Posting # 39. The Story of “Warriors”(Part II)

Part I of this posting appeared on Wednesday, March 26. Here’s the story and my take on it that appeared in that first posting. What follows as Part II is the “So what?” answer to why this story matters.

The Story: Since the Global War on Terrorism began in 2001, the US armed forces have deliberately referred to its servicemembers as “warriors,” not soldiers, airmen, marines, or sailors. This alternate and ubiquitous naming, Americans come to understand, is a harmless way to depict servicemembers as active, not passive, and as the ultimate patriots. Though with the “Warrior Games” the entire Defense Department has embraced the word, the US Army especially has replaced “servicemember” or “soldier” with “warrior.” There are: hoped-for “Warrior Restaurants” (aka “chow halls”); “Best Warrior Competitions” in the active-duty, National Guard, and among units stationed in Europe; the “Wounded Warrior Project,” whose aim is to support wounded servicemembers returning from the American wars in Afghanistan and Iraq; the “Warrior Transition Command,” dedicated to overseeing the medical care of returning servicemembers; the US Army “Warrior Ethos,” which reads: I will always place the mission first; I will never accept defeat. I will never quit. I will never leave a fallen comrade; and finally, The Soldier’s Creed, whose first and last of thirteen lines reads “I am an American Soldier” while another two lines—the second, “I am a warrior and a member of a team,” and eighth, “I am disciplined, physically and mentally tough, trained and proficient in my warrior tasks and drills”—suggest warrior and soldier are synonymous. Meanwhile, the Air Force, Marine Corps, Space Force, and US Navy all have their own “warrior ethos.” The Coast Guard alone has only an ethos and not a warrior one. And the new Trump administration threatens a “Warrior Board” to “remove officers unfit for leadership.”

My take on the story: Rather than being a harmless semantical difference intended to entice potential servicemembers with promises of warrior derring-do, this re-naming instead is substantially dangerous to the nation. “Warrior” is a floating signifier, meaning it can be given multiple meanings that vary across time and space. While in the most recent iteration the stark difference between “warrior” and “soldier/airman/marine/sailor” has been minimized and “warrior” is used to emphasize the patriotism and courage of those who serve, the peril of the word has reached its peak recently, with the Trump resignification of “warrior” and his administration’s subsequent politicization of the US Military.

SO WHAT?

The current temporary occupant of the Oval Office and his temporary Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, use “warrior” in a way that not only connotes its resignification as benign and normal but simultaneously condones the commission of war crimes.

This use of “warrior” is dangerous not only for those against whom the US wars, but also for all residents of the United States: servicemembers, immigrants, people of color, women, and Americans writ large.

Who is Pete Hegseth and why is he dangerous as the new Secretary of Defense?

On June 4, 2024, before he was nominated by Trump and confirmed by the Senate to be the Secretary of Defense, Fox and Friends Weekend co-host Pete Hegseth published a book entitled The War on Warriors: Behind the Betrayal of the Men Who Keep Us Free. In the book, Hegseth makes clear that he thinks “the military has been undermined by feckless civilian leaders and foolish brass” whose policies are trying to “neuter our fighting forces,” who in all respects “are normal men, looking to be heroes and not victims.” That Hegseth does not want women serving in the armed forces is obvious. What is most interesting, though, is that Hegseth also confesses that the working title for his book was “Battle for the American Military,” not The War on Warriors. What this means is that his publisher—Broadside Books, a conservative imprint of HarperCollins—altered the title to appeal to the broadest audience possible. After more than two decades of “servicemember” or “soldier” being supplanted with “warrior,” the word had been normalized for an American audience. And so that word became central to Hegseth’s book’s title.

Hegseth apparently has embraced the word, promising during his swearing-in ceremony that he would “revive the warrior ethos and restore trust in our military.” “We are American warriors,” Pete Hegseth said. “We will defend our country.”

But Hegseth and Trump both seem to support the connotation of “warrior” that leads to war crimes.

