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WORLD✒ EDITORIALABSURDITY:
The Book That Predicted Pete Hegseth’s Failures
Filed 22h ago · Via Foreign Policy · The Buffoon Desk
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Blue Feather
Kevin MacLeod · incompetech.com · CC BY 4.0
Photo: PMO Barbados from Bridgetown, Barbados · Public domain · via Wikimedia Commons
Foreign Policy marks the 50th anniversary of Norman F. Dixon's ‘On the Psychology of Military Incompetence,’ a study of British military disasters from Afghanistan to Arnhem, grounded in Victorian public-school psychology and Freudian theory of the era. The review argues the book, long respected even inside U.S. military reading circles, reads uncannily like a profile of Pete Hegseth.
The piece ties Hegseth's public struggles, including his campaign against beards, a widely mocked pull-up attempt, and difficulties addressing Iran, to patterns Dixon identified in historically incompetent commanders. It stops short of claiming Dixon predicted anything specific, since he died having never heard of Hegseth.
The full dispatch is available from the source below.
✒ FROM THE EDITORIAL DESK
A psychology book about Victorian boarding schools getting drafted to explain a modern defense secretary says less about the book than about how short a supply of fresh material there is on this particular secretary. Fifty years is a long time for a theory to wait around for its best case study to show up. Still, if the shoe fits an 1890s general, somebody ought to ask why it also fits the Pentagon lobby.
