‘Slit some throats’: Ron DeSantis has already put forth a Pentagon agenda

Image via Ron DeSantis Rumble.

What would a Defense Department run by Gov. Ron DeSantis look like?

The once-hypothetical question became a more concrete consideration this week, amid concerns about the ability of Secretary of Defense nominee Pete Hegseth to be confirmed.

While DeSantis, who was a Navy JAG lawyer in Iraq and at Guantanamo Bay during the war on terror, may have never eyed becoming Defense Secretary in a Donald Trump administration until this week, as a presidential candidate he outlined what his own Secretary of Defense would do.

In July 2023, he told Real America’s Voice that the person he picks to run the Pentagon would have to be prepared to “slit some throats” and be “very firm, very strong” in imposing their will.

“You know, they may have to slit some throats, and it’s a lot harder to do that if these are people that you’ve trained with in the past,” DeSantis contended. “So we’re going to have somebody out there, you know, be very firm, very strong. But they are going to make sure that we have the best people in the best positions and there’s not going to be necessarily prior relationships that would cloud that judgment.”

During a Newsmax interview with Eric Bolling earlier the same month, DeSantis criticized the Lloyd Austin Pentagon.

“We want people who are going to be hard chargers. We want people who aren’t going to deal with the political nonsense. Our military should be unique in society. It should not be a reflection of values at places like Goldman Sachs or civilian bureaucracies,” DeSantis said.

To that end, DeSantis also rolled out a series of policy proposals to root the so-called “woke mind virus” out of the military. 

In a campaign stop in South Carolina, he excoriated a “military that has been ordered by civilian officials to pursue political ideology, to pursue social experimentation, to be yet another institution in American life that gets infected with the woke mind virus.”

“This is changing the character of the military,” DeSantis said in West Columbia. “It’s changing the culture of our services and it’s creating a situation in which great warriors have been driven away and recruiting is at an all-time low post abolition of the draft in the Vietnam conflict.”

Among the issues the Governor identified: the use of “drag queens” to help with military recruitment.

“When China sees the Navy, for example, using drag queens to recruit people, they are laughing in our face,” DeSantis said. “When you see some of the nonsense that’s gone on in the services, these are things that would have been unthinkable even 10 years ago, much less in prior generations. Our enemies are whetting their appetite.”

DeSantis’ presidential campaign also said that if he were elected, he wouldn’t allow “transgender personnel to serve in the military in their preferred sex.” He would also stop providing “taxpayer funds for sex change hormones and surgeries, which cause issues with readiness.”

Additionally, DeSantis vowed to end the “DEI bureaucracy,” including eliminating the “Defense Equity Team,” the “Defense Advisory Commission on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion,” and a swath of other DEI initiatives. The Governor also promises to ban courses “associated with critical race theory at service academies.”

“We need to make sure they’re upholding martial values and martial education,” DeSantis said last year, explaining the policy outlined by his campaign.

DeSantis’ campaign also announced his intention to ban “equity plans that prioritize certain veterans for benefits over others based on their race,” and would “investigate any commander suspected of using racial or gender preferences in promotions.”

The campaign asserted DeSantis would also block the “Department of Defense from conducting business with advertising with left-wing firms that blacklist conservative news sources.”

Beyond the social engineering DeSantis would bring to the office, he also would promise a strategy shift, including a shift on the issue of Ukraine and retrenchment on the threat posed by China.

In comments made to Nikkei Asia, he called for a cessation of hostilities, lest a situation happen such as the entrenched bloodshed in World War I.

“You don’t want to end up in, like, a Verdun situation, where you just have mass casualties, mass expense, and end up with a stalemate.” he said. “It’s in everybody’s interest to try to get to a place where we can have a ceasefire.”

DeSantis originally deemed the war a “territorial dispute” and not one of America’s “vital national interests” in a statement provided to Tucker Carlson, in a seeming effort to curry favor with the now-former Fox News host.

In an October 2023 speech to the Heritage Foundation, the 2024 presidential candidate positioned his own approach as a deviation from “post-9/11 neoconservatism” and the “feckless” approach to statesmanship under the Barack Obama administration, including the former President’s nuclear deal with Iran.

Speaking on China, DeSantis promised to “reorient” American foreign policy to the Indo-Pacific region, so that “we win and they lose.”

To that end, DeSantis wants a bolstered military to “deter China” with “adequate hard power,” including what he calls a “four-ocean Navy.” Additionally, he wants to make the defense bureaucracy more “agile.”

He also noted that 9/11 brought the advent of “non-state actors” and a war on terror with “some successes and some failures,” an era which gave way to the “looming China threat” and an American “failure to articulate” a clear national security vision. 

Protecting the well-being of Americans and countering foreign and domestic threats are also key, DeSantis said, with “power … rooted in concrete objectives” devoid of “Wilsonian abstractions.”