What Regime Security Clown Pete Hegseth Calls “Lethality” Is Not What Any Serious General Calls Command

I wrote the book on how to be a general. In fact, I wrote it in parts: A General’s Handbook, Project Merlin, There Is No Lose, You Are a Byzantine General, and then the blog-based continuation into asymmetric warfare. And in those works, the word “lethality” does not appear as the organizing concept of command in the way Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth now uses it. That is not an accident. It is the difference between a serious theory of command and a piece of macho branding.

The books I wrote are about power, efficiency, tempo, logistics, proportionality, morale, cognition, trust, multi-domain coordination, and the preservation of command under betrayal. Hegseth’s vocabulary, by contrast, reduces the military to a slogan about killing power and then treats that slogan as though it were doctrine. The official language around him makes this plain: at confirmation and on entry into office, he described a Pentagon “laser-focused on lethality, meritocracy, warfighting, accountability and readiness,” and the Department of War has repeatedly elevated “lethality” as one of his defining lines of effort.    

That contrast matters because my books begin from a fundamentally different proposition. The original A General’s Handbook treats command as a moral burden. It says power must be held lightly. It insists on the Middle Path between passivity and rash aggression. It widens the battlefield beyond land and sea into cyber, economic, nuclear, and cognitive domains, but it never loses sight of restraint, shared accountability, and the responsibility to protect rather than merely destroy. Even when the text discusses offensive capabilities, it does so under the pressure of proportionality and human consequence. The general in that framework is not a killer in search of targets. He is a steward of force under ethical constraint.   

Then came Project Merlin, which moved from philosophy into mathematics. There the central concept is not lethality but power, defined first as harm over time and then refined into the equation P=(E⋅η)/t. In that framework, force is not some chest-thumping abstraction. It is a composite of energy, efficiency, and time.

A general has to understand logistics, friction, morale, tempo, sustainment, coordination, and feedback loops. Merlin says that wars are won not by sounding violent, but by converting resources into durable operational effect more intelligently than the enemy can. It also says that a single act of extreme force is never self-explanatory. Context still rules. Sustainment still rules. Relative power over time still rules. That is already a far more rigorous conception of command than anything Hegseth means when he repeats “lethality.”     

There Is No Lose hardens the theory still further. That volume argues that modern power is multi-domain, soft-preemptive, and strategic rather than merely reactive. It moves beyond traditional deterrence and says that dominance now lives in the integration of military, cyber, financial, informational, and narrative control. But even there, the key term is not lethality. The governing ideas are military supremacy, optimization, decision superiority, and control of the strategic environment.

In other words, even my harshest volume does not reduce command to the ability to kill. It expands command to include every modern domain in which advantage is created, protected, or lost. Military strength remains part of the picture, but it is not the total picture. Hegseth’s favorite word shrinks warfare to the most adolescent version of itself. There Is No Lose tries to model the whole battlespace.   

Then You Are a Byzantine General adds the layer Hegseth seems least capable of understanding: in human systems, the deepest danger is not insufficient aggression. It is the collapse of trust, clarity, and shared interpretation under conditions of betrayal.

Byzantine Fault Tolerance works in machines because they follow protocol, messages are authenticated, timing is constrained, and the number of compromised nodes is bounded. Human systems are not like that. Humans editorialize. They misread one another. They split over interpretations. They centralize around repeated frames. They confuse confidence for truth. They allow propaganda to become social fact. In that environment, a command structure can sound hard and still rot from the inside. Indeed, one of the central warnings of You Are a Byzantine General is that once confusion takes hold, systems begin doing the traitor’s work for him. A leader who floods the institution with a simplified, emotionally loaded frame may look strong while actually dissolving the trust graph beneath him. That is not command. That is sabotage disguised as style.    

Part 5, the blog extension into asymmetric warfare, makes the same point in a more public-facing register. It begins with “The War on Terror and the Manufacturing of Stupidity,” where I argue that America did not emerge from two decades of asymmetric conflict wiser, but strategically dumber, because the public was managed rather than educated.

The lesson is decisive: the public was taught cartoons instead of structures, obedience instead of understanding, fear instead of strategic literacy. That series then continues with “Asymmetry Is the Oldest Strategy,” which argues that the powerful routinely lose because they see only strength and mistake brute force for insight.

This is exactly why Hegseth’s vocabulary is so revealing. “Lethality” is a cartoon word. It flatters the listener into thinking war is about hardness, aggression, and the visible projection of violence. But asymmetric warfare is about manipulation, confusion, strategic shaping, and attacks on the enemy’s ability to think clearly. A defense secretary who makes “lethality” his calling card is telling on himself. He is speaking the language of the lamppost: looking where the light is, not where the problem actually lives.

That is why the omission of the word from my handbook series is so important. It shows that I was trying to build a general’s vocabulary rather than a culture-war vocabulary. A real general must know how to wield violence, but he must also know how to subordinate violence to strategy, and strategy to reality. He must know that logistics often matter more than bravado, that morale multiplies power, that cyber and economic warfare can achieve what bombs cannot, that restraint is often the sharpest instrument available, and that trust and verification are the hidden skeleton of every effective command.

He must also know that propaganda and narrative compression can destroy institutions faster than enemy armor if they fracture the ability of subordinates to agree on what is true. None of that is captured by “lethality.” The word is a reduction, and a juvenile one at that. It advertises force without demonstrating mastery of said force.     

Hegseth’s public usage proves the point. Official department messaging has attached “lethality” to software acquisition, personnel policy, force structure, Army transformation, and general institutional posture. In those communications, “lethality” is not being used as a narrowly technical descriptor. It is being used as a universal legitimating word, a way of sorting programs, personnel, and priorities into the approved and the disfavored. That is exactly how a branding term behaves. It absorbs complexity into an applause line. It allows every purge, every reshuffle, every ideological performance, every performative tough-guy gesture to be sold as necessary for the warfighter. But once a word starts doing that much political work, it is no longer a doctrine term. It is a regime term.

Under the Raymond Method, this is all easy to read. Pillar One, regime security, tells you to ask what the language is doing for the regime rather than what it claims to mean on paper.

Pillar Two, asymmetric warfare, tells you to examine the term as an instrument of internal shaping, not just external warfighting.

And the Byzantine insight tells you to watch what happens when a repeated frame becomes more authoritative than reasoned process. “Lethality” is useful to Hegseth not because it clarifies command, but because it simplifies and centralizes perception. It is the kind of word that subordinates repeat because repetition itself becomes proof of seriousness. In a healthy command structure, terminology sharpens judgment. In a degraded one, terminology replaces judgment.   

So let us be plain. I wrote the books on how to be a general, and I did not build them around “lethality” because that word is not deep enough, precise enough, or moral enough to carry the burden of command.

My series is about force as part of a system. It is about power measured over time. It is about logistics, cognition, adaptation, asymmetric pressure, and ethical discipline. It is about how to think as a general in the modern age.

Hegseth’s preferred word, by contrast, is what happens when military language is hollowed out and repurposed for ideological theater. It is not the vocabulary of command. It is the vocabulary of someone trying to look like command.

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