President-elect Donald Trump has nominated Pete Hegseth as Secretary of Defense, shocking everyone. It's the definition of an outside-the-box selection, as Hegseth is a Fox News host outside the chain of command structure you'd typically expect for such a position. Whether he's successful or not will depend entirely on his capacity to clean house at the Department of Defense.

The question for Hegseth is not one of experience; he has 20 years in the military, serving in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. What he lacks is the experience you'd expect from the Joint Chiefs of the military—having no military leadership background in the traditional sense could both help and hurt him in this position, where he's rocketing to the top of the country's defense apparatus.

So, while his lack of experience is an issue, the flip side of the coin is what people with similar experience are doing. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin practically vanished on the job, undergoing a medical procedure without telling anyone. While no one could find him, not one Democrat could give a reason for why the country's top defense official couldn't be found.

Then there's the decisions themselves. For some bizarre reason, the 9/11 terrorist attackers are getting generous plea deals instead of the death penalty. Austin claimed to overrule that decision, but judges reinstated them, stating that Austin had no such power. The Biden administration pushing forward with leniency is among its worst decisions, but not the last.

This is the same Defense Department, with all its brass, that put together the Afghanistan withdrawal disaster. Biden's approval ratings never recovered from that debacle, and neither he nor anyone in the Defense Department answered why they allowed such a disaster to take place or how 13 American soldiers died from it.

The leadership of the Defense Department, combined with the ineptitude at the State Department, did nothing whileVladimir Putin took one look at Joe Biden and immediately started war preparations in Ukraine. The empty threats just weeks into Biden's tenure did nothing, and before the end of 2021, it was clear Putin was going to invade. Thus began the land war in Europe.

This Defense Department, again in combination with the State Department, has been weak while a shooting war erupted in the Middle East. Everyone involved bragged about ending the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but now we've got the Ukraine War and a brewing conflict between Iran and Israel. None of this mentions China's growing aggression towards Taiwan.

That brings us back to American shores, where the Defense Department sat idly by under Biden as we watched a Chinese spy balloon float over the continental United States. And Russian spy submarines enter Cuban waters.

These are just the highlights. That leaves me with the question: What good are the experienced military leaders doing in the Defense Department? I don't know if Pete Hegseth is adequate enough for this job. The current command structure of the Defense Department is not only letting America down, but it's also actively making us a less safe place to live.

That makes Hegseth's job, if he's approved by the Senate, straightforward to begin with: He must fire everyone involved with the mistakes made in defending America. That sounds like a broad mandate, and it is. At no point during the Biden administration was anyone ever held accountable for the increasing mistakes made by the government or anyone close to it.

In the past, our military was held to a much higher standard. But the slippage we're witnessing in real time is astonishing. We have multiple stories from Politico, NPR, and others about how the bureaucracy in these agencies is trying to "Trump-proof" the federal government. From a constitutional perspective, this is not how the government should work.

Hegseth and the other Trump appointees have a duty to ensure that bureaucrats trying to prevent the policy from being implemented are fired. We cannot exist as a democracy when the bureaucracy tries to wrest power away from the political forces on which the constitution is built.

That's why Hegseth's first priority is clearing out the Biden loyalists and anyone else putting their job above the country. We need a clean house at the Department of Defense, and I hope Hegseth is successful in getting that job done and restoring a working department. It's not hard to see why we need that when the failures of the last four years compound each other.

I wish Hegseth success. Hopefully, his lack of experience will give the department the push it needs to rebuild itself.