A cult of military superiority over civilians is not only unwarranted, but actively dangerous. By Eliot A. Cohen Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth is again focusing his attention on junior officers and noncommissioned officers. In a speech delivered September 30 at the Marine Corps base in Quantico, Virginia, he invoked a verse he has frequently cited, Isaiah 6:8—And I heard the voice of the Lord, saying: Whom shall I send, And who will go for us? Then I said: Here am I; send me. Understandably, in these remarks he does not quote a rather more applicable previous verse: Then said I: Woe is me! For I am undone; Because I am a man of unclean lips.

Isaiah volunteered for the solitary and dangerous task of reproaching a corrupt court that confused ritual with faith, filled with those who oppress the widow and the orphan, “grind the face of the poor,” and “declare their sin as Sodom, they hide it not.”He was, according to the Talmud, eventually sawed in two by the evil king Manasseh. The eighth-century B.C.E. prophet was not joining a military of well more than 1 million men and women with competitive pay, excellent lifelong benefits, and the right to board an airplane ahead of an 80-year-old grandmother.

Hegseth is a ludicrous figure in many ways—the strutting sycophant who has promised a military with “no fatties, no trannies, no beardos, no weirdos”; the flaunter of push-ups that are performative but out of regs; the grown man stuck at the development level of an angry first lieutenant; the testosterone-obsessed infantry officer who, unlike most of his peers, never managed to earn a Ranger tab. Even so, we should take what he is saying seriously.

Following the Quantico speech, Hegseth spoke to cadets at the U.S. Air Force Academy before the annual Air Force–Navy football game. In what is now his stump speech, he called them “the real one percent” of our society who have “a perspective that 99 percent of Americans do not have.”For 251 years, he said, America has required “the absolute best” to stand up and redeem the rest of us.

It is not only balderdash, but dangerous balderdash. With the greatest possible respect for the work of the all-volunteer military of the past 50 years—with acknowledgment of its hardship, suffering, and loss—the fact is that the armed forces of the United States have fought the country’s most important and difficult wars not with the one percent, but with all the rest of us: the doughboys and the GIs who cheerfully or reluctantly went when called, and who yearned to get the job done, go home, and resume civilian life.

George Washington’s Continentals were vital to winning American independence—but so, too, were the thousands of militia who harried British troops. The Civil War was won with mass armies; the American Expeditionary Force of World War I was filled by soldiers inducted through the Selective Service System, as were the armies of World War II, Korea, and Vietnam. In American history, only our lesser wars were fought exclusively with volunteers, and many of those who fought them were recent immigrants looked down upon by those who got here before them.

In the fall of 1863, Abraham Lincoln contemplated conscription for the Union armies. In his cool appraisal, he noted: At the beginning of the war, and ever since, a variety of motives pressing, some in one direction and some in the other, would be presented to the mind of each man physically fit for a soldier, upon the combined effect of which motives, he would, or would not, voluntarily enter the service. Among these motives would be patriotism, political bias, ambition, personal courage, love of adventure, want of employment, and convenience, or the opposites of some of these.

Just so. People enlist for all kinds of reasons, but not necessarily because they are morally, physically, or mentally the best.

Moreover, the brute fact is that the challenges faced by our professional forces have been different from and smaller than those confronted by America’s previous mass militaries of short-term volunteers and conscripts. Again, with respect and gratitude to today’s American soldiers, the Iraqis, Taliban, and Iranians were lesser opponents than the Wehrmacht, the Korean People’s Army, the Chinese People’s Liberation Army, and the People’s Army of Vietnam.

Against its more recent enemies the United States has brought to bear infinitely superior weapons, an array of allies, and usually greater numbers. It is a far cry from American sailors up against Japanese heavy cruisers and German U-boats; American soldiers staring down the barrel of the 88-millimeter gun on a King Tiger tank from a much-flimsier Sherman or watching bazooka rounds bounce off a T-34; or airmen jousting with Russian-piloted MiG-15s over the Yalu River.

What is even worse than biblical illiteracy and historical ignorance from this product of Princeton and Harvard universities is a project about which he seems to be deadly serious: the cultural isolation of the military. His speeches subtly denigrate the general officer corps and focus on the most impressionable segment of the military, those old enough to have bought into the system but young enough to be naive about its merits.

What Hegseth is saying amounts to this: You are better than 99 percent of your fellow Americans. You are better physically and morally. You are crusaders, and they—particularly the media and the intellectuals—are not only uncomprehending of your merits but ready to subvert you. They are traitors. We want to select you from a specific slice of society: We want socially conservative young men and (very few) women from Liberty University and Hillsdale, not from liberal research universities and colleges. We want you to be isolated on bases from the rest of this corrupt society, which we despise, as should you.

It is profoundly dangerous stuff, the antithesis of what soldiers such as George C. Marshall or Dwight Eisenhower believed, that the soldier is a citizen first, that one cannot adequately defend this society without believing in its values and its essential goodness, that an air of contempt is incompatible with a life of self-abnegation.

A Hegsethian cult of military superiority over civilians is not only unwarranted, but actively dangerous. If allowed to fester, it will breed a military detached from America, poorly educated, and contemptuous of the press and all politicians save those of the Trumpian stripe. The force will be narrowly recruited, unrepresentative of a magnificently diverse country, insular, and obsessed with technical matters. It will resemble nothing so much as the Imperial German Army that led its country to disaster in World War I. That the secretary of defense, himself bearing a crusader tattoo, begins this project by quoting a lonely man of faith is little short of blasphemy.