Before Hegseth was nominated by Trump to be the Secretary of Defense and when he was a Fox News presenter during Trump’s first term, he lobbied Trump to pardon two servicemembers who had been found by the military justice system to be guilty or accused of war crimes and to restore the rank of a petty officer who had been demoted for committing war crimes. Trump did so. This act reveals both men’s true colors.

Why is Trump as the Commander-in-Chief dangerous?

In numerous ways, Trump revealed his colors in his first term. Even though he had previously mocked servicemembers, all indications are that Trump became aware of the popular, supposedly benign meaning being given to “warrior” and began to use it himself, sometimes implicitly and sometimes explicitly.

The examples below demonstrate how Trump increasingly uses “warrior” less for military servicemembers and more to paint violence as a virtue, even if “warrior” means committing war crimes.

· On November 15, 2019, then-President Trump granted full pardons to two US Army officers found guilty of war crimes and restored the rank of a US Navy SEAL who was acquitted but demoted after having been tried for committing war crimes. Though all three had been tried by the military justice system, Trump intervened politically by overriding that system’s decision, stating that “when our soldiers have to fight for our country, I want to give them the confidence to fight.”

In short, American “warriors” should not be hampered by pesky Rules of Engagement or international law. They should be “confident” to kill, rape, and pillage at will, regardless of the circumstances and without accountability.

· On February 19, 2020, during the anniversary celebration of the Battle of Iwo Jima and Medal-of-Honor-awarding ceremony, then-President Trump used the anachronistic “warrior” to describe World War II recipients of the Medal. “In the long record of American heroism in combat, few episodes capture the indomitable will and the stouthearted spirit of the American warrior better than the triumphs on the island of Iwo Jima in early 1945.”

Note that Trump uses “warrior” to describe other people, not himself, and continues to normalize using “warrior” by using it when (during World War II) it would not have been used.

· On May 6, 2020, when around the world tens of thousands of people were dying from Covid and 85K Americans had died, when the US had 30% of the world’s cases though making up only 4.4% of the world’s population, when the US economy was at a standstill under quarantine and unemployment was soaring, then-President Trump called himself a “wartime president.” In that same month, he referred to healthcare workers as “warriors,” and finally, desperate to open the US economy, called all Americans “warriors": “And I’m actually calling now … the nation warriors. We have to be warriors. We can’t keep our country closed down for years. And we have to do something.”

Note that with “we,” Trump uses “warrior” to describe other people AND himself while he urges action, any action whatsoever, with “we have to do something.”

· On December 23, 2020, Trump pardoned four private military contractors who in 2007 were working in Iraq for Blackwater and were found guilty of killing without cause 14 Iraqi civilians (including two children and two women) and wounding 17 others. (Blackwater was founded by Erik Prince, the brother of Trump’s Education Secretary, Nancy DeVos. Prince has since proposed to the Trump administration a $25B program “to carry out mass deportations through a network of ‘processing camps’ on military bases, a private fleet of 100 planes, and a ‘small army’ of private citizens empowered to make arrests.”)

Following Trump’s pardon, “A statement from the White House said that the four, all military veterans, had ‘a long history of service to the nation,’ arguing the move reflected broad public sentiment in the US.”

That the Blackwater private military contractors had been US military “warriors” at one point seemed to matter most in Trump’s pardoning, as though being a veteran excuses all behaviors, even those that are criminal and privately committed.

· On January 6, 2021, for 60 minutes, Trump spoke to a crowd assembled on the Ellipse. On that day, the members of Congress were convening to certify the election that Trump had lost. The so-called “speech” was a litany of his beefs with the “China virus,” the Supreme Court, Hilary Clinton, Stacey Abrams, Brian Kemp, Bill Barr, Liz Cheney, illegitimate voting in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Georgia, Arizona, Nevada, and Michigan, and “tech monopolies.” Throughout the talk Trump used rhetoric about fighting and strength, but one comment—"And we fight. We fight like hell. And if you don't fight like hell, you're not going to have a country anymore” has been held up as his inciting the subsequent insurrection.

