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Some of the countries Legendary “great men” – leaders like George Marshall and Clark Clifford – served the country as Secretary of Defense. President-elect Donald Trump tapped a Fox News host for the job. Pete Hegseth is a veteran of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but he stands out as the only one among his predecessors not qualified to oversee an agency with nearly 3 million employees. If you understand what Trump wants him to do, he’s probably the right man for the job.

Several former Trump administration officials, working with the conservative Heritage Foundation, have created a blueprint for a second Trump term known as Project 2025. Much of the new Defense Secretary’s likely agenda is stated in it. And while it makes a few nods to transparency, calls for better contracting procedures and, of course, big budget increases, much of the document is just a road map for a culture war .

Christopher Miller, who served as acting secretary of defense for 72 days during the first Trump administration, authored the Project 2025 section on the Department of Defense. He begins by suggesting that the Pentagon has favored “left-wing politics” over military preparedness. To combat this problem, Miller lays out a series of priorities for the incoming Trump administration. These include eliminating active military service for transgender people and their health care, as well as ending access to abortion.

As Miller explains:

Exceptions for people already predisposed to requiring medical treatment (e.g., HIV positive or suffering from gender dysphoria) should be removed, and those suffering from gender dysphoria should be expelled from military service. Gender dysphoria is incompatible with the requirements of military service, and the use of public funds for transgender surgeries or to facilitate abortion for service members should end.

Miller seems to believe that the military is full of “Marxists” seeking to conduct social justice experiments while indoctrinating the ranks. He urges the next Secretary of Defense to ensure that senior officers “understand that their primary duty is to ensure the readiness of the armed forces, not to pursue an agenda of social engineering.” To this end, he calls for eliminating diversity and equality programs and removing Marxist professors from military academies – where tenure should be abolished. Additionally, the new administration should audit the health programs and policies of schools located on military bases so that they can be rid of any “inappropriate” content.

Everything on this conservative wish list aligns well with Hegseth’s rhetoric on Fox News. He denounced “woke” policies that he said hurt military recruiting and denounced the Pentagon’s “social justice” messages. “The Pentagon likes to say: ‘Our diversity is our strength.’ What a pile of rubbish”, he said on Fox. “In the military, our diversity is not our strength, our unity is our strength.” On a podcast hosted by conservative commentator Hugh Hewitt, Hegseth said once“There aren’t enough lesbians in San Francisco, Hugh, to run the 82nd Airborne. You’ll have to go to guys from Kentucky, Colorado, and Ohio, who love the country.

Hegseth’s televised attacks on “wokeness” in the military helped derail a Pentagon initiative to suppress widespread white supremacy and extremism within the armed forces. In 2021, Hegseth dedicated a segment on Fox News’ Prime time to attack a black combat veteran named Bishop Garrison, whom Biden had tapped to oversee a new counter-extremism task force. The task force was tasked with figuring out how to identify people like Jack Teixeira, the Massachusetts Air National Guard member with a history of violent and racist behavior who leaked a trove of classified documents on Discord in 2021. This week, Teixeira was sentenced to 15 years in prison.

But Hegseth reframed the anti-extremist effort as just another liberal attempt to impose woke policies on the federal government. He described Garrison’s mission as “a purge, a purge of the Department of Defense led by a new and now powerful radical leftist, a Project 1619 activist, a die-hard social justice Democrat, a man who thinks all Trump supporters are racist and extremists. Biden’s nomination of Garrison, he told viewers, was “the equivalent of Ibram How to be an anti-racistresponsible for controlling the entire US military, past, present and future. His attack ultimately generated enough political pressure from Republicans that the task force disappeared in less than a year without having had much impact.

Under the last Trump administration, there were no fewer than six secretaries of defense– seven if you count Mark Esper’s two separate stints in the position. (By comparison, there has only been one during the Biden administration, Lloyd Austin.) Only two of Trump’s defense secretaries have been confirmed by the Senate. Given that track record, there’s a good chance Hegseth will return to Fox News soon enough. But even a short term could give him enough time to check off some items on the Project 2025 to-do list.