Hegseth recently announced that he is considering reversing the ban on the "shark attack," the time-honored aggressive practice used by drill sergeants to train new U.S. Army recruits. It is usually employed at the beginning of training when several drill sergeants get in the faces of young recruits and yell at them at the top of their lungs.
"We are going back to basics. Drill sergeants will be drill sergeants with knife hands who ensure, who maintain good order and discipline and train up great recruits who will make great formations. Just like we need military officers with that same rigorous discipline and background. So, we're going back to the basics, and it's bearing fruit,” Hegseth said on Fox News last week.
Bob Maginnis is a retired Army officer, and national defense strategist who is president of Maginnis Strategies LLC.
“We've gotten softer, and DEI and CRT stuff has crept its way into the military, and it made us less ready. I'm not unfamiliar with these types of tactics. I did go to West Point, and they typically raised their voices on certainly many occasions as I experienced … especially as a Plebe up there. Returning the military academies to a tough environment is something that needs to be done -- and certainly in basic training."
Maginnis says shark attacks instill that toughness.
“The ultimate outcome is to drill into them the ability to cope with stress, how to deal with fear, how to work as a team. So what Pete Hegseth is doing I think is important. It's going to make us a more capable and more ready-to-fight armed forces. And given what's certainly ahead, I think that that's something that's going to bode well for the United States."
Hegseth believes recruits can handle -- and will benefit from -- the pressure of training tactics like the shark attacks.
Recruiting numbers support that theory. They've surged since Donald Trump was elected president last November.
Yet the mainstream media has presented a narrative that female recruitment numbers have either fallen or stayed the same.
"It's such a ridiculous charge that recruiting was down or even because of Hegseth and Trump in charge. Who made that up? It's just not true. Women are part of the military. The military is growing in size across the board in the all of the services," Elaine Donnelly, president of the Center for Military Readiness, told AFN.
Donnelly says the increased numbers can be attributed to the better leadership.
"They want to know that the Commander in Chief and the Secretary of Defense have their priorities straight so that when they serve they're not going to be asked to do foolish things. It's all about lethality as Hegseth keeps saying. What that means is if he says we're not doing woke stuff anymore we're doing warfighting. What he said with those few words is the entire reversal in priorities and the paradigm."