Trump’s single use of “warriors” during this talk, however, was in reference to Republican members of the House: “I want to thank the more than 140 members of the House. Those are warriors. They're over there working like you've never seen before. Studying, talking, actually going all the way back, studying the roots of the Constitution, because they know we have the right to send a bad vote that was illegally gotten.”

Though Trump didn’t call his Ellipse-talk attendees warriors, they subsequently behaved like berserking, frenzied, undisciplined warriors. Thousands, many armed, made their way to the Capitol Building and laid siege to it. They broke windows and forced open doors with makeshift battering rams to gain access. Four attendees and five police officers lost their lives during or as a consequence of the attack, four officers subsequently took their own lives, about 150 officers were injured, and the Congress—many fearing for their lives—was delayed by hours in formally certifying Biden’s election victory.

Shockingly, on the day after the insurrection, January 7, 2021, Fox News weekend host Pete Hegseth defended the January 6 insurrectionists and legitimized their activities: “These are not conspiracy theorists motivated just by lies—that’s a bunch of nonsense that people want to tell us. These are people that understand first principles, they love freedom and they love free markets.”

Moreover, a significant number of those who stormed the Capitol and were charged were found to have military backgrounds and so probably thought of themselves as “warriors.” As early as January 21, 2021, “an NPR analysis has found that nearly 1 in 5 people charged over their alleged involvement in the attack on the U.S. Capitol…have served or are currently serving in the U.S. military. To put that number in perspective, only about 7% of all American adults are military veterans, according to the U.S. Census Bureau” and less than 1% are on active duty (emphasis added).

This number is indicative of the domestic extremism plaguing the US military and how devoted Trump’s supporters are to his cause. They are willing to be his warriors.

Trump revealed even more of his colors with his use of “warrior” as he campaigned to return to the Oval Office.

· On March 26, 2023, then-candidate Trump—who had evaded the draft during Vietnam—for the first time that I can find, referred to himself as a warrior, one who, once returned to office, would wreak retribution on the part of his voters. Speaking at his first campaign rally, in Waco, Texas—a place infamous for the “belief that the federal government is tyrannical and willing to attack citizens while depriving them of liberty, freedom and firearms”—Trump said “I am your warrior. I am your justice…For those who have been wronged and betrayed … I am your retribution.”

Note that candidate-Trump includes only himself in this lauded position of warrior. According to this claim, no one else can deliver the vengeance he can deliver as a “warrior.”

· On June 9, 2024, at a campaign rally in Las Vegas, candidate-Trump called the January 6, 2021 insurrectionists “warriors." But he also, quite remarkably, called them “victims.”

"Those J6 warriors, they were warriors, but they were really more than anything else, they're victims of what happened. All they were doing is protesting a rigged election," he told a crowd during a rally in Las Vegas, falsely asserting that the 2020 election was fixed.

It is notable, though, and correct how one pundit analyses Trump’s use of “warrior” and “victim” at the campaign rally:

By using the term “warrior,” Trump is not just valorizing Jan. 6 violence as virtuous. He’s both recruiting a new set of warriors to fight for his cause and is openly spurring the most militant members of his movement. And by using the term “victim,” Trump is signaling that he believes that those who (literally) fight for him should be immune to accountability, that even their most brutal actions should be blamed on authorities who allegedly provoke and entrap them…[these] victim-warriors are perpetually aggrieved, aggressive and preemptively justified in violence because they’ve been “set up” by the system (emphasis added).

· On October 13, 2024, during an interview with Fox, candidate Trump threatened to use the US military against “the enemy within”: “I think the bigger problem are the people from within. We have some very bad people. We have some sick people,” he said on Fox’s Sunday Morning Futures programme. “It should be very easily handled by, if necessary, by the national guard, or if really necessary, by the military, because they can’t let that happen.”

