver on one of his most important pledges in the 2024 campaign. Think of it as “Make America’s Military Great Again.”

While Pete is best known as a popular host on Fox News, he is also a decorated combat veteran and a longtime champion of a strong national security posture and the veterans who have sacrificed so much to protect us. 

He is also the author of, among other terrific books, The War on Warriors: Behind the Betrayal of the Men Who Keep Us Free. It’s a powerful indictment of what has been done, as Barack Obama would say, to “fundamentally transform” the U.S. armed forces. 

The list includes using ideological purges, mandatory vaccinations and political commissars to remove patriots from the ranks and indoctrinate and suppress those who remain for believing the military must be a color-blind, merit-based institution rooted in and defending traditional American values – not intentionally and toxically divisive cultural Marxist norms.

President Trump pledged publicly in the course of the campaign to replace senior officers who went along with this so-called “Woke” agenda. He reportedly will put into place a commission of retired senior officers to review the records of all three- and four-star generals and admirals and recommend the immediate retirement of the many who have, as Pete put it, betrayed the men who keep us free.

At a moment when the world is an extremely dangerous place, there is no more pressing mission – and Trumpian promise to be kept – than restoring our national practice of “peace through strength.” Pete Hegseth is the man our next President has brilliantly selected to lead it and the new Republican Senate can’t get him to work soon enough! 

This is Frank Gaffney.