The ‘warrior ethos’ promises victory — history says it leads to defeat
At Marine Corps Base Quantico in September 2025, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth promised assembled generals “maximum lethality” and no “stupid rules of engagement.” Under his leadership, the newly rebranded Department of War would “untie the hands of our warfighters to intimidate, demoralize, hunt, and kill.” Troops would be held to the “highest male standard,” he said. “Weak men won’t qualify.”
Hegseth also restricted anonymous whistleblower and discrimination complaints and limited how long past misconduct can be held against a service member, weakening internal rules and oversight processes the military had built over decades.
Months later, with the Iran war underway, he told reporters at a Pentagon briefing that the U.S. was “punching (Iran) while they’re down, which is exactly how it should be.” He has also said the U.S. will give “no quarter, no mercy” to its enemies, language legal experts say can constitute a war crime under international law.
Hegseth calls his military doctrine the “warrior ethos.”
Historians of fascism have catalogued similar rhetorical patterns — strongman posturing, contempt for constraint — for decades.
I’m a historian of race and nationalism and author of “Blood, Oil and the Axis,” a book about World War II and nationalism in Iraq and Syria. I’ve studied how fascist regimes fight. At its core, fascism is ultranationalism fused with a cult of masculine strength, racial hierarchy, paranoia about socialism and contempt for democracy. It also has a theory of war: Victory belongs to the ruthless and the ideologically pure. Rules are for the weak.
Nazi Germany, fascist Italy and Imperial Japan all built their military strategies on some version of this ideology in the run-up to the Second World War. And in each case, the strategy failed, undone by its own contradictions.
The fascist theory of war
Democracies don’t necessarily fight clean wars. During World War II, the Allies firebombed cities, created internment camps and dropped atomic bombs.
What distinguishes fascist powers from democracies is their contempt for rules based on their sense of superiority. In 1933, Adolf Hitler’s propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels announced that the Nazis would claim the absolute right to override democratic constraints. “This contemptible parliamentarianism … is gone,” he said.
Italian dictator Benito Mussolini said it more bluntly in 1936: “We do not argue with those who disagree with us, we destroy them.”
But rules of engagement function as a control system that ties tactical decisions to strategy, law and the risk of escalation. Discarding them tends to produce the atrocities and strategic blowback that lose wars.
Democratic procedure does similar work: Political scientists who studied 197 conflicts from 1816 to 1987 found that democracies won about 76% of their conflicts and non-democracies 46%, in large part because accountable leaders and public access to information force a government to notice when a plan isn’t working.
A fascist regime that treats democratic constraints as obstacles is likely to decide inconvenient information is an obstacle too. Because of this, in fascist governments, loyalists rank higher than experts. Fascist systems don’t remove people for being wrong; they remove them for insufficient loyalty. The man who tells the leader what he wants to hear rises. The man whose report contradicts the leader’s views endangers himself.