This is an alarming and illegal threat to use the US military against Americans.

Trump and his supporters also normalize “warrior” and promote it and him as a warrior with merchandise, making the word seem even more benign: there is the Trump Shield Warrior Watch, which features his signature on the watch face; T-shirts that read “Warrior President/Trump 2024” and include the infamous photo of him immediately after the July 2024 assassination attempt; a flag with a Rambo-like Trump holding a bazooka and the inscription “No Man No Woman No Commie Can Stump Him; a sticker that reads “WARRIOR” and has a photo of Trump shaking his fist after the assassination attempt; AI-generated art featuring Trump garbed as a warrior in different periods of time; and a “GOD BLESS OUR WARRIOR PRESIDENT yard sign.

The examples above demonstrate the evolution of Trump’s thinking about “warrior”: from actual military servicemembers to healthcare workers and all American residents taking part in its economy, to implicitly conferring this status when he exhorted his supporters to “fight like hell” by besieging the Capitol Building, to explicitly naming the violent insurrectionists as “warriors,” to claiming that the opposite of “warriors,” “enemies within,” deserved to be “handled” by the US military—to himself as a “Warrior President.”

· On January 20, 2025—the day of his inauguration—President Trump pardoned and commuted the sentences of more than 1500 people who attacked the Capitol Building on January 6, 2021, who he had previously called “warriors.” But also, as “victims of a grave national injustice that has been perpetrated upon the American people over the last four years,” Trump has made them unaccountable for their crimes…and beholden to him as a private army.

So Trump, a master of using floating signifiers for his ends, signifiers like “disgrace” and “nasty” and “steal,” is using “warrior” to approvingly describe people who practice violence and who should not be accountable for that practice.

Why is Secretary of Defense Hegseth dangerous?

Secretary of Defense Hegseth abets Trump, thereby politicizing the US military, an institution that was necessarily designed to be non-partisan.

To protect the nation from politicians who have the backing of tanks and bombers and to assure the US populace that the tanks and bombers will not be used against them, the US Military has always aimed to be non-partisan, that is, unaligned with one political party or the other.

Consequently, all members of the military, both enlisted and commissioned officers, take oaths to, first and foremost, defend the Constitution. Furthermore, the enlisted oath includes a pledge to obey superiors, obedience that is subject to the military system of justice established in 1950, the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ):

I, ____________________, do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; [here’s where the enlisted oath diverges] and that I will obey the orders of the President of the United States and the orders of the officers appointed over me, according to regulations and the Uniform Code of Military Justice. So help me God. (emphasis added)

This caveat, “according to regulations and the Uniform Code of Military Justice” compels the oath takers not to follow unlawful orders. DoD has a bevy of lawyers to determine the legality of orders.

That is what is so shocking that Trump/Hegseth not only fired on a single day the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Chief of the US Navy, and the Vice Chief of the AirForce, Trump/Hegseth also fired the top lawyers for the Army, Navy, and Air Force. It is the lawyers who determine the legality of orders and serve as the “conscience” of the US military.

Given his embrace of the word “warrior,” Hegseth at least condoned this firing and at most, recommended it. After the firing Hegseth commented that the lawyers were “roadblocks” to Trump’s orders. When asked by reporters how the military lawyers present an obstacle, Hegseth answered “It’s roadblocks to orders that are given by a commander in chief,” he said. That is, Hegseth thinks the oaths servicemembers take should be reversed so that their primary allegiance is to the Commander-in-Chief, not the Constitution or lawful orders. Under Secretary of Defense Hegseth and in the service of his president’s will, servicemembers as “warriors” will not be bound by any laws, regulations, rules, disciplines, or even ethics.

This overtly political act has astonished and outraged multiple legal and military analysts: see here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here. The firing of lawyers because they might determine a command is illegal is a political act, an act to minimize the constraints on Trump of using the “warrior” military for his violent ends.

