Amid horror, Hegseth takes his casting cues from Fox News founder Roger Ailes

This week, CBS News published a set of devastating photographs that active-duty service members leaked anonymously because, they said, the rigid media restrictions inside the U.S. military wouldn’t let them tell the truth about what’s going on in the Middle East.

The images are ugly. A Boeing E-3 Sentry at Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia with its tail blown off, wreckage at Camp Buehring in Kuwait, base after base across Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Oman, and Jordan absorbing seven months of Iranian missiles and drones.

Those are haunting pictures of the reality of the war that is being shielded from Americans. So naturally, Pete Hegseth only wants you to see pretty things.

The Wall Street Journal reported this week that the Pentagon is instructing commanders to nominate only the fittest, best-groomed troops to appear at Hegseth’s upcoming "State of the Force" address.

Pete wants his boys to meet requirements involving waist-to-height ratios and fitness levels, everything short of requesting Speedo pics. Somewhere between the burned-out E-3 and the rusted-out USS Abraham Lincoln, Hegseth has demanded that he not look at an audience of "fatties."

Related: The despair on the USS Abraham Lincoln exposes the deadly fraud of Pete Hegseth’s machismo

As a gay man, I am beginning to wonder about Hegseth’s unending obsession with pretty boys. At Quantico last September, he stood in front of the Marine Corps’ top brass and announced there would be “no more beardos” and no more “fat generals” because it was “tiring,” in his words, to look out at formations and see anyone who wasn’t beefcake.

And what on Earth was up with those testosterone screenings for every service member over 30? In a video fit for Pornhub, he boasted about his “High-T Department of War.” You can, of course, read that two ways.

Then, the program disappeared, likely thrown into a metaphorical biohazard bin as bad “lethal” ideas usually do.

Hegseth famously cast a dreamboat guest list for the White House UFC fight this summer, where the 1,200 troops invited to Trump’s 80th birthday cage match were filtered, under Hegseth’s penchant for studly height-to-weight ratios, and soldiers who were fit as a fiddle.

Or, as my grandmother used to say, "fit as a flea," the kind of thing Hegseth seemed to have in mind when he rolled back sex-neutral combat standards. His fixation on fratty, fit, foxy fellows has a familiar ring to it. After all, before he made his way to the Pentagon, Hegseth came from Fox News, where beauty, brawn, and the catwalk could sometimes seem almost as important as the newsroom.

Before he left Fox because of his lurid behavior, Roger Ailes ran it like a modeling agency, albeit one that was laden with cruelty, harassment, and misogyny. Ailes wanted blondes, and only blondes, on camera. He wanted them in short skirts and heels, lit from below through glass desks so viewers could see their legs.

The "leg cam" was an actual and atrocious production tool. Former staffers have described private office "auditions" where women were asked to twirl so Ailes could look them over.

Ailes’ sordid seduction strategy became known, inside the building and out, as the “Fox News look.” It was less about who had the journalistic chops and more about who had the most glamorous gams.

Hegseth is running identical auditions at the Pentagon, just flipping the sex of the auditionee. Ailes was a leering man building Fox News around women’s bodies. Hegseth is a preening man building TK around men’s bodies, leanness, beards (or the absence of them), testosterone counts, who gets to stand in the shot next to him, all while phonily positioning himself as a “lethal warrior” and last defender of red-blooded American masculinity.

Related: The despair on the USS Abraham Lincoln exposes the deadly fraud of Pete Hegseth’s machismo

The bottom line here is that Hegseth is running the Pentagon like Fox News, even beyond who he casts as its ”stars.” You will recall that one of Hegseth’s first priorities after he arrived at the Pentagon was to have a makeup studio installed in his office. It figures that Ailes’ edicts about only pretty people getting hired was the only thing Hegseth took away as a lesson from his former employer.

Well, there’s that and all the lying and buffoonery.

Ailes eventually got run out of Fox HQ and American society for treating people as bodies to be fondled and leered at. He left behind a disgusting legacy and a sexist moniker in "Fox News look." Hegseth is building the Pentagon equivalent, or as it might be called, "the Pentagon pretty-boy platoon."

While American service members are dealing with battered bases, destroyed aircraft, and a logistics system stretched across thousands of miles, their secretary of defense is worrying about whether the people in the room are fit enough, groomed enough, and pretty enough for the television shot.

And maybe that’s the real lesson from Hegseth’s time at Fox. Ailes may have taught him that the picture matters more than the people in it. So now, while the Pentagon is being battered in the real world, Hegseth is busy casting the Pentagon for television.

You can read that two ways, too. You can read it as another example of Hegseth’s obsession with appearances. Or you can read it as something far more revealing about what he thinks the job of secretary of defense is supposed to look like.

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