In a February 27, 2025 letter to the Congress signed by five past Secretaries of Defense serving for both Republican and Democratic presidents (including Trump), they call for investigations of these firings.

Mr. Trump's dismissals raise troubling questions about the administration's desire to politicize the military and to remove legal constraints on the President's power. We, like many Americans—including many troops—are therefore left to conclude that these leaders are being fired for purely partisan reasons.

The United States cannot afford to have our military infected by partisan politics and distracted from its core mission of defending the nation. As George Washington warned Alexander Hamilton in 1783, after Hamilton had pressed military officers to insert themselves into domestic politics, “The Army is a dangerous instrument to play with." We're not asking members of Congress to do us a favor; we're asking them to do their jobs. We're urging them to take George Washington's warning to heart. (emphasis added)

As the chief, retributive warrior, Trump—determined by the Supreme Court in July 2024 to be immune to legal prosecution for acts considered official—will use his US Military warriors as he chooses, legal constraints be damned. Unlike Trump’s previous Senate-confirmed Secretaries of Defense, James Mattis (who signed the letter above) and Mark Esper (who published his tell-all memoir), Hegseth will ensure Trump’s will is carried out.

Trump and Hegseth’s resignifying “warrior” as violence in support of Trump means that he can use the military—America’s warriors—in support of him and his interests. Although he is ostensibly prevented from using the US military domestically by the Posse Comitatus Act, Trump is likely to try, especially with a malleable Secretary of Defense with very little executive experience of saying “no.”

But in his first term, Trump’s first two Secretaries of Defense (SecDef) were able to say no.

Trump’s first SecDef, James Mattis, resigned in December, 2018 because first, his reputation as the most revered living Marine Corps general was at risk, having, “in the fall of 2018, acquiesced to Trump’s deployment of troops to the U.S.-Mexico border,” and second, Trump’s insistence—against Mattis’ advice—that all American troops be withdrawn from Syria. Mattis resigned, writing this in his resignation letter:

My views on treating allies with respect and also being clear-eyed about both malign actors and strategic competitors are strongly held and informed by over four decades of immersion in these issues. We must do everything possible to advance an international order that is most conducive to our security, prosperity and values, and we are strengthened in this effort by the solidarity of our alliances.

Mattis made utterly clear that he and Trump did not agree on how to treat allies and how to distinguish between “malign actors” and “strategic competitors.”

Trump’s second SecDef, Mark Esper, was appointed first the Acting and then Senate-confirmed as the Secretary of Defense from July 2019-November 9, 2020. This period was filled with Trump-imposed calamities that would turn the US military into a political tool. During the Summer 2020 George Floyd protests, Trump wanted to use the US military against domestic protestors by shooting them. Secretary of Defense Mark Esper dissuaded him. According to Esper’s memoir, Trump also tried to prevent the promotion of Alexander Vindman, the whistleblower whose testimony led to Trump’s first impeachment. And finally, Trump suggested launching missiles into Mexico to target drug labs. Esper has said that “he stayed in the administration because he worried that if he left, the president would more easily implement some of his ‘dangerous ideas’.” Ultimately, Esper was fired unceremoniously via Twitter by Trump on November 9, 2020 and replaced with an acting-SecDef, Christopher Miller (who wrote the Department of Defense chapter in Project 2025.)

During his confirmation hearing, Hegseth was asked whether he would order the US military to shoot protestors. He would not answer the question.

Now, as president, Trump already is using the US military politically: deploying active-duty troops (trained for warfare) as law enforcement to patrol the southern border and using military bases as prisons for undocumented immigrants. Given Trump’s history and his and Hegseth’s resignification of “warrior,” it’s not inconceivable that the Commander-in-Chief will use the US military to corral undocumented immigrants and to suppress opposition to his warrior politics—which could include brutalizing and killing American civilians.

This endangers us